PDP-1
PDP-1
The PDP-1 — Programmed Data Processor-1 — was DEC's first computer and the machine that taught computing to play. Ben Gurley designed it in 1959 straight from MIT's TX-0/TX-2 lineage (themselves descendants of Whirlwind), priced it at a then-astonishingly-low $120,000, and shipped it with a CRT display standard — the Type 30 — at a time when most computers' output was a typewriter or a deck of cards. Fifty-three were built.[1]
The hardware was honest minimalism: 18-bit word, 187 kHz, 4K words of core — a machine you could sit in front of, hear running, and watch. That last part is what changed culture: the first unit went to BBN in 1960, and the MIT installation became the gymnasium of the first hacker generation — the TMRC crowd who named themselves for the word "hacker." On this machine they wrote Spacewar! (Steve Russell, 1962) — one of the first real video games, spread by hand to every PDP-1 site — plus the first chess programs, the first timesharing experiments, and MUMPS's own ancestors (BBN's TELCOMP line).[2]
The machine games began on
Spacewar! deserves its own paragraph: two toroidal-wraparound rocketships, a starfield, a gravity well, hyperspace — written in PDP-1 assembly by Russell with the TMRC crew, running on the Type 30's vector display. It is possibly the first program written purely to be fun — and it propagated the way software now does: copied to every PDP-1 installation, patched and improved at each one (gravity, hyperspace, scoring), making it also one of the first open-source-style collaborative programs. The game is a canonical ancestor of the entire industry that followed.[3]
Where it sits
The PDP-1 is the hinge between the mainframe priesthood and the minicomputer congregation — Whirlwind's real-time DNA commercialized, the first display-native computer, and the birthplace of games, hacking, and everything interactive computing became. DEC built an empire on the series it founded.
Check your understanding
- Who designed the PDP-1, and from what lineage?
- What made it culturally different from every computer before it?
- What was Spacewar! — who wrote it and when?
- How much did it cost, and why did that matter?
Show answers
1 — Ben Gurley, from the TX-0/TX-2 line at MIT (Whirlwind's descendants). 2 — a CRT display standard + a price a lab could own — the first machine hackers could sit at. 3 — one of the first real video games — Steve Russell & the MIT TMRC hackers, 1962. 4 — $120,000 — an order of magnitude below a mainframe: the price point that let labs own computers outright.
Footnotes
- ↑ PDP-1 and the bitsavers PDP-1 docs — the Gurley/TX-0 lineage, price, production count, and the Type 30 display
- ↑ PDP-1 — the BBN first sale, the MIT/TMRC hacker community, and Russell's Spacewar!
- ↑ PDP-1 / Spacewar! — Russell's 1962 game and its distribution across PDP-1 sites