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414 points henry_flower | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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digitalsushi ◴[] No.43108644[source]
Spock levels of fascinating from me. I want to learn how to compile a pdp11 emulator on my mac.
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thequux ◴[] No.43108732[source]
Compiling an emulator is quite easy: have a look at simh. It's very portable and should just work out of the box.

Once you've got that working, try installing a 2.11BSD distribution. It's well-documented and came after a lot of the churn in early Unix. After that, I've had great fun playing with RT-11, to the point that I've actually written some small apps on it.

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1. an-unknown ◴[] No.43114792[source]
> After that, I've had great fun playing with RT-11 [...]

If you want to play around with RT-11 again, I made a small PDP-11/03 emulator + VT240 terminal emulator running in the browser. It's still incomplete, but you can play around with it here: https://lsi-11.unknown-tech.eu/ (source code: https://github.com/unknown-technologies/weblsi-11)

The PDP-11/03 emulator itself is good enough that it can run the RT-11 installer to create the disk image you see in the browser version. The VT240 emulator is good enough that the standalone Linux version can be used as terminal emulator for daily work. Once I have time, I plan to make a proper blog post describing how it all works / what the challenges were and post it as Show HN eventually.