PDP7 Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7 - S#113 PDP7
University of Oregon

All photos and pictures ©2009 University of Oregon.

University of Oregon's PDP-7A (S# 113) was operated by Dr. Harlan Lefevre until his recent retirement when it was de-commissioned and donated to the PDPplanet Project museum in Seattle. It is believed this machine was fully operational after nearly 40 years use with some 65,000 hours logged.

Rich Alderson, Server Engineer with the PDPplanet Project emailed us recently - "when we disassembled the system in the High Energy Physics Lab at the University of Oregon in June, 2006, it was still in running condition. At present, it is disassembled and awaiting reassembly, that's on the schedule for this spring (2009). We'll announce when it's ready for visitors."

In 2001 the University featured their PDP-7A in an on-line article here, copied below (©2001, University of Oregon).

"Goodbye to the PDP-7:" A Computing Pioneer Retires.
At the end of this year, when a DEC PDP-7 computer leaves campus, a part of the UO's computing history will disappear.

Since 1963, when it was purchased with funds from a National Science Foundation grant, the PDP-7 computer has served as an invaluable research tool for physics professor Harlan Lefevre and his colleagues.

Four years after Prof. Lefevre came to the University of Oregon in 1961, and three years before the UO built the Computing Center, the PDP-7 was installed in the basement of what was then the Student Health Center (now Vulcanology). The computer, which has a magnetic core memory with a capacity for 8000 18-bit words of code, was first linked to an IBM 360-50 and later was linked in real time to the Computing Center.

For more than 30 years, the PDP-7 served the university as a vital research tool. Initially, the computer was used to analyze neutron physics data, and 20 Ph.D. candidates used it to complete their theses in nuclear physics. Subsequently, the PDP-7 was put to work in a Federal Aviation Administration safety project to detect the presence of explosives in luggage. The venerable computer analyzed data from a special scanner that recorded the presence of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in sample suitcases.

Prof. Lefevre, happy to demonstrate the machine's virtues, can easily coax it to life again. At his bidding, it lights up and hums with the same vitality it exhibited nearly 40 years ago.

Sadly, this bit of computing history will be gone forever by the end of this year, when it will be removed from its longtime home with the accelerator that was its partner in research for so many years.

The PDP-7 Service list (1972) lists that machine #113 (DEC #999999) was a PDP-7A shipped to the University of Oregon in February 1966 and consisted of the following options -

For descriptions of the above options see the full PDP-7 options list here.

The service list is available here (6.5Mb pdf), and comprises the 99 known PDP-7 and PDP-7A systems on the list at that time. 120 systems were built in total, but at this time we do not have any information about the remaining 21 systems or who they were delivered to. The PDP-7 appeared to have sold well into Government research and University sectors with 11 systems shipped to the UK alone, almost 10% of the production run !. Serial numbers are concurrent for both the PDP-7 and PDP-7A so the missing 21 could be either type.

If you know of any information about any of the PDP-7 systems worldwide, location of existing systems, spare parts, ancillary bits, software, tapes or manuals, then please let us know here. PDP7

Documents associated with PDP-7A S#113 - None at this time

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