"Here, we see the Brown-Crested Techus Wendellus, frolicking gleefully in his favorite shaded glade. Though he is at ease, he is ever-vigilant for errant diodes and resistors attempting to flee his table. And now he actuates several switches. If you listen closely, you can here the serotonin flooding his brain."
Good Lord young man, you took me all the way back to my youth! When I was first starting out with a family I started working at a local Navy base as a contractor to maintain the flight simulators. We had PDP 11/45s, two each per simulator. One was used as a math processor and I remember flipping those switches to run diagnostics and starting them up for the day. One of the neatest things about the units was the neon indicators in parallel with the fuses. If the fuse blew the neon lamps illuminated. Simple and effective. Thank you Wendell.
Check out the PDP2011: it's a recreation of the PDP-11 in VHDL, suitable for use on a cheap FPGA dev board. It can even connect to the PiDP-11 front panel from this video, to give the full blinkenlights experience.
I never expected to see a build like this on a big channel :) I built my PiDP-8 while I was away on a business trip. I squeezed a soldering/rework station, third hand and all the necessary parts and tools into checked luggage. It gave me something to do in the evenings in the hotel :)
We had a PDP 11/44D running RSTS/E at our high school that some of us students helped admin . Being short, I would have to hop up on the hard drive unit to close it when creating a backup of the drive - we had to swap the 20MB disc drums. While we never had to touch the switches like shown here, I do recall having to deal with octal on the printer command console when the system was basically halted - like for backups. Fun times.
Oh, Jeezus... reminds me of working on a Data General Nova 3. Originally had a paper tape programmer but they upgraded to something that looked like mom's train case (luggage for those not old enough) that had a cassette tape programmer. Huge upgrade....
The SimH emulator, which is what makes this PDP-11 panel work, actually emulates a whole load of old computers, including the Data General Nova. You can run RDOS on it.
My first real computer job was working with a PDP-11, while my first home system was a Cromemco. I’m currently building a replica Cromemco, but when that’s done, this looks like a cool next project.
This brings back old memories, going to a military course to learn how to use, program and repair the PDP11. Then later the VAX system. I miss the old days of the CPU consisting of four boards on the back plain and having to replace a component to repair the CPU, to old memories...
Hey guys, Pastor Fred Marshall here. The 11/70 (and the very few 11/72s that were built) are the only PDP 11s I did not work on. Started on 11/03 in high school, then 11/40 11/34, 11/04, 11/05 in college. Went to work as a dec tech in Dallas TX in 1984, where I began a long career of computer "fixing" on PDP 11's. PDP 08's, MicroVAX, and almost all VAX series machines. I loved working for that company, and those machines..... in college, they called me fat finger Fred, as I could input toggle those switches in a hurry!! Good times!! Thanks for sharing!!!
I think the PDP/11 70 Ate My Brain.I worked on 11/70s with Front Panel Switches and had to know binary code,and also the Pdp1170 With Font Panel for remote access for Colorado.
This is doing weird things to my brain: my first Unix system was on a PDP-11/70. Now all we need is a tape drive and tapes to throw me back forty years.
Fantastic Job Wendell. Its always a pleasure to watch you work on things you love and I surely find very interesting. Keep it up and see you on the Level 1 Forum.
Haha, I actually programmed a real PDP11 running UNIX v6 and an LSI 11 in assembler. It definitely doesn't look like a 70's super computer, the boards were discrete logic and the size of a washing machine!!
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are smiling from their Bell Labs laboratory in Heaven! I know that had to have been a pain in the butt to assemble but you made it look easy!
In the end of the seventies we used a PDP 11/34 in each of the ~35 graphical radar displays we sold to the Austrian Air Force. We did run it on RSX-11S.
Wow that takes me back, had a love/hate affair with that machine in my early career, would occasionally not run my program even if I changed nothing ;-). Thanks for the memory.
It's a great kit! The one slightly annoying thing is that if you want to fit connectors to the back panel (you don't need to, it just makes things neater), there's very little clearance in the case to accommodate them. Eventually I'll probably get around to 3D-printing a case extension for mine, to solve this.
Love it. Now I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of the last Baby Blue Lear Sieglar terminal with the orange display. Man that thing was nice to type on. Cut my teeth on FORTRAN 77 with WatFor IV and V on an 11/70 before I discovered Assembler then rediscovered it later working on CMX Video editing systems in the mid 80s running on LSI11s.
You can partially relive that experience using cool-retro-term on Linux: it emulates an amber-phosphor CRT, including various effects like bloom and jitter. It makes a good companion to a PDP-11 emulator!
Hi Wendell, the PiDP-11 is all fine and good with a raspi. But if you look for a more realistic experience, check out the PDP2011 project at pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/pdp-11 Its a FPGA implementation of a PDP-11, including the PDP-11/70. You can use a Cyclone CYC1000 FPGA board with an adapter/shim to plug into the PiDP-11 panel. You essentially get a "realistic" PDP-11/70, with serial, networking and disk. I run such a setup for fun, using BSD 2.11. To me, it is really refreshing to go back to the early Unix variants and run them on a nifty hardware, such as the PiDP-11/PDP2011 combo instead of "just a software simulator". As neither, PiDP-11/70 nor PDP2011 projects are mine, I'd like to give a shout-out to Oscar Vermeulen (PiDP-11) and Sytse van Slooten (PDP2011). Put together, a PiDP-11/70 driven by a PDP2011 is a must-have for any vintage UNIX lover (like me).
if you'd prefer to not use a Pi and an entire Linux on it, it can also run on an FPGA board powered by the PDP2011 project. Makes it a bit more "bare metal".
Awesome, how much Pi CPU does the PDP emulator use at idle? The PDP11 project would make an interesting case for a Pi doing firewall duties or whatever.
With the PDP-11 halted, my Pi 4 is aroound 93% idle. If I boot RSX-11M+ and run ADVENT, the Pi is around 80% idle. I haven't yet measured what it's like while compiling.
If you have a 4-processor Pi, the PiDP-11 software only uses 1 processor. If it's a Pi4, it runs about 10x faster than an original PDP-11/70, rather than 0.7 mips, it will run at 7.0 mips.
Honestly if typing experience is your main goal go with Kailh box clicks or nice linears. That extra spring they use for the click is better tactile keyfeel than nearly all of Cherry style tactiles. If you want the toppest tier quiet tactile experience, go for a Topre or find a dampened Apple Extended Keyboard from the 90's in good condition. Boba U4s or something like that wouldn't be massively far off the mark though.
While that is an amazing soldering iron, I really think you should try a JBC iron (or any powerful iron with an active tip). You can lower the temp by a lot (to prevent damage) and it will still solder great :)
Yeh I think I was the Most Fired Tech..at least 4 times.but lasted 17 yrs...now Dec Retireee I got the Last laugh.They lost jobs 1992 came and I went into Field Service.Even worked for IBM in Georgia almost 1 yr. and dec alpharetta.DEC was the company you loved to hate for.
"first computer fast enough to run a multi-user unix system" no, it was the first computer cheap enough to be handed to bored hackers. Timeshared systems go back a little earlier.
Yeah, the cheapest PDP-11's were about half a year's salary for a college professor of CS - $10,000 - in the early 1970's. But you needed at least a PDP-11/45 with memory segmentation/banks and 256KB or more to run UNIX v6, v7.
I'm not sure the 19" size makes sense but maybe something a tiny bit bigger (closer to the size of a stereo receiver) would have made the most sense. Oscar had to comission all the PCBs, the silk-screens, and the injection-moulded switches, and the case, and so I think he was probably limited in how large he could make the PiDP-11 without the costs exploding from a different, larger model of switch, etc. The original PDP-11 I am told had 10w lamps - not LEDs.
@@dgillies5420 I only say 19" because it's the full size deal that the real one would be. I get the whole size and cost thing. Just if it was full size I could fool myself for a minute that the I was back in 1980 with a massive chunk of underpowered hardware that was in reality using a 1000th of the power and 1000 times more powerful. Not only that, it would look great in the 19" half-height rack in my office.
@@dgillies5420 Hi D Giles. To be honest I hadn't thought about that and I'm also not sure. I think I would have to be faced with the option. The reason I am not sure is because in reality the PDP-11 is kind of pointless in terms of performance, it's just nostalgia. It's the same as I have an Atari 2600 that I play but in reality I can have a better experience on an emulator. So, ultimately I don't know.
@asdrubale bisanzio Unix runs on many CPUs, as did Windows NT, so I ask the same of VMS. VMS used to run on Intel's PowerPC chips, for example, and others before that. It now runs on x64 CPUs too. So I wonder if it will run on ARM?
I doubt it. Multics and its child, UNIX were the first and just about the only operating systems written entirely in a high-level language - at least in the 1970s. Very few other operating systems were written in high-level languages in the 1970's. A significant amount of VAX/VMS was written in VAX Macro Assembly language. If you read the article about VMS on wikipedia they actually had a build a compiler to translate VAX Assembly into Alpha code for the port to Dec Alpha : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
The sad thing is... There is still production equipment running off of pdp11s... That's without mentioning they are emulated... On Windows XP machines... I wish I was making this up 😭
Yup, we have one still running at work. Legacy code written by summer students for the safety interlock system for something for high energy physics. What could possibly go wrong? They buy replacement parts from some guys barn on eBay.
Ticketmaster, supposedly. Actually the instruction set of the PDP-11 was fantastic; while (*p++ = *q++); compiles into 2 instructions - a memory mov using 2 registers in post-decrement mode and setting the condition bits, and then a jump-nonzero back to the memory move. The motorola 68000 (used to launch macintosh) was a pretty faithful attempt to make a 32-bit PDP-11.
How fast is the raspi in comparison to a pdp11? The more you bend the pins the harder it'll be to repair it afterwards. If you don't have a spring loaded PCB holder (www.productiondevices.com/PC%20Board%20Holder.htm) at home you can solder some components from the top if you just put small boxes under the PCB. Don't worry about the diodes they can take the heat. Some ICs can't, so, maybe you want sockets for those. If you can manage to secure the PCB in a vertical position it will be easy to solder the LEDs one by one without fastening them to the PCB.
10x faster for a Pi4, running at 7 vax-mips, running on a single processor of the Pi4. The other 3 processors are idle and can be used for other things.
You CAN program through the front panel - that ALL WORKS. It will also show lights as your program executes, but they are sampled and not updated as quickly in real-time as a real PDP-11. People have been working on the software emulator for 30Y - oscar @ obsolescence guaranteed showed up and did the hardware part.
Actually the $11,500 model (pdp-11/03) is too small to run Unix. You need at least an 11/34 or an 11/45 to run UNIX. I'm guessing that an 11/70 cost $150,000 and inflation is up by 10x since I was a kid in the early 1970's and so that would be $1.5M today. I just put together a fully spec'ed out PiDP-11 Pi4 with all the I/O ports, 8GB RAM, 128GB flash, and it cost about $150, with Ethernet, 802.11 (did not exist in 1975 Boggs was just about to publish his paper), 5 USB serial ports for 5 terminals, etc. And the PiDP-11 is 10x faster. So it's 100,000 better (10,000x cheaper and 10x faster) than the original PDP-11/70.
![ทางเดินชีวิต - ธีเดช ทองอภิชาติ x อ.ไข่ มาลีฮวนน่า [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1f3wcG16dd4/mqdefault.jpg)
We are witnessing Wendell in his natural habitat.
This computer was historically important. Fun video 🖥️
"Here, we see the Brown-Crested Techus Wendellus, frolicking gleefully in his favorite shaded glade. Though he is at ease, he is ever-vigilant for errant diodes and resistors attempting to flee his table. And now he actuates several switches. If you listen closely, you can here the serotonin flooding his brain."
New editor on point with the extras today.
I appreciate it! ~Editor Autumn
@@Level1Techs Where's editor Amber!? Did she leave or L1 is just expanding?
@@Quarky_ She got a new job doing tech stuff!
@@Level1Techs Did you learn your editing style from SovietWomble? I love it!
@@DangoNetwork He was definitely on my mind when I was making it lol ~ Editor Autumn
Good Lord young man, you took me all the way back to my youth! When I was first starting out with a family I started working at a local Navy base as a contractor to maintain the flight simulators. We had PDP 11/45s, two each per simulator. One was used as a math processor and I remember flipping those switches to run diagnostics and starting them up for the day. One of the neatest things about the units was the neon indicators in parallel with the fuses. If the fuse blew the neon lamps illuminated. Simple and effective.
Thank you Wendell.
PDP-11/45 is almost the same as the PDP-11/70. The '70 model added a cache memory so that it could run just a little bit faster.
Grad school Hardware I class, I built a PDP8 out of FPGAs. It ran the original DEC diagnostics suite for the PDP8 flawlessly. Fun times. Fun times.
Check out the PDP2011: it's a recreation of the PDP-11 in VHDL, suitable for use on a cheap FPGA dev board. It can even connect to the PiDP-11 front panel from this video, to give the full blinkenlights experience.
I miss LED's. Used to have them on drives so you knew which drive was being accessed. And the address and data lights...
I never expected to see a build like this on a big channel :)
I built my PiDP-8 while I was away on a business trip. I squeezed a soldering/rework station, third hand and all the necessary parts and tools into checked luggage. It gave me something to do in the evenings in the hotel :)
Relaxen und watchen ze blinkenlights
Alright Autumn. You win this time.
Edit: The PDP was born the same year as my 1971 Volvo 144. Fascinating for real 🖖🏻
Very cool. I have very fond memories of the PDP11/70 as it was the first computer I ever used.
We had a PDP 11/44D running RSTS/E at our high school that some of us students helped admin . Being short, I would have to hop up on the hard drive unit to close it when creating a backup of the drive - we had to swap the 20MB disc drums. While we never had to touch the switches like shown here, I do recall having to deal with octal on the printer command console when the system was basically halted - like for backups. Fun times.
Oh, Jeezus... reminds me of working on a Data General Nova 3. Originally had a paper tape programmer but they upgraded to something that looked like mom's train case (luggage for those not old enough) that had a cassette tape programmer. Huge upgrade....
The SimH emulator, which is what makes this PDP-11 panel work, actually emulates a whole load of old computers, including the Data General Nova. You can run RDOS on it.
Pdp was so cool! I love those old DEC machines. It's nice to see stuff like this pay homage to them
My first real computer job was working with a PDP-11, while my first home system was a Cromemco. I’m currently building a replica Cromemco, but when that’s done, this looks like a cool next project.
Man I wish I could solder like that. Genius
That will make a cool set piece. I'd like it in a home office or something, pretty neat looking
This brings back old memories, going to a military course to learn how to use, program and repair the PDP11. Then later the VAX system. I miss the old days of the CPU consisting of four boards on the back plain and having to replace a component to repair the CPU, to old memories...
Hey guys, Pastor Fred Marshall here. The 11/70 (and the very few 11/72s that were built) are the only PDP 11s I did not work on. Started on 11/03 in high school, then 11/40 11/34, 11/04, 11/05 in college. Went to work as a dec tech in Dallas TX in 1984, where I began a long career of computer "fixing" on PDP 11's. PDP 08's, MicroVAX, and almost all VAX series machines. I loved working for that company, and those machines..... in college, they called me fat finger Fred, as I could input toggle those switches in a hurry!! Good times!! Thanks for sharing!!!
These used to occupy multiple floors at bankers trust in New York City they even had four of the famous PDP 1174s
My first paying job was on a PDP-11/70 (CAE technology transfer). As you said, cool!
10:20 Damnit Wendell, now I'm gonna have to play some Defcon.
EVGA all the things w/ all the _engagement_
Functioning movie props 😯😲😃
Wendell does Retro. TODAY IS A GOOD DAY!
This video is inspiring me to get off my butt and finally assembly my PiDP-11 kit.
I think the PDP/11 70 Ate My Brain.I worked on 11/70s with Front Panel Switches and had to know binary code,and also the Pdp1170 With Font Panel for remote access for Colorado.
This is doing weird things to my brain: my first Unix system was on a PDP-11/70. Now all we need is a tape drive and tapes to throw me back forty years.
If you had the drives it is possible to hook them up to modbus or storbus here, too
Woo, the first eunuchs!
Fantastic Job Wendell. Its always a pleasure to watch you work on things you love and I surely find very interesting. Keep it up and see you on the Level 1 Forum.
Had a PDP-11 in the basement of uni that drove a lithography system for chip fab late 80's
Such cool videos deserve much more views!
10/10 intro graphics
Would love to see more level1 retro
Oscar previously made a PiDP-8 kit and he is supposedly working on a PiDP-10 (PiDP-20?) kit.
Haha, I actually programmed a real PDP11 running UNIX v6 and an LSI 11 in assembler.
It definitely doesn't look like a 70's super computer, the boards were discrete logic and the size of a washing machine!!
I was a dec field service engineer. Maintaining DECsystems, VAXen and pdp11s. Very interesting and well presented thanks from Orlando Florida
neat.
knock ur socks off awesome....... i'm gonna have to get one of these...... geeks r us...............
This is just sick! I mean in a good way
Love this
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are smiling from their Bell Labs laboratory in Heaven!
I know that had to have been a pain in the butt to assemble but you made it look easy!
Ken Thompson is still alive! I believe he's working at Google currently
@@MarkRose1337 Guess I should have looked him up first! Good to know tho....thanks!
For a moment I thought Ken had died and I hadn't realized.
Still have my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie the original red version. Still use it one in a while as a C reference
I'm refreshing my C skills (as they are) after a long hiatus from programming using the K&R 2nd edition myself!
In the end of the seventies we used a PDP 11/34 in each of the ~35 graphical radar displays we sold to the Austrian Air Force. We did run it on RSX-11S.
Loved it! Do more retro PCs 👍👍😉
@Level1Techs Where is that PINECIL??!
Don’t know if it’s new but I love the retro title card and music
It is new! Thank you! ~ Editor Autumn
This won the internet today
I have never heard of sautering basket before, but I keep hearing Mel Blanc say it like Bugs Bunny.
Wow that takes me back, had a love/hate affair with that machine in my early career, would occasionally not run my program even if I changed nothing ;-). Thanks for the memory.
Nice intro
It's a great kit! The one slightly annoying thing is that if you want to fit connectors to the back panel (you don't need to, it just makes things neater), there's very little clearance in the case to accommodate them. Eventually I'll probably get around to 3D-printing a case extension for mine, to solve this.
I played both those computer games - nearly 40 years ago !
I was over Lego Technic at 10. I wish i had access to these kind of project in the late 80's. It is a lot more stimulating!
The first computers already had RGB in them!
Make that keyboard 60% & I would buy it in a heartbeat EVGA!!!
I worked on 2 PDP 11/70 running rsts e. Also programmed with Dec Fortran 77.
I believe rsts is one of the 7 operating systems that can be selected with the selector knob on the PiDP-11.
Nice prop uber nerd lava bulb.
Love it. Now I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of the last Baby Blue Lear Sieglar terminal with the orange display. Man that thing was nice to type on. Cut my teeth on FORTRAN 77 with WatFor IV and V on an 11/70 before I discovered Assembler then rediscovered it later working on CMX Video editing systems in the mid 80s running on LSI11s.
You can partially relive that experience using cool-retro-term on Linux: it emulates an amber-phosphor CRT, including various effects like bloom and jitter. It makes a good companion to a PDP-11 emulator!
This is so next-previous level... 😎
It's a micro-sized mini computer!
hmm, might get one and make it rack mountable.
Woot!
Hi Wendell, the PiDP-11 is all fine and good with a raspi. But if you look for a more realistic experience, check out the PDP2011 project at pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/pdp-11 Its a FPGA implementation of a PDP-11, including the PDP-11/70. You can use a Cyclone CYC1000 FPGA board with an adapter/shim to plug into the PiDP-11 panel. You essentially get a "realistic" PDP-11/70, with serial, networking and disk. I run such a setup for fun, using BSD 2.11.
To me, it is really refreshing to go back to the early Unix variants and run them on a nifty hardware, such as the PiDP-11/PDP2011 combo instead of "just a software simulator".
As neither, PiDP-11/70 nor PDP2011 projects are mine, I'd like to give a shout-out to Oscar Vermeulen (PiDP-11) and Sytse van Slooten (PDP2011). Put together, a PiDP-11/70 driven by a PDP2011 is a must-have for any vintage UNIX lover (like me).
1:59 "It's a UNIX system!? I know this!"
About time I got round to putting the kit I bought together.
BTW - have you seen the kits for the IMSAI 8080 and Altair 8800?
if you'd prefer to not use a Pi and an entire Linux on it, it can also run on an FPGA board powered by the PDP2011 project. Makes it a bit more "bare metal".
Awesome, how much Pi CPU does the PDP emulator use at idle?
The PDP11 project would make an interesting case for a Pi doing firewall duties or whatever.
do you have a RP04/06 ? Broke my back on them or even a 8"" Floopy Drive,or even RK05.....and the Suckie Mag Tape.
With the PDP-11 halted, my Pi 4 is aroound 93% idle. If I boot RSX-11M+ and run ADVENT, the Pi is around 80% idle. I haven't yet measured what it's like while compiling.
If you have a 4-processor Pi, the PiDP-11 software only uses 1 processor. If it's a Pi4, it runs about 10x faster than an original PDP-11/70, rather than 0.7 mips, it will run at 7.0 mips.
finally a computer where the UNIX philosophy will make sense.
12:44
"It's very important... Deez nuts..."
This was a fun video. : )
This is awesome 😎
Is that a beam spring keyboard i see 😲?
Wow, we are seriously spoiled by how easy modern computers are to use.
Honestly if typing experience is your main goal go with Kailh box clicks or nice linears.
That extra spring they use for the click is better tactile keyfeel than nearly all of Cherry style tactiles.
If you want the toppest tier quiet tactile experience, go for a Topre or find a dampened Apple Extended Keyboard from the 90's in good condition.
Boba U4s or something like that wouldn't be massively far off the mark though.
But if you wanna dampen those rotary clickers just open them up and grease them, ezpz silky smooth.
In 2011 I had to use Fortran77 during an internship, it was used to manage all the street lights of the city
I do not want to use it ever again...
One day the screws will rise up and take over.
While that is an amazing soldering iron, I really think you should try a JBC iron (or any powerful iron with an active tip). You can lower the temp by a lot (to prevent damage) and it will still solder great :)
3:13 lol
Linus in making.
Next week building a VAX minicomputer? ;-)
FORTRAN 77 unix Tar wow
The Unix v7 fortran compiler actually translated fortran into C and compiled using the C compiler.
Wait, there is there more retro level1techs content?
Yeh I think I was the Most Fired Tech..at least 4 times.but lasted 17 yrs...now Dec Retireee I got the Last laugh.They lost jobs 1992 came and I went into Field Service.Even worked for IBM in Georgia almost 1 yr. and dec alpharetta.DEC was the company you loved to hate for.
Soon the L1 set will look like Steve Gibson's place on Security Now lol
Great
It’s Mini PDP 11/70 😂😂😂
Is that an MX Ergo that I spy?
Great, now I have to go play Zork…
does anyone have the link for the OS history inforgraphic?
"In the background of a set"... so like Leo?
God I really want one but I don't think I can stomach the price (especially with the exchange rate to Aud.) :'(
"first computer fast enough to run a multi-user unix system" no, it was the first computer cheap enough to be handed to bored hackers. Timeshared systems go back a little earlier.
Yeah, the cheapest PDP-11's were about half a year's salary for a college professor of CS - $10,000 - in the early 1970's. But you needed at least a PDP-11/45 with memory segmentation/banks and 256KB or more to run UNIX v6, v7.
It's a pity it's not the full size 19" rack mount panel size.
I'm not sure the 19" size makes sense but maybe something a tiny bit bigger (closer to the size of a stereo receiver) would have made the most sense. Oscar had to comission all the PCBs, the silk-screens, and the injection-moulded switches, and the case, and so I think he was probably limited in how large he could make the PiDP-11 without the costs exploding from a different, larger model of switch, etc. The original PDP-11 I am told had 10w lamps - not LEDs.
@@dgillies5420 I only say 19" because it's the full size deal that the real one would be. I get the whole size and cost thing. Just if it was full size I could fool myself for a minute that the I was back in 1980 with a massive chunk of underpowered hardware that was in reality using a 1000th of the power and 1000 times more powerful.
Not only that, it would look great in the 19" half-height rack in my office.
@@iggysfriend4431 would you be willing to pay $500 for a 19-in model versus $300 for the existing sized model?
@@dgillies5420 Hi D Giles. To be honest I hadn't thought about that and I'm also not sure. I think I would have to be faced with the option. The reason I am not sure is because in reality the PDP-11 is kind of pointless in terms of performance, it's just nostalgia. It's the same as I have an Atari 2600 that I play but in reality I can have a better experience on an emulator. So, ultimately I don't know.
Ah, a trip down memory lane. I wonder, can you run its successor, VMS, natively on ARM? Not just emulated.
@asdrubale bisanzio Unix runs on many CPUs, as did Windows NT, so I ask the same of VMS. VMS used to run on Intel's PowerPC chips, for example, and others before that. It now runs on x64 CPUs too. So I wonder if it will run on ARM?
I doubt it. Multics and its child, UNIX were the first and just about the only operating systems written entirely in a high-level language - at least in the 1970s. Very few other operating systems were written in high-level languages in the 1970's. A significant amount of VAX/VMS was written in VAX Macro Assembly language. If you read the article about VMS on wikipedia they actually had a build a compiler to translate VAX Assembly into Alpha code for the port to Dec Alpha : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
The sad thing is... There is still production equipment running off of pdp11s...
That's without mentioning they are emulated... On Windows XP machines...
I wish I was making this up 😭
Yup, we have one still running at work. Legacy code written by summer students for the safety interlock system for something for high energy physics. What could possibly go wrong? They buy replacement parts from some guys barn on eBay.
Ticketmaster, supposedly. Actually the instruction set of the PDP-11 was fantastic; while (*p++ = *q++); compiles into 2 instructions - a memory mov using 2 registers in post-decrement mode and setting the condition bits, and then a jump-nonzero back to the memory move. The motorola 68000 (used to launch macintosh) was a pretty faithful attempt to make a 32-bit PDP-11.
In Retro circles, we actually call this an emulator.
freeeedom! xD
Can it run Crysis?
Lol sorry I had too.
How fast is the raspi in comparison to a pdp11?
The more you bend the pins the harder it'll be to repair it afterwards.
If you don't have a spring loaded PCB holder (www.productiondevices.com/PC%20Board%20Holder.htm) at home you can solder some components from the top if you just put small boxes under the PCB. Don't worry about the diodes they can take the heat. Some ICs can't, so, maybe you want sockets for those. If you can manage to secure the PCB in a vertical position it will be easy to solder the LEDs one by one without fastening them to the PCB.
10x faster for a Pi4, running at 7 vax-mips, running on a single processor of the Pi4. The other 3 processors are idle and can be used for other things.
So, you can’t program through front panel switches? What a bummer!
You CAN program through the front panel - that ALL WORKS. It will also show lights as your program executes, but they are sampled and not updated as quickly in real-time as a real PDP-11. People have been working on the software emulator for 30Y - oscar @ obsolescence guaranteed showed up and did the hardware part.
Guessing the price for the 2021 edition is only 1% of the origin $11500
Nope. But close. It’s only 2% of the original.
Actually the $11,500 model (pdp-11/03) is too small to run Unix. You need at least an 11/34 or an 11/45 to run UNIX. I'm guessing that an 11/70 cost $150,000 and inflation is up by 10x since I was a kid in the early 1970's and so that would be $1.5M today. I just put together a fully spec'ed out PiDP-11 Pi4 with all the I/O ports, 8GB RAM, 128GB flash, and it cost about $150, with Ethernet, 802.11 (did not exist in 1975 Boggs was just about to publish his paper), 5 USB serial ports for 5 terminals, etc. And the PiDP-11 is 10x faster. So it's 100,000 better (10,000x cheaper and 10x faster) than the original PDP-11/70.
"Deez nuts...you don't want 'em to be tight, you want 'em to be loose." - Wendell, 2021.
Level1Sechs
*Freedom* -NOPE!?
If you have clicky switches and play anything online with a mic I'm just letting you know your "friends" they hate you and your keyboard
I always migrated over to silent keyboards because I didn't want to wake up the parents in the next room.