DEC PDP-9

Purdue had a PDP-9 behind glass on the ground floor of the electrical engineering building. It took me a while to discover that I was welcome to program it. I hung out there late at night with Bill Croft, a developer with a strong notion of style and a great influence on me at the time.

Bill Croft tends the model 35 teleprinter which provided text input/output for the PDP-9.

I programmed the 9 in Fortran and Focal.

PDP-9 Football took a side view of the field and ran plays based on input from the light-pen and button-box.

The same room held the Imlac PDS-1 which had a slightly more modern display architecture and which I was comfortable programming in assembler.

The physics department had a PDP-15, the big brother to the 9. I remember visiting but not programming the 15.