There are a lot of us “living computer museums” still around, and still programming. It can be used to run other PDP and VAX operating systems, too. The article inspires me to reactivate my original DEC vt101 terminal and do something stupid (but entertaining and educating) with it… 🙂 Why can I make such kind of claim? Because I’m living in a computer museum. They did master those tools easily on a professional level, while you have problems finding the power switch. You hear the computer, you see parts move, blinkenlights, and it’s the original feeling that those people did experience who considered this technology their impressive working tools. You can learn so much more when you can get the chance to work with real historic hardware, running historic software. If you can see the whole real machinery working, feel the keys of a real terminal or a teletype, put your fingers on a real front panel of a big computer, the whole sensory perception is much more intense than what you get when you sit infront of your shiny MacBook Air, your finger on the trackpad, listening to music on your headphones. Honestly: It’s no big deal to run decades old software on today’s laptops, but in my opinion, it’s not that much fun, and primarily it’s about fun when running old software. I don’t think emulators are that interesting, and they’re not even visually impressive. This would have been more useful if it was walking us through the emulator.

Pdp-11 emulator mac