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Rebuilding the PDP-11/70 with a Raspberry Pi (wixsite.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the retro-computing dept.

"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.

18 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Pi does it all by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm always amazed at what people use a Pi for. While bad mouthed for it's limitations it seems the Swiss Knife of tiny SBC devices.

    1. Re:Pi does it all by mystik · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Before the Pi, you'd see all sorts of devices hacked to get new firmwares and new capabilities into them, that the original creator hadn't even dreamed of. Remember the Chumby? Hacking various routers?

      The Pi platform lets you skip that sometimes difficult hacking phase, and onto the, "What could I do with this hardware?!"

      --
      Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
    2. Re:Pi does it all by rickb928 · · Score: 2

      Where I work the IBM tape library was 'automated' decades ago. It is used exactly the same way, but it is, of course, all DASD drive now. And that's virtualized in a SAN inside a VM cluster that merely mimics a tape library.

      I use PuTTY daily. At work it's HostExplorer, they can jam PComm up their Java. Lots of VT100 emulations out there.

      Needless to say a PiDP-11 would handle mSATA fine. Imagine giving your VMS install more data space than existed in the world when it was introduced.

      First-world problems. With a Pi at the heart of it I suppose I/O speed wold be realistic...For 100+ users.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    3. Re:Pi does it all by dwywit · · Score: 2

      I'll reserve my applause for the person/s who manage to emulate OS400/IBM i on RPi or x86/64.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    4. Re:Pi does it all by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

      The Hercules emulator will emulate an IBM z system on your PC. Now, any IBM mainframe software that's not decades old is copyright and basically impossible for an ordinary Joe to get for an emulator. But in the 60s and 70s, IBM released much of their system software free, figuring to make money on the hardware. You can get an MVS turnkey system for Hercules built with the last free version of MVS (3.8j). You get an assembler (G--H and HLASM were licensed program products) and TSO (not ISPF or SDSF, though. You do get a homebrew replacement which seems to be markedly inferior). No CICS or DB2. You don't get PL/I, FORTRAN or COBOL, but you can install old versions of these (no Checkout or Optimizing compiler for PL/I, but PL/I-F was free and you can find install tape images). I've got it installed on my Linux laptop, and it was a blast seeing the operator console come up in the x3270 session (I was an MVS operator for many years).

  2. ed is the standard text editor! by Entrope · · Score: 3, Funny

    ed. Not vi, ed.

    Now get off my lawn, I'm growing belt onions right there.

    1. Re:ed is the standard text editor! by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Funny

      Software text editors are for wannabe hipsters.

      Serious developers use the switches and LEDs that are right there on the front panel. Why would you pay for all that hardware if you didn't intend to use it?

    2. Re:ed is the standard text editor! by Xtifr · · Score: 2

      For those who missed the joke: ed is the standard text editor.

    3. Re:ed is the standard text editor! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

      And thanks to this project? NOW YOU CAN!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
  3. Looks good, but... Sound? by lenski · · Score: 2

    The builder set up a prototyping area, and my thought would be to install an audio amp and speakers to replicate the 12 (? it's been 40 years for me...) fans it needed for cooling. To say nothing of the RK-05. Of course an organization that could afford a /70 could probably afford the RP06 drives to go with it.

    I remember wishing that someday if I could get really rich, I could someday have an 11/45.

    ..This comment was typed on a 2016-vintage Intel NUC with 16 gig RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD and a 40-inch 4k monitor. Total "investment": $1500, having splurged on the entirely unnecessary NVMe... Nothing fancy but so many orders of magnitude more powerful than the 11/70 that the systems are incomparable.

  4. Loved my PDP 11/70s by renerobinson · · Score: 2

    I miss those days, cut my baby teeth on a PDP 11/70 with RSX11M+ OS. Did Fortran 66, Fortran 77, Assembler and C code on them.
    We also had 11/34s and a really small one in the lab with a low serial number. It came with the pizza box drives and paper-tape reader/writers.

    --
    been there, done that, got the T-shirt, burned it, going back home
    1. Re:Loved my PDP 11/70s by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 2

      Was his name Mel?

  5. Re:That's not "rebuilding". by bitMonster · · Score: 2

    He rebuilt the front panel and switches from photographs, primarily. This is a serious effort.

  6. Re:That's not "rebuilding". by bitMonster · · Score: 2

    http://obsolescenceguaranteed....

    Not a tinkerer.

  7. Memories by RhettLivingston · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The highlight of my Digital Electronics II Lab course in college was to design and prototype a PDP5 using 74xx series logic chips on breadboards. In comparison, the PDP 11/70 was an advanced supercomputer, but the task of designing even the simplest computer at the gate level really created an appreciation for the complexity of processors. It took 20 breadboards to prototype and worked for just a few minutes before a chip lost its smoke somewhere. Fun days!

  8. Have to build it before putting it on by raymorris · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This article is not about the emulator. That's been around for a while.

    This is about reproducing the physical hardware - the switches and lights and all that. You say "that's not rebuilding. That's putting a fancy front on" - you realize one has to design and build the "fancy front" before putting it on, right?

    1. Re:Have to build it before putting it on by rnturn · · Score: 2

      That was still rather impressive. But... 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. What I guess I need to find is a source of the 11/70 maintenance prints--should be a piece of cake, right?--for all the pinouts of the connectors on the front panel. Then... the real fun begins.

      --
      CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    2. Re:Have to build it before putting it on by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."