Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?

Boris Gimbarzevsky boris at summitclinic.com
Fri Jul 24 01:36:03 CDT 2020


Have been going through my shop and storage room trying to see what 
can get rid of and wasn't aware of how much old electronics and 
computers have accumulated over last 50 years.  Should note that this 
process has been at insistance of my wife as a lot of these boxes 
just got moved whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked 
at for decades.

Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3 but then figured 
someone might want it.  Have a couple of XT systems kicking around 
somewhere but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and considered 68000 
processor a far superior architecture as it was an easy transition 
from someone who'd spent most of their time programming on a 
PDP-11.  Also have early Mac software, hundreds of 3.5" disks which 
are primarily taking up space and all of them have been copied to 
HDD's and now run my Mac code under Basilisk2 was faster than it used 
to run on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).

Also managed to find, in no particular order, a couple of C64's, a 
TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8" floppy drive with full documentation that 
I faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics place in 
Seattle.  Also found a box of old Univac cards which appear to be DTL 
with individual transistors and then go on to having DTL IC's as well 
as some old IBM cards.  Used to pull transistors and diodes off these 
to build my own circuits 50 years ago.  Now, with storage being so 
ridiculously cheap haven't even come close to making a dent in the 
capacity of a 256 Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld supercomputer 
of which I'm using the camera function to create high res images of 
what I'm going through.

Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with XT's and progressing 
upwards.  Never liked 80286 and so only collected from 80386 and 
higher.  Seem to have lots of various parallel port adapters, disk 
interfaces as well as parallel and serial port boards.  Was planning 
on using these as dedicated processors for data acquisition but found 
that technology progressed faster than my getting around to use them 
and it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC with various 
sensors for environmental monitoring or a much less power hungry 
Parallax Propellar chip for more demanding data acquisition 
applications.  (Haven't let my wife know how many of newer systems I 
have stashed away but they take up way less room than old hardware).

Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which I'll probably have 
to part with as I haven't used then in last 15 years.  Also have a 
number of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but won't be using 
them.  Lots of old computer books as well which would be nice to keep 
but likely have most of documentation in digital form and usually 
back up all important pdf files to separate drives.

The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's any interest, can 
post images of what I have on my web site.  Only components I've 
tested are disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives are all old 
and a number of them didn't take kindly to be powered off after 
running for years and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.

Boris Gimbarzevsky



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