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I've had minicomputers on my mind lately, particularly the old PDP-11. I just came across a special issue of the Bell System Technical Journal about a minicomputer Bell Labs built to shoot down nuclear warheads

https://srmsc.org/ref1040.html

A new module is about to drop. Any idea what it might be?

An insigthful analysis on why there are no minicomputers anymore. More specifically it discusses why the minicomputer form factor, architecture, and vendors disappeared.

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/why-are-there-no-minicomputers-any

1/ I fondly remember that evening in the early 1980’s when my dad, a research engineer at the Insititute of Physics (later “Teknikum”, later „Angstrom Lab“) in #Uppsala brought home a trailer or two with a DEC PDP 7/9 #server aka #minicomputer consisting of 5 x 19” full size racks plus a bunch of terminals (several of those TTY’s) and a *large* 117VAC transformer. All of it just shy of a metric ton in weight. Image by Tore Sinding Bekkedal of a PDP 7. #retrocomputing

We’ve come a long way in the last five decades!

This diagram discovered six years ago by @workergnome among his father’s old papers shows ARPAnet as it stood in May 1973

ARPAnet, named after the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA), was the precursor to the modern internet

But it is astonishing to think that it began with two computers linked together in California, and within a few years was a network of 42 multi-user computers across the US (including Hawaii, which had a satellite link to California)

Most of those computers were Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-series (Programmed Data Processor) minicomputers, though there were also several IBM S/360 and S/370 mainframes and a few others

The IMPs (Interface Message Processors) and TIPs (Terminal Interface Processors) were Honeywell DDP-516 and 316 minicomputers (essentially functioning as what we’d now call routers)

ASCII gaming on the 3B2/500 celebrating the Vintage Computer Festival East 2022 - ssh 3b2@sdf.org to play now

Systems Concepts SC40 hosted by SDF and the Interim Computer Museum.