the PDP-11 is awesome. i believe its instruction set was the inspiration for the 6800 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6800#MC6800_microprocessor_design yes it was) which then resulted in the 68000 all the way up to the 68040, processors which both commodore and amiga used to great effect up until the early 90's. at imperial college we didn't write a compiler for 68000 or even x86, we wrote a compiler for the PDP-11 instruction set.

the other thing is: if they're still running PDP-11's in large geometries (.35 micron or even bigger) then chances are it'll be much more robust and less prone to random radiation hits/changes. the kind of thing you really really REALLY want to be still working and under computer control is the "emergency shutdown" procedures in the event of a radiation leak. the LAST thing you want is one of the bits changing a floodgate to "open" instead of "shut" due to a random gamma ray flipping a bit somewhere.

it depends on what you're concerned about. if you're concerned about server presence in general because you're developing software that you absolutely do not want the NSA to be able to either track or take down, then you don't want a server - at all. that's when you should consider funding gittorrent, which is a TRULY peer-to-peer distributed git system. git is "considered" to be "peer-to-peer" because it is possible to *manually* distribute the git repository. each git repository - a peer - is completely free and independent of every other git repository - a peer - and it is possible to use HTTP, SSH and even email or carrier pigeon to transfer commits between one of those "peers" and another "peer". what is missing - what the concept of gittorrent brings to the table - is the means to AUTOMATICALLY transfer commits between previously UNKNOWN (i.e. DHT-discoverable) peers in an effectively unkillable, decentralised and secureable fashion.

if on the other hand you merely want a place to push and pull from then there are plenty of options, but the one that i've found to be absolutely superb is gitolite. from a management perspective the fact that you can control read/write access on not only a per-repository basis but also a per-branch basis is something that's amazingly useful, but it also simplifies both user and management usage because there is only one user: gitolite. the trick is in the use of ssh commands and the creation of a special authorized_keys file (which is created and managed via a git commit hook). as a result, there is no need to create multiple POSIX users: just one [gitolite], and the users only need one git clone username: gitolite. if you need a web interface you can always point gitweb at it.

yep - started with a commodore pet 3032 at school, aged i think it was 8. very unusual that a school actually had a computer. i watched someone type in a program:

10 FOR I = 1 to 40
20 PRINT TAB(I), I
30 NEXT I
40 GOTO 10

and the number scrolled 123455bababababa in a diagonal line, and i went, "ah that's obvious".

from there, i went on to work out how to read the keyboard (GET), we typed in a "would you like a cup of tea?" program (if N goto 10) which explained all about how you needed to make tea. from there i began to write games after someone else brought in an Apple IIe (as a personal computer!) and it had "castle vulfenstein" where you shot german soldiers all very politically correct.

the games i wrote were much simpler (40x25 screen, go figure) and usually involved drawing and moving of dots as "bullets", which could be stopped by on-screen ASCII characters if you were lucky. we set up 3 sets of keys so that 3 of us could play (wasx and z for fire, tghb and okl,) and soon discovered something called "keyboard matrix scanning limitations" whereby one player could hold down keys that cause the other players' controls to be non-functional.

by age 11 we'd moved to skelmersdale, where several neighbours had weird machines like superbrains, jupiter aces, tangerines and one guy even had a Z80 that he clocked by hand with LEDs on the outputs just to see what it did. he actually took notes when i explained what i'd been doing with keyboard input (interactive no less!) and things like screens.

after wrecking my eyes borrowing a neighbour's ZX80 with a ZX81 ROM upgrade, and playing chess in 1k of RAM (unbelievable) and typing in 1-line BASIC programs that would scroll binary across the screen, my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum (and a thermal printer, wow!). and a 16k RAM pack eventually. after several months of typing in games and programs, and playing jet-pac and lemmings, i actually bought my first computer software: a BASIC compiler. it could do 26 variables (A to Z) as integers, no floats, and no strings. cost me 30 quid.

by school aged 13 to 18 i'd moved to BBC Micros - the school had 6 of them, all connected via Econet. memorable times there included writing a program which sent notes to each computer on the network so that tunes with more than 3 notes could be played across all 6 computers; writing networked games and creating something similar to "Risk" which was stolen by one of the kids, hidden under carpet where feet destroyed the 5.25in floppies irretrievably. the lab also had one of those digital programming interfaces, with GPIO, ADCs and DACs, which i used on a BEEB to do strange experiments out-of-hours.

so, naturally, when it came to a choice of university and a choice of degree, perhaps unsurprisingly i picked Theory of Computing at Imperial College. there we had a Gould Terminal system that could connect and route over 2,000 VT100 terminals to a configureable array of servers (micro-vaxes, SunOS 4.1.3 and so on). that started to get interesting, especially when someone did "cat /bin/csh | lpr" by mistake. if you're familiar with line printers, you'll now how bloody fast they are and how much of a racket they make. "cat /bin/csh | lpr" churns out 600 pages *real* fast.

all good fun...

it's more than that: it's actually a criminal offense, known in the U.S. as "Assault by Lawyer". if you repeatedly sue someone, for example, such that they are made bankrupt by the legal fees of doing nothing more than defending themselves, it's actually a criminal offense. could someone please get word to this guy's legal team about this please?

"hiro: you're a fucking gargoyle!"

quote from neal stephenson's book, "snow crash".

my brother worked for mother theresa's hospice in india, 25 years ago. it wasn't what you'd think. they had a number of people come in from different outside organisations who tried to order people around: this being india they of course didn't listen, because why should they listen to foreigners?

so my brother stayed there and worked with them for six months before advising them to build a brick out-house for effluent, to change the sheets on the beds when somebody died, and to wash the needles in between injecting one patient and the next.

it also didn't help that as mother theresa got older, she began to lose her memory and would wander off, go to sleep, taking the key to the medicine cupboard with her so that nobody could get access to it for an entire day.

ghandi on the other hand is a far better choice for discussion, here. i love the story where he was asked by a mother to tell her son to stop eating sweets: he told her to come back in 2 weeks. when they came back, he said, "stop eating sweets!" and the son went "yes yes mr ghandi!!". the mother, perplexed, asked "why didn't you do that 2 weeks ago??" and he said "because i had to first give up sweets myself".

now *that's* inspiring, and it tells you something that we can learn from this fuss over 3D printing. there's no point asking "what would ghandi do with a 3D printer" because it's the principles that ghandi applied in his life *whenever he met someone* that are the key. it's never about the technology: it's about the people and what they face.

the point is: asking this question is silly. what you need is just to have the 3D printer, and go wander around the world, meeting people. you'll soon find problems that can be solved with it.