Retro or vintage computer computers and their clones or derivatives are commonly spotted on Tindie but this replica of a PDP-11 is a particularly gorgeous example!
The PiDP-11 is a scale model of the PDP-11/70 in its most colourful “blinkenlights” format. Scaled down at 6:10 ratio the PiDP-11 is a much more suitable size for home use. Building on their previous experience making a PDP-8 kit Obsolescence Guaranteed built this kit using custom injection molded parts to make it faithful to the original. You might guess correctly from the name that it uses a Raspberry Pi (not supplied) running the SIMH emulator as the actual computer system.
It’s capable of running all the operating systems the original PDP-11 could run; unix systems, BSD, as well as RSX-11, RSTS-E, and RT-11. Of course a lot of original peripherals can also be emulated within SIMH and on the product page you can see, for example, some vector graphics displayed on a simulated TEK 4010 terminal which of course you could view on a modern attached HDMI monitor.
There’s an active scene online of people tinkering with both SIMH and PDP-11 so if you have some basic soldering skills to put this together, it’s really unlimited what you can do with it, or of course you can just enjoy it as a beautiful blinkenlights object in itself!
