My Computer is now 4× Faster! That’s Why It Won’t Boot...
Community Score: 50% | 2.8K views | 1w
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A Mentec CPU made this PDP-11 about 4× faster. That is why it would not boot. Once it did, it went on the internet as pdp1173.com, serving a live UNIX process list and the front end for Gary, a curmudgeonly wizard whose answers come from a pair of modern GPUs. The machine is still a PDP-11. The software still sees 2.11BSD. The faster board just ran the firmware’s wait loops before the disk controller was ready. Visit it: https://pdp1173.com In this one: • A Mentec processor with 4MB on the board, roughly 4× my 11/73 and 8× my 11/44 on integer benchmarks • Bus-grant jumpers, a ZuluSCSI that was reading an EFI partition, and a kernel that had to be told to fake floating point • A diagnostic bootstrap pasted into ODT in octal, because the machine would not boot any other way • The MSCP firmware’s polling limits, 40 and 100, raised to 256 in a RAM copy, then abandoned for a controller that answers in time • Why a cached page from a PDP is the only way this site survives a Facebook link
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