There was one on eBay a couple years ago, "only" $5k. They're definitely out there! I hope when you do get your crazy hobbyist hands on one that you document the shit out of every interaction you have with it.

I'm attempting to acquire one now because I'm starting a retro computing club at my college. I want to get my hands on it so me, and a group of about 12 other college students, can fix it up and keep it running for as long as the college is alive. Since the college is a state funded college that will likely be for quite some time.

If I were to ever find a PDP I'd ask the person to donate it to me and I'd donate it to my club with the stipulation that I'm allowed access to it even after I graduate. If that didn't work out then, hell, I'd still take the PDP if it was only for a few years.

My club's constitution has been approved, it's being voted into club-hood (or whatever) in a few weeks. It's called Ar.C.S. or the Archaeological Computation Society. This is a play on a A.R.C.S. which stands for Academic Research Computing Services. This is a department of my university that manages all of our super computing power. They run our cluster called Kong.

ARCS maintains the super computers, ArCS maintains the not-so-super computers.

So far we have an...

     1. Compaq III clone (i486, 200MB drive, Debian 1.1, DOA & fixed by me)
     2. Timex Sinclair 1000/ZX80 \w cassette player (untested) 
     3. Commodore 64, NIB (will be donated by my coworker during the semester)
     4. IBM PCjr (will be donated by another coworker when he finds it in his attic)

If I got a PDP my goals would be....

    1. Get it working
    2. Get a VT100, CR11 (punchards), LA36 (dot-matrix), RX01 (8" floppy), and a RL02K (swapable HDD)
    3. Get SVR1 installed on it
    4. Get other CS majors to help me write our own operating system on it (optional)
    5. Bell Labs Day. Suits, thick glasses, etc. Most of my profs are ex-bell so they'd get a kick out of this.
    6. I'm a ham radio operator so allow Radio TeleTYpe  (RTTY) for login.

A lot needs to happen before any of that.

I commissioned and programmed pdp11/83 based systems used for process control and operator interface systems in a steelworks as "recently" as 1989. I wouldn't be surprised if they were still running...

They're pretty easy to emulate.

http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_Unix_v6_(PDP-11)_on_SIMH

I suspect there are quite a few in private ownership (I have several). If you really want one, your best bet may be find someone who wants to 'pass the torch', so to speak.

Would you happen to have a PDP that's ripe for torch passing?

Couldn't help but ask....