alt Hacker NewsA restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix
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.
Comments
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.
Fantastic build.
Do you know by any chance a source for Q-Bus edge sockets?
I posted this to twostopbits. Community over there is small but devoted to such willful acts of restoration
What is the giant blinkenlight panel on the right?
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
What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.
How about a nice game of chess?
Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old internet alive :)
I hope you won’t have to restore it from tape!
as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.
Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?
[dead]
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.