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Rebuilding the PDP-11/70 with a Raspberry Pi (wixsite.com)
"You could look at this as a smallish PDP-11/70, built with modern parts," Oscar Vermeulen writes on his site. "Or alternatively, and equally valid, as a fancy front panel case for a Raspberry Pi."
Long-time Slashdot reader cptnapalm writes: Oscar Vermeulen's PiDP-11 front panel, modeling a PDP-11/70 in all its colorful glory, has been released to beta testers. This is Mr. Vermeulen's second DEC front panel; his PiDP-8 was released a few years ago. The PiDP-11 panel is designed to work with a Raspberry Pi running simh or, possibly, a FPGA implementation of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11... In addition to the front panel with its switches and blinkenlights, also included is a prototyping area for the possibility of adding new hardware...
UNIX and later BSD were developed on the PDP-11, including both the creation of the C language, the pipe concept and the text editor vi.
Long-time Slashdot reader cptnapalm writes: Oscar Vermeulen's PiDP-11 front panel, modeling a PDP-11/70 in all its colorful glory, has been released to beta testers. This is Mr. Vermeulen's second DEC front panel; his PiDP-8 was released a few years ago. The PiDP-11 panel is designed to work with a Raspberry Pi running simh or, possibly, a FPGA implementation of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11... In addition to the front panel with its switches and blinkenlights, also included is a prototyping area for the possibility of adding new hardware...
UNIX and later BSD were developed on the PDP-11, including both the creation of the C language, the pipe concept and the text editor vi.
I was hoping to find that the project entailed interfacing an actual 11/70 front panel to a Raspberry Pi. Because--yep, you see guessed it--I have an 11/70 front panel and I've wanted to do something like that for ages.
There's a similar project that does just this. This is the Blinkenbone project, "historic Blinkenlight console panels controlled by simulators".
The creator references and links all of this on his obsolescence.wixsite.com page. He explicitly states that this is a scale recreation of the PDP-11/70 panel, and uses Blinkenbone simulator logic for the RPi to drive his kits. This is preferable than having it drive the on-screen java clients, and more accessible than locating a real discarded, vintage panel.
On eBay, I see panel switches for the PDP-11/70 listed for 75-100 USD each, so unless like YOU, you're blessed with a salvage find, this is super cool.
Because you have a real salvage panel, this is what you want, the Blinkenbone panel, on the retrocmp site:
http://retrocmp.com/projects/b...
http://retrocmp.com/projects/b...
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