Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Correction -- it's a 2:3 scale model of a PDP-10 front panel, concealing a Raspberry Pi running an emulator. In the original equipment, the panel would have been attached to one of several racks containing the CPU and main memory, cabled up to peripherals (tape drives like in '60s movies, disk drives the size of washing machines) through wires under the false floor of a dedicated computer room...

The PiDP-10 accurately models the console, but it doesn't depict the rest of this at all.




Full authenticity would also require raised flooring, and an audio track of people shouting "SAVE YOUR FILES!" whenever the lights flickered.


The KA-10 had core memory (except for the instruction counter and locations 0-15 which were general purpose registers which were implemented in DTL). So when the power went out you could just restart, except for the running process.

Bad news if that was the monitor of course.


An interesting thing about the KA-10 is that those DTL registers were optional. Architecturally the registers are simply the first 16 words of core memory. If you bought the fast register option with your KA-10 they installed the DTL registers which overlaid the first 16 words of core.

A consequence of that was that anything that took a memory address could access the registers as memory. Just give it an address in [0,15].

That included the program counter. Load code in 0-15 and jump to it and it would run quite a bit faster than if it were in core if your KA-10 had the fast register option.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: