Top
Best
New

Posted by davepl 1 day ago

A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix(pdp1173.com)
The box is a restored Q-bus PDP-11/83 named minerva: Mentec M11 CPU, two chassis tied with M9404/M9405, RQDX3, 2xEmulex UC07, KDA50, RLV12, DEQNA, M3104. Storage is RA82 + dual RA92, MFM boot/swap, dual RL02, RX50s, and a TKZ50. OS is 2.11BSD.

The live panel is top. /cgi-bin/webtop is the raw snapshot.

A 16-bit httpd will not survive the front page, so Varnish/Caddy/Cloudflare cache the HTML and a 5-second webtop sample. Origin is still the 11 itself, and it handles all of the webtop and visitor count requests.

Telnet exists (pdp1173.com, guest) but it is a 40-year-old UNIX with no modern security story. Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Happy to answer Mentec, MSCP, Q-bus, or 2.11BSD questions.

To get BSD running on the Mentec, I had to customize the BSD kernel to use FPSIM, as the Mentec supports IEEE floating-point and NOT the DEC formats.

97 points | 44 comments
kjs3 23 hours ago|
Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Unfortunately, for a disturbing percentage of the Internet, ruining things for everyone else is the goal. I'd turn off telnet.

pmlnr 9 hours ago|
I will never understand why, but the story of Reddit Place ( https://web.archive.org/web/20170409173246/http://sudoscript... ) certainly supports this :(
dwedge 22 hours ago||
A PDP-11 serving adverts for an AI-written site in 2026 was not on my bingo card. Imagine being brought back from the dead for that.
nancyminusone 21 hours ago|
Unfortunately, this is just Dave "I wrote Task Manager" Plummer's handwriting.
ok123456 20 hours ago||
Dave "fake antivirus software scammer" Plummer

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

kev009 19 hours ago||
Wow. I can't imagine the thought process of going from accumulating a decade of Microsoft shares and experience during a pivotal era and deciding to plow it into a consumer scam op.
b00ty4breakfast 18 hours ago||
for some reason, the tech industry attracts these types like flies to...well, you know the saying. They aren't the majority of folks drawn to tech but outside of maybe finance, it seems to be their preferred habitat.

it's their raison d'être to Always Be Conning

jasomill 7 hours ago||
I miss my 11/83, which was connected to my network through a SLIP connection to a Power Mac running Yellow Dog Linux and connecting to the Internet via dialup.

It was the late '90s, and it shared my small apartment with a DEC AlphaServer running VMS, an HP 3000 running MPE, an IBM System/36, an IBM AS/400, a Wang OIS, a SparcStation 1, and a NextStation.

I miss them all.

I do still have an external SCSI TK50 in an MicroVAX 2000-style lunchbox enclosure (complete with carrying handle) in good working order, though, and have toyed with the idea of installing a Raspberry Pi in the enclosure alongside the tape drive to emulate a VAX.

mikerg87 22 hours ago||
I posted this to twostopbits. Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration

https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970

jmbwell 22 hours ago||
I love it. My PDP-11 has some fault that keeps it blowing fuses. Emulators don’t feel the same. Real hardware doing the work, well done
sph 21 hours ago||
What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.
dboreham 20 hours ago|
Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.
dallen33 20 hours ago||
He isn't, but nearly everything he puts out there is AI produced. His video thumbnails look awful, and that task manager he built for macOS is fully AI coded. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I dunno it's kinda all ugly looking to me.
davepl 17 hours ago||
Every pixel is where I put it, so that's all that matters to me. If it's ugly, it's intentionally so. AI had no input into designing the visuals or UX.
b00ty4breakfast 18 hours ago||
this appears to just be an ad for some webpage widget-maker.
frumplestlatz 22 hours ago||
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)

I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!

varjag 20 hours ago||
Fantastic build.

Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?

wrs 20 hours ago|
What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?
davepl 17 hours ago|
There's an 11/70 panel at the top of the rack; it's emulated (but a real panel). Below that are the two chassis of 11/83, which has a panel of its own from Joerg Hoppe.
More comments...