KL10 operator console.
Photo:Wikipedia
Digital Equipment Corporation's 36-bit
PDP-10 was, arguably, the
birthplace (together with its sibling,
the DECSYSTEM-20) of both the Internet and the
Open Source movement, and without argument, the source of many of the most
influential software applications, including EMACS, TEX, ISPELL
(the first spell checker), MACSYMA, SCRIBE, numerous LISP dialects, MM and
other pioneering email clients, and Kermit.
The PDP-10 was the successor to the PDP-6, which appeared in 1964. PDP-10s
came in four models: KA10, KI10, KL10, KS10. The primary operating system
for the DECsystem-10 was
DEC's TOPS-10
("Timesharing Total Operating System-10").
The typical PDP-10
installation included multiple full-size cabinets for CPU, memory,
controllers, networking front ends, and magnetic tape, plus
washing-machine
sized disk drives, line printers, and so on, requiring a large machine room
with serious air conditioning and a great deal of 3-phase power; the
electrical bill alone ran into the thousands of dollars per month, ditto for
hardware maintenance. This was typical of any mainframe of the era.
A large DECsystem-10 installation.
Photo: DEC
Other PDP-10 operating systems included MIT's ITS, Stanford's WAITS,
Tymshare's TYMCOM-X, the version of
TENEX that Xerox PARC ran on their MAXC PDP-10 clone (more or less
equivalent to a KA-10 with BBN pager), and maybe some others. The PDP-10
line was canceled by DEC in 1983 and the machine gradually faded from view
in the ensuing years. Manufacturing ceased in 1988. Some machines or
clones remained operational through the 1990s (and a handful even to this
day as museum pieces), and then in 2001 a renaissance of PDP-10 culture
began with the release of several Unix- and/or Windows-based PDP-10
emulators (see Links section).
The distinguishing feature of PDP-10 is its rich instruction set and
powerful repertoire of system services. This combination made the PDP-10
more fun to program than any other computer before or since (except
the DECsystem-20!), and spawned a generation of
prolific programmers ranging from Richard Stallman to Bill Gates.
PDP-10 ad 1968 (KA10)
DECsystem-10 Kermit, or Kermit-10, was written in 1983-86 by Bob McQueen and
Nick Bush at Stevens Institute of
Technology, Hoboken NJ, in DEC's Common Bliss cross-platform
implementation language. Version 3(136) from Nick Bush consolidates the
patches that have accumulated over the years and fixes a few bugs.
Kermit-10 shares common source with Kermit-32 (the VAX/VMS version that was
retired in 1987 in favor of VMS C-Kermit) and
Kermit for the long-forgotten DEC Professional (PDP-11 based) workstation
with P/OS. Recognizing that most sites never did and never will have a
Common Bliss compiler, MACRO-10 versions of the source files are also
available, output by Bliss-36, suitable for input to MACRO-10. As of
version 3(136) the Bliss and Macro files are once again synchronized and the
binaries produced from either set of sources are identical.
Kermit-10 source code is available in
tar and Zip archives:
"tarballs":
The files listed above as a Unix tar archive of text files in Unix
format. Transfer in binary mode to Unix, uncompress with gunzip, and then
de-archive with "tar xvf".
The files listed above in a Zip archive; extract them with unzip.
The files are also available separately as follows. Some of these file
types, such as .mac, are nowadays associated with
applications that might try to play them as music or show them as movies, so
you might need to right-click on the link and then choose "Save as" or
whatever:
In January 2017, Lars Brinkhoff informed me of a version of Kermit in
Maclisp for ITS, MIT's
Incompatible Timesharing System. It was adapted in 1988 from a Common
Lisp version (not sure which one yet) by Jonathan Rees of
Scheme48 fame.
Here are the files:
Lars notes, “I don't have the
file AI: MATH; COMMON > which is referred to in
lines 16 and 40 of kermit.170“. If anybody else has a copy,
please let me know.
Kermit for Other PDP-10 Operating Systems
To my knowledge, no Kermit programs were ever written explicitly for TENEX,
WAITS, or TYMCOM-X, but since Kermit programs were written in various LISP
dialects, including Common Lisp, which presumably would have worked anywhere
that Common Lisp was available. (The Emacs LISP version wouldn't have
helped because PDP-10 EMACS was based on TECO, not LISP, and I don't think
there was ever a TECO Kermit either!)
