Dave’s Garage: Shop Talk

The Craziest Retro Games You Can Play on a PDP-11


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Why did Dave’s kids get hassled at the Canadian border while picking up a PDP-11?How does Dave plan to train an AI to beat his world record in Tempest?What challenges does Dave face simulating the Tempest encoder wheel for the AI?Why does Dave give the AI only the visual data a human player would see, not internal game states?How does the AI Tempest model improve its performance frame-by-frame?What retro games can the PDP-11 run, like Zork or Star Trek, and can Dave showcase them?Why does Dave salute at the intro of his episodes, despite not being military?How did Dave expand his garage into a massive nine-car shop?Why didn’t Dave use his car hoist to move the PDP-11 off its pallet?Can the PDP-11 run modern languages like C, and how did Dave add a C compiler?What’s the history behind Dave booting BSD Unix on the PDP-11/34?How does the power efficiency of a PDP-11 compare to modern systems like a Raspberry Pi?What’s Dave’s favorite keyboard, and why does he love the DOS keyboard despite its flaws?Why does Dave miss working at Microsoft and running his own company?How does Dave justify not coding to NASA’s strict programming standards for his projects?

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Dave’s Garage: Shop TalkBy Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges