If you ever are in Sicily you must go visit the MUSIF (The museum of functioning computers) it's in a beautiful small town near Siracusa. They have a very nice collection of working computers in an old building.It's a treat ! check it out https://museo.freaknet.org/it/

The living computer museum in Seattle is pretty sweet too. https://www.livingcomputers.org

Although its future is uncertain now that it's founder, Paul Allen, has passed away and the pandemic has forced it to close for now.

Eureka! It is effectively where their experiment was conducted!

Here is the picture of the room: https://i1.wp.com/museo.freaknet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015...

Didn't that museum have telnet/sshable old machines long ago? Maybe I am confusing it with another museum. Edit, it was!!! I knew it from some gopher holes out there :D

gopher://medialab.freaknet.org

FWIW here's a link to Tetris version from Vadim Antonov, who I believe crossed paths with Pajitnov back in the day: http://www.kotovnik.com/~avg/old_page/tetris.c As Vadim says: "The version of Tetris for BSD/386 which feels and looks like the original program running on the DVK-2M computer (this was a Soviet clone of LSI-11/03)."

it works great, just change

      struct fd_set fds  ;

to

      fd_set fds ;

in line 608.

PDP11/34 ain’t big iron. An IBM 360-67, or a CDC6600 is big iron.

If I can't lift it, it's big.

On a serious note, PDP systems were "minicomputers" back in the day. Look up what comes up when you put "mini computer" in a web search, especially image search. If you guessed a... small computer, you're right.

Words change meanings over time; and what PDP-11 was called when it was made is now used for other systems. I am not at all surprised to see PDP-11 being now described with the word used for the grander IBM/360.

This fails. You can lift the pieces.

Try that with a single module from real “big iron.” The disk drives of the CDC6600 at the Courant Institute shook the floor when operating. The punch card readers in the MIT computer center in 1970 could read a foot high tray of cards in half a second, and the chain printer could print about four 11x17 pages in a second.

Also, I think you may be referring to VAX-11.

Neat project, unexpected title. I thought the PDP-11 (and the PDP line in general) was designed as an explicit alternative to "Big Iron", i.e. a minicomputer.

http://www.wolfgang-houben.de/faqpdp11.htm

Well, they became the new big iron once powerful microprocessor-based machines became commonplace.

(DEC did make a microprocessor version of the PDP-11 called the DEC Professional, but it failed to catch on.)

1. Can someone explain to me the obsession with rewriting software for, and rebuilding obsolete and con temporarily incapable hardware? 2. Or even simulating such sytstems on modern, 50 times faster, hundred times more memory, $35 systems?

On the same note, 1) Why would anyone be interested in vintage cars or antique mechanical clocks when modern cars are so much better and a $2 quartz clock is so much more precise?

2) Why would anyone be interested in emulating an imprecise analog clock on their smart watch which is perfectly capable of showing Arabic digits and much more?

Exactly. Except perhaps for aesthetic reasons. But much of the old stuff was grotesquely ugly.

A loaded entry-level car has more luxury and performance than an old land yacht. My phone has more computing power now than the Pentagon, then.

When books began to printed, did people long for hieroglyphics?

Funny how this appeared the same day as "What Is the PDP-11 Instruction Set".

And both posted by the same user!

I'm into PDP-11 programming currently. I'm not alone apparently.

PDP-8 forever!

I have part of a basic Forth system going now! There are ancient rumours of a FIG-Forth written for the PDP-8 somewhere, but AFAIK there's nothing online.

On the same site, I've found a "partial Forth interpreter": http://www.dbit.com/pub/pdp8/tss8/ (forth.pal). I thought you might be interested.

Thanks, very interesting! More elaborate than mine, but maybe less complete.

I've found a Pascal compiler targeting the PDP-8 based on Pascal-P4. I think it generates bytecode. But the interpreter seems missing: http://www.dbit.com/pub/pdp8/pascal/compiler/

Hi elvis70, I'm working on something pdp11 related. I'd love your feedback. My email is on my profile.

Why?

I've ported the Unix v7 C compiler (DMR) to DOS with bcc in six days. Why? I'm a hacker at heart.

If only this could be cloned into a more accessible instance (as is original).

You can run it in a PDP-11 emulator: https://lab.dyne.org/OriginalTetrisHowto (Original Tetris Emulation Howto) from the same wiki.

I love that VT100 in the background of that image. I have a thing for video terminals.

Sadly I don't think you'd get tetris running on it very well as it only supported scrolling text

PDP-11 != Big Iron