A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix (pdp1173.com)
100 points by davepl 10 days ago | 45 comments



kjs3 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

dwedge 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

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

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.


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

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

mikerg87 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

I posted this to twostopbits. Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration

https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970

encom 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

>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
davepl 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

It is though. Dig deeper.
mkirk 9 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Dig deeper how, though? If Cloudflare is just proxying a tunnel back to the PDP-11, the netname tells you nothing. Has anyone actually checked the origin?
jmbwell 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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
sph 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.
bronze32 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

It's plain http served off a 40-year-old box, so your browser flags it "not secure." Same warning every hobbyist site got once Chrome started nagging in 2018.
dboreham 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.
bkline 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Human or not, a restored PDP-11 on the public internet is one dead disk from an outage. Spare parts? Good luck sourcing those at 3am.

Is anybody install Doom there?

SubZero be here )


this appears to just be an ad for some webpage widget-maker.
varjag 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Fantastic build.

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

wrs 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?
davepl 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
hartjer 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Has to be cached, no? Its snappy
hinkley 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

How about a nice game of chess?
budman1 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
mlmonkey 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
davepl 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.
copper60 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

Because naming things is hard, and apparently renaming them is harder than upgrading the CPU.
ktm5j 10 days ago | flag as AI [–]

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.

I disagree that tape restore is the worry. Dying disks and power supplies are. No backup fixes a dead 40-year-old PSU, which is why I'd keep an emulator mirror.