Boeing’s PDP-7a
Boeing News – November 14, 1968
In November 1968, Boeing engineers demonstrated to Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, Commanding General of the Army’s Sentinel Logistics Command, a hybrid computing system built around a DEC PDP-7A and a Type 340 graphics display. The PDP-7A functioned as an interactive front-end processor, handling light-pen input and real-time display refresh, while an SDS-930 provided high-precision floating-point computation for missile defense simulations. The Type 340’s ability to render vectors and alphanumeric data under program control enabled Boeing to prototype battle management consoles where an operator could manipulate data directly on the screen. This configuration anticipated later command-and-control systems and represented an early example of distributed computing, coupling minicomputer interactivity with mainframe computational power. The demonstration, reported in Boeing News on November 14, 1968, underscored the PDP-7’s pivotal role in bridging interactive computing with aerospace and defense applications during the Cold War.
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September 2025
Charles and Bruce are tracing an intermittent bit which can get set reliable under certain conditions, but only predictably in others. On this type of computer the majority of the interesting signals can be found on the wire wrapped back plane. You can trace the logic paths there without even touching the cards on the other side.
August 2025
This DEC PDP-7a was used at Boeing to process AWACS data fed by an SDS-930. The data could then be displayed and manipulated with a light pen on the DEC Type 340 point display. This machine uses an emulated drum-like memory which was made compatible with UNICS (UNIX) Version 0 by Josh Dersch. The drum-like memory hardware was developed by Jeff Kaylin based on the DEC RB09 as used at Bell Laboratories for UNICS Version 0.
