It would take unusual dedication, plenty of space, and a huge budget for electricity and air con to run a KL10 at home.

I understand the attraction, because they were very popular with users - partly because TOPS-10 was relatively intuitive and could be learned by almost anyone, and timesharing was very much an experience of personal computing.

That was a huge deal when most computing still had to go through operators and other expert intermediaries.

TOPS-20 was more refined and tried to be even friendlier, with nice features like command completion.

Neither was at all UNIXy - a good thing IMO.

he was prepared to sacrifice his 2-car garage, but i think the three-phase and other electrics defeated him. of couurse, it wouldn't have been switched on anywhere near all the time. and his girlfriend wasn't keen. perhaps a bit too big for a hobby project?

If I remember correctly the DEC supplied power supplies were hugely inefficient, and CompuServe redesigned the power supplies since they were using so many of these systems.

> first release 1970, according to wikipedia.

Under that name. It goes back to the PDP-6 monitor, 1964.

I have good memories of playing Star Trek all night on a DECwriter connected to a -10.

i have good memories of playing empire :-)

Such a shame. Did he try to contact a local museum maybe? I'm looking forward to have PiDP10 but seeing a real one, especially a KA-10, would be a bit of a dream.