The Pocket DEC Pretender (PDP) Zero

PDP (Pocket DEC Pretender) Zero: lettering came out a bit more, um,  artisanal than I’d hoped …

Digital (aka DEC) used to make some very solid minicomputers back when a minicomputer was fridge-sized and people were still building nuclear power stations to be controlled by them. The Raspberry Pi Zero is a very mini computer indeed, and in USB gadget mode running SimH it makes a nice little emulation platform.

The case is from Thingiverse: One Piece Raspberry Pi Zero + Camera Case (with GPIO) by Superrei, but with the DEC PDP logo in relief on the top.

DEC minis were famous for their arrays of blinkenlights. The Pocket DEC Pretender, not so much: it has one tiny green light that flickers a bit now and again:

PDP (Pocket DEC Pretender) Zero: case open, very few blinkenlights

But it’s a genuinely useful (for my values of useful) emulation platform. Here it is pretending to be a PDP-8, running BASIC under OS-8:

PDP (Pocket DEC Pretender) Zero: PDP-8 BASIC!

(background in case pictures woven in Toronto by Deftly Weft)

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