13 Facts About PDP-11

PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series.

The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer.

PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that made it much easier to program than earlier models in the PDP series.

The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time computing applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years.

The ease of programming of the PDP-11 made it very popular for general-purpose computing uses.

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Design of the PDP-11 inspired the design of late-1970s microprocessors including the Intel x86 and the Motorola 68000.

PDP-11 family was announced in January 1970 and shipments began early that year.

For example, instead of instructions such as load and store, the PDP-11 has a move instruction for which either operand can be memory or register.

PDP-11 was designed for ease of manufacture by semiskilled labor.

LSI-11, introduced in February 1975 is the first PDP-11 model produced using large-scale integration; the entire CPU is contained on four LSI chips made by Western Digital (the MCP-1600 chip set; a fifth chip can be added to extend the instruction set).

Basic design of the PDP-11 was flexible, and was continually updated to use newer technologies.

The article on PDP-11 architecture describes the hardware and software techniques used to work around address-space limitations.

PDP-11 was sufficiently popular that many unlicensed PDP-11-compatible minicomputers and microcomputers were produced in Eastern Bloc countries.