The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers (the PDP-5 was not originally intended to be a general-purpose computer).
The earliest PDP-8 model (informally known as a "Straight-8") used d...
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The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers (the PDP-5 was not originally intended to be a general-purpose computer).
The earliest PDP-8 model (informally known as a "Straight-8") used diode-transistor logic, packaged on flip chip cards, and was about the size of a refrigerator.
This was followed by the PDP-8/S, a desktop model. By using a one-bit serial ALU implementation, the PDP-8/S was smaller, less expensive, but vastly slower than the original PDP-8.
Intermediate systems (the PDP-8/I and /L, the PDP-8/E, /F, and /M, and the PDP-8/A) returned to a faster, fully-parallel implementation but used much less-expensive TTL MSI logic. Most surviving PDP-8s are from this era. The PDP-8/E is common, and well-regarded because so...
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