Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

The ultimate retro computer tech

The older I get, the more I appreciate the fun we had with older computer systems.

Yes, fancy GPUs that can render photorealistic games in realtime are all fine and dandy but they lack the charm and accessibility of those old 8-bit microcomputers or the machines that came before them, such as the venerable PDP 8 and PDP 11 from Digital.

I recall, when first getting into microcomputers, that the PDP/11 was the number one mini-computer of the day. They were the bee's knees and the duck's guts of almost personal computing.

While my puny microcomputer was just a box with a bunch of DIP integrated circuits solderd to a PCB, a real minicomputer had substance and presence that no micro could come close to matching.

Not only were these machines *big* but they also came with a bewildering array of equally imposing peripherals.

Disk drives that took up an entire desktop on their own and terminals with screens and keyboards that were streets ahead of my modified TV set and horrifically bouncy QWERTY buttons that made typing a nightmare.

One thing these minicomputers had in common with those early micros however, was a delightfully complex front panel, festooned with switches, buttons and lights. They were a real spectacle, even if most of the I/O was done using far more capable bits of tech.

Now, half a century or so later, those old Digital minicomputers are only seen in museums and history books. Even if you had one, its performance is so slow that even a humble Raspberry Pi would run rings around it with two of its cores tied behind its back.

Yet something strange is happening...

The PDP/8 and PDP/11 are making a comeback.

Even more strange, the driving force behind this comeback is that humble Raspberry Pi SBC.

There are now several projects on the market that allow enthusiasts to build reproduction PDP computers using the Pi as the brains and some very nice bespoke enclosures, buttons, lights and front panels as the eyeware.

The PiPDP-8 is one such offering and it's beautiful, at least in this humble commentator's opinion.

Want something a little more modern? How about the Pi PDP-11 which is from the same manufacturer and designed to reproduce the Digital PDP/11 machine in all its glory and front-panel blinkiness.

Imagine being able to build a machine that is op-code compatible with the original PDP minicomputer and relive the late 1970s, all in the comfort and convenience of your own home.

Interestingly enough, the original PDP/8 ran at a clock speed of just 667Khz while the Raspberry Pi that emulates it in these retro rebuilds runs at over 2GHz. That gives the PDP-8 around 0.8 MIPS of processing power, versus over 8,000 MIPS for the Pi. The PiPDP-8 runs around 24 times faster than the original PDP-8 while using about 1/150th the power and costing around 500 times less, even once the price of the fancy retro-kit is included.

I think it's fair to say that this is a great example of how rapidly and strongly computing tech has advanced in a few short decades.

The real reason for wanting one of these however, just has to be the joy that would come from writing a program that made the LEDs on that front panel blink in sequence.

Maybe one day, when I've finished paying the bills and have a few hundred dollars left over...

Did I mention that it's my birthday next month?? :-)

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font