PDP-11

Possibly the single most successful minicomputer design in history, a favorite of hackers for many years, and the first major Unix machine, The first PDP-11s (the 11/15 and 11/20) shipped in 1970 from {DEC}; the last (11/93 and 11/94) in 1990. Along the way, the 11 gave birth to the {VAX}, strongly influenced the design of microprocessors such as the Motorola 6800 and Intel 386, and left a permanent imprint on the C language (which has an odd preference for octal embedded in its syntax because of the way PDP-11 machine instructions were formatted). There is a history site.

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