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PDP-12 Roll Call

I'm the caretaker of PDP-12 #435 at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). We have a project page here: https://umdpdp12.blogspot.com/

RICM has one here; they and their friends have helped us immensely.

@gnupublic has just acquired one.

There is an old list of PDP-12s here: http://dustyoldcomputers.com/pdp12/location.html

There is one at Computermuseum-Stuttgart that works and one at Computer Cabinett Göttingen that partly works.

It's not clear to me if CCA has one or not: https://www.cca.org/tech/rcs/pdp12.html

There's one in Uppsala, Sweden.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11b6rj

I know there are some others in North America.

More later!
 
The Rhode Island Computer Museum has a very late model, S/N696. It was a test system for pneumatic computers. The original operator donated it to the museum. It is usually used to run Spacewar!

Everything works OK except for the LINCtapes. They are unreliable, but the controller passes all diagnostics. We swapped the TU56 for a TU55 and it didn't make a difference.

1673449430615.png
 
I believe Paul Allen's estate has three or four machines in the LCM's inventory.
CHM also owns at least two. Mike Ross also owns at least one machine.
 
m_thompson said:
The Rhode Island Computer Museum has a very late model, S/N696. It was a test system for pneumatic computers. The original operator donated it to the museum. It is usually used to run Spacewar!
Click to expand...
Do you know when the machine was originally purchased, by any chance?
 
Near the end of This 1978 report from DEC, they cite a 1977 third-party market report to claim that 765 PDP-12 units had been sold. All the numbers we've seen before suggest something on the order of 750 units (755 was a common number cited), so this seems in line with historical figures.

I note that elsewhere in the report (see page 13&14) they describe some application-specific 12 builds that may have been marketed as a "COMPUTERPAK" such as the "Clinical Lab-12", and not been recorded by some accounts under the PDP model number.

So once you know your model number, you can probably put 765 in the denominator to get a floating point representation of your unit's place in 12 history!
pdp-12-installations.jpeg
 
This is great, too, because it's the best-attested source for a total (approximate) machine count that I have seen.
 
Found it. Mine says:
M36
PDP12
326
and it also has the little plaque with the DEC logo and the 72 on it.

I know of several PDP-12 that I'm not supposed to talk about, so I'm not sure how complete any such list will ever be.

But, if we're helping folks find each other, I'm guess I'm in.

Vince
 
vrs42 said:
I know of several PDP-12 that I'm not supposed to talk about, so I'm not sure how complete any such list will ever be.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Yeah, it's obviously fine if people don't want to be known / publicized. But I think it would be nice to, as you said, find each other, and to have a current list of publicly known machines, and then information about which machines can be seen / used / etc. No pressure on anyone if they'd rather stay under the radar. I get that.
 
Also, @vrs42, with yours at 326 and ours at 435 -- and both with the "72" plaque, it's practically like they're PDP-12 siblings!
 
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