This week’s selection is the DEC Mini 3D printable minicomputer by Lorenzo Herrera.
For those old enough, the word “DEC” might bring up some memories. “DEC” stands for Digital Equipment Corporation, and there was a time back in the 1970s when their equipment was among the biggest sellers in the computing world, and they were the second largest computing company after IBM.
Their most popular “minicomputers” were the venerable PDP 11/70 and VAX series, which you’d access from a “terminal” with a keyboard — only. DEC designed a terminal series, likely one of the first in history. Eventually these devices became “smart” with their VT series, and ended up with the VT100, shown here:
The company’s products persisted until 1998, when a series of corporate moves eventually shut it all down.
But now it’s back, sort of. Herrera created a replica of the VT100, called the DEC Mini. It’s a 3D printable project, and is actually fully functional. You can equip the DEC Mini with a modern single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi, and get yourself a working systems.
Herrera explains his motivation behind resurrecting the design:
“The DEC VT line of computers not only forged standards in the telecommunications industry, but they certainly also took the industrial design of computers to a whole new level, where the looks and the function started to work together for a better human-machine interaction. Nowadays it seems natural to buy, use and love computing devices for their looks, not only for their capabilities. It would only seem logic to say that the interface revolution started in the hardware, not in the software.”
The project has its own website, and has extensive explanations on how to put the 3D printable parts together. There’s no cost to this project, other than you own time and cost to print the parts, plus any computing hardware you put into your DEC Mini.
Via DEC Mini
