The Computer Museum will host its next Hardware Day on Tuesday June 18th, 2024 from 10am to 4pm in the Davis Centre "Fish Bowl" (DC1301).
We plan to bring out the DEC PDP-11/04 and the Waterloo Computer On Wheels ("the WatCOW"), another PDP 11 system that was used for outreach in the 1970s. We will also have a variety of portable computers and some of our functioning vintage systems on display (Commodore 64, Apple II, Macintosh, TRS-80).
Speaker: At noon, Lanny Cox will present the PiDP-8 and PiDP-11 systems - a pair of scale-model simulations of DEC minis running on a Raspberry Pi using the SimH simulator. His talk is entitled "My Many Mini-Minicomputers: Peeking Inside The PiDP".
Lanny Cox is a lifelong computer enthusiast with great interest in the DEC minicomputers of the 1960s and '70s, but not much space to store them, or extra spare change to pay the power bill. Luckily, though these computers are no longer in production, a dedicated community of engineers have spent decades preserving their hardware and software and making their computing environments available to a new generation of users.
Join us for an exploration of DEC's significance in computing history, a look at modern efforts to make computers like the PDP-8 and PDP-11 accessible to home users, and perhaps even a scale-model demonstration of these iconic machines.
All are welcome!