Announcing the DPD-11

The DPD-11 is a truly innovative state-of-the-art computer, the first linked-list multi-processor machine. It has 1024 words of doubly linked list storage and an arbitrarily large amount of ordinary memory. It has eight independent processors, each of which executes its own independent doubly linked list. Each processor has the capability of linking and unlinking link memory from the linked lists of any other processor. Each processor is assigned its own area of ordinary core memory which is hardware protected – except that any processor can redefine the limits. Each processor can select its own addressing step level – i.e., memory can be bit addressable, two bit addressable, etc., depending on the addressing step level. The DPD-11 is the only commercially available computer that offers advantages such as any processor being able to specify which direction any other processor will take its instruction from.

The user is referred to the DPD-11 programming guide Fundamentals of Computing Programming for advice on how to most effectively program a doubly-linked-list multi-processor. The DPD-11 can be programmed as a conventional stack processor; this is not the most effective use of the machine, but it is possible, and a chapter on stack processing is included. (We understand that there are still people around who program accumulator oriented machines. We find this very hard to believe, and we certainly don’t talk to people like that.)