The restoration of a 1963 PDP-1 was completed in October, 2005 and is now on display in the Museum's Restorations Display Area.

The first step of the project, and one of the most time-consuming, was the repair and testing of the machine's power supplies to ensure it wouldn't damage the computer circuitry when turned on.

But while the machine's CPU worked almost perfectly right away, restoring the peripherals - such as the paper tape reader and punch, a screen with a light pen and a typewriter - proved to be more challenging.

After the Computer History team completed work on the hardware they began testing original software, and in March 2005 they ran the 1962 game Spacewar!.

Here is PDP-1 restoration team member, Peter Samson listening to music programmed for the DEC PDP-1. During the course of the restoration project, original MIT hacker Samson, read the music data tapes, reverse-engineered their data format, and wrote a program to play them.

The usability of the machine is credited with giving birth to the hacker culture at institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a slew of programs followed its release, such as debugging, text editing, and music programs, as well as games such as Spacewar!.