In reply to rdbrown@pacific.net.au:
It is possible they're using hardware like Strobe Data's Osprey FPGA PDP/11 implementation in a PC host. http://www.strobedata.com/home/products.html
When I saw this in that Metrol PDF: 2006 Emulation hardware successfully installed to stabilise the current PDP 11/84 computer system I was thinking maybe that they were running VAXes in PDP-11 emulation mode. :-) (Because the PDP-11 was so popular, when DEC brought out the VAX, they designed it to have a PDP-11 emulation mode.) And in reply to Rick Moen:
In the mid-1970s when I was a high school student, Community Computer Center at 1919 Menalto Ave., Menlo Park had a PDP-11 running RSTS and a PDP-8 or two, all accessible to us feckless members of the public. Lots of ASR-33 Teletypes, I recall.
From 1977, I was doing my Ph.D. in the Computer Vision Lab (CVL) at the University of Maryland. We had a fully loaded PDP-11/45 (with 128kB of *core* memory, 20MB fixed hard disk, 5MB removable). But we were running Unix -- Version 6 to start with if I remember correctly. (I also did a lot of my Honours Project on a PDP-8e in 1975, but that's another story. I'll just say: Yes, ASR-33 Teletypes and paper tape, and that 4k is a lot of memory if you have to fill it by hand... Well, actually 4k of 12-bit words, so I guess 6kB equivalent in today's money.)
Responding to what Petros said:
I keep an half inch tape from a K1630, an East German PDP-11 clone.
We'd often have four or five simultaneous users on the PDP-11 at CVL (out of about 30 in the Lab with accounts on the machine), doing image processing and analysis, and I remember interactive performance (editing, shell) was generally pretty good. But we had a strong culture of nicing any non-interactive processes (like compiles and image processing). Do you remember what OS you ran on the K1630? Maybe it didn't have a convenient nice. The habit of nicing makes and compiles and heavy batch processing (like even apt-get upgrade) stays with me even today -- part of the reason why I can be pretty happy on low-end hardware. -- Smiles, Les.