A 1980s PDP-11 is still running Unix – and now you can watch
Plummer's machine is real 1980s hardware, still running a Unix-derived operating system.The website displays the machine's running processes, refreshing the list every few seconds. Think Task Manager for an old Unix box: ps lists what is running, while top keeps that view up to date. Visitors can't issue commands themselves, but they can watch the hardware at work.
- ▪Plummer's machine is real 1980s hardware, still running a Unix-derived operating system.The website displays the machine's running processes, refreshing the list every few seconds.
- ▪Think Task Manager for an old Unix box: ps lists what is running, while top keeps that view up to date.
- ▪Visitors can't issue commands themselves, but they can watch the hardware at work.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/23/a-1980s-pdp-11-is-still-running-unix-and-now-you-can-watch-1/5298072 |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:40:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T15:09:30.654Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T15:09:30.654Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yMCUlFHfAAil · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); offbeat A 1980s PDP-11 is still running Unix – and now you can watch Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you? Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published wed 23 Sep 2026 // 13:40 UTC READ MORE Commodore's forgotten Amiga Unix gets a modern revival 1 day ago The improbable music of the ZX Spectrum's one-bit speaker 10 days ago Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux 12 days ago Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer 14 days ago Exec…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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