The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1

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The PDP-1 was the first computer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (sometimes called Digital and other times just called DEC) in 1959. Most environments that used the computers initially either powered them on to run an application, or, ran software loaded at startup, like the game Spacewar! that was run on it to test that it worked. The computer was transistorized and so interactive - it didn't just use punched cards. That led to a few innovative firsts on the PDP-1 but also beyond. The PDP-1 was somewhat based on the TX-0 and TX-1 computers where magnetic core memory cam out of. The TX-series of computers were part of the government-funded Lincoln Labs project at MIT. The first unit was sold to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) in 1960. These sold for $120,000 and were a fraction the cost of many less powerful computers. The low cost and new interactivity gave way to new ideas for what people could do on computers. They were also a fraction the size of the big mainframes of the era, so they started the Minicomputer movement. That movement saw the team at MIT build a number of innovative tools and even the game Spacewar! on the computer. BBN used theirs to build the BBN Time-Sharing System and Stanford used them to build the Stanford Time Sharing System. It was also the first machine used to dial random numbers to find something on the other end, or war dialing we would later call it. DEC would continue to produce machines, first with the PDP line and then with the VAX lines, up until they were acquired by Compaq, who was then acquired by HP, and the DEC systems became a part of the HP portfolio of products.