My PDP10? It sounds presumptuous, even to me.

My PDP10? It sounds presumptuous, even to my ears. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I will probably include a good bit of history here as I know it. Not because I am an historian, or even have done more work than internet searches, but because I an aware of those who came before, am grateful, and wish to express it.

This blog will be about my attempt to build a PDP10 compatible processor and perhaps some peripherals so it can run the native proprietary operating system TOPS-10.

This is the "KI-10" "DecSystem-10" "PDP-10" system at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. This museum is a Paul Allen project and I believe he and Bill Gates programmed on Dec-10's back in the day. I was a Dec-10 maintenance engineer at that time.

Retirement is nearing. From time to time I have thought of finding and restoring one of these old machines, just to see if I could. Starting to see this one is running at the LCM has fueled this desire. I haven't been out there yet, but look forward to at least a visit. I'd love to ask if they need any help with any part of the project. Maybe I'll find the time and voice for that....

But, as mentioned above, my current main thought is that I probably don't have the resources to find and restore one of these systems, but maybe I could engineer a work-alike.

I have been thinking about this for most of a year, I have blue skied, done internet research, and even proceeded with some purchases. I have emailed some friends on this and will use some of those emails to get this party started.

Hopefully MUCH more to follow, although progress will be very sporadic. I am not sure how many people were in the Dec LCG engineeering group and working on the mainframes, but I am pretty sure it was more than one old guy sitting in a hallway upstairs in his house. I do have some advantages. It's many years later. Better schematic drawing tools exist. Laboratory test gear to do the job can be purchased on eBay (and some new) for 10% of their former cost. The cost of semi-comparable logic IC's is also fractions of what it once was.

I'd be kidding myself if I didn't think this will take a fair bit of time. Stay tuned to see if I retain the ability to reason long enough to finish....