5 Aug
2023
5 Aug
'23
7:44 p.m.
Cool.
One of packages that I supported also ran on the "Medium Systems" (B3000
and B4000 at that point). When I needed to run tests on those machines,
I had to drive to the Pasadena office. There was an old-school fish bowl
system operator room though it hadn't been used as such for a long time.
The whole place felt like the remains of another era, which it was.
Back to B1000, several years after the fact I found that, within six
months of when I moved to the Seattle area, Fort Lewis had included some
model of B1800 in a surplus auction. If i had only known ...
On 8/5/23 7:27 PM, Mike Stein via cctalk wrote:
Ah, BBM memories...
My first paying programmer/operator job was on a B260 in the late 60s, the
first Burroughs minicomputer in Canada IIRC. Many years later, after trying
a few other careers including managing a large motorcycle dealership, I
wound up back with Burroughs doing contract programming for series L
machines, B1800s and B80 & 90s, cross-compiling on a B2700 at night when I
had it all to myself. I too had lots of disk cartridges, cassettes, mag
tapes and even punched cards and tapes, many pretty rare today, that I
threw out before I realized that there were actually folks interested in
that old 'junk'.
Still have the operator console from that B2700 though...
On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 8:04 PM Alan Perry via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
> My holy grail is a Burroughs B1965. I was one of the last people at
> Burroughs (Unisys at that point) fixing bugs in the system software on
> B1000 (the only one in the Lake Forest, CA office; all of the sys admins
> knew of the B1965 there as "my" machine.). My office was filled with
> B1000 removable disk packs (different versions of the OS and release
> management of the software packages I owned). I loved working with that
> machine.
>
> I have boot and maintenance cassettes and a disk pack that I picked up
> on eBay. I should have taken and preserved more stuff before I left.
>
> On 8/5/23 4:30 PM, John Herron via cctalk wrote:
>> For no personally good reason other than the stigma (and technically
>> incorrect) being the first PC, the Altair 8800 is my holy Grail. Some
> day
>> I'd like to have a real one but they increase in value at the same rate
> as
>> my income lol so not likely going to happen. It's a neat system though
> and
>> like a lot of people I like blinken lights and flip switches. Still feels
>> science fantasy to me.
>>
>> Less systems being around makes all of these popular systems go up in
> price
>> with supply and demand. Not sure what would make the market go down
> unless
>> hundreds were found somewhere and flooded the market. But it's
> interesting
>> as less kids would have heard of any of these systems so maybe history
>> becomes less interesting and valuable at some point?
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 6:21 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <
> cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 8/5/23 15:58, brad(a)techtimetraveller.com wrote:
>>>> Do you have an emotional attachment to it? I just saw one sell on ebay
>>> yesterday for $6100. An e-recycler will have a nice payday on your
>>> Altair.
>>> No real attachment; it was a useful tool for a time. It took an entire
>>> weekend with coffee and little sleep to assemble it. And those really
>>> awful cheap white wires...
>>>
>>> I'd have to pull it off the shelf, clean it up and get it working again.
>>> That's not trivial and I have better uses for my time.
>>>
>>> --Chuck
>>>
>>>
>>>