Skip to content

Comment on What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?

Comments

His book "Computer Engineering" is an interesting read. I noticed someone posted a scan PDF : http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/_Books/Bell-Compu...

I have a copy of the book. And a PDP-11. Well, most of one, in a closet.

I'm an early career software engineer and I hope that one day I can retire with one of those machines in my basement.

A big issue is the hard drives which used materials that don't stand up long-term (urethane foam for example).

You could use an FPGA to build an emulated RL-05 I suppose but where's the fun in that.

The bus is sufficiently slow you can emulate the hardware with an MCU.

I'm using a slightly different approach with my PDP-11's, which is to use a custom device driver using DRV-11 parallel interfaces connected to a PC at the other end.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.