The IBM RT PC : the first IBM RISC workstation

Hardware
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Well I have never heard of the IBM RT-PC RISC workstation :slight_smile:

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Other interesting links on the history of these machines:

More links from the Wikipedia page:

RT-PC at Crummy computers :slight_smile:

RT-PC manuals:

More RT-PC documentation, pictures, and links :
http://www.damage.fi/slas/rt/rt.html

RT-PC at old-computers.com:
OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum

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As a maybe interesting aside, the original IBM RISC architecture by John Cocke, as found on the IBM 801 and the IBM RS/6000, was — according to Ed Fredkin (once known as the world’s best programmer, but certainly the PDP-1’s best promoter) — heavily inspired by the design of the DEC PDP-1.

Compare here (there’s also some about this before this, but this the important part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmYfEnnnBJw&t=1329s

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Reportedly, this happened to be IBM’s second confrontation with the PDP-1 architecture: when J.C.R. Licklider went to IBM, they offered to have a take at a PDP-1 clone for him, but never achieved this.

Now, Licklider had spent time at IBM for a while. When he left DARPA he went to work for IBM, and he wanted to buy a PDP-1. And they refused, and he tried to insist, and they said, “We’ll build you something just as good as a PDP-1, but we can’t, at IBM, buy a competitor’s computer.” They just couldn’t do it. They never did build it for him, anyway.

This is, again, Ed Fredkin, here in his oral history, p.42.
(This is provided in the context of some harsh criticism of IBM’s early display architecture and that this would have provided a chance for IBM to get some experience with this. Given that Fredkin was also a consultant for IBM related business and on intimate terms with Licklider, there may be some to this story. – This is also some kind of reverse to the success story of PARC engineers gathering experience together while building their own PDP-10, because Xerox wouldn’t buy any computer from a competitor.)

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I knew about it back about 1988 or 1989. I was in a short-lived local science-fiction club, and the guy whose house we met at was an IBM engineer. He had a couple RTs at his house (a desktop model, then the tower model). Huge monochrome CRT on it (in retrospect it was probably a 17" screen, although it seemed more like 19"). It was set up to dial into the systems at IBM as well.

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