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.
kjs3 5 hours ago
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 4 hours ago
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.
nancyminusone 4 hours ago
Unfortunately, this is just Dave "I wrote Task Manager" Plummer's handwriting.
Wow. I can't imagine the thought process of going from accumulating a decade of Microsoft shares and experience during a pivotal era and deciding to plow it into a consumer scam op.
b00ty4breakfast an hour ago
for some reason, the tech industry attracts these types like flies to...well, you know the saying. They aren't the majority of folks drawn to tech but outside of maybe finance, it seems to be their preferred habitat.
it's their raison d'être to Always Be Conning
hartjer 29 minutes ago
Has to be cached, no? Its snappy
b00ty4breakfast an hour ago
this appears to just be an ad for some webpage widget-maker.
mikerg87 5 hours ago
I posted this to twostopbits.
Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration
What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.
dboreham 3 hours ago
Dave Plummer definitely isn't AI.
dallen33 3 hours ago
He isn't, but nearly everything he puts out there is AI produced. His video thumbnails look awful, and that task manager he built for macOS is fully AI coded. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I dunno it's kinda all ugly looking to me.
jmbwell 5 hours ago
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
varjag 3 hours ago
Fantastic build.
Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?
wrs 3 hours ago
What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?
frumplestlatz 5 hours ago
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)
I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
hinkley 3 hours ago
How about a nice game of chess?
budman1 5 hours ago
as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
mlmonkey 5 hours ago
Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
ktm5j 5 hours ago
There's a couple eyebrow raising things about this post.. like the fact that there's nothing but vague details in text and one photo with an AI prompt like alt-text. I think they're just trying to get clicks for that banner ad.
cube00 5 hours ago
While probably it's legit because I've seen Dave discussing the process on the YT channel (which I no longer watch) he unfortunately does have form https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625
Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.
ktm5j 5 hours ago
I'm a little confused by your comment.. especially considering the fact that you edited it and changed the link from and old comment thread from 2024 to whatever this dead post is from 2012. What does having form mean? Who is Dave?
cube00 4 hours ago
Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now. This restored PDP-11/83 project is Dave Plummer's
Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.
dboreham 3 hours ago
What's not real about it?
roryirvine 4 hours ago
Sadly, the site does seem AI-flavoured to a rather off-putting extent.
And, as you say, the details are so vague - it's exactly what you might expect if an LLM wrote them based on reading a spec sheet rather than any practical experience.
In particular, connecting that DEQNA to a modern network must have been a huge challenge all in itself and I'd have expected there to be a series of blog posts about just that. Maybe it's legit (and I'd love more detail if it is), but right now the presentation screams "thinly disguised ad".
spijdar 4 hours ago
I think he has actually posted videos of the restoration before (they've popped up in my youtube feed in the past), but I've never watched them, so dunno. The LLM site design and advertisement front-and-center are certainly a... choice....
It has some pretty broken behavior regarding multicast/broadcast traffic IIRC, but nothing putting it behind a vlan or separate LAN altogether wouldn't solve. I've got a little lsi-11 system under my bed I'm hoping to, one day, get the Fuzzball [0] distribution running on. The 22-bit address extension wirewrap the previous owner did needs to be redone entirely, so it's been a "later" project for years now, but I am hoping my little DEQNA will be able to ping the Internet still.
I was assuming that something of that vintage would only have been able to handle a 10BASE5 transceiver, but a wee bit of googling suggests that an UTP transceiver works well enough.
(That cosam.org site is more what I'd be expecting for a project like this, but maybe I'm just too old and grumpy for my own good!)
dboreham 3 hours ago
Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.
ktm5j 27 minutes ago
You and several other people here are making unsubstantiated claims about how you're super sure this is real in a way that makes it seem less real. You guys seem to know this Dave character and are doing him a solid, right?
dcminter 14 minutes ago
Dave Plummer's a well known YouTuber. He pops up in a couple of DEC groups that I'm in on Facebook. However I'm not a fan. He seems to take a lot and contribute only self-promotional videos.
The photo on this page looks very AI heavy. I'm not an expert but I really don't think those light panels are real (if they're real they're not contemporary to the machines they're in).
(Edit: I should qualify that I don't mean the panel with the octet switches, that looks roughly right - I mean the one under the 8" disks and the one on the vaguely Vax-pedestal looking thing)
