A new book about the PiDP-11

[Andrew Barron]

Hi everyone, I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book about the PiDP-11, it follows the same format as my book about the PiDP-10.

The book is called PiDP-11 "a minicomputer in the office!"

It is an introduction to the PiDP-11 kit produced by Oscar Vermeulen and the PDP-11 SimH emulator originated by Bob Supnik and refined by many people over the years.

The book is not intended for Wizards, Hackers, Internet Trolls, people using real PDP-11 hardware, or people using SimH on other platforms.

It is a beginner's guide, not a comprehensive programming guide. It will help you build and test the PiDP-11 kit and get started with navigating around the many included operating systems, loading a few games, and experimenting with some high-level programming languages, (Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, & C). Also hand coding and assembly language on SimH and using Macro-11.

I am standing on the shoulders of giants. All the hard work has been done by Oscar Vermeulen, the creator of the PiDP-11 kit, Bob Supnik for the original SimH, and Mark Pizzolato, the developer of the PDP-11 simulators for the PiDP-11. Jörg Hoppe created the BlinkenBone project, which has been used to interface the SimH emulation with the lights and switches on the PiDP-11 front panel. Many other enthusiasts contribute to the preservation of the PDP-11 software and architecture.

Mark Matlock and Johnny Billquist, Manfred Koethe, John Bruner, and a few others, were very helpful, answering my dumb questions with patience and kindness.

You can order my books from Amazon US UK DE FR ES IT NL PL SE JP CA and AU

Check it out on my website at https://www.qsl.net/zl3dw/PiDP-11.html

Or on Amazon at; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GLH3BTY5

[Andrew O'Neill]

Well done Andrew, this is much appreciated and I look forward to ordering a copy and working through it.

Hopefully the trolls will have calmed down enough by now to have wound their necks in!

Best wishes,

Andrew

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[Mark Matlock]

Andrew,

    Congrats on the new book! If it is as good as your PiDP-10 book, it will be a great help to the PiDP-11 community of Vintage Computer Hobbyists!

I ordered on just now and Amazon will have it to me in two days!

    Thanks for compiling all the information scattered around into one convenient 270+ page volume. I have one question, do you have any plans to also publish your PiDp-11 and PiDP-10 books in the Kindle format? I use a iPad Pro to carry around my RSX11M+, Fortran 77, BasicPlus2, etc manuals and having your books there as well would be great.

   Thanks for your effort to produce this much needed book.

Best Regards,

Mark

[Johnny Billquist]

Very nice. I hope it will help more people to get into playing with
PDP-11s. Emulated or not...

Great work!

Johnny

On 05/02/2026 10.28, Andrew O'Neill wrote:
> Well done Andrew, this is much appreciated and I look forward to
> ordering a copy and working through it.
>
> Hopefully the trolls will have calmed down enough by now to have wound
> their necks in!
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
> Andrew
>
> On Thu, 5 Feb 2026, 08:57 Andrew Barron, <zl...@outlook.co.nz
> <mailto:zl...@outlook.co.nz>> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone, I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book
> about the PiDP-11, it follows the same format as my book about the
> PiDP-10.
>

> The book is called *PiDP-11 "a minicomputer in the office!"*

> Or on Amazon at; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GLH3BTY5 <https://
> www.amazon.com/dp/B0GLH3BTY5>

>
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[Pete Hartman]

"I quickly went from not knowing what to do to not being able to
remember which reference source contained the information I needed."

SO MUCH RELATING. :-D

Thank you, I look forward to reading it.

Pete

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[Ken Hansen]

Andrew,

Thank you for putting in the work to collect all this info in one place. I anticipate it will have great sales as the number of PiDP-11 units 'in the field' is much greater than the PiDP-10 your first book covers.

Ordered copies of both the -10 and the -11 books, thanks,

Ken

On Feb 5, 2026, at 02:57, Andrew Barron <zl...@outlook.co.nz> wrote:



--

[Lawrence Fisher (RealTimeCat)]

Andrew,

I have a copy of your excellent PiDP-10 book, and use it as a reference book when dealing with certain ITS oddities. 

I look forward to reading this book (which I have already ordered) to see what insights you have brought to then PDP-11 pantheon of operating systems!

[DR]

Is there a best way to order?

Does the author sell privately and through Amazon? I can only imagine
Amazon gets a hefty cut, so to be most helpful to the author, is it best
to order from him?

[Ken Hansen]

Andrew's book is, I believe, printed on demand by Amazon, it is printed only after it has been ordered - if you look in the back of the book, I recall seeing a note about where and when it was printed in my copy of the PiDP-10 book (ordered from Amazon)

I don't believe there is any other way to purchase the book.

Ken

> On Feb 5, 2026, at 11:50, DR <daleea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a best way to order?

>
> Does the author sell privately and through Amazon? I can only imagine Amazon gets a hefty cut, so to be most helpful to the author, is it best to order from him?
>
>

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[Jim Jagielski]

Ahh. That explains the `paperback only` option. Looks very interesting.

Cheers!

--

Jim Jagielski

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[Henk Gooijen]

I think this is very handy. Everything nicely bundled takes a lot of hassle and googling out of my hands.

As I was ordering this book, I thought "why not grab a copy of the PiDP-10 book as well?"

So, I did  :)  Expected delivery date is 18th February ... can't wait!

[Roy Simkins]

I ordered this  book as soon as it was announced to put on the shelf next to my copy of the PiDP-10 book. I'll get to  both of them as soon as I come up for air on my current project. Looks like it will be a nice and well welcomed book.

Will you be doing a similar book for the PiDP-8/i? I'd like to see that to refresh my long dormat memory of the PDP-8E I learned in high school.

Roy Simkins

484-680-0507

NEVER ASSUME MALICE WHEN

INCOMPETENCE IS AN EXPLANATION.

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[R Clark]

Have one on order. I really like the PiDP-10 book as a reference, so having the PiDP-11 book will be just as handy.

[Andrew Barron]

Hi all, thanks to everyone who has posted encouraging comments and bought a copy of the book(s). I did a posting before, but I cannot see it, so apologies if you have already seen this. 

I thought I would respond to some of your questions. 

Regarding where to buy the book. It is available from Amazon in 12 countries. Amazon publishes the book, provides the website and marketing, prints the book, and ships it. Usually from an Amazon branch in or near your country. It is not feasible for me to ship books worldwide from New Zealand. It would add too much to the cost of the book. Also Amazon freight works out cheaper if you order two or more books at the same time. As someone pointed out, the Amazon system is a "print on demand" service.  They don't hold a large inventory, although they do seem to hold a few copies of books that have regular sales patterns.

Mark asked about Kindle. I usually do produce Kindle editions, but I was very disillusioned by the trolling of the PiDP-10 book, so I wasn't inclined to put any additional work into it. The book only sells 8 or 9 copies a month, and it takes about three days to create a Kindle version. I am snowed under with other projects at the moment. I am writing a book about the Icom IC-7300 MK2 amateur radio transceiver, I have to write a technical review of the same radio for RadCom magazine, and I have a chapter to write for the Radio Society of Great Britain 'Radio Communication Handbook.' It is a big biennial publication. So a Kindle edition will have to wait until later in the year. 

The PiDP-11 book includes building the PiDP-11 kit and installing the Raspberry Pi software. I cover all of the operating systems, including the Nankervis distribution. Some of the sections are small, especially for the early Unix editions with only a bare operating system, on a 2.5 MB disk. In those cases I have covered how to start and stop the system safely, and what's on the disk. The big sections are RSX-11M+ and 2.11BSD, because there is much more to explore on the disks, and they there are active user groups providing a heap of information and software. Those two systems have network support. In the RSX-11M+ section I included the RPM and DECUS resources. I have examples of Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, and C programming for you to type in and run. Sometimes that is just a "Hello World," but it gives you an idea of the language syntax and how to use the editor. There are also Macro-11 assembly language, and SimH machine code examples, you can run. Even a small program entered using the front panel switches.

Thanks again, 

Andrew B

[mark.lawler]

PiDP-8?  :)  Just ordered your other two for the collection.

Best,

-Mark

Autocorrect is not my friend... 

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[Roy Simkins]

Hi All,

Just got my copy today. That's less than 40 hours from ordering to delivery! Haven't done any in depth reading yet, but it looks similar to the PiDP-10 I got last year. Nice job, Andrew!

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/oTQcvNxUUSuFYoTQcviBn9.1770413512.3ac64464d7e0ac0fc35267bdf19d4b5c.MISSINGID%40comcast.net.

--

[andy]

Thank you - I've ordered the book... appreciate the guide!

andy 

[R Clark]

Postman delivered the book today at lunch, and I went through it over the last couple of hours. I have come to the conclusion that it would take a life-time(s?) to truly come to understand and use 'all' the operating systems and explore all the different applications that people have written on them.   Therefore, I will just enjoy taking 'peeks' now and then and not be deep diving like one would do if a youngster just starting out  on a PDP-11/70 system to do real work (getting paid for it)....  Anyway, thanks for the nice brief overview of  each system to give one an idea what he/she is getting into :) and what computing was like back in those formative years.  Looks like a lot of time went into writing this book for us occasional  users! Thank you Andrew. Going to be a helpful reference just like the PiDP-10 book.  I am not one to remember everything I read....

[Kevin Murrell]

Bought both and very impressed! I know it can all be found on the web but having it brought together is so useful!

Looking forward to the PiDP-1 edition!

Kevin

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[Andrew Barron]

Thanks to the many people who have bought the book, and a few who also purchased the PiDP-10 book. If you like the book(s), please leave some stars and a short review on Amazon. It is a huge help to people wondering whether to make a purchase. 

I see that there are a couple of other books about the PiDP-10 on Amazon now. It looks like one of them has been written by a real person. I'm not sure if they both were. It's a bit ironic to buy a book written by an A.I. about a computer from the 1960s and 70s. I guess that shows how far computing has come since those first A.I. experiments on the PDP-10 computers running ITS and LISP at MIT. One A.I. wrote and published 19 books during December and January. Including several amateur radio books, just like mine. He, or it, has published 96 books in less than a year.  I'm a dinosaur! Maybe it's time to hang up my quill pen and typewriter ribbons.

cheers

AndrewB

On Thursday, 5 February 2026 at 21:57:00 UTC+13 Andrew Barron wrote:

[Charles Wall]

I ordered your PIDP-11 book as soon as I saw your earlier post.  I am glad to have so much information in one place; it is a great resource.  

I have a question.  How does one determine which books sold on Amazon are written by a human versus those written by AI?  I looked at several that claimed to be about the PIDP-11, and I couldn't decide which ones were AI.  I spent my career in the Information Technology world and don't know yet how I feel about AI.  Looking at AI as a tool which a human uses to do a job such as write a book or a computer program seem appropriate but sticking a pseudo name as author on a book written entirely by AI is different in my mind. 

I am just getting around to assembling a PIDP-11 kit I have had for several years.  It made sense to me to follow the instructions and install the software on the Raspberry Pi first which is what I did.  I have discovered that I don't know as much about Simh and Linux as I should.  Lots of information is available in the web but changes have occurred over time and some information I find is incorrect and/or links provided no longer work.  Your book helped me work through some of this, but I still have a way to go.

[Ken Hansen]

Charles,

I don't think we are yet at the point where AI alone can create a finished product like Andrew's book, I *strongly* suspect when someone dismisses something as "AI Generated" they are likely discussing a book that was started by an AI prompt, reviewed by a human interatively refined by re-running a modified prompt to improve the book, then, at some point, the person prompting the AI then goes thru and acting as an editor, reviews the book the AI generated and 'cleans it up'.

If that is the process, a book initially generated by AI and edited by a human before publication, I don't think the use of AI is a bad thing.

If, on the other hand, the person simply publishes whatever AI generates unedited, then it is just a bad book period, and its issues should be obvious.

How to tell the former from the latter? Well, unless you can discern 'imagined' from factual in the book, your best bet would be to wait for a trusted source to endorse the work in question. Sadly, AI can convincingly hallucinate and generate worthless books, but you almost have to be an expert in the subject to tell the difference.

Well, those are my thoughts, I hope it's helpful,

Ken