langreiter.com plain, simple: DEC10

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DEC10

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 8270 days AGO

The DEC10 was probably the `high-water mark' in a line of DEC computers that, in many ways, started with MIT's TX-0 and the PDP-1. While it was followed by the DEC-20, that machine was relatively quickly eclipsed by the VAX, and also by the rise of PCs.

The DEC10 was particularly well designed for Time Sharing. It was able to run with what was, for the time, fairly large memories, and saving state and `process swapping' were generally fairly easy. It also had a `logically complete' instruction set. (One amusing aspect of this was the famous JUMP instruction which was defined in the reference manual by the phrase `Do _not_ JUMP'---it existed for reasons of logical completeness).

Several of the first `distributed information systems' were implemented on DEC10s, and it served as the workhorse of this industry for nearly a decade---a long time back in those years when `generations' were much shorter in length.