Well that was interesting!

[sunnybo...@gmail.com]

I'm resurrecting my glass rack (short rack with glass front) housing my Altairduino, PiDP-11, PiDP-8 and a 9-node Pi cluster.

I got the PiDP-11 working yesterday fairly easily as it has wired ethernet on DHCP, and was pleased to see it fire up to BSD 2.11 as if I never turned it off (some years ago now).

The PiDP-8 was not as easy. The faceplate keeps falling off, which I need to fix, so I took it out of the rack to work on it. I could see it running, but I never cut holes in the wooden case for USB or NIC ports, meaning it must run on WIFI. That' won't work as we changed everything (from dual-port ADSL to fiber) meaning new modem and new WIFI access point.

I pulled the guts from the case and plugged in a network cable, and could see the blinky green light indicating it was running, but it never appeared on the network. Finally I got out my micro HCMI monitor and micro keyboard and plugged them in. 

It was stalled on Raspien  (Jesse) boot. Some disk errors and just sitting there. I guess the SD card got corrupted somehow just sitting there. I tried downloading new Raspien using their installer, but it kept failing on verify. So the SD card was probably toast.

I found another one and was able to doawload and install a newer 64bit (recommended) Raspien and booted that. While downloading I was careful to set the SSID and password, and other options, but once it booted (HDMI screen still attached) it gave me a generic "press next to begin" followed by a full installation process that asked for username, WIFI SSID and so on all over again. Very annoying (yes, I did save my changes in the download)

Once complete I had the desktop, nice and stupid, so had to run 'sudo raspi-config' to turn on SSH logins and VNC. (that stuff should be default, IMO). After that, I needed to install PiDP-8 software again.

I did a quick lookup on PiDP-8 and found this page "https://obsolescence.dev/pidp-8-quick-install.html" and followed the first recommendation (why not - it's the latest!). It downloaded using a thing called 'fossil' from a website called 'tangentsoft.com', showing just how long I've been out of the PiDP-8 loop!!!

I followed directions to build the system and it worked perfectly. As soon as I rebooted the hardware came up and I was able to bring up  the console terminal and use the PiDP-8 as if it hadn't been off for years.

Excellent manual (still), and excellent new distribution. 

Now I  have all my 'Oscar' machines running: PiDP-8, PiDP-11, PiDP-10 and the newest, PiDP-1. Lots of fun to play with them all.

-R