A 1980s PDP-11 is still running Unix – and now you can watch

Fresh from releasing TMOG, his take on a cross-platform Task Manager upgrade, former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has put his PDP-11 on the web.

The PDP-11 is a family of minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation that became a fixture of computing labs and early Unix history.

Plummer's machine is real 1980s hardware, still running a Unix-derived operating system.

The website displays the machine's running processes, refreshing the list every few seconds.

Think Task Manager for an old Unix box: ps lists what is running, while top keeps that view up to date.

Visitors can't issue commands themselves, but they can watch the hardware at work.

Plummer explained: "My love for all things Task Manager was born when I was a kid in the 80s, tinkering with the PDP-11/40 at the local university.

Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with multiuser systems, playing with ps and top to get a sense of the machine and what was happening on it.

"And since 'top' is where it all started for me, when I came full circle with TMOG, I wanted a tie-in back to my old PDP-11.

Ps is the simple process list.

Top is an automatically refreshing screen of that process list and a few other stats thrown together." A few years ago, Plummer tried to get an AI to write a version of top for 2.11BSD, the operating system running on his machine.

At the time, he said, "it wasn't yet ready or able." "Today it was, and it cranked out a top implementation for me quickly in C, about 400 lines of code." The site refreshes the process list every five seconds, with a cache between visitors and the PDP-11 to limit the demands on the machine.

We'd categorize this under "cool" and "a little bit pointless", which all the best projects are.

Plenty of PDP-11 emulators are out there, and many run in a browser, but there is a certain delight in seeing output from actual hardware.