A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix

Posted by davepl 1 day ago

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.

Comments

Comment by kjs3 1 day 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.

Comment by pmlnr 21 hours ago

I will never understand why, but the story of Reddit Place ( https://web.archive.org/web/20170409173246/http://sudoscript... ) certainly supports this :(

Comment by dwedge 1 day 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.

Comment by nancyminusone 1 day ago

Unfortunately, this is just Dave "I wrote Task Manager" Plummer's handwriting.

Comment by ok123456 1 day ago

Dave "fake antivirus software scammer" Plummer

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

Comment by kev009 1 day 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.

Comment by b00ty4breakfast 1 day 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

Comment by jasomill 19 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.

Comment by mikerg87 1 day 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

Comment by jmbwell 1 day 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

Comment by sph 1 day ago

What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.

Comment by dboreham 1 day ago

Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.

Comment by dallen33 1 day 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.

Comment by davepl 1 day 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.

Comment by frumplestlatz 1 day ago

Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)

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

Comment by b00ty4breakfast 1 day ago

this appears to just be an ad for some webpage widget-maker.

Comment by varjag 1 day ago

Fantastic build.

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

Comment by wrs 1 day ago

What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?

Comment by davepl 1 day 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.

Comment by hartjer 1 day ago

Has to be cached, no? Its snappy

Comment by hinkley 1 day ago

How about a nice game of chess?

Comment by budman1 1 day ago

as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.

Comment by encom 1 day ago

>A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix

No it isn't.

  ~$ whois $(dig +short pdp1173.com | head -n1) | grep netname
  netname:        CLOUDFLARENET-EU

Comment by davepl 1 day ago

It is though. Dig deeper.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by mlmonkey 1 day ago

Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?

Comment by ktm5j 1 day ago

There's a couple eyebrow raising things about this post.. like the fact that there's nothing but vague details in text and one photo with an AI prompt like alt-text. I think they're just trying to get clicks for that banner ad.

Comment by roryirvine 1 day ago

Sadly, the site does seem AI-flavoured to a rather off-putting extent.

And, as you say, the details are so vague - it's exactly what you might expect if an LLM wrote them based on reading a spec sheet rather than any practical experience.

In particular, connecting that DEQNA to a modern network must have been a huge challenge all in itself and I'd have expected there to be a series of blog posts about just that. Maybe it's legit (and I'd love more detail if it is), but right now the presentation screams "thinly disguised ad".

Comment by spijdar 1 day ago

I think he has actually posted videos of the restoration before (they've popped up in my youtube feed in the past), but I've never watched them, so dunno. The LLM site design and advertisement front-and-center are certainly a... choice....

But, more importantly, why do you reckon DEQNA would be hard to connect to a modern network? NetBSD still supports it when running on a q-bus VAX: https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/dev/qbus/if_qe....

It has some pretty broken behavior regarding multicast/broadcast traffic IIRC, but nothing putting it behind a vlan or separate LAN altogether wouldn't solve. I've got a little lsi-11 system under my bed I'm hoping to, one day, get the Fuzzball [0] distribution running on. The 22-bit address extension wirewrap the previous owner did needs to be redone entirely, so it's been a "later" project for years now, but I am hoping my little DEQNA will be able to ping the Internet still.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_router

Comment by roryirvine 1 day ago

I was assuming that something of that vintage would only have been able to handle a 10BASE5 transceiver, but a wee bit of googling suggests that an UTP transceiver works well enough.

Needs a patched ROM and recompiled kernel, though! See http://www.cosam.org/computers/dec/pdp11-23/20080402.html (and the two subsequent installments)

(That cosam.org site is more what I'd be expecting for a project like this, but maybe I'm just too old and grumpy for my own good!)

Comment by dboreham 1 day ago

Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.

Comment by ktm5j 1 day ago

You and several other people here are making unsubstantiated claims about how you're super sure this is real in a way that makes it seem less real. You guys seem to know this Dave character and are doing him a solid, right?

Comment by dcminter 1 day ago

Dave Plummer's a well known YouTuber. He pops up in a couple of DEC groups that I'm in on Facebook. However I'm not a fan. He seems to take a lot and contribute only self-promotional videos.

The photo on this page looks very AI heavy. I'm not an expert but I really don't think those light panels are real (if they're real they're not contemporary to the machines they're in).

(Edit: I should qualify that I don't mean the panel with the octet switches, that looks roughly right - I mean the one under the 8" disks and the one on the vaguely Vax-pedestal looking thing)

Comment by ktm5j 16 hours ago

Okay gotcha, sorry I was jumping to conclusions.

Comment by dcminter 16 hours ago

Given the AI-heavy page, I don't think your skepticism was unreasonable.

Comment by cube00 1 day ago

While probably it's legit because I've seen Dave discussing the process on the YT channel (which I no longer watch) he unfortunately does have form https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625

Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.

Comment by davepl 1 day ago

FWIW, .com was taken so I registered .org, and it's only used for the free version. The PRO version lives at tmog.store, which should be pretty plain.

Comment by cube00 21 hours ago

> The PRO version lives at tmog.store

https://tmog.org/pro.html

Comment by roryirvine 1 day ago

Oh, yeah - this popped up on HN yesterday too and also met with scepticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772362

Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.

Comment by davepl 1 day ago

"Probably isn't real". Interesting theory.

Comment by ktm5j 16 hours ago

Well be real, you could do a lot more to make this convincing. Couple the lack of details with some other posts you've made that seem to be an attempt at advertising your software (the one with a big banner on this page), sprinkle in the AI generated website and the fact that the domain name says a different model than the page does.. this is going to raise some eyebrows.

You put all this work into a project like this, all you would need to do to prove it's real is post a selfie with the hardware.. but "interesting theory" is all you're going to say?

Comment by dboreham 1 day ago

What's not real about it?

Comment by ktm5j 1 day ago

I'm a little confused by your comment.. especially considering the fact that you edited it and changed the link from and old comment thread from 2024 to whatever this dead post is from 2012. What does having form mean? Who is Dave?

Comment by cube00 1 day ago

Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now. This restored PDP-11/83 project is Dave Plummer's

Comment by davepl 1 day ago

Because it started as a 15Mhz 11/73 but I later upgraded it to an 18MHz 11/83 CPU. And now it's a Mentec M1, but it's still an "83 class" machine. That's my thinking, anyway.

Comment by corbinvachal 1 day ago

[dead]