Dave Plummer, the well-known former Microsoft engineer with a hand in adding Zip folders, Task Manager, and even Pinball to Windows, is on a mission to save one ridiculously large bit of storage – not in capacity by modern standards, but certainly in physical size. In a recent video on his YouTube channel (via PC Gamer), Plummer explained that he wanted to use a DEC RA82 disc drive, weighing nearly 200 lb and containing just 622 MB of storage, to run Unix on his DEC PDP-11/73, a 16-bit minicomputer from 1983.
Calling the project “gloriously anachronistic,” Plummer explains in his “SD cards are lame!” video that while he’d been running the PDP-11/73 with more modern solutions, including both real and emulated SCSI drives, these weren’t “satisfying” to use. Instead, Plummer was looking for “period correct storage, with its own beautiful set of limitations, rituals and noises.”
