Time to jump in the waaaay back machine. Turn the dial back to the 1970's, when developers were real developers, and computers were the size of refridgerators. back to a time when the Digital Equipment Corporation ruled the land, and sold computers that came in a variety of neon colors, like pink and purple. It was a time when my college assembly language professor was still in his prime, working on edgy technology in Boston, instead of teaching and waiting for his stock option to turn into HP shares. To a time when paper tapes were the leading cause or piracy. back in those heady days, there was one computer that stood above all others as the almost standard deskside machine: the DEC PDP-11.

Everyone who used them seems to remember them fondly. It's not unsurprising, since the PDP series had a long and lustrioous history: the PDP-1 played host to the first computer game: Spacewar! The BART transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area was built on an infrastructure of PDP-8's, complete with digital voices to annouce when trains were coming.

According to the Wikipedia, there were PDP-11's still being sold new from DEC in the 90's.

All of this is a very long winded way of leading up to a fantastic link I found today on Hacker News: Build your own PDP-11. Using an FPGA and some Verilog code, consultant Brad Parker built himself a PDP-11. Well, rather, he built some hardware that behaves like the PDP-11. Either way, it's an impressive hack, and one that I feel we should all attempt to emulate in some way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to go build an ENIAC with some tin cans, some niobium dust, and a few paperclips.