[2] Digital Equipment Corporation's prototype PDP-1 was ready in November, 1959, and the machine was featured in the November/December issue of Datamation magazine.

[3] BBNer Ed Fredkin saw a prototype system at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston in December 1959, and was extremely interested.

BBN agreed to be the test site, at its regular hourly rates, and then in early 1960 obtained the prototype PDP-1.

"[7] As Fredkin recounts:[8] McCarthy recalled in 1989:[9] Accordingly, a BBN team, largely led by Sheldon Boilen, built custom hardware add-ons to the company's second PDP-1 to provide an external interrupt system and a magnetic drum for swapping storage.

To this end, BBN acquired the first UNIVAC FASTRAND rotating drum, with a 45-Mbyte storage capacity and an access time of about 0.1 second.