Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, prompted by the high cost of memory for his vintage PDP-11, designed a standalone RAM card using ChatGPT and the EasyEDA circuit simulator despite lacking prior experience with such projects. The board uses a Lattice MachXO2 FPGA as a memory controller linked to four ISSI 1MB memory chips, and was tested on a backplane with an M8190 CPU board. He hit setbacks including inexperience flashing FPGA chips and the PDP-11's quirky word-based memory bus, which required careful handling of byte-lane selection during reads and writes.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-31
The piece traces LISP implementations that fit within extremely small memory budgets, starting with the original 1960 LISP on MIT's IBM 704, which used 32K words of 36-bit core with the LISP system itself taking 12K words, leaving under 20K cons cells. It also cites 1964's PDP-1 LISP, which ran on systems with just 4096 words of 18-bit storage, with the system consuming roughly 2000 words.
t3x.org
· 2026-10-25
The Interim Computer Museum has taken on a new restoration of Galaxy Game, the 1971 Stanford coin-op version of Spacewar! built by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck on a PDP-11/20. The project, prompted by Pitts along with Josh Dersch and Robert Schmuck, has already rebuilt the machine's power supply and gotten the PDP-11 running again, with work now shifting to refurbishing its HP 1300A electrostatic X-Y displays.
icm.museum
· 2026-09-29
A hobbyist has restored a PDP-11/83 system built around a Mentec M11 single-board CPU, two interconnected Q22 bus chassis, and a mix of DEC and Emulex peripheral controllers. The machine runs 2.11BSD Unix and is actively serving a live status page showing its own memory, disk, and system metrics in real time. Classic peripherals including magnetic tape drives and serial terminals remain part of the working setup.
pdp1173.com
· 2026-09-21
Yugoslav manufacturer Iskra Delta built its Partner microcomputer in the 1980s by assembling widely available components rather than designing everything in-house, following the industry shift pioneered by minicomputers and cemented by the IBM PC. The report traces the Partner's case specifically to a UK design origin, illustrating how even locally branded machines relied on components and designs sourced from elsewhere.
racunalniski-muzej.si
· 2026-09-07
GoKawiil