I Restored a 1983 PDP-11 UNIX Powerhouse-and You Can Log In Right Now!

[@DavesGarage]

To connect: telnet pdp1173.com login: guest -- if that doesn't work -- telnet davepl.dyndns.org login: guest

[@auser1922]

I will be amazed if this survives 24 hours.

[@1slotmech]

Damnit Dave, I hadn't had to telnet anywhere for close to 30 years!! 😆 I'll have to come back like 2 or 3am to have a shot of getting in.

[@danielktdoranie]

Welp I can’t get in on either but I’m thinking your PDP-11 may be hammered with requests… I am the west of Ireland.

[@openevents]

No route to host from here.... i'll try again later ;)

[@AddieDirectsTV]

Seems like she down. :(

[@danoconnell1833]

Dave, I'm a long time computer user (my first was IBM running two 5 1/4" floppies) but I've never been a real techie. I love watching you wax poetic about the old systems. Most of it is Greek to me - I recognize maybe every other word in the video - but I appreciate it nonetheless. Your depth of knowledge and love of the legacy shine through. Thank you.

[@DavesGarage]

Glad you enjoy it, thanks!

[@3eyedfishy]

Greetings from Canada. Server worked great for me. I was captured by Klingons and tortured mercilessly. 10/10, would login again.

[@BillyDickson]

Thanks Dave, thats very nice of you, I'll give it a week for the rush to slow down then try.

[@wtmayhew]

Thank you! Boy was that a flood of memories from the mid 1970s and on. I worked on 11/34s, 11/40s, 11/70s, 11/03, and Vax 11/750s running various flavors of RT-11, RSX-11, RSTS, TOPS-20, BSD 2.11 and Ultrix flavors. I know what you mean about cable management and the red stripe not always being pin 1. The other chore which verged on being a full time job was making serial cables for a sea of different terminal types and printers. One of my favorite tools was a self-powered box with two DB-25 connectors and two rows of red/green LEDs separated by DIP switches for all 25 wires. There was a square pin corresponding to each position on either side of the switches. The box came with a bunch of jumpers for the pins. That made it easy to figure out what sort of cross connects and local feedback connections were required to make a given null modem. It seemed like almost every model of equipment needed a different null modem. Once that was done, then it was on to resolving fights with baud rates, xon/xoff, need DTR/DSR or not, and hardware flow control buffering, in the O/S configurations, then it was on to termcap definitions and compiling terminfo for the device. It is so much easier now. I can’t say I miss that part of the old days.

[@mholzer54]

It is so cool to see another DECUS attendee (hee-hee). No Vaxes for me, but all the PDP-11s. 9 of them networked with DECNet.

[@protectiongeek]

Thanks for this one, Dave! There is surely no greater accolade than "I would hug it and squeeze it and call it George". You and I may have watched the same Bugs Bunny cartoons as kids.

[@henriquestanke]

The BEST youtube channel EVER.

[@xcalibur839]

Thanks for setting this up, it has been fun to play with and try to defend from malicious actors. I think I fixed the fork bomb that was previously executing. When it was running it was exceptionally difficult for more than a small handful (

[@ConnerWithAnE_]

nuts, I think I waited a little too long to try it. No route to the host.

[@fusseldieb]

Aaand... it's down again.

[@xcalibur839]

@@fusseldieb Yep, though this looks like a different problem. Did someone cause the PDP to fully crash? It seems like it, or perhaps Dave has taken it offline intentionally.

[@JolieMeyer]

My dad had a "personal" PDP-11/03 computer with 2 floppies, extended arithmetic chip, and a Tektronix 4051 micro with vector display that he had first used in college. He kept them in working order for years, and I played games on them he had written as well as the classic Adventure, Star Trek and Zork. He ended up selling the machines to a gold recycler because of the gold contact pads and gold wires in the integrated circuits. Nowadays I hand out Pi Zero dev kits to my students to learn on, but the thrill and wonder of having a personal set of hardware and software to tinker with just never goes away!

[@bernarrcoletta7419]

Oh! You made my day. I’ll give it a try in a couple of days.

[@baxtermullins1842]

Dave, there is one big issue with PDP-11 machines with respect to the buss system. I once had a PDP-11/45 cluster used for B-747 training. The computer would seem to randomly lock up. It took some time, but I found 2 boards with buss master, one in the back of the rack. For the DEC computers, I moved the board in the back to the first slot in the rack, and the card in the first slot to number 2 position as it could be made a lower response to an interrupt command. The new first card became absolute master. Problem solved!! (We had 2-boards, both master because of location in the drawer and they could ask respond at the same time, locking the machine in an electronic loop - be careful of card locations on the buss!) Have fun! I loved the DEC 11 series including the 11/780.

[@melissa-chrisladouceur5176]

Took me a minute to actually go into Windows and add the Telnet functions. I wasnt even alive when these machines were being used. Thank you Dave for brining these online and letting us play around. I ended up disconnecting and couldnt get back in, all ports in use. I couldnt even change directories lol. Time to go learn some BSD command line I guess.

[@coldlyanalytical1351]

I worked in a food factory as an automation engineer in the late 1970s. We used 11/23s with 2 x 8" floppies as process control computers, running RT-11 They looked so high tech and modern at the time!

[@AlexDawson2020AD]

Thankyou Dave!

[@RickO.-vq8oh]

I used to love that show "The Friendly GIant" Thanks for this video and Telnet access!

[@Namegoeshere-op9hg]

That is so generous of you!

[@duncanny5848]

Oh God, you made me laugh!! At <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="123">2:03</a> - "I would hug it and squeeze and call it George" Never change, love your channel.

[@andrewebbatson5595]

Beautiful PDP and BMW.

[@kellingc]

This awesome, Dave. Thank you for putting it online and letting us play.

[@RalphHightower]

I love the instruction set of the PDP-11.

[@hauger27]

I'm in, this is awesome, thank you for putting it online to play with.

[@clgreenhagen]

youtube needs to add a two thumbs up icon. Love your channel Dave.

[@marygauffin7290]

Nostalgia++! Thank you for this video.

[@rbus]

There used to be a museum of supercomputers in Germany that had a Cray on 24/7 for anyone to log into and occasionally would flip on some of their other machines. Spent a lot of time hacking around on the Cray experimenting with the vector engine. Was pretty exciting but now I collect old(ish) supercomputing tech like Xeon Phi, GraphCore AI accelerators, Mercury Computer Cell boards/blades, etc. Crazy what you find on the eBay market.

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

Please make videos!

[@alpharmd]

This is fantastic work Dave. Love your channel and this brings back memories of using a PDP 11/73 back in the mid 80s. Along with a cluster of Dec Vax 4000 and a HP9000. Managed to login to the 11/73 no problems. Thank you.

[@DevilsHandyman]

I had an off campus programming class in 10th and 11th grade and one of them was PDP-11 assembly language but running in a very slow emulator written in Fortran on a DEC-System 10. I still have a love for the PDP-11 and a desire to get a VT100/102 terminal.

[@snarfusmaximus]

I'm watching this in my kitchen with my PDP-11/73 to my right and a VAXserver 3800 behind me next to the fridge. I'm in DEC heaven!

[@ThomasLeavitt]

I started with BSD Unix on a VAX that the local big U had donated to the local humble junior college. VT220 and all. This takes me back 30+ years to 1993, hanging out with my buddy Zachary in the psych lab while he got everything up and running, grinding through the vilearn tutorial and learning regex back and forward. So cool! My next machine was an HP 835 running HP-UX 9.0 that served as the server for the web hosting company I started in 1994.

[@billymania11]

Timed out for me, but I'll keep trying. Super excited to try Zork!

[@richardbrobeck2384]

Great video Dave !!

[@Egilhelmson]

In my first real (post college) job, the computer that controlled the transmission X-ray microscope was a PDP-11/73 for some reason, yet what it used the computer for needed a PDP-11/23 at most (which is what handled the scanning electron microscopes). The beam control was mainly done by a Tracor (originally Northern Scientific) attachment to the PDPs, so the computer just served to save X-ray spectra and programs (the TEM scopes didn’t use any programs, though, except to take spectra).

[@gradyparks5249]

Memories memories memories! Awesome - Thanks Dave

[@danconlon1962]

Thank you, Dave. I appreciate what you do here.

[@guidichris]

I majored in Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech in the late 70s early 80s. I wanted to learn Pascal, and this was taught on a DEC. Really enjoyed that class.

[@jeremyrebelka]

feckin Amazing ! I was Bit late for Digital Stuff but I have couple SGIs and Suns. Digital was always the Ultimate Stuff for me - Keep em Running !!

[@woodch]

Are we life-experience dopplegangers? I have the same childhood memories of walking/riding to the college in my neighborhood and social-engineering my 12-year-old way into login credentials for their PDP 11/70 as well! It started with the guest user account (250,250), then I was given my own, proper account (4,194) with a quota and access to some of the public folders and processes. I spent so much time there writing dumb little programs and exploring how the system worked. Was there when they slowly transitioned to a VAX/VMS system, and got to play around while they experimented with linking the two systems together so you could telnet back and forth between them. What an exciting time to be a nerdy kid!

[@landlocked4771]

I hope this all works out. Very cool. Thanks Dave.

[@Mr.1.i]

When I was a kid I use to bit map my mums knitting patterns into a acorn electron,I was allways doing those sums that added variations of 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128

[@DumbledoreMcCracken]

You are a King amongst men.

[@PixelPipes]

I've liked a lot of your videos but these retro computer videos are a real highlight.

[@jimcraig8754]

After several attempts, I was finally able to log in. I only played a game of hangman but it took me back to my college days logging into a Unix system remotely. Thanks for doing this!

[@ReallyLee]

On Friday night, December 14th I connected at about 9 pm PST. Lucky for me, man telnet worked and at the end of the manual page I found "close" as the proper way to close a telnet connection. I was a biology aide and I programmed in Basic on the Caltech DEC system in 1973. I computed angles and distances for machining an aluminum Fresnel lens for a solar energy collector project. I milled the reflector in my Dad's machine shop. Around 7 pm each day I had to log off because the DEC was being used for physics calculations.

[@blai5e730]

I had Digital's 1973 "101 BASIC Computer Games" and ported SPACWR over to the school's TRS-80 Model 2 back in 1978. Originally bought the book (from a Tandy store) as we had a Teletype terminal connected via a 50 baud modem to a PDP-11 at another school. When I left the school, I donated the book to the library for others to enjoy.

[@StanBenoit]

This is great! Thanks Dave. OUCH! No more processes. Will keep trying, always wanted my own PDP. Can't believe I'm on my new Mac running telnet to a pdp... I can't stop smiling !

[@blackghost7263]

Love this stuff Dave! Well done!

[@BrentUpton1]

Awesome! Thanks, Dave. I'm sure it's getting hammered now. Maybe I'll get a chance to log in later tonight.

[@wtmayhew]

Something which found handy was to have an RJ-45 twisted pair Ethernet to AUI transceiver and a 15 pin D connector with a 9 Volt battery connected to the AUI power pins. I could power up the transceiver with the battery and plug it into wall plates or switch ports to see if they were live. I also carried a cross-over cable so I could plug into equipment. I got a transceiver with as many status LEDs as I could find. It turned out to be a very handy and very inexpensive basic trouble shooting tool. It was a lot lighter than dragging around a Fluke network tester.

[@Andy-fd5fg]

Connection timed out - i guess everyone else has already connected to all those 8 serial ports. Have you thought about knocking up a simple website to go with it, that provides some details and status of the machine?

[@v12alpine]

Would be cool to have some insight on what the users are up to... I'm connected but can't do anything due to "No more processes."

[@sharkcz3099]

Unix on a real PDP-11, this is awesome!

[@eliweatherby9768]

thanks Dave, I have always had an interest in older computers in general i was able to login without a problem and i am amazed by the fact that even tho the computer is one of the iconic models from the past it just works with a modern computer i will would recommend trying it out to anyone that likes this kind of thing

[@paulscarlett4346]

ah ...what memories ... I supported 6 PDP-11 73s supervising material handling equipment - AGVs, 2 AS/RS, and Monorail. Fond times. We used RSX-11M+ ... The 11s talked to Allen 3 Bradly PLCs via serial ports. Was best of times - was the worst of times.... Sadly, Y2K was the death of the DEC environment, but the time had come to move on to more capable hardware and software.

[@deejayiwan7]

You put the COM in Retro Computing... Excellent 👏👏👏👏👏

[@andrewb6]

Snoopy for the Win!!! And the Like. 😃

[@MmMerrifield]

This is really cool Sir! I wish I could hear the hum of those hard drives in person.

[@JasonBillingham]

Loved this episode, especially the nod to The Friendly Giant. I still have fond memories of specifically that opening sequence. Thanks!

[@JasonBillingham]

Also, I managed to get onto the system. Absolutely fantastic. Left you an insignificant note in the guestbook file :)

[@alliejr]

Dave, THANK YOU. I also remember playing Star Trek on PDP-11. At university, my first class in C was hosted on a PDP-11. ❤❤❤

[@jim.radford]

I miss these days ~>more guestbook Hi Dave! Jim from Lake Tapps -- Hello Dave! and hi Jim from Lake Tapps! -Jeremy from British Columbia Neal from Wisconsin -- Hi Dave, Mike from England

[@stuart4858]

Love your work Dave. Stuart from Melbourne AU

[@APWaddington]

can not even ping the pdp at the moment, will try again in the morning Sydney Australia time. Thank for showing us the fun with old gear you have

[@BFLmouse]

Half an hour after the video went up, and it appears the PDP11 is buried under people trying to connect... I'll try again in a couple of days. On my Linux system I had to manually install Telnet first. It's not installed by default.

[@jfseaman1]

So cool. Wanted one back then.

[@philsbbs]

another great video, thanks for uploading.

[@LJ45Chimera]

Thanks for the video. Just logged in and tried it and its working great :)

[@mehmetnaciakkk3983]

Worked with several PDPs, and had a DEC Professional and a Rainbow 😊 I actually started my PDP-adventures using a 12-bit PDP-8 in hybrid with a Donner Analog. My first summer practice 😊

[@andresrvlife1386]

lol.. all ports are n use.. :-) Ahh the memories!!!! thanks Dave!!!

[@emilcziljak7224]

I always enjoy your show :)

[@blob537]

Really fun! I was on for a while before it started throwing 'no more processes' messages, but how fun is that! I'll try again a little later, but thanks Dave!

[@johnny2600]

I am getting 'No more processes' for every command I try. Still, pretty awesome. Thank you for sharing! Good ole nostalgia.

[@jadamsnz]

Brings back memories of playing Star Trek in the 70s, not on a CRT but on a line printer...

[@0000lmm]

The Friendly Giant? After a load of PDP11? Whew! The flashbacks are overwhelming! I like your 11/34, but it needs some DECtape drives like that purple one in the stock photo :) RL01's are sooooooooo much better than RK05's and I hope you enjoyed configuring the jumper switches on your DL11's ... Real men used RP06's...

[@roberthealey7238]

Puttered with v7 on a PDP11/45 back in school days in the 80’s. Dept. sent it to the industrial dept for scrapping, managed to save the front panel but everything else was already ripped apart by the time I got over there. Someday I’ll get the panel working with PiDP11. Saved some of the related books but the 11/45 docs and brochures had already been thrown out by the time I found out what had happened. 😢 Also puttered with 2.11bsd on a buddies J11 based 11/73 rack mount qbus system for a bit before graduating and going out into the cold, cruel real world. SIMH is a decent emulator for reliving the glory days of PDP11.

[@bokami3445]

I was going to say, WHAT! no hunt the Wumpus but reviewing and freezing the video I see that is is there after all, Jolly good show!

[@roberthealey7238]

I thought greenpeace had gotten a global ban on hunting wumpi back in the late 80’s? 😂

[@ronboe6325]

they really knew how to design computers back then (at least the outsides......) Glorious kit! My terminal in college was a Zenith, Z29 I think. Good stuff.

[@unknownXYZchris]

Login worked 😀 thank you... will have a look around.

[@KameraShy]

All these young-uns nostagically reminiscing about their childhood dreams of playing with a PDP. It wasn't until college that I had my first interaction with a computer - through punch cards. IBM 360. I still remember my first program, six or seven cards of Fortran, and the elation when it actually ran and produced output. A truly magical moment. It wasn't until my third corporate job over a decade later that I encountered a PDP-11. It was used in the factory of a major electronics manufacturer to control an automated storage warehouse. Of course everything was all messed up and it lost control of where all the parts were stored. Long story for another time.

[@tndigi1233]

Wow - pdp11s have been long before my time (started as an NT admin in the mid/late 90ies). However I've somehow become fascinated with DEC and it's products, realizing that so many things have their roots connected to this this long bygone company kead by such a charismatic figure like ken Olson. And we'll I guess the VAX guys who would always make fun of our tinkertoys had also kindled my interest. However I've never touched or even used any of the old dec systems - now there is a chance! Christmas has come early this year.... thanks Dave! I haven't managed to log on yet, but I am really looking forward to do that... maybe the system will be idle enough on Christmas day 😉 Take care and thanks again!

[@user-nd8zh3ir7v]

your videos are so awesome!!!

[@andrewjenery1783]

Reminds me of a DEC PDP-11/70 that a company I used to work with used in 1984, that ran various COBOL prgrams.

[@CrassSpektakel]

OMG, I feel old and young at once. While I never used a PDP11 myself I know almost all the programs you have installed from the 1980/1990ths. In fact I still have "bsd-games" installed on every Linux and BSD I get my pawns on. trek was actually a great game although I prefer the version for the Commodore Business Machines a bit more as it got a couple of minor addons and extensions, not to mention it runs a lot faster because it doesn't go through a terminal at 9600bps ;-)

[@yogibarista2818]

If I recall correctly, we had an 11/93 as our production server for a few years, with the previous 11/73 being assigned to being the development server.

[@dahlia695]

Something tells me this is going to work out about as well as the guy who put a Windows XP computer on the open Internet.

[@fusseldieb]

Yep, it's unfortunately down. Either being hugged to death or someone effed it up.

[@Canthus13]

THis is awesome. I'll have to take a look sometime. I've run quite a few emulators in my time, but it's been decades since I've played on a PDP-11. We had an old 11/40 in college (and this was 1993, so it was a relic even then) that I got to play around on, as well as vaxen running VMS. Nothing with Unix, sadly. That was something I didn't get to touch until dialup internet came about for more people and I managed to snag a BSD account for telnet access around 95. From there... Well, we all know what happened as the wild west of the internet was tamed.

[@IndianapolisGerry]

as one would expect...not accessible. Can't wait for some free cycles --- this is going to bring back some memories!

[@zonegamma8197]

A very cool project

[@mattd5757]

my hero !

[@KiwiHelpgeek]

Awesome work. Just got home after a long work day and tried connecting (<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1191">19:51</a> NZDT (UTC+12) or <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="411">06:51</a> UTC). No joy with either Kitty or the Windows built in telnet client.

[@neilbradley]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="360">6:00</a> - Lovely E46 M3! I have an E36 with an S54 swap!

[@FatherGapon-gw6yo]

Super cool

[@charlessimms84]

Dave’s choices in computing technology, cars, and timepieces is *chef’s kiss* 🤌🏻

[@TheGramophoneGirl]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="630">10:30</a> we had one of those in an office I worked at in the very early 90s. I'm pretty sure ours had a DAT tape drive (or similar) instead of duel floppies so we could make a backup each night. We used to take the previous nights tape home for safety lol.

[@mysomervda]

Thanks Dave, nice video. I tried connecting but got a busy response so looks like its popular :)

[@sdrc92126]

My first physics computer😍

[@unclerojelio6320]

I played Star Trek via acoustic modem and keyboard in a high school closet connected to the (don’t remember ) mainframe on the UT campus in 1982.

[@dudehuh5491]

heavy traffic cant get in Good ! nice to see

[@debugin1227]

Love the pdp11

[@christochristoff9141]

Thanks :)

[@williamm3691]

So cool! 😎 Waiting for my turn haha

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

This is really cool. It'd be awesome to get modern software running on it, and actually make it be able to carry out modern workloads.

[@douro20]

Speaking of old drives not working the first time around, I bought a Seagate ST-4096 about a decade ago to put in my 5150 and the head locking mechanism was stuck. It took several power cycles to get it to unlock and it hasn't given me any trouble since.

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

Great job on restoring that old system Dave! I love seeing old hardware restored…..😄

[@andymouse]

That galvanized back panel with the LED display was always hanging off the back of every system I worked on LOL!