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

100 points · 45 comments · davepl

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davepl · 1790005507 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. budman1 · 1790009740 · focus · HN ↗
  as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
corbinvachal · 1790005990 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
kjs3 · 1790008863 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. pmlnr · 1790058069 · focus · HN ↗
  I will never understand why, but the story of Reddit Place ( <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170409173246/http://sudoscript.com/reddit-place/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20170409173246/http://sudoscript... ) certainly supports this :(
mlmonkey · 1790009526 · focus · HN ↗
Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
1. ktm5j · 1790010911 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. cube00 · 1790011622 · focus · HN ↗
    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=3981362">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3981362)
    Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.
    ktm5j · 1790012237 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1790012435 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now.
    roryirvine · 1790012757 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.
    dboreham · 1790017559 · focus · HN ↗
    What's not real about it?
    davepl · 1790030090 · focus · HN ↗
    "Probably isn't real". Interesting theory.
    ktm5j · 1790074557 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    davepl · 1790030060 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    cube00 · 1790059136 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree <a href="https://tmog.org/pro.html" rel="nofollow">https://tmog.org/pro.html
  2. roryirvine · 1790012301 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1790013429 · focus · HN ↗
    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....
    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
    roryirvine · 1790014330 · focus · HN ↗
    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 (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!)
    dboreham · 1790017467 · focus · HN ↗
    Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.
    ktm5j · 1790026853 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    dcminter · 1790027647 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ktm5j · 1790074186 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay gotcha, sorry I was jumping to conclusions.
    dcminter · 1790075326 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
2. davepl · 1790030192 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
frumplestlatz · 1790010276 · focus · HN ↗
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)
I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
jmbwell · 1790010762 · focus · HN ↗
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
cube00 · 1790011104 · focus · HN ↗
Feels a little disingenuous to put TMOG on a .org domain when it sells commercial licences.
mikerg87 · 1790011669 · focus · HN ↗
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
dwedge · 1790012355 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. nancyminusone · 1790014374 · focus · HN ↗
  Unfortunately, this is just Dave "I wrote Task Manager" Plummer's handwriting.
  1. ok123456 · 1790017512 · focus · HN ↗
    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...
    kev009 · 1790021015 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1790025068 · focus · HN ↗
    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
sph · 1790016764 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. dboreham · 1790017393 · focus · HN ↗
  Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.
  1. dallen33 · 1790017826 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1790030140 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
hinkley · 1790017791 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
varjag · 1790018627 · focus · HN ↗
Fantastic build.
Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?
wrs · 1790018702 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. davepl · 1790030009 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
b00ty4breakfast · 1790024777 · focus · HN ↗
this appears to just be an ad for some webpage widget-maker.
hartjer · 1790026706 · focus · HN ↗
Has to be cached, no? Its snappy
encom · 1790028326 · focus · HN ↗
>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
```
1. davepl · 1790029953 · focus · HN ↗
  It is though. Dig deeper.
jasomill · 1790065001 · focus · HN ↗
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.
SubZero576 · 1790413887 · focus · HN ↗
Is anybody install Doom there?
SubZero be here )

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