I highly recommend watching the video above. Wilkes wrote an OS for the scope that provided a full-screen text editor at a time when most luxury OSes only had teletype-oriented line editors at best. The interviewers are kind of pushy, and seem to be getting her to give her talk to the camera when she wants to ensure they get certain documents, but she's game and gives a lot of good history about the machine's operational lifetime.

In particular, she worked first on a LINC simulator on the TX-2, but they kept changing the architecture so that's partly why they had to ship her a LINC in Baltimore while they all set up shop in St. Louis.

Note that she also stressed the behaviour of system sounds as an indication of smooth operation, much like the technicians who preferred Hamilton's code for SAGE.

Anyway, LINC showed that you could build a small inexpensive computer from #dec flipchips. So what did Digital themselves do?

Well, they tried to make their own, and that was the #PDP5. This ultimately became the #pdp8
But they did something clever: they made a change to the #LINCTape format that let it read data backwards as well as forwards.

And they called it #DECTape. In one of the videos I pasted above, Wes Clark mentions that he specifically asked that they take all LINC branding off of this, because he didn't want to get called doing support requests for Ken's customers!

While @tastytronic is setting up the new more powerful #dec #flipchip tester (in its snazzy #pdp12 livery!), I went to re-watch the videos about the tester that the #umnpdp12 project uploaded to YouTube. The last one ended with a classic fix (CLEAN THE CONTACTS, LADS) while diagnosing the LINCTape, and they didn't even test the cards before making progress: https://youtu.be/aiHSRF_2bmk

I did a bit of digging into #LINCTape and #DECTape over the past couple years, and so here's a #VintageComputing thread with some of the backstory on these tape formats.

Spoiler: The answer is *always* MIT Lincoln Labs.

@tkohl @onthisday I miss the PDP-11/45 with DECtape.

#dectape #dec #pdp11/45 #digitalequipmentcorporation