Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7/A
S#129 - Boeing (USA)

June 2026 -   Following the closure of the The Living Computer Museum (Seattle, Washington) operations at the museum have ceased and the exhibits sold.  From information recently received it now appears that PDP-7/A S#129 was sold off to the Interim Computer Museum - who have a blog entry for the Boeing PDP-7/A S#129 here.

Fred Yearian, a retired Boeing engineer who owned S#129 has sent us recent photos of it in its new home, we aim to get these uploaded here very soon.

September 2024 -   We have now heard that following the Covid19 pandemic the The Living Computer Museum (Seattle, Washington) and the passing of Paul Allen its founder, operations at the museum have ceased.  Various exhibits from the museum are to be sold off by Christie's later in 2024.  At this time it is not known what is going to happen to the larger systems, which includes this PDP-7A S#129 originally from Boeing.

Late in 2019 we found out from Jon Leech and Nathanael Motz that the Paul G. Allen PDPplanet collection at the The Living Computer Museum in Seattle had bought PDP-7 S#129 from Fred Yearian, a retired Boeing engineer who had acquired the system many years earlier from Boeing Surplus, and kept it in semi-running condition.  Once at LCM it was checked out and repaired, and then used to boot and run UNIX V0.

The Living Computer Museum had several blogs about the Boeing machine but following the museums closure they have now gone.  In June 2026 an email from Fred Yearian noted that one of the blogs - Restoring UNIX V0 on a PDP-7: A look behind the scenes - has been found on The Internet Archive - November 1, 2019
The second blog - Unix Version 0 on the PDP-7 at LCM+L - November 13, 2019 - is currently still missing.

The PDP-7 Service list (1972) shows that machine #34 was shipped to Boeing (USA) in August 1966 and consisted of the following options -

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

120 PDP-7 and PDP-7/A systems were forecast to be built in total, but the 1972 18-bit service list available (6.5Mb pdf download) only has details of the 99 known PDP-7 and PDP-7/A systems in the list at that time.  We do not have any information about the possible remaining 21 systems, who they were delivered to or even if they actually existed.

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 forecast production run!  Serial numbers are concurrent for both PDP-7's and the PDP-7/A's, so the missing 21 could be of either type; however we are reasonably confident that the 99 systems shipped were the only ones that were ever built.

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

Documents associated with PDP-7 S#129 - None at this time

Site design ©2007- - privacy -