Foreword

When I first got a summer job at MIT’s Project MAC almost 30 years ago, I was delighted to be able to work with the DEC PDP-10 computer, which was more fun to program in assembly language than any other computer, bar none, because of its rich yet tractable set of instructions for performing bit tests, bit masking, field manipulation, and operations on integers. Though the PDP-10 has not been manufactured for quite some years, there remains a thriving cult of enthusiasts who keep old PDP-10 hardware running and who run old PDP-10 software—entire operating systems and their applications—by using personal computers to simulate the PDP-10 instruction set. They even write new software; there is now at least one Web site whose pages are served ...

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