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
frumplestlatz 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)
I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
budman1 2 hours ago [-]
as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
1 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
mlmonkey 2 hours ago [-]
Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
ktm5j 1 hours 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.
roryirvine 55 minutes 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".
spijdar 37 minutes 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....
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.
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.
(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!)
cube00 1 hours 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.
Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.
ktm5j 57 minutes 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?
cube00 53 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now. This restored PDP-11/83 project is Dave Plummer's
corbinvachal 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:33:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Unfortunately, for a disturbing percentage of the Internet, ruining things for everyone else is the goal. I'd turn off telnet.
https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970
I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
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".
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
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!)
Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.
Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.