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

(pdp1173.com)

63 points by davepl4 hours ago

14 comments

kjs33 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.
dwedge2 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.
- nancyminusone1 hour ago
 Unfortunately, this is just Dave "I wrote Task Manager" Plummer's handwriting.
 - ok12345641 minutes ago
 Dave "fake antivirus software scammer" Plummer<a href="https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s-office-sues-settles-washington-based-softwareonlinecom" rel="nofollow">https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...</a>
varjag23 minutes ago
Fantastic build.Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?
wrs21 minutes ago
What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?
mikerg872 hours ago
I posted this to twostopbits. Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration<a href="https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970" rel="nofollow">https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970</a>
hinkley37 minutes ago
How about a nice game of chess?
jmbwell2 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
sph54 minutes ago
What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.
- dboreham43 minutes ago
  Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.
  - dallen3336 minutes 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.
frumplestlatz2 hours ago
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
budman12 hours ago
as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
mlmonkey2 hours ago
Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
- ktm5j2 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.
 - roryirvine2 hours 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".
 - spijdar1 hour 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: <a href="https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/dev/qbus/if_qe.c" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/dev/qbus/if_qe....</a>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] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_router" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_router</a>
 - roryirvine1 hour 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 <a href="http://www.cosam.org/computers/dec/pdp11-23/20080402.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cosam.org/computers/dec/pdp11-23/20080402.html</a> (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!)
 - dboreham42 minutes ago
 Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.
 - cube002 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 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625</a>Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.
 - roryirvine2 hours ago
 Oh, yeah - this popped up on HN yesterday too and also met with scepticism: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772362">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772362</a>Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.
 - dboreham41 minutes ago
 What's not real about it?
 - ktm5j2 hours 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?
 - cube002 hours ago
 Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now. This restored PDP-11/83 project is Dave Plummer's
corbinvachal3 hours ago
[dead]