Great. I can see a whole new market for these kind of retro machines. As I never used a PDP-11, this however doesn't have the same kind of nostalgia for me. Is anybody doing anything like this for IBM mainframes?
PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case you should probably try ITS. http://github.com/PDP-10/its
Thanks for the link. What hardware this would install on? I was just thinking how neat it would be to have a place where you could go online to try out all these old operating systems.
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Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the link. What hardware this would install on? I was just thinking how neat it would be to have a place where you could go online to try out all these old operating systems.
It works on a PC or Rasberry Pi, or anything similar. Linux works best, because that's what most users have, but MacOS, FreeBSD and Windows work too although the last one can't run the build script. Various people have ITS running online. Here's mine (click to access the hidden content). http://its.pdp10.se/
Thanks I checked it out, looks cool though I couldn’t do much cause I’m on a mobile device and the keyboard never popped up no matter where I tapped the screen.
These emulator setups always seem super complicated to me. From one of the pages:
“This is a Knight TV console emulator. It's connected to a PDP-11 emulator running the TV-11 software, which in turn talks to a PDP-10 emulator running ITS.”
Wow...that’s quite a long chain of software cobbled together!
Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want a DECwriter very $7K much, :) one of the photos in this current eBay listing looks like it might include one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Applicon-DEC-Digital-PDP-11-34-Main...
I got mine for $200.
And now I’m wondering what it’s worth on the open market. Biggest problem is it’s not something you could easily ship. It’s pretty heavy and not something you want tossed around.
Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got mine for $200.
And now I’m wondering what it’s worth on the open market. Biggest problem is it’s not something you could easily ship. It’s pretty heavy and not something you want tossed around.
If a couple people could lift it into the back of a normal $20 U-Haul van (maybe partially disassembled, if the legs come off), without injuring themselves, then the daytrip radius might cover a lot of geography of people who might want it.
(Otherwise, you've got professional crating, freight, lifts or docks, pallet jacks, insurance, etc.)
When I arranged for my university to donate an HP-PA box to the Linux kernel effort, one person made the trek to pick it up (and I vaguely recall they might've been relaying it to someone else). If a DECwriter needs a van rather than a trunk, it seems not that much different. Nostalgic vintage systems might be even more motivation for some enthusiasts to collaborate.
Tangentially related: I was thinking yesterday (when tempted to get a real VAX or Alpha VMS box, but not know what to do with it other than explore a while and then maybe put it up on the 'net for free accounts that would probably get abused)... What I'd really like to see happen is a very active in-person hands-on museum/clubhouse/afterschoolprogram/hackerspace for these systems. One half of your warehouse floorspace is a working setup of various of these systems, set up so that people can sit down and use them, terminal-server into them, etc. And the other half is where you hold classes/mentoring/workshop space for kids and adults who are already enthusiasts, as well as to introduce disadvantaged kids to the opportunity and catch them up on mentoring support in techie stuff that many kids have and we'd like everyone to have. I know there have been some places like that, and maybe there should be more, and refine the idea, and people will be happy to chip in to acquire pieces for the hands-on collection, like a DECwriter.
Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
And now I’m wondering what it’s worth on the open market. Biggest problem is it’s not something you could easily ship. It’s pretty heavy and not something you want tossed around.
If a couple people could lift it into the back of a normal $20 U-Haul van (maybe partially disassembled, if the legs come off), without injuring themselves, then the daytrip radius might cover a lot of geography of people who might want it. (Otherwise, you've got professional crating, freight, lifts or docks, pallet jacks, insurance, etc.) When I arranged for my university to donate an HP-PA box to the Linux kernel e…
Well that's easy: http://chiclassiccomp.org/
Re: PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
#57Oh, those marketing folk who designed the console switches -- how often I dreamed of appropriate places to send them for education...
What was wrong with them?
The sexy plastic switches on the PDP-11 console panel are not easy to toggle, to operate from the bottom or the top of the switch.
When you are flipping through a few hundred words of bootloader or debugger, I was way faster on simple, metal toggle switches.
I will try to find a better example, there are a number of these demonstrations on YouTube: