On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 10:48 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
the PDP-10 was in fact considered a mainframe in the 1960s. They were more commonly called DECsystem-10, or KA10, KL10. the CPU was multiple cabinets, the KL10 supported up to 4 megawords of ram (where a word was 36 bits). They were commonly used as timesharing systems which was relatively uncommon in the late 1960s
What type of memory did it have?
At my second computer job in 1967 on a Honeywell H-120 (a baby machine with 3 tapes which took 1 hour to do a Cobol compilation ... and then another hour for a recompile to correct the 400 errors the Punch Room had mysteriously added to 'verified' coding sheets) the memory was magnetic cores using 3 wires physically through each hollow core or ring. The memory total was, I think, octal 37777.
I can still read punch cards held upto the light to see where the holes are :-)