Collaborate Disseminate
After we last saw [David Lovett] of [Usagi Electric], he was knee-deep in trying to fix a DEC PDP-11/03 power supply, which fortunately led to a fixed PSU and a …read more Continue reading Fixing A PDP-11/03 Power Supply Is Easy When You Understand It
Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on …read more Continue reading Preserving Floppy Disks
The wildly successful PDP-11 minicomputer was a major influence on the evolution of computing throughout the 1970s. While fondly remembered in modern day emulation, there’s nothing like booting up the …read more Continue reading PDP-11/34 Restoration And The Virtue Of Persistence
[Lee Adamson] is no stranger to classic computers. He recently picked up a Heathkit H11A which, as you might remember, is actually a PDP-11 from DEC. Well, technically, it is …read more Continue reading A PDP 11 by Any Other Name: Heathkit H11 Teardown and Repair
If you want to play the original Spacewar! but you don’t have a PDP-1 nearby, then you’re in luck — assuming you have a PDP-11, that is. [Mattis Lind] has …read more Continue reading Spacewar! on PDP-11 Restoration
The PDP-11 is perhaps the most important computer in history. This was the king of all minicomputers, and once you get past the amazing front panels of the 11/20, 11/40, and 11/70, you’ll find PDP-11s everywhere. Heathkit sold one. It was the smallest computer that could run Unix. There were desktop versions sold as DEC Professionals. I have been told Ticketmaster — the entire backend of all event ticket sales in the United States — still runs on PDP-11s.
One of the interesting bits of the PDP-11 is the miniaturization that happened over the course of its development. Over time, …read more
Hands up if you feel your spiritual home is in front of a terminal with a “DIGITAL” logo on it. It’s a name that has long ago been subsumed into first Compaq and then by extension HP, but it’s one with a lot of history when it comes to computing.
From the start of the electronic computing age, there were the computers we’d probably now describe as mainframes. Big computers that cost the GDP of a small country, filled an entire floor of a building, and could only be found in government departments, universities, and large companies. By the 1960s, …read more
If you entered the world of professional computing sometime in the 1960s or 1970s there is a high probability that you would have found yourself working on a minicomputer. These were a class of computer smaller than the colossal mainframes of the day, with a price tag that put them within the range of medium-sized companies and institutions rather than large corporations or government-funded entities. Physically they were not small machines, but compared to the mainframes they did not require a special building to house them, or a high-power electrical supply.
One of the most prominent among the suppliers of …read more
