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“Informs viewer of the experimental advances in audiovisual communications techniques Bell Telephone Laboratories’ researchers are experimenting with: computer graphics, synthesized speech, computer-made movies and music, and designing prototypical devices.” The guys designing circuits with a light pen on a circular CRT are using a DEC PDP-5 minicomputer (described below).
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Programmed Data Processor (PDP) was a series of minicomputers made and marketed by the Digital Equipment Corporation from 1957 to 1990. The name “PDP” intentionally avoided the use of the term “computer” because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines, and the venture capitalists behind Digital (especially Georges Doriot) would not support Digital’s attempting to build a “computer”; the word “minicomputer” had not yet been coined.[citation needed] So instead, Digital used their existing line of logic modules to build a Programmed Data Processor and aimed it at a market that could not afford the larger computers.
The various PDP machines can generally be grouped into families based on word length…
Members of the PDP series include:
PDP-1
The original PDP, an 18-bit machine used in early time-sharing operating system work, and prominent in MIT’s early hacker culture, which was to lead to the (Massachusetts) Route 128 hardware startup belt (DEC’s second home, Prime Computer, etc.). What is believed to be the first video game, Spacewar!, was developed for this machine, along with the first known word processing program for a general-purpose computer, “Expensive Typewriter”.
PDP-2
A number reserved for an unbuilt, undesigned 24-bit design.
PDP-3
First DEC-designed (for US “black budget” outfits) 36-bit machine, though DEC did not offer it as a product. The only PDP-3 was built by the CIA’s Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) in Waltham, MA to process radar cross section data for the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft in 1960. Architecturally it was essentially a PDP-1 controlling[citation needed] a PDP-1 stretched to 36-bit word width.
PDP-4
18-bit machine intended to be a slower, cheaper alternative to the PDP-1; it was not considered commercially successful. All later 18-bit PDP machines (7, 9 and 15) were based on a similar, but enlarged instruction set, more powerful, but based on the same concepts as the 12-bit PDP-5/PDP-8 series. One customer of these early PDP machines was Atomic Energy of Canada. The installation at Chalk River, Ontario included an early PDP-4 with a display system and a new PDP-5 as interface to the research reactor instrumentation and control.
PDP-5
DEC’s first 12-bit machine. Introduced the instruction set later expanded, in the PDP-8, to handle more bit rotations and to increase the maximum memory size from 4K words to 32K words. It was the first computer series with more than 1,000, then 10,000 built, which was a large number in the decade after ENIAC/UNIVAC builders predicted that 3 computers would serve the nations computing needs…
