PDP-6
(''Programmed Data Processor model 6'') was a computer model developed by Digital_Equipment_Corporation (DEC) in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype (effectively) for the later PDP-10; the instruction_sets of the two machines are almost identical. Worldwide, only 23 PDP-6's were sold, the smallest number of any DEC machine, but DEC management still considered the system useful because those sales were to technical leaders such as universities. That gave DEC a number of advantages, including a foothold in that market, access to advice on future technical direction from a group of advanced and technically knowledgeable users, and finally a source of intelligent young employees as the business grew. It used a 36-bit word_length, and had a maximum memory capacity of 256,000 words, although many systems were installed with only about 32,000 words (that's 160 Kbytes). It included simple mechanisms to support time_sharing, including a pair of operating modes ("Executive" and "User", with access to I/O, etc, being restricted in the latter), and a set of "base and bounds" registers which allowed a user's address_space to be limited to a set section of main_memory.Further Reading
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