A RP2040 based DECstation 3000 emulator that can run DECWindows

There's something beautiful (and slightly jarring) about a computer where the ethernet and VGA ports are each bigger than the entire CPU and RAM. For all that it may have slowed more recently, Moore's law really did hit it out of the park in the long run:)

People used to get productive work done on DECstations, they were big and expensive in their time. Now we can recreate them for just a few dollars (plus the cost of a screen and keyboard). Today almost everything we do relies on the internet, so a wifi driver would be useful as well.

Many things we do today require more processing power, but many things do not. Writing, terminals (well SSH could be a problem), email, hn. We used to do raytracing on a DECstation, had to use a remote X window to view the finished image in colour.

You would think that a certain subset of people would quite like a simpler system today to work on, but I guess it's just easier to buy something modern with all the extra layers of complexity.

Maybe this is because today programming largely relies on having access to the accumulated knowledge of the internet, and a very complex web browser.

When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had hundreds of DECstations. A mix of 2100 black and white machines, 3100, and a few 5000 machines. That's where I learned C/C++, ran Spice and various logic simulators. DEC had already announced the Alpha but the college decided to move to Sun and HP-UX which was probably a good decision because there was more software available for those platforms.

I was thinking "this looks awfully familiar", and was going to link http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard, but it turns out that the code is directly based on that!

For anyone interested, it's still very worth visiting that link, as it describes the whole journey and technical details about how the original DECstation emulation code came to be.

Wow! Really pushes the capability of the RP2040 to add a Memory Management Unit for the external RAM and incorporate DMA and a VGA display. The PIO on this chip is amazingly flexible.

My university was a DEC shop, 6000 and 8000 series in the machine room and DECstations and VAXstations in the lab, and a million vt320s for the masses in the terminal rooms. All †his project is missing as a candle that generates the smell of hot dust on CRT guns.

Wow. Pretty neat stuff.

This is another great way to understand what computers getting faster by three decimal orders of magnitude means :-)

Related, but is there a way to emulate a VT520 on a Pi using opensource? Just want to have a replica that looks like the ultimate form of that extinct lineage.

I want to know if they have a patched version of Ultrix or a license file that allows more than two users? Ultrix on a MicroVAX was my first contact with a Unix system. Then briefly some SunOS 4.x and then extensively Ultrix on DECstation 3000. But while you can do some fiddly show and tell stuff without a license, only being able to have two process owners, one of which is root, is kind of limiting.

Interests me how little mention of Ultrix lies on the page. Pretty directly a BSD type, with some interesting twists, and the inclusion of DECnet support. the desktop was CDE?

OSF/1 was such a departure. Nice, but different. Strange days.

I would love to get one os these and run NetBSD it. NetBSD runs better than one might think on a system with 32 megabytes of memory and a relatively slow CPU.

What boggles my mind is the notion of running an RP2040 at 300mhz.

I ran over 1200 domains and the POP server for the largest ISP in a medium city on a single 3100, not on NT obviously, osf/1

most of my undergrad was done on decstation 3100s running ultrix. i loved the huge mono monitors. so many xterms open at once! amazing.

Well done!

rscott2049, you sir, have earned yourself a follower on GitHub!

And I'd love to follow you on other Social Media as well -- if you have any other Social Media accounts!

Other than pure nostalgia is there anything interesting you can run on this? Definitely a cool way to push the limits of a rp2040 regardless.

I'm looking over at my Decstation 5000/260 with the burnt-out power supply. Maybe this is what I need to get that feeling back.