Here's a topic list for my chat with Lex: 1:22 - First computer 7:00 - Dropping out of high school 14:41 - Joining Microsoft 16:53 - MS-DOS 20:05 - Windows 95 26:52 - The man behind Windows 31:48 - Debugging 37:05 - Task Manager 42:14 - 3D Pinball: Space Cadet 47:13 - Start menu and taskbar 58:12 - Blue Screen of Death 1:00:21 - Best programmers 1:08:22 - Scariest time of Dave's life 1:15:50 - Best Windows version 1:17:40 - Slot machines 1:21:23 - Autism and ADHD 1:40:43 - Fastest programming language 1:44:48 - Future of programming

On an 8" floppy, the write notch is the write ENABLE notch. When you take a disc out of the box, you can't write to it UNTIL you ADD the write-enable tab. The first time, I did not know that and assumed it was the right PROTECT, like everywhere else. Now I know. Now we both know! Took me an hour to format my first floppy...

Anyone take Comp Sci at Cornell in the 80s? If so, I have your Terak systems under restoration! I've got a pair on the bench now - one working, one not - and hope to figure it out, though I'm a software guy and not a hardware guy! Wish me luck! The Teraks are powered by a DEC LSI-11 CPU and they have a pixel-addressable framebuffer, which might be the first of its kind, given they're from 1977! Cornell developed a programming IDE for it that I'm told was pretty widely used at major schools throughout the US.

Looks like my next project is here! Has anyone ever heard of the Terak? Seems to be a 1977 PDP-11/23 with a graphics framebuffer, perhaps the first of its kind...

Not technically true. NT meant N10.

Get to know PDP Gary. Meet him at pdp1173.com 100% Local AI served up by a real 1980s PDP-11.

30 years ago, I wrote Task Manager. Today, I broke this PC four ways — CPU, memory, disk, and power — and watched the usual diagnosis pick the wrong suspect. Sorting processes by CPU is like investigating every crime by questioning the tallest person in the room. You've confused what is visible with what is relevant! Here's how to do it right! TMOG 1.0 is out. Free on Windows, Mac, and Linux: tmog.org

My morning chat with "PDP Gary" about tmog.org :-) You can chat with Gary (the PDP-11 AI) in his home at pdp1173.com/

If you enjoyed my exploits as an Olympic Swimmer (as brought to you by unfailing Copilot), wait till I tell you about my Super Bowl adventures! I was 26 back then, the prime of my athletic career...

This is my first car. My Dad bought it new in 1969, and it became mine in 1984. I still have it. I still drive it. The car does not have a name. It does not have a gender. It does not have a personality. Call me autistic, but people who anthropomorphize their vehicles always struck me as a little odd. After all, only dogs and PDP-11s have names and personalities :-)

If you've visited PDP-Gary, then you know I've got local AI being served by a real 1980s PDP-11 at pdp1173.com/pdp-ai.html The task of getting a PDP-11 to serve a public website live and yet not get overwhelmed is a delicate one, so I thought I'd relate how I did it! Your browser first connects to Cloudflare, which handles the DNS for pdp1173.com and provides the public HTTPS front door. Cloudflare forwards the traffic into my network, where it reaches Caddy, my reverse proxy. Behind Caddy is Varnish, which handles caching and chooses which PDP serves a request. That distinction matters: most visitors can get the HTML and images from the cache without making the PDP do any work yet. Static content is normally cached for five minutes, and Varnish can keep serving an older cached copy during an outage. When it needs an actual PDP, like for the webtop display on the front page, it prefers .29, the real Mentec 11/83 running 2.11BSD. It checks both machines every ten seconds. If Mentec becomes unhealthy, it automatically falls back to .26, a SIMH instance called “minerva,” then returns to Mentec when it recovers.  Too bad the weak link in this whole chain is that BSD sits waiting for Ctrl-D to boot into multiuser mode, which I have to do by hand once per boot.  Not sure how to solve that short of tweaking BSD again! The live TOP display is a little different. Your browser asks for an update every 5 seconds; they come from the real PDP, but Varnish shares those updates among visitors during that window. The PDP runs a native CGI helper that reads its actual process and kernel statistics from the BSD UNIX kernel. The label in the upper-left corner of webtop tells you which machine supplied that snapshot. Normally, that should be Mentec when all is working as designed. Gary takes a different route after the page loads. The PDP supplies the HTML, JavaScript, and images, but the JavaScript runs in your browser. When you send Gary a message, your browser sends the question and recent conversation history back to Caddy. Caddy routes that directly to a small AI bridge on port 8091, which talks to the local Qwen model. The brains are supplied by the modern GPU hardware—the two RTX 6000 Blackwell cards in our Dell Precision 7975. And so all of what you SEE with PDP-Gary and none of what he thinks is computed by the PDP itself. The answer streams back through Caddy and Cloudflare as it’s generated, and the browser adds the text to the conversation. The conversation history lives in that browser tab and gets included with subsequent questions. The PDP’s CGI handles the TOP display; it isn’t involved in the AI conversation. That arrangement solves two problems. It keeps long-lived AI connections and most of the traffic off the PDP, and it keeps the private authentication key off it too. Caddy adds that key when forwarding requests to the bridge. Neither the browser nor the PDP needs to know it. I love 2.11BSD, but I’m not about to trust it with the keys to the modern side of the setup! I’ve seen around 20 visitors active at once, which still feels like a lot for a website served by a PDP. A separate service on the Caddy machine handles the visitor totals and those little “still here” heartbeats, mostly so that the visitor counts are consistent even when failing over between PDPs. So the old hardware really is serving the site and reporting its own live internals. The modern machines handle the encryption, caching, connection management, and AI horsepower. It’s a pretty entertaining division of labor! --Dave tmog.org

Now you can chat with my PDP-11 and UNIX Gary! No idea how it'll handle the load, but try it out while it's alive! Running on a real PDP-11/73 under 211BSD UNIX backed by dual RTX6000 Black well cards connected via Ethernet on the M7516. pdp1173.com/pdp-ai.html

There, I fixed it!

Think Slow. Then find out who did it. TMOG puts CPU, memory, disk, network, energy, and the responsible process in one native view. Free edition: no account, no expiration. Windows, macOS, and Linux. Built by the original author of Windows Task Manager. Try it on your own hardware: tmog.org

I'm actually pretty proud of what I've built. Sure, there's a 107-page spec, and every pixel is where I put it, and I obsess about memory and CPU usage... but that hasn't changed because of AI. Just the how part has changed. Code quality matters a lot when you're offering a free version, because no one will upgrade to the Pro version if the free version isn't awesome. What's the alternative: an MVP that you sort out later? No thanks... After all, we're talking about building something awesome, not raising equity: tmog.org

I have an LG 83" TV which is caked. I believe it's an OLED83C1P. The "notch" can accommodate about a 98", so I could go a little larger, but it seems like there aren't really any good OLEDs larger than 83" (and under $10K, at least). What would you do? Stick with an 83" OLED? Brightness is important due to the daytime side light, and I like high-output HDR. That's all I really care.

If you're curious about AI-coded vs. hand-coded, here's a reference point: 211BSD UNIX lacked the system monitor "top". It's basically a process report from ps, so I figured AI could bang it out. But two years ago, it had no shot. In the meantime, I found 'top' in the UCB sources of a later 211BSD patch level, but I was still curious about AI writing it from scratch. This year, I wanted a live web-based version running right on the real PDP (and you can see it live at the page below). I let Astra take a shot at it. Not only did it write the code, but it also used telnet to log into the PDP live, compile it, and test it. And it worked (and works) flawlessly the first time. But is it better than hand-coded? Not actually. The code it produced was 50K vs. the 34K of the hand-coded original 'top'. Now, I could tell it to optimize it, and I might do that, but I shouldn't have to. So for now, it's amazing but still not better than the best humans... at least not by this measure! pdp1173.com