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PDP-11

Rating

PDP-11

Possibly the single most successful minicomputer design in history, a favorite of hackers for many years, and the first major Unix machine, The first PDP-11s (the 11/15 and 11/20) shipped in 1970 from DEC; the last (11/93 and 11/94) in 1990. Along the way, the 11 gave birth to the VAX, strongly influenced the design of microprocessors such as the Motorola 6800 and Intel 386, and left a permanent imprint on the C language (which has an odd preference for octal embedded in its syntax because of the way PDP-11 machine instructions were formatted). There is a history site.

The Jargon File

Cartoons

The crunchly saga

The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the ‘next cartoon’ information in the captions.