Alternative communication channels?

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

Hiya PDP-1 fans,

i'm not at all happy with the way i engage with this group here. every few weeks i go through the traffic and at least reply to some old messages, but without doing much. and i think email is to blame (not me of course!). i simply hate email or forums for anything but the most rudimentary communication.

That isn't to say that the group here is bad. i think it's great for recording information more permanently! (a big issue with instant messages). but my brain needs instant messaging to work smoothly.

I don't know how other people deal with this but if anyone *actually* wants to get a hold of me, email (or this group) will not work well i think.

For the moment I have created an IRC channel #pdp-1 on libera, so feel free to join that. i'm also still on discord (aap_) which however should not be taken as an endorsement of that platform.

Other suggestions are welcome.

cheers,

angelo

[Bill E]

Ok, sent you msgs on libera. Unlike you, I hate IRCs. :)

Bill

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

I saw, but you immediately disappeared. i keep saying we (as in humanity) still haven't figured out how to use the internet for communication. it's an incredibly hard problem!

[The Oracle]

I think we should keep everything in one place. 

Just my humble opinion :)

[Glenn Babecki]

I don't know why this caught my attention but it has been bugging me, so I thought I'd share my stream of consciousness take on the situation.  Full disclosure:  I'm retired so I've left the day-to-day world of collaboration behind, and I'm feeling much better thank you.  My personal situation aside, I hate forums or forum-like platforms for exchanging information because they lack the structure to prevent people from spiraling out of control.  By this I mean that in a forum people tend to fork message threads or generate redundant or even new threads, which diffuses the intended coherence of the information being conveyed.  Therefore, you must scour many similarly labeled threads to find what you're looking for.   I haven't actively used an IRC so I'm not sure if "messaging channels" like IRCs provide the requisite discipline to combat the free-for-all dissemination of information.  As Angelo lamented: "...we (as in humanity) still haven't figured out how to use the internet for communication.  It's an incredibly hard problem!"

I know all this PiDP stuff is supposed to be "just for fun," but it's a complex enough subject that it may require some discipline and proper project management to stay organized; otherwise, you just have to accept the current organizational structure.  It seems there are at least three (perhaps more) groups of people involved with the PiDP project and products:  the creators/owners (i.e., Oscar, Angelo, et al.), contributors, and the end user who just wants to power-up the product and "play."  These groups likely require different means of communicating information within their group and to the other classes.  The owners and collaborators have the closest relationship, with the creators having the final control over which contributions are formally incorporated into the product.  GitHub appears to be the preferred tool for managing software development and releases. The outstanding issue is determining the best communication method to coordinate development, and perhaps a separate method for communicating product availability, updates, and usage to the end user community. When I stopped working for a living there were so many so-called "best in class" collaboration tools available that it made your head spin.  Anyway, my point here is that the development side may require separate serious communication and collaboration tools than those needed for conveying product information to the general end user.

Okay, I'm just rambling now and I haven't really offered a solution to this age-old problem because I'm out of touch with current tools.  If the tendency is to stick with the current Google forum format, someone should at least set out guidelines for posting topics.  I guess that's why most forums have a moderator, which is a full-time job no one wants for a "just for fun" project.

Please feel free to ignore my blathering.

~Glenn

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[Whit Turner]

Most internet-connected "communities" use a forum for communicating, discussions, organizing topics, and in general sharing information such as links (e.g. GitHub repos), and personal websites.

Various platforms exist, some better than others. And some are free. But most are better than Google Groups and certainly better than email. Obviously, moderation tasks require some volunteer work and dedication, but IMHO the time has come to organize all the PiDP topics we have Oscar and team to thank for.

[BTW - I dislike Discord very much]

Whit

On Sun, Mar 8, 2026 at 4:49 PM The Oracle <lfma...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Ken Hansen]

Angelo,

Have you considered using the Google group web interface?

 https://groups.google.com/g/pidp-1

Ken

On Mar 6, 2026, at 05:42, Angelo Papenhoff/aap <a...@papnet.eu> wrote:



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[Matthias Barthel]

Hello,

In my opinion, the google group is very confusing, an organized forum would be better to structure content and topics better. But as already written, everything should stay in one place and not use several communication channels so that no information is lost.

Matthias 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-1/66BC0782-653E-4770-9841-1ADA03FB62FC%40n2vip.org.

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

My main issue is that i absolute HATE asynchronous communication, and this google group is an instance of that (i'm using the web interface btw, but it's mainly not an interface problem).

i simply cannot communicate efficiently like this. i need to talk to people, bounce off thoughts, discuss ideas and projects, make jokes, just have a conversation with people about the things i'm exited about.

i can do that to some degree with oscar when we meet (last time was a year ago, but we're planning to increase that rate). but even then it's just the two of us. and otherwise i just lose motivation and move on to something else.

IRC and discord mostly fix this for me, even though i do not feel comfortable supporting discord anymore.

[Bill E]

This is all somewhat fascinating. Personally, I hate IRC!. It's antiquated, from 1998, is text-only, and if you don't happen to be connected when someone wants to talk to you, too bad. And, no history. Well, not that I know of, I'm no expert since I basically haven't used it for 25 years or so. I know some features have been added. And wow, is the UI crude and confusing. Again, maybe there are some better client apps out there, but I'm not inclined to find out.

Discord is a non-starter for me now.

I'm not a huge fan of Groups, either, but at least there is history and you can attach files and such.

I could rant a bit about Github (and git) also, but I'll refrain.

Oh well, this is one of those things that everyone will never agree on.

Bill

[Matthias Barthel]

Angelo, 

I understand you very well, discussing from person to person in real time is significantly better than any other platform. 

But in order to communicate worldwide, we need a well-organized and clear platform, for example a  forum and not a google group.

 Too much is lost in the Google group. 

For me, every conversation with you is asynchronous because I'm in europe and almost everyone else is in america.

A monthly or weekly live session with Teams, IRC or a similar tool would be a good way to talk about ideas or improvements...

Best Matthias 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-1/92dd9ba8-2878-48fc-9365-f6839a8805e5n%40googlegroups.com.

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

well oscar and me at least are in europe :)

as for IRC i have a tiny VPS (netcup) which costs me like 2€ per year that keeps me connected. i know people also use bouncers but i never could be bothered to figure out how to use one.

perhaps we need to invent ARC (arpanet relay chat) and run it on a PDP-1 to make people happy? :)

[Bill E]

Now there's an idea, what fun that would be. The DCS IOT impl I did provides sockets under the covers, piece of cake. :)

Bill

[Whit Turner]

I vote for VAX Notes.

Just kidding, but I do miss it. It was an enormously effective way for us DEC folk to interact.

Whit

PS - for those who may not have experienced VAX Notes, a pretty good synopsis is here: https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vaxnotes.pdf

On Mon, Mar 9, 2026 at 10:39 AM Bill E <wjegr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Now there's an idea, what fun that would be. The DCS IOT impl I did provides sockets under the covers, piece of cake. :)

Bill

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[sunnyboy010101]

I grew up using modem-based BBS chat forums. I love text chatting on forums, usually moderated. I've used (and still use) forums for glassblowing and scuba diving as well as computing chat forums. They have to be moderated to be any good.

I even came up through the internet 'rec.xyz.abc...' days so remember them rather fondly as well.

However, hosting and moderating (even with lots of good helpers) a forum these days is something that seems to call for a good-sized lottery win to be maintainable. If you can't host it yourself (your own iron, dedicated static IP) then it's a crap shoot hoping the hosting provider doesn't just abandon you at a moment's notice. A very iffy proposition at best. I host my own sites (one commercial application for a client and one for me personally) and I could not afford to pay for the bandwidth or server space for even a modest BBS type thing.

But I do love them. I do notice they all tend to be akin to those scrolling history charts that used to be popular in tv shows - where the scroll shows a particular year and what happened then moves on. IN other words, history repeats (and repeats and repeats and repeats and...) on any good chat forum. Some of the better forum software allows older chats to be archived, or pinned, or otherwise saved for future. But topics continue to resurface, usually as a new person 'discovers' what all the old timers knew years and years ago. In most of the forums I still frequent, there's a lot of generous knowledge transfer to the new person and often real encouragement. Abusers are flagged and 'disposed of' in most of these systems as well, keeping the general tone very pleasant.

I don't find google groups to be horrible. It's not great - a lot of repeat same topics, but unless someone is going to moderate, then getting (for example) a single "show us your build" threads just aren't going to happen. We get too excited when the build is done, and rather than hijack someone elses' older 'see my kit' thread, we start our own. It's not really all that bad for the most part -- except when you want to look up something you kinda remember but can't quite recall. The search function seems to be far too generic, often flagging hundreds of posts that have to be waded through. A 'search within results' would be nice.

Anyway, that's about it for now...

[Oscar Vermeulen]

I vote for a mail group on Arpanet.

It is not a joke. With Lars Brinkhoff (as the brains), me (not the beauty) and Otto (can't comment) we've set up a fully functioning replica of the 1973 Arpanet. It is real:

https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home is the demo server. 

Give it a bit of development time (this WILL happen), and any PiDP could either connect to either a 35-IMP-Arpanet at home, or connect to this online version on the server. Slight problem: not all at the same time, Arpanet had only 63 nodes with max 4 hosts each. But I hear TCP/IP 4 has run out of numbers already?

Alright, it is silly: I would LOVE to figure out how to mirror this Google Group onto one of the 3 MIT ITS PDP-10s currently online on that link.

It just needs a project with some people to put time into it. Would it not be cool to telnet to MIT AI from a PiDP-X, and read a synchronised mirror of this group that way?

Another project in my dreams is to plug in a PiDP-1 as host 0 on IMP #5. That was the BBN Network Control Center back in 1973, and the data is already flowing to it. We just do not have a sufficiently peripheralled PDP-1 to hook up and run the multi-user Time-Sharing Executive saved on the Walden-family site. Nontrivial, but feasible: Bill Ezell's upgrades brought us a lot closer to this fantasy of mine.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Unibus]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Unibus <uni...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 at 10:43
Subject: Re: [PiDP-1] Re: Alternative communication channels?
To: Oscar Vermeulen <vermeul...@gmail.com>

Hi,

What springs to mind is setting up a site at home with a machine that emulates ARPANET as 252 (63 x 4) IPv4 addresses and people 'dial in' as they need. If I was doing this then one more IP Address would be for a Wiki. And do you know what is the easiest part... the 256 IP addresses. 

I currently have 256 IPv4 addresses at home with BGP protocol. If I had the software and the time ARPANET could be running tomorrow. Of course it can't happen as my time is taken up with court case prep at the moment.

Catch with BGP protocol is the minimum allocation is 256 IPv4 addresses.

Next catch is an allocation is only available to Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators

Next catch is it can be experimental but it can't be commercial.

For further info see the 44Net Wiki wiki or 44Net 

Regards,

Garry

                     

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