Minutes of the Low-Cost PDP-10 Meeting

This interoffice memorandum from November 4, 1971, documents a meeting held to discuss the development of a low-cost version of the DECsystem-10 and its strategic alignment with the PDP-11/45 project. The discussion addressed concerns regarding potential feature overlap, the manufacturing costs of the new hardware, and the necessity of software compatibility between the two platforms.

The document concludes with four main recommendations: developing a unified two-year plan for both projects, maintaining focus on hardware cost reduction for the KL-10 while supporting existing DECsystem-10 software, allowing the 11/45 to continue its trajectory toward specialized real-time and multi-user systems, and ensuring the future transportability of user source code (FORTRAN and BLISS) between the two systems.