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.

Comments

Pi does it all

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:Pi does it all

[mystik]

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?!"

ed is the standard text editor!

[Entrope]

ed. Not vi, ed.

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

Re:ed is the standard text editor!

[Waffle Iron]

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?

Memories

[RhettLivingston]

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!

Have to build it before putting it on

[raymorris]

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?

Re:Have to build it before putting it on

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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...