Comment by ktm5j
6 hours ago
There's a couple eyebrow raising things about this post.. like the fact that there's nothing but vague details in text and one photo with an AI prompt like alt-text. I think they're just trying to get clicks for that banner ad.
Sadly, the site does seem AI-flavoured to a rather off-putting extent.
And, as you say, the details are so vague - it's exactly what you might expect if an LLM wrote them based on reading a spec sheet rather than any practical experience.
In particular, connecting that DEQNA to a modern network must have been a huge challenge all in itself and I'd have expected there to be a series of blog posts about just that. Maybe it's legit (and I'd love more detail if it is), but right now the presentation screams "thinly disguised ad".
I think he has actually posted videos of the restoration before (they've popped up in my youtube feed in the past), but I've never watched them, so dunno. The LLM site design and advertisement front-and-center are certainly a... choice....
But, more importantly, why do you reckon DEQNA would be hard to connect to a modern network? NetBSD still supports it when running on a q-bus VAX: https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/dev/qbus/if_qe....
It has some pretty broken behavior regarding multicast/broadcast traffic IIRC, but nothing putting it behind a vlan or separate LAN altogether wouldn't solve. I've got a little lsi-11 system under my bed I'm hoping to, one day, get the Fuzzball [0] distribution running on. The 22-bit address extension wirewrap the previous owner did needs to be redone entirely, so it's been a "later" project for years now, but I am hoping my little DEQNA will be able to ping the Internet still.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_router
I was assuming that something of that vintage would only have been able to handle a 10BASE5 transceiver, but a wee bit of googling suggests that an UTP transceiver works well enough.
Needs a patched ROM and recompiled kernel, though! See http://www.cosam.org/computers/dec/pdp11-23/20080402.html (and the two subsequent installments)
(That cosam.org site is more what I'd be expecting for a project like this, but maybe I'm just too old and grumpy for my own good!)
Dave posts frequently about his work, some on YouTube and some on Facebook. You have to be in the right groups on FB.
You and several other people here are making unsubstantiated claims about how you're super sure this is real in a way that makes it seem less real. You guys seem to know this Dave character and are doing him a solid, right?
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While probably it's legit because I've seen Dave discussing the process on the YT channel (which I no longer watch) he unfortunately does have form https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625
Having TMOG on a .org when it sells commercial licences doesn't sit well with me given the history.
FWIW, .com was taken so I registered .org, and it's only used for the free version. The PRO version lives at tmog.store, which should be pretty plain.
Oh, yeah - this popped up on HN yesterday too and also met with scepticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772362
Oh well, so this PDP restoration probably isn't real. Disappointing.
"Probably isn't real". Interesting theory.
What's not real about it?
I'm a little confused by your comment.. especially considering the fact that you edited it and changed the link from and old comment thread from 2024 to whatever this dead post is from 2012. What does having form mean? Who is Dave?
Sorry, lost the last digit, fixed now. This restored PDP-11/83 project is Dave Plummer's