Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shakna 505 days ago
> Even getting an OS, compiler etc is not that easy.

There's a GCC fork [0], macro11 [1] (GCC and clang also both have macro11 backends), ack [2] and more.

Getting hold of a modern compiler is trivial.

> It's kind of hard to get hold of a PDP-11 these days.

The PiDP-11 [3] emulator that runs on a Pi, is fairly popular among the retro crowd. So sourcing something hardware wise that behaves that way is easily possible.

The Computer History Simulation Project [4] will give you easy access to simulating a PDP-11 on just about anything that you own.

But if you want the original hardware, then they're in the $400-500 range, in my area. Easy to source.

[0] https://github.com/JamesHagerman/gcc-pdp11-aout

[1] https://gitlab.com/Rhialto/macro11

[2] https://github.com/davidgiven/ack

[3] https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

[4] https://github.com/simh/simh

1 comments

You can find original PDP-11s in the $400-$500 range?
Through a few of the computer-oriented antique dealers, yes. Not so much online. Part of being locally located, means the device has been sitting on their shelves for over a decade without anyone even making a bid. Several would take even less.

But for a hobbyist, I'd still probably recommend something like the PiDP. Run the system and learn it, without having to take the power bill of an early machine.