[TUHS] understand earliest hardware?

reed at reedmedia.net reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Oct 1 07:59:49 AEST 2019


I read in the PDP-7 reference manual that Precision CRT Display Type 30 
and Precision Incremental Display Type 340 are the typical displays used 
with the PDP-7, but aren't standard equipment. I read about the 
Graphics-II scope. Was it the only display? I read it was used as a 
second terminal and that it would pause per display full with a button 
to continue.

I assume this second terminal's keyboard was TTY model 33 or similar 
since it was the standard equipment. Does anyone know?

Do you know if the PDP-7 or early edition Unixes have pen support for 
that Graphics-II or similar displays?

Clem has written that the PDP-7 had a disk from a PDP-9. Where is this 
cited?

The ~1971 draft "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" says first version runs 
on PDP-9 also.
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/
But I cannot find any other reference of running on PDP-9 at all. Was 
this academic?

That draft calls the PDP-7 version the "first edition" but later the 
PDP-11/20 is called the "first edition". When did the naming of first 
edition get defined to not include the PDP-7 version? Or is it because 
the early "0th" version was never released/shared outside?

Thompson interview 
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/OralHistory/transcripts/thompson.htm 
mentions an "interim machine" and a "PDP-11 that had PDP-10 memory 
management, KS-1."  What is this interim machine? Is this a PDP-11 
without a disk (for a few months?) What is this PDP-11 
and KS-1?  Maybe this is the PDP-11/20 with KS-11?

Do we know what hardware was supported for the early editions? We don't 
have all the kernel code and from a quick look from what is available I 
didn't see specific hardware references.

The later ~1974 "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper does mention some 
hardware at that time on the PDP-11/45 like a 201 dataset interface and 
a Tektronix 611 storage-tube display on a satellite PDP-11/20.

When did a CRT with keyboard terminal like DEC vt01 (with Tektronix 611 
CRT display), LS ADM-3, Hazeltine 2000, VT01A display with keyboard 
(what keyboard?) get supported?  Any code to help find this?  (The 
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html does mention the 
VT01A plys keyboard).

Thanks,

Jeremy C. Reed

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 tr "Onoqrsuvxzabcefghl" "Babdefhikmnoprstuy"


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