The series of mainframes from DEC that made time-sharing
real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its
adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing
facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab,
Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set
(most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered
unsurpassed.
The PDP-10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines
(descendants of the PDP-11) when DEC recognised that the
PDP-10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other
and decided to concentrate its software development effort on
the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from
DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter
Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by
other companies to market clones came to nothing; see Foonly
and Mars.) This event spelled the doom of ITS and the
technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon
File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of
honourable old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth
on a PDP-10.
