A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix

74 points - today at 3:45 PM

The box is a restored Q-bus PDP-11/83 named minerva: Mentec M11 CPU, two chassis tied with M9404/M9405, RQDX3, 2xEmulex UC07, KDA50, RLV12, DEQNA, M3104. Storage is RA82 + dual RA92, MFM boot/swap, dual RL02, RX50s, and a TKZ50. OS is 2.11BSD.

The live panel is top. /cgi-bin/webtop is the raw snapshot.

A 16-bit httpd will not survive the front page, so Varnish/Caddy/Cloudflare cache the HTML and a 5-second webtop sample. Origin is still the 11 itself, and it handles all of the webtop and visitor count requests.

Telnet exists (pdp1173.com, guest) but it is a 40-year-old UNIX with no modern security story. Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Happy to answer Mentec, MSCP, Q-bus, or 2.11BSD questions.

To get BSD running on the Mentec, I had to customize the BSD kernel to use FPSIM, as the Mentec supports IEEE floating-point and NOT the DEC formats.

Source

Comments

kjs3 today at 4:41 PM

Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Unfortunately, for a disturbing percentage of the Internet, ruining things for everyone else is the goal. I'd turn off telnet.

dwedge today at 5:39 PM

A PDP-11 serving adverts for an AI-written site in 2026 was not on my bingo card. Imagine being brought back from the dead for that.

mikerg87 today at 5:27 PM

I posted this to twostopbits. Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration

https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9970

varjag today at 7:23 PM

Fantastic build.

Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?

wrs today at 7:25 PM

What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?

jmbwell today at 5:12 PM

I love it. My PDP-11 has some fault that keeps it blowing fuses. Emulators don’t feel the same. Real hardware doing the work, well done

sph today at 6:52 PM

What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.

hinkley today at 7:09 PM

How about a nice game of chess?

frumplestlatz today at 5:04 PM

Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)

I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!

budman1 today at 4:55 PM

as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.

deleted today at 5:18 PM

deleted today at 3:45 PM

mlmonkey today at 4:52 PM

Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?

corbinvachal today at 3:53 PM

[dead]