If you’ve spent a few years around Hackaday, you’ve probably seen or heard of the DEC PDP-11 before. It was one of the great machines of the minicomputer era, back when machines like the Apple ][ and the Commodore 64 weren’t even a gleam in their creator’s eyes. You’ve also probably heard of Unix, given that so many of us use Linux on the regular. Well, now you can see them both in action, as [HappyComputerGuy] fires up real Unix on a real PDP-11/73… with a real Teletype Model 33 to boot!
It’s a fascinating dive into the tech of yesteryear, with a rich dose of history to boot. It’s mindboggling to think that video terminals were once prohibitively expensive and that teletype printers were the norm for interacting with computers. The idea of interacting with a live machine via a printed page is alien, but it’s how things were done! We’re also treated to a lesson on how to boot the PDP-11 with 2.11BSD which is a hilariously manual process. It also takes a very long time. [HappyComputerGuy] then shows off the Teletype Model 33 rocking the banner command to great effect.
It’s awesome to see this hardware as it would really have been used back in its heyday. Computing really was different before the microcomputer format became mainstream. It’s not the only PDP-11 we’ve seen lately, either! Video after the break.
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