A certifiable antique
So there’s this guy named Dave and he’s put together an entire PDP11 workstation from 1983 and he’s built a website around it. When you visit the site, those numbers at the top are a custom Task Manager, showing you the running processes and refreshing itself every five seconds.
At the very top of the page is PDPGary, a link to a modern AI chatbot running on this computer. I don’t know how wide its knowledge is, but you can certainly use it to ask questions about Dave and this setup. It’s a little bit spicy, but very interesting. Erm, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
I remember this console. The company I worked for was still run on these things when I started there. We – the art department – had the very first desktop computer in the whole company in 1985, and we snuck it through by calling it an ‘electronic slidemaking apparatus.’ Because the engineers were Very Serious Men who did not Play With Toys.
My friend the photographer was trying to illustrate the concept of risk to computers using one of these behemoths. He put a single water droplet on the chassis, looked away for a sec and naturally it snuck inside and shorted out $100,000 worth of computer.
The good old days.
Posted: September 28th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from tinman
Time: September 29, 2026, 3:04 am
When I need to go to my happy place, I close my eyes and recall the VAX-11/780 that was my first work computer after college.
Comment from Mitch
Time: September 29, 2026, 6:18 am
Completely not involved with computers but I worked in a high end art gallery in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas back in the 90’s. We sold a rare $100,000 print. The guy who did the packing and shipping tore it in half removing it from the frame. he was fired.
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