The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer popular in the 1970s. ITS was an operating system for the PDP-10, created by hackers at MIT.

ITS had many applications for displaying time. Two of them were CROCK and DCROCK. The first displayed an analog clock on a terminal, and the second was a digital version. There was also a CLOCK which worked with the Knight TV raster display.

I think it would be an appropriate tribute to the PDP-10 and a nod to the ITS hacker culture to make a wall-mounted CROCK using a PDP-10 emulator running on a small board connected to a flat screen.