Angelo and I always knew the PDP-1 was next on the to-do list. Angelo had studied the schematics of not only the PDP-1, but also its progenitors at MIT: the TX-0 and TX-2, and had a VHDL simulation of them running.

Our goal was, as always, to get people interested in hands-on experience with historical machines. But where our PiDP-8/11/10 projects had loads of operating systems, with hundreds if not thousands of games, applications and languages, the software menu for the PDP-1 is more scarce.

Yes, there is spacewar, a bunch of graphics and music demos, and of course DDT and an assembler. But much has been lost. Those lost treasures include the first-ever text editor, teco. The fun in playing with a PDP-1 must and will be much more in the bare-metal interaction than running software.

So.

Our goal will be to entice hackers and democoders to see the PDP-1 as a platform to code for. 

It is a machine that is capable enough to write serious programs (you have the equivalent of 64K memory if you want to, though most PDP-1s were limited to 4Kw). And the display is fun to code for -- a hybrid between vector display and pixel display, you basically have to generate a constant stream of XY coordinates on the electron beam to refresh the (radar) CRT tube.

     Why code for C64 or MSX if you can code for the PDP-1? Seriously?

There is some precedent: Hrvoje Čavrak backported a good game of Pong; Martin Landsteiner did tons of work, including the Ironic Computer Space Simulator. So we'll add two controllers to our replica and the PDP-1 team at the Computer History Museum is interested in running a 'best of' new demos and games on their real PDP-1 (the only working one left in the world). To try and get the PDP-1 a new lease of life as the most retro of games consoles/democoding platforms.

Why not? We might not succeed in this goal but at least new we have a goal.