Obsolescence Guaranteed

The PiDP-8 came out in 2015; the 11 in 2018, with a remarkably constant stream of new builders to this day. Work on the PiDP-10 started in 2020, and after struggling with injection molding again (Development blog) it finally became a kit earlier this year. The launch party was at the MIT Museum in Boston. Very fitting, as the reconstructed ITS operating system is at the heart of MIT’s history. You'll see quite a few of the original MIT Hackers here:

Already 800 PiDP-10s have been built, putting us well on track to the 1,000 needed to earn back the injection mold. We'll have our Projects Budget back for use in some new ambitious projects soonish.

The project’s entry page is here. There also are some ongoing PDP-10 projects, you’re very much invited to join, see further down.

The PiDP-1 was done by Angelo Papenhoff (software) and Oscar Vermeulen (hardware). We really want this to be a lower-cost replica, so it uses a case made from PCB material. We hope it will attract democoders to write games and demos for the PDP-1’s interesting “Type 30” vectordot display. The dream is that this grandfather of personal computing will become something of a retro games console... why not? Vector graphics are much more fun than pixels.
With the PDP-1 team at the Computer History Museum, we plan to do an annual programming competition: the winner gets invited to run his code on the last working PDP-1 in the CHM in Mountain View. And to make sure PiDP-1 code runs exactly the same as on the real machine, the PiDP-1 uses a simulation at the circuit level, so it will be extremely exact, and still only need a low-cost Pi Zero 2. We hope it will draw a younger generation to the PDP-1 - make it live forever ;-)

New software update: The Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported thanks to Bill Cattey and Warren Young. See https://obsolescence.dev/pidp-8-quick-install.html. But the Pi 5 (even more so than the Pi 4) is so fast you better throttle the simulation speed down a notch. To make your PiDP only 2 times as fast as a PDP-8/e, add a line “set throttle 800k” to your config file (that’ll be /opt/pidp8i/share/boot/0.script for OS/8).

Steve Tockey and HB added a new cycle-exact simulator to the PiDP-8i repository. It might become the default software for the PiDP-8 soon - in the times of the Pi 2, the heavier CPU load might have been a reason not to go for Cycle Perfection, but in the days of the Pi 5 we're actually looking for things to keep the Pi's CPU a bit occupied. And a cycle-exact simulator matters for coding things like graphics demos. See posts on PiDP-8 Google Group and cycle-realistic code branch on Tangentsoft.

Update, December 9th: Work has begun on an add-on software package for the PiDP-8, to add both the GUI/terminal simulator niceties we just added to the 11, and bring the cycle-exact simulator in as a run-time option. It'll take a week or two yet.

Very useful: Ian Schofield wrote OS8Viewer, a tool that lets you view/edit/transfer files on/to the OS/8 disk image. See PDP-8: How-to-Use, in the “Mid 70s: Using floppy and hard disks in OS/8” section.

Ian also made a neat new VC8 display simulator. You can run and compile it for Windows, Linux and of course the Raspberry Pi. It will give you a display to view Spacewar on any of these. See PDP-8: How-to-Use, in the “1974: Play spacewar!” section.

There's a major new release of the PiDP-11 software package! See the updated Building Instructions.
It includes the 'new' unix v1 (see below), can pull in the latest updates to RSX-11 and 2.11BSD (these are the oldest operating systems on the planet with active support!), and now lives on Github, so as to allow for a more active update cycle. The install process now follows that of the PiDP-10, with a pidp11control command to start/stop the simulator and a pidp11 command to grab the PDP-11 console terminal from anywhere. VT-11 graphics now work without hassle. Last but perhaps not least, Angelo Papenhoff's VT-52 terminal simulator and Rene Richarz' Tek4010 simulator are integrated into the package. The Pi's desktop ties together the eye candy (but you can still run the package on a headless Pi as well):

1st Edition UNIX has been reconstructed! You can read about it here. Install on your PiDP-11 through the above update, or do a manual install:
  cd /opt/pidp11/systems:
  sudo wget obsolescence.dev/pidp11-sw/unix1.tar.gz
  tar -xvf unix1.tar.gz
  sudo nano selections
    Then, in the nano editor, insert a line “0101unix1” to make the new boot option known to the PiDP-11.
  Reboot with the front panel switches set to 101.

In further news...

Unusual for mainstream media, the Guardian in the UK ran an article on the PiDP-10, getting the word out on preserving computer history. And CuriousMarc made a very nice Youtube movie of the PiDP-10, ITS, and their history. See it here.

Shrdlu was the first-ever AI that inhabits a 3D world full with objects it is aware of and can manipulate, in response to an English language conversation. The demo has been around for a long time – but that, in fact, was just a screen recording (which the ITS operating system easily lets you do).
In September, Eric Swenson (@eswenson) edited the original old LISP and reconstructed the MicroPlanner code from the early 1970s it relied on, to run on the latest version of Maclisp. This reconstruction was thought impossible for decades, it’s a major achievement. Getting this alive on a PiDP-10 is a nice and manageable way to learn about Lisp on ITS too. It's also a major step in preserving the earliest history of AI.

Muddle and MIGS (Muddle Interactive Graphics System) have been resurrected. It is worth exploring, just for seeing what was possible in 1973 already:

Terry Kennedy went all-out with a PDP-10 cluster; mounting additional Pis on the back of the PiDP-10 so he's got TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 to connect to from the PiDP-10 itself. Which gets you thinking - you'd could do an ARPANET replication mounted to the back panel. All with a single USB-C cable (delivering power and networking either through Wifi or through USB Gadget mode); the Pi 5 power supply can handle all of this through the Pi 5's USB ports :-)

Maybe these are potential topics to kick off on the PiDP-10 and PiDP-11 Google groups:

Porting to microcontrollers and FPGAs:

PDP-10 networking setup and reconstructing the ARPANET: