The PiDP-1 

The beginnings of Hacker Culture

The PDP-1 was a first in many respects. But it is also just an absolute puppy. So simple it is quickly understandable to any 21st century user.

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Famous for spacewar, the world's first computer video game, this is the original Hacker's machine - the word comes from its early student users at MIT.

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Their demo programs are still pure eye candy thanks to the Type 30, a converted radar display. Driving the electron beam over its slow phosphor, pretty graphics effects come out of just a few lines of code.

But this is more than the original democoding platform. It had the first text editor, the first inter-active debugger - even acted as Arpanet's controller.

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This was a 3-year passion project for Angelo Papenhoff and me, resulting in two versions. The stand-alone 'PiDP-1 Console', and a 'PiDP-1 Rack' version. Both existed back in the day, too. And because DEC could never make its mind up on the front panel color, we gave the PiDP-1 interchangeable white and blue front panels.