Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has put a real PDP-11/83 online at pdp1173.com. The PDP-11 family of minicomputers, made by Digital Equipment Corporation, played a major role in computing laboratories and early Unix history. Plummer’s system runs 2.11BSD, a Unix-derived operating system.

The site displays the machine’s active processes and refreshes the list every five seconds. Visitors cannot send commands, and a cache between the site and the computer limits the load. Plummer connects the project with TMOG, his cross-platform Task Manager upgrade. His interest began in the 1980s, when he experimented with a PDP-11/40 at a local university and used ps and top to observe multiuser systems. A previous attempt to have an AI create top for 2.11BSD did not succeed. A later attempt produced a C implementation of about 400 lines.

The PDP-11/83 has a Mentec M11 CPU complex, four megabytes of RAM, old disk drives, magnetic tapes, and serial terminals. Its process list includes inetd, which starts services such as ftpd and httpd, along with sendmail for email. PDP-11 emulators are widely available, including browser-based versions, but this site exposes output from physical hardware. The result is an online presence built from equipment dating to 1984.