Pdp Quotes

PDP-1 was the first computer to be designed for direct interaction with the user.

I'll bite: Hard science TA's and RA's often repair equipment; it's part of our science. If you want a silver spoon, don't go to grad school. Science is all about dangerous chemicals, semi-safe experimental equipment, and 4am drives down gravel roads in old vans with a nice steep drop on one side. Guardrail? Ho ho ho. Fixing the computers is just the tip of the iceberg. Plus, where else could you get on-the-job experience with a PDP-8?

I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own,” DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether to create a smaller version of its PDP-8 for personal consumers.

Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood. Operating System/360 is hailed by its builders as the finest ever built, because it indisputably has the most function. Function, and not simplicity, has always been the measure of excellence for its designers. On the other hand, the Time-Sharing System for the PDP-10 is hailed by its builders as the finest, because of its simplicity and the spareness of its concepts. By any measure, however, its function is not even in the same class as that of OS/360. As soon as ease of use is held up as the criterion, each of these is seen to be unbalanced, reaching for only half of the true goal.

One was the chairman of the PDP Chapter. I first thought his name was Wai Wai Suleiman, until I realised that Y.Y. were his initials.

There were two kinds of delegates: automatic and ad hoc. The automatic ones were PDP royalty.

The computation of partial dependence plots is intuitive: The partial dependence function at a particular feature value represents the average prediction if we force all data points to assume that feature value. In my experience, lay people usually understand the idea of PDPs quickly. If the feature for which you computed the PDP is not correlated with the other features, then the PDPs perfectly represent how the feature influences the prediction on average. In the uncorrelated case, the interpretation is clear: The partial dependence plot shows how the average prediction in your dataset changes when the j-th feature is changed. It is more complicated when features are correlated, see also disadvantages. Partial dependence plots are easy to implement. The calculation for the partial dependence plots has a causal interpretation. We intervene on a feature and measure the changes in the predictions. In doing so, we analyze the causal relationship between the feature and the prediction.3 The relationship is causal for the model – because we explicitly model the outcome as a function of the features – but not necessarily for the real world!

December 1959, DEC shipped the prototype to the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston for the PDP-1’s official world debut.

In December 1959, DEC shipped the prototype to the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston for the PDP-1’s official world debut.

BBN engineer named Ray Tomlinson had sent a message between the company’s two PDP-10s—the same ones that BBN was using to run the Arpanet itself, as it happened.

Tomlinson had already written an E-mail utility for Tenex, BBN’s new time-shared operating system for the PDP-10, and had also begun to experiment with a new version of the Arpanet’s file-transfer protocol. So putting the two together seemed a natural step.

official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC’s BASIC for the PDP-11.

(The language also owed its existence to the Harvard PDP-10, interestingly enough. Since Gates and Allen didn’t have access to an Intel 8080 at the time, they used Gates’s student account on the big machine to create a simulation of the microprocessor

In April 1974, for example, Intel introduced its 8-bit 8080 chip, the first microprocessor to come within shouting distance of, say, a 12-bit mini such as the PDP-8.

Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?

She pokes around in her lunch—spaghetti and meatballs—and gets her PDP out of her pocket to read up on the battalion news while she eats.

Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?

Weizenbaum did not acknowledge the beauty of the hacker devotion itself...orthe very idealism of the Hacker Ethic. He had not seen, as Ed Fredkin had, Stew Nelson composing code on the TECO editor while Greenblatt and Gosper watched: without any of the three saying a word, Nelson was entertaining the others, encoding assembly-language tricks which to them, with their absolute mastery of that PDP-6 “language,” had the same effect as hilariously incisive jokes. And after every few instructions there would be another punch line in this sublime form of communication . . . The scene was a demonstration of sharing which Fredkin never forgot.

1965 DEC PDP-8 Real price: $172,370.29 Computations per second: 312,500 Computations/second/dollar: 1.81

In 1965, the PDP-8 managed around 1.8 computations per second per dollar.

1962 DEC PDP-4 Real price: $647,099.67 Computations per second: 62,500 Computations/second/dollar: 0.097

Taylor maintained that his group considered the PDP-10 so self-evidently superior to the Sigma they never gave a moment’s thought to how their request would resonate in El Segundo.

At 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time the PDP-11/73 received a very brief telephone call that would severely impact the Southern LA area.

Deutsch: My PhD thesis was a 600-page Lisp program. I'm a very heavy-duty Lisp hacker from PDP-1 Lisp, Alto Lisp, Byte Lisp, and Interlisp. The reason I don't program in Lisp anymore: I can't stand the syntax. It's just a fact of life that syntax matters.

I really believed that computers were deterministic, that you could understand what they were supposed to do, and that there was no excuse for computers not working, for things not functioning properly. In retrospect, I was surprisingly good at keeping the system running, putting in new code and having it not break the system. That was the first instance of something I got an undeserved reputation for. I know that my boss, and probably some other of my colleagues, have said I was a great debugger. And that's partly true. But there's a fake in there. Really what I was was a very careful programmer with the arrogance to believe that very few computer programs are inherently difficult. I would take some piece of code that didn't look like it was working and I would try to read it. And if I could understand, then I could usually see what was wrong or poke around with it and fix it. But sometimes I would get a piece of code—often one that other people couldn't make work—and I would say, “This is way too complicated.” So I would think through what it was supposed to do, throw it away, and write it again from scratch. Some of the folks I worked with—like Will Crowther—who are terrific programmers, couldn't tolerate that. They would believe that by doing that, I would probably have fixed the 2 bugs that were there and introduced 27 new bugs. But the fact is, I was good at that. So I would rewrite stuff completely and it would be organized differently than the original programmer had organized it because I had thought about the problem differently. Typically, it was simpler than it used to be, or at least simpler to my eyes. And it would work. So I got this reputation—I fixed these mysterious bugs that nobody else could fix. Fortunately, they never asked me what the bug was. Because the truth of the matter is if they'd have asked, “How did you fix the bug?” my answer would have been, “I couldn't understand the code well enough to figure out what it was doing, so I rewrote it.” I did that a lot on the PDP-1 time-sharing system. There were chunks of the code that I would read and would say, “This doesn't do what I think this part of the program is supposed to be doing,” or “It's weird.” So I'd rewrite it. The only thing that kept me working there, with that attitude, was that I had a good track record. That's one of the things, that if you're not good at it, you make chaos. But if you are good at it, the world thinks that you can do things that you can't, really.

The ARPAnet/PDP-10 culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. The Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone connections. And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts bent on taking computer power to the people.

If the PDP grants the access request, it also sends the uniform resource identifier (URI) for the physical resource in question. This enables the PEP to carry out the requested access by using the URI to identify the appropriate RAP, issue the appropriate commands against it, and return the results to the application.

The architecture supports a SAML attribute responder that can supply attributes in standardized SAML format not only for Jericho’s EnterSpace Decision Engine (PDP) but also for Jericho’s JAzP module (PEP) as well as for the accessing user.