ohRight now, on my desk, next to my ultra-modern gaming PC, is a strange device that resembles the control panel of a spaceship from a 70s sci-fi movie. It has no keyboard or monitor, just several neat lines of colored switches beneath a cascade of flashing lights. If you thought the recent spate of retro video game consoles like the Mini SNES and Mega Drive Mini were a surprising development in tech nostalgia, meet the PiDP-10, a 2:3 scale replica of the first-released PDP-10 mainframe. time. by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1966. Designed and built by an international group of computer enthusiasts known as Guaranteed obsolescenceIt’s a beautiful thing.
The origins of the project date back to 2015. Oscar Vermeulen, a Dutch economist and lifelong computer collector, wanted to build a unique replica of a PDP-8 mainframe, a machine he had been obsessed with since childhood. “I had a Commodore 64 and I proudly showed it to a friend of my father’s,” he says. “He just sniffed and said the Commodore was a toy. A real computer was a PDP, specifically a PDP-8. So I started looking for discarded PDP-8 computers, but never found any. They are now collector’s items, extremely expensive and almost always broken. “So I decided to make a replica for myself.”
As something of a perfectionist, Vermeulen decided he needed a professionally made front panel cover. “The company that could make it told me I would have to pay for a whole four-square-meter sheet of methacrylate, enough for 50 of these panels,” he says. “So I made 49 extra, thinking I’d find 49 idiot partners. “I had no idea that in the years to come I would make thousands of dollars at my table.”
At the same time, Vermeulen began posting in several early computing groups on Google Groups, where people were already working on pre-microprocessor computer software emulators. As word spread about his replica, it quickly became a group activity, with more than 100 people now participating. While Vermeulen concentrates on designing the hardware reproduction (the front panel with its working switches and lights), others handle various aspects of the emulation of the open source software, which has a complex history. At its core is SIMH, created by ex-DEC Employee and megastar hacker Bob Supnik, who emulates a variety of classic computers. This was later modified by Richard Cornwell and Lars Brinkhoff by adding controller support for the PDP-10. IS operating system and other projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There were many other people involved along the way, some collecting and preserving old backup tapes, others adding improvements and debugging, or providing documents and schematics.
The attention to detail is wild. The lights on the front aren’t just for show. As on the original machine, they indicate the instructions being executed, some signals from the CPU, the contents of memory. Vermeulen refers to this as watching the computer’s heartbeat. This element was taken very seriously. “Two people spent months on a specific problem,” says Vermeulen. “As you know, LEDs turn on and off, but incandescent lamps shine. That’s why an entire study was done to make the LEDs simulate the brightness of the original lamps. And then we discovered that different lamps from different years had different glow times. Measurements were taken, math was applied, but we added lamp brightness. More CPU time is spent simulating that than simulating the original CPU!
Because? Why go through all this trouble? First, there is the historical importance. Built between 1959 and the early 1970s, the PDP machines were innovative. Not only were they much cheaper than the giant mainframes used by the military and large corporations, but they were also designed as multipurpose, fully interactive machines. There was no need to produce programs on punch cards that were then given to the IT department, who ran them through the computer, which provided a hard copy that was debugged perhaps a day later. With PDPs, you can write directly to the computer and test the results immediately.
These factors led to an extraordinary burst of experimentation. Most modern programming languages, including C, started on DEC machines; a PDP-10 was the center of the MIT AI Lab, the room where the term artificial intelligence was invented. “The PDP-10 computers dominated the Arpanet, which was the precursor to the Internet,” says Lars Brinkhoff. “Internet protocols were prototyped on PDP-10, PDP-11 and other computers. The GNU project was inspired by the free exchange of software and information about the PDP-10. “Stephen Hawking’s artificial voice came from a DECtalk device, which grew out of Dennis Klatt’s speech synthesis research initiated on a PDP-9.”
PDPs were installed in university laboratories around the world, where they were adopted by an emerging generation of engineers, scientists, and coders—the original hackers. Steve Wozniak began coding on a PDP-8, a smaller, cheaper machine that sold by the thousands to hobbyists; His operating system, OS/8, was the ancestor of MS-DOS. Teenage schoolchildren Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to sneak into the University of Washington to program PCP-10. And it was on PDP computers that MIT student Steve Russell and a group of friends designed the shoot’em-up, Space war!one of the first video games to run on a computer.
This legendary game wasn’t alone: there were many others at the time, because creating games was a fun way to explore what was possible. “There’s Dazzle Dart, a four-player laser tennis game, and Lunar Lander,” Vermeulen says. “Maze War was the first network video game; “People would connect two IMLAC minicomputers/graphics terminals over Arpanet via a PDP-10 mainframe, and with that multimillion-dollar stack of hardware they could chase each other through a maze and shoot each other.” It was also on PDP computers that the original text adventures such as Colossal Cave and Zork were written, as well as the first online multiplayer games, including MUD and Star Trek.
These machines, then, are a vital part of our digital culture: they are the furnace of the modern technology and gaming industries. But to be understood, it is necessary used. “The problem with the history of computing is that you can’t really show it by putting some old, dead computers in a museum; that says almost nothing,” Vermeulen says. “You have to experience these machines, how they work. And the problem with computers from before 1975 or so is that they are huge, heavy, and more or less impossible to keep running. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, deeply loved the PDP-10 and, with the means he had, could afford a team of veteran technicians to repair and operate one. But it was very expensive; Unfortunately, his family decided to stop him after his death.”
The answer is emulation. All PDP replicas reproduce the fascias of the original terminal, with its lights and switches, but the computing is handled by a Raspberry Pi microcomputer connected to the back through a serial port. To get it working at home, you plug in the Raspberry Pi, attach a keyboard and monitor, boot it up, and download the software. Next, press a switch on the front of the PDP-10, reboot the Raspberry Pi and you’ll now be in PDP mode, your monitor running a window that emulates the old Knight TV terminal screen. Using the command line interface (remember it?), you can access a wide range of original programs, including games.
This is what I was waiting for. We all understand SpaceWar’s pivotal role in the birth of the modern gaming industry, but playing it, actually controlling one of the spaceships fighting amidst vector explosions in front of a flickering starscape… it feels like experiencing history. .
Fifteen years after Vermeulen began work on his personal PDP-8 emulator, the Guaranteed Obsolescence group has sold hundreds of its replicas and is working on more, including MIT’s experimental Project Whirlwind computer from the 1950s (which ran a simple version of tic-tac -toe). Now there is a company, Chiriqui Electronic Design Studio, in Panama that builds the hardware. What started as a personal project has turned into something much bigger. “We just had the ‘official’ launch of the PiDP-10 replica at MIT in Boston, where the original machine was located. About 50 hackers from the 70s joined us for a demo session. It was fun to see people playing a multi-user Maze War game 50 years later!
That’s the other reason the PiDP-10 is worth it: it’s fun. I never expected to see one of these things up close, let alone plug one into my monitor at home and play with it. It has been an exciting, nostalgic and strangely emotional experience. Navigating the ITS disk system, with that bright green dot-matrix font, its lists of intriguing programs and games, the message on the terminal command line that says “happy hacking!”… is incredibly evocative.
Meanwhile, programmers who bought PiDP machines are creating new programs and games. Their ages range from 80-year-old PPD veterans to 20-year-olds eager to experience a bygone era of programming. The lack of memory and processing power meant that you had to write elegant, super-efficient code: there was no room for overload. “Many universities use PiDP-11 and -8 in classes,” says Vermeulen. “Partly to show computer science students where we come from, and also because the very low-level programming that still needs to be done for microcontrollers or hardware controllers is the type of coding that is learned very well in these dinosaurs.”
Brinkhoff agrees that while there is nostalgia in these machines, they still have something to teach us. They are functional. “I enjoy writing new software for the 10; for example, a program to display fractals or generate QR codes,” he states.
“I hope this is something that more people pick up on, because if nothing is done with the PiDP, it will sit on a shelf, blinking the lights. “It’s a nice sight, but I think a computer won’t be really happy if there are no users to program it.”