PDP-11 mockups?

YES!! My working mock-up does not look very much like any early Unibus PDP-11 (PDP-11/10 if that is your definition of an early model PDP-11????) on the outside, but the characters displayed to the screen on my monitor are exact duplicates of what would have been displayed on a VT100. I am not much of a hardware addict (my addiction is with software), so I also have not bothered to produce a bank of "console switches and blinkenlights" which would provide me with the additional look and feel of a PDP-11/10 system. I understand that they are possible for anyone who likes to pretend that they really are running a PDP-11/10. [What no one has ever managed to help me understand is what the purpose is of having the hardware look like the PDP-11/10. After you actually restore a real PDP-11/10, what can you do with it other than run a few programs that don't run very fast on that hardware. Or you can look and admire your effort, but then what? Of course, I can fix the many bugs in RT-11 and enhance that operating system as much as I can manage, but no one else seems even interested. So my software addiction to RT-11 seems just about as useful.] In general, I usually run my PDP-11 software on a mock-up which supports at least a PDP-11/23 CPU with 4 MegaBytes of mock-up memory. There are those SATA II drives hidden inside the mock-up and they tend to run a bit faster than the RK05 drives which were originally available on the PDP-11/10. In the actual mock-up that I just used yesterday to test the Y3K ready code in one of the programs that runs under RT-11, I actually had the mock-up configured to look like a PDP-11/73 with 4 MegaBytes of mock-up memory and SCSI drives (around a dozen or so) of 2 GigaBytes each (not much use under RT-11 to have more than 2 GigaBytes per SCSI mock-up drive since RT-11 can't easily see more than 2 GigaBytes of a disk drive at a time). As for the actual difference between what is displayed on the screen, the characters do look a bit different than a VT100 would display them (and if I choose, I could configure the mock-up to pretend that a PDP-11/10 was being run), but the software runs between 500 and 1000 times faster than a PDP-11/10 would run the program or about 100 times as fast as a PDP-11/93 runs the program. Also, the disk I/O is about 200 times faster than any SCSI disk drive connected to any Qbus PDP-11 (SATA III drives would be even faster, but I have yet to upgrade). If you want a commercial license for the software which runs the mock-up (you can probably get help here to produce the "console switches and blinkenlights" although I can't help you with that), the cost is about $ US 3000 if I remember correctly. You will need your own PC running Windows or DOS and be careful with the video card and monitor if you want it to display 132 character text lines in FULL SCREEN mode. Needless to say, for anyone who knows of may software addiction to RT-11, the software program to emulate a PDP-11 is called Ersatz-11. There is also a hobby version which you can download for free if you are not doing commercial work, i.e. not selling the results of your efforts. SIMH also does the same thing, although I have a problem with the screen display since SIMH does not have built-in emulation for the VT100 (or at least the last time I used SIMH, it did not). Does this VERY long response answer any of your questions? You did not say how much the mock-up had to actually look like the original PDP-11, so I assumed that as long as the input to the keyboard and output to the screen were correct as far as content, that would be sufficient (even though it was being displayed 1000 times as fast as an early PDP-11 system could support - interesting, my keyboard input never seems to be any faster than those original PDP-11 systems could support). Tim, please at least acknowledge my response and state if your definition of a PDP-11 mock-up required something that is close enough to a real PDP-11/10 to fool someone who has never seen a PDP-11/10 before. Or if the output to the screen was the key aspect (as long as the speed of the output was not a factor). Any other questions? Jerome Fine