housebroken PDPs was Re: What is this Vadic thing ?

I think a related question is 'What will a PDP11/23 do that I can't do with my existing machines'. There are some pretty good PDP11 emulators, so I guess if you want to run the DEC OSes and related software you could do it one those rather than on the 'real' machine. OK, a PDP11/23 will let you talk to real Q-bus peripehrals. For mass storage, most people use a ST412-interfaced winchsseter drive on these machines. There are SCCI interface boards, but they're expensive. You can get SMD controlelrs, but I suspect that gets you into the 'too large' category fast. Waht this mahcine _won't_ do is have a blinkenlights panel. Nor will it really let you 'get inside' the CPU. The CPU is a couple of custom ICs, really. Pwersonally, I'd go for an 11/34 (with a keypad panel) or an 11/44 (no front panel, but an emulator in the CPU control processor ROM that lets you do frontpanel fucntions using a serial terminal). These machines have CPUs built from TTL, PROMs, PLAs, etc and you can spend many a long light with one and a logic analyser... -tony