I'd try to contact Assetnote. Most (sadly not all) managed vuln scan companies are pretty sensitive to scanning stuff that doesn't belong to their client and could expose them to liabilities because they don't have permission.
Oh, and be sure to include "you're scanning a pool address so you're probably scanning a lot of other sites that don't belong to your customer". They should know it's potentially not one little web site.
I'll be honest...I never really 'got' the PDP-8. It's a great example of what really, really smart folks can come up with when you have a very limited transistor budget. The ISA is limited and quirky (aka 'strange'), there's not much memory and it's relatively slow, but a huge amount of serious work got done.
OS/8 and TSS/8 are the 'common' OS. ASM, FOCAL, FORTRAN & BASIC were popular programming languages. You can find images lots of places. I don't guess there's a lot of 'canned' software, as the PDP-8s were more targeted at roll-you-own software. I personally think the most interesting things about them was the many places they were used as controllers for other things, like manufacturing machines and laboratory kit. Not very amenable to a home lab, but they have a very dedicated following in the classic computer world.
If I recall correctly, Oracle best practices back in the day (waaaay back) was always put the DB on raw partitions, which caused us some issues with existing tooling. I've been fortunate enough to not have to pay attention to Oracle best practices in quite a while.
High performance databases still use raw I/O. You get much better control of data placement and write ordering, without filesystem confounders. With traditional spinning rust being replaced with SSDs and SMR it can be even more important.
You may even have different firmware on the disks / disk controllers for database disks.
Sure...pretty clear there's a use case. I just recall our ops folks having to retool some of their playbooks because of the assumption there would be a standard filesystem on every active slice.
Fortunately, the whole "load a particular firmware on the disks" wasn't new. That was something some of the HW RAID vendors recommended.
There are also semiconductor reimplementations of some of these classic minicomputers if you was the real thing in a smaller package.
The Harris/Intersil 6100/6120 processor line was basically a highly integrated PDP-8 on a chip. You could get a really cool 6120 kit for a while[1], tho now you'd roll your own, since the kit is no longer being sold.
The TI9900 of crappy microcomputer fame is a implementation of the TI990 minicomputer. There are a couple of example SBCs projects running around.
Data General had the microNOVA version of the DG NOVA. Separately, Fairchild had the F9440. There were dev boards for both, but no open source projects I know of. Software has been an issue for the NOVA.
The WE32000 (not NS32000) was a VLSI implementation of the AT&T 3B5/3B20 minicomputers. There was a dev board, but you'd mostly find one in a 3b2.
And, of course, there were VLSI version of the DEC VAX-11 (e.g. CVAX, NVAX) and PDP-11 (Harris J-11, DEC T-11, several ASIC versions). Found lots of places.
We can all combine our own knowledge, enthusiasm, and AI to do amazing things. It's like using better computers with better processors. For programming, I could perfectly well use a PC from 2001.
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