Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32 | Hacker News Reader

Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32

spritesmods.com

127 pointsrcarmo25 comments

The first machine of any type that I myself booted in real life was a PDP-8 in 1976. Front panel switches to get it up, paper tape punched from an ASR-33 to load a program and get it rolling. Maybe a 5MB drive on the thing. It is amazing to see what a influence the whole PDP family had on the technical/engineering computing world back in the days of mainframes being the only "real" information technology systems. Thanks DEC.

That was my first hands-on computer as well. No disk drive, though the teletype had a tape punch and a tape reader.

I was fortunate to have such an experience. I have had a satisfying career writing software for embedded systems and medical devices.

There's a nice scale replica available: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8

This is yet another great demonstration of sprite_tm's combination of technical skills, creativity and perseverance to make something cool out of plain curiosity or maybe just because. I really admire his drive to not only make the technical proof of concept but also to package it up in a very nice case. And to top it off, a long read about the entire process. And he is not even bragging about it!

Yes, my sentiment exactly! My heart starts pumping when I see a new project from spritesmod, and I settle in with a coffee. Spritesmod never disappoints, and I always learn some cool new details!

Hehe, comments like these make me finish and document my projects when half of me actually would rather throw it into a box and start something new instead. Thanks!

This is really lovely. I wasn't aware you could even theoretically strip SIMH down to run on such a constrained target.

What I love about this is it isn't overengineered, nor is it trivial or easy. It's a pleasant amount of work with a tangible, fun demo at the end.

I've made a similar device: https://aaron-fischer.net/tdn (German)

This looks great fun. I first worked in C and 8080 so I didn't see the PDP-11 ISA until a few years later. What amazed me at the time was how much the PDP11 was like C. There is just about a one to mapping of things like pre and post increment, pointers and basic structures. For 8080 there is not much more code generated to do the same but it is not such a clean match.

I just love what the esp32 can do - in the right hands!

It is such a capable piece of kit for arduino prices - love the 8 bit arcade builds people have done. I bought a few esp32 when lockdown started but having kids means the time I thought I might have now has evaporated. But wonderful to read what others are able to do.

There's hope! I found my esp32 board was just the right amount ready-made (especially with the Arduino ui) and flexible to get some meaningful toy projects for my child.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691603

Though I suppose it gets harder with more than one child!

Cheers man - yeah 2 needing schooling, and my wife has long covid since the end of March - means not a lot of time for me, but soon I hope!

The ESP32 is more powerful than the PC I had access to in the school computer club, which we basically used to play defender of the crown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512

Still, we could use most high level programming languages of the day, even though Assembly was still the name of the game for anything requiring performance.

I think many don't realize how much these modern tiny devices are actually capable of.

That 1/6 scale VT100 is sweet!

Agreed. I probably wouldn’t have noticed that there was more than one page if it wasn’t for your comment as I was only skimming over page 1.

All others coming to the HN comments make sure you catch the demo video on page 4.

Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtmNOZVrz98

Also to the author of the page, if you see this: I would recommend putting the video embed at the top of page 1 so that it is the first thing that visitors see. Nothing beats a good video for me, and the video you made is very good. So best to put it first IMO and then people can read about the details afterwards.

You have a good point... I always tended to write my stuff down chronologically, with the reveal at the end, but I'm not sure if in the age of 10-minute Youtube videos that still works well. I'll see if I can at least link the last page, so people without patience can go there directly.

Have you written a blog post about your dev machine? I see it is a thinkpad model. What distro are you using? Is that a tiling window manager? Are your dotfiles public? :)

Nothing special - Thinkpad T470s, running Debian, with Awesome as a window manager and Kitty as my main terminal. No public dotfiles as I feel most of them are duct-taped together and perpetually in the precarious state of only being one apt-get update away from failing because of something deprecated I put in 15 years ago.

Thanks, now for the cliché: vim or emacs?

None. Mcedit. I'm not even kidding.

On a related note: what are you using for designing your 3d prints?

OpenSCAD. Textfile in, 3d model out, just like I like it. As an indication: this is what I had to type in to get the VT102 model: https://github.com/Spritetm/esppdp/blob/master/case/vt100.sc...

Love the case - but it needs a better keyboard!

> super-important tasks like payroll, bookkeeping and other beancounter-y tasks in a business.

And a whole new world was created when PDP wasn't just a "faster horse"

I have an original PDP-11/5 front panel (and the remnants of the PDP-11 rotting in the garage. How hard would it be to wire it up?

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