What is "pdp-10"

The PDP-10 is a discontinued mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1966 into the 1980s.

The PDP-10 architecture is almost identical to the earlier PDP-6 architecture, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the " byte" instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

The PDP-10 is the machine that made time-sharing common, and this and other features made it a common fixture in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard's Aiken Computer Center, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET. For these reasons, the PDP-10 looms large in early hacker folklore.

Projects to extend the PDP-10 line were eclipsed by the success of the unrelated VAX superminicomputer, and the cancellation of the PDP-10 line was announced in 1983.