I came across this today: a modern replica of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computer. What makes this so wonderful is that it's not just a simulation of the PDP-10's OS and software running on a Raspberry Pi but also includes a facsimile of the original front panel.
The PiDP-10 front panel is not just a mock-up but allows you to control and interact with the PiDP-10 exactly as an operator would have done back then. I used a PDP-10 when I did my MSc in AI at Essex University in 1985. The PDP-10 was popular with "university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), ETH (ZIR), and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET. For these reasons, the PDP-10 looms large in early hacker folklore".
Thus, the PiDP-10 comes with MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, "the PDP-10 formed the heart of a large array of connected hardware, and its ITS operating system became a playground for computer scientists and hackers alike. MACLISP, emacs, the earliest AI demos, they were born on the 10, running ITS." I'm particularly interested to see SHRDLU - the first AI to understand a 3D blocks-world. I remember doing assignments in LISP on that and how, in the mid-80s, it was the considered the cutting edge of AI.
There's a waiting list to buy the PiDP-10 from Obsolescence Guaranteed, which I have eagerly joined.
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