{"id":45660,"date":"2021-07-08T20:50:07","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T00:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pappp.net\/?guid=82f78c22bbd37602364316162cdbead0"},"modified":"2021-07-08T20:50:07","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T00:50:07","slug":"the-historical-significance-of-dec-and-the-pdp-7-8-11-and-vax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=45660","title":{"rendered":"The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, 8, 11 and VAX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.osnews.com\/story\/133678\/the-historical-significance-of-dec-and-the-pdp-7-8-11-and-vax\/\">OSNews<\/a><\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color : #fff7d5;\n\t\t\tborder-width : 1px; padding : 5px; border-style : dashed; border-color : #e7d796;margin-bottom : 1em; color : #9a8c59;\">Article note: We need more of this kind of thing in at least CompE curricula, and I'd assert CS curricula as well even though it would make the theoreticians cry.  I always inject some history when I can and get a chorus of \"Oh, that makes sense now\"s. \n\nTalking about the history of things is talking about the how and why of current practices.  Exposing students to that would go a long way to damp both hanging on to bad assumptions (hint: modern performance analysis has little to do with operation counts and a lot to do with memory access patterns) and design fads that have been oscillating between extremes for 60 years.<\/div><p>Liam Proven posted a good summary of the importance of the PDP and VAX series of computers <a href=\"https:\/\/liam-on-linux.livejournal.com\/81341.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">on his blog.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p>Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. It&rsquo;s entitled &ldquo;First new vax in &hellip;30 years?&rdquo;<\/p><p>Someone posted it on Hackernews. One of the comments said, roughly, that they didn&rsquo;t see the significance and could someone &ldquo;explain it like I&rsquo;m a Computer Science undergrad.&rdquo; This is my attempt to reply&hellip;<\/p><p>Um. Now I feel like I&rsquo;m 106 instead of &ldquo;just&rdquo; 53.<\/p><p>OK, so, basically all modern mass-market OSes of any significance derive in some way from 2 historical minicomputer families&hellip; and both were from the same company.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Liam Proven posted a good summary of the importance of the PDP and VAX series of computers on his b&#8230;<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=45660\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}