Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
discrete nature, being comprised of a collection of transistors, resistors, capacitors and
other electronic components. xxxiv
In November of 1960, Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC)
started production of the world’s
first commercial interactive
computer, the PDP-1 (left). The
$120,000 machine’s four cabinets
measured approximately 8 feet in
length. A DEC technical bulletin
describes it as:
"...a compact, solid state general
purpose computer with an internal
instruction execution rate of
100,000 to 200,000 operations per
second. PDP-1 is a single address,
single construction, stored program
machine with a word length of 18-
bits operating in parallel on 1's
complement binary numbers."
It had a 4000 18-bit word memory.
It was the first computer with a
typewriter keyboard and a cathoderay
tube display monitor. It also
had a light pen, which made it
interactive, and a paper punch output device. Producing 50 of these machines made DEC
the world’s first mass computer maker. xxxv
Between 1961 and 1962, Fernando Corbató of MIT developed Compatible Time-Sharing
System (CTSS) as part of Project MAC, which was one of the first time-sharing
operating systems that allowed multiple users to share a single machine. It was also the
first system to have formatting text utility and one of the first to have e-mail capabilities.
Louis Pouzin developed RUNCOM for CTSS, the precursor of UNIX shell script, which
executed commands contained in a file and allowed parameter substitution. Multiplexed
Information and Computing Service (Multics), the operating system that led to the
development of UNIX, was also developed by project MAC. This system was the
successor to CTSS and was used for multiple-access computing. xxxvi
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