Aww! Looks like Mr. Mouse paid a visit. That will be fun to get running. (I'd normally sell one of mine for 6k working with Focal loaded up.  They're cute and all, but 15k? And it nice to have a spare for troubleshooting the other one if needed) CZ On 8/28/2023 2:37 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:

Lander, in FOCAL? The only one I know is for the GT40, in assembler. paul

Interesting. And amazingly short. I flipped through some of those articles. There's a version from around those early times not mentioned, for the CDC 6000 mainframe computer. It used the console display, dual green text displays that could also do graphics (clumsily, because the API was a dot drawing one, not line vectors). What's unusual about that one is that it's a pilot's point of view display -- it shows you the lander's instruments and a view out the windows, rather than an outside observer view as the GT40 version does. I played it a few times, it was hard -- I never managed to land it. One of the system staff (at University of Illinois PLATO project) was rumored to have a fast way to land: flip upside down, blast rockets, flip right side up, blast some more for a soft landing. paul

I forgot to mention that I was playing the Focal version on a PDP-8/L coincidentally. On 8/28/2023 4:16 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:

On Tue, 29 Aug 2023, Tom Hunter via cctalk wrote: Is that why people don't go to the moon very often, any more? :-)

On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 6:22 AM Peter Coghlan via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: They instead chose the ever-popular Simplified Planetary Landing Approach Trajectory.

On Tue, Aug 29, 2023, 7:02 AM Gavin Scott via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.orgwrote: The original moon landing utilized Ballistically Unrealistic Lunar Landing Simulation Hallucination Initiation Technology. Sellam

I was worried before the first lunar landing, because prior to sending passengers, they had never previously managed a soft landing, nor take-off from anywhere but Earth. Then, one of the Sci-Fi magazines included a very short story (a couple of paragraphs), in which the capsule settled down onto the moon, and immediately sank irrevocably below kilometer thick layer of dust.

On Wed, 30 Aug 2023 at 01:29, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: I am strongly reminded of _A Fall of Moondust_ by Arthur C. Clarke. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven(a)gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053

Still too spicy :)

However, epay does charge an insertion fee so they will have to pay even when it doesn't sell. On 8/28/2023 1:37 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:

But you can re-list at different prices... though. All auction houses seem to take huge cuts. At traditional auction houses there are often buyer and seller premiums. So a place local to me reports the following :- Based on the amount provided here is a breakdown of the additional charges you will receive if you bid on a dash-cam :- Name Value VAT Bid Amount £32.00 £6.40 Buyers Premium £6.40 £1.28 Internet Charge £1.60 £0.32 Lot Processing Fee £1.00 £0.20 Total Price £49.20 So if I bid £32.00 I pay £49.20. Makes E-Bay look cheap Dave

I wonder if it came to it which option would be best for me if I sold my Mark-8 stuff.  I have the unbuilt board set and then also the built one I acquired recently that was photoed in 73 Magazine.  It seems like the actual auction houses get more usually.BradSent from my Galaxy -------- Original message --------From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Date: 2023-08-28 3:10 p.m. (GMT-08:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Cc: Sellam Abraham <sellam.ismail(a)gmail.com> Subject: [cctalk] Re: PDP-8/L $15,000 On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 2:27 PM Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:> > -----Original Message-----> > From: Ethan O'Toole via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>> > Sent: Monday, August 28, 2023 9:38 PM> > To: Mike Katz via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>> > Cc: Ethan O'Toole <ethan(a)757.org>> > Subject: [cctalk] Re: PDP-8/L $15,000> >> > > However, epay does charge an insertion fee so they will have to pay> > > even when it doesn't sell.>> But you can re-list at different prices...>> >> > Eh, you get a lot of free listings these days. They take a huge chunk> though.> >>> All auction houses seem to take huge cuts. At traditional auction houses> there are often buyer and seller premiums.> So a place local to me reports the following :->> Based on the amount provided here is a breakdown of the additional charges> you will receive if you bid on a dash-cam :->> Name                       Value        VAT> Bid Amount            £32.00    £6.40> Buyers Premium     £6.40        £1.28> Internet Charge       £1.60     £0.32> Lot Processing Fee £1.00        £0.20> Total Price                                £49.20>> So if I bid £32.00 I pay £49.20. Makes E-Bay look cheap>>> >                       - Ethan>> Dave>Indeed.  Typically, in high-end houses, if you bid in an auction and youwin an item with a bid of $10,000, you are also paying a 25% "buyer'spremium" on top of that, so your subtotal is now $12,500.  RR Auction,Christie's, Southeby's, etc.Sellam

I hate what epay is doing to our hobby. I prefer to sell and trade between our selves as reasonable prices understanding that a lot of what we do is sweat equity. On 8/28/2023 3:56 PM, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:

Also, it is a GREAT way to generate buzz FOR PENNIES. -- Will

Sometimes. But a lot of times it's just simply trying to get as much as possible, which I guess is rational economic behavior. And the fault for the high prices is us collectors - ye who bid thousands for old Apple IIs or $3500 for a Microswitch keyboard. I've been hunting for a Sanyo MBC-16 like the ones we had in our highschool.. there's one on ebay right now.. but despite another previously selling for less than $300 the seller is absolutely locked to $999. And he might be right, someone more motivated than me and to whom $1000 is no big deal might reward his patience. I've seen that happen with items that sat literally for years on ebay before selling pretty close to asking. It's too bad the various collecting communities can't have the disarmament equivalent of SALT talks and maybe agree to not keep feeding the beast. Although I suppose on the upside, the high values mean stuff that might otherwise get discarded survives. -----Original Message----- From: Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, August 28, 2023 11:38 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.orgCc: Bill Degnan <billdegnan(a)gmail.comSubject: [cctalk] Re: PDP-8/L $15,000 On Mon, Aug 28, 2023, 1:46 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.orgwrote: I think some Ebay sellers simply overpriced an item when they know it's probably valuable but they're not sure how much to sell for. They will wait for people to contact and say, "your price is way too high, you might sell if you charged $nnnnn instead." It's not an illogical tactic. Bill

-----Original Message----- From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, August 28, 2023 3:07 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Cc: Sellam Abraham <sellam.ismail(a)gmail.com> Subject: [cctalk] Re: PDP-8/L $15,000 On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 2:24 PM Brad H via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: Yup. You mean this one? https://www.ebay.com/itm/144865038347 It was marked sold but seems to be back again. Weird. Problem with that one is like you said, the shipping, plus it's not working, plus it's 220v and I don't know if those PSUs have a way to switch to 110V. Not sure why they're so rare.. I guess they were more of an international thing, like my Dad's "Panasonic" Tandy. I sold mine for $120. I've not seen one go for more than that since. Is there something special about your C8101s? I don't know my Altair stuff that well.. I thought they all had those chips. I have been thinking about selling my Godbout G8008, as well as the 16 white ceramic P1101s I have - I think those are pretty collectible now. I'm all ears! Brad

I will say the desktop chassis thing is kind of snazzy..... But man be prepared to replace a LOT of 7474 flip flops and 8 input NAND gates (they seemed to use those as drivers. Weird, but worked but put the chip under serious stress when old) On 8/28/2023 1:45 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:

Oh baloney. As long as the backplane pins are not mushed these are surprisingly easy to fix and mouse crap can be vacuumed out and cleaned off the cards and pins. The thing that drove me the most nuts was finding a backplane wire that had worn through its insualtion and shorted against another pin. C On 8/29/2023 12:01 AM, Tom Hunter via cctalk wrote:

-BUT- That does not mean it *can't* be restored, only that $15,000 is ridiculous for a machine that clearly needs an expert with time and money. b On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 7:54 AM Mattis Lind via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

Or DECnet/8, though I suspect an 8/L can't run that. paul

I have one Interprocessor Buffer (M8326). Of course just one won't help to connect my Lab-8/e and my PDP-8/e. :-( On Thu, 31 Aug 2023, 12:49 am Mike Katz via cctalk, &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

On 2023-08-29 6:46 a.m., Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: How about a 36 bit PDP-8L? :)

I know I was a little late in making a reservation for a vendor table at the VCF MW. But, last year they were able to fit me in.  Now, I have made my request, and not heard ANYTHING whatsoever, even that they are working on it.  The VCFMW web site was last updated in JUNE! Does anybody know what is going on?  The web site has vague warnings that overflow vendors might end up exhibiting from the trunks of their cars in the parking lot.  Last year the lot was totally filled and people were parking on the grass behind the building. Chicago weather can be real changeable in the fall, and it was raining when we tried to load out our stuff on Sunday afternoon. Thanks for any comments on what is really going on! Jon

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023, at 7:26 AM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote: I swear to God, Discord will be the end of the open Internet, it's where information goes to die. I hate it with every fiber of my being. And yes, I use it, I'm on many servers. I'm still allowed to detest it. -Seth -- Seth Morabito * Poulsbo, WA * https://loomcom.com/

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 12:45 PM Tom Uban via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: Generally, Jason has been posting things on the vcfmw.org site as they happen. The classiccmp discord server invite was sent to this list in this message if you want to join: https://classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2020-April/043238.html The #vcf channel is bridge to the irc.libera.chat irc server on channel #vcfmw, and is another place you can ask for info. Pat

This dislike of “Discord” has touched a nerve for me. It’s also one of the reasons the cctalk list has lost most of it value. Discord is a collection of channels most devoted to specific subjects that you more or less subscribe to. It’s just a server and you need an invite to join a group. I’m in the Classic computer group and find it to be filled with knowledge people willing to share that knowledge with others. Saying you don’t like “Discord” is like saying you don’t like TV. If you don’t like the content, simply don’t watch it. Don’t blame the medium. Sent from my iPhone

Just like Twitter (X), Facebook, Google, Yahoo or just about any online business. Sent from my iPhone

/ / I'm sorry but I have to disagree. The way that discord presents the information vs a forum style or even Facebook style is, to me, very very distracting and hard to communicate across. The constant chatter, distracting graphics and animations, etc. make it difficult, again for me, to find and clean the information that I am looking for. In my opinion, the forum construct is a much much better way to disseminate information and carry on category and subject oriented conversations. Just jump on the VCF DEC forum and see that there are conversations going on from PDP-9 Restoration to OS/8 Internals to PDP-11 Operating systems. And since there are forums for most every vintage computer category you don't get assailed with noise that you aren't interested in like in the mailing lists. On 8/30/2023 1:30 PM, Wayne S wrote:

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023, at 11:30 AM, Wayne S via cctalk wrote: It's not that I don't like the content, it's that content accessibility is awful. We're moving important information from a publicly available, searchable, indexable web, and putting it into a walled garden where you can't find it unless you sign up for a service, find the right server, and join it. Let me be more clear: I love the CHAT feature of Discord. It's perfect for that. It's a great place to discuss things in real time. But it is dreadful as a replacement for forums and archives. Every time a phpBB forum shuts down and deletes its archive we lose history. The new history being made on Discord is never going to be a viable replacement because it's a closed system behind locked doors. Even when you get the key to the doors and join a server, good luck finding information that's well laid out, organized, searchable, and accessible. And good luck exporting that information. We already have wikis, we already have forums. Let them do what they're good at, leave Discord for real-time discussion. Anything less is just a sad, sad waste of potential and robbing from the future. -Seth -- Seth Morabito * Poulsbo, WA * https://loomcom.com/

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 11:45 AM Tom Uban via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: Correcting a post from earlier, the ClassicCMP Discord (and IRC) is not the primary source of VCFMW information. It is an easy way to find some of the organizers and ask a quick question, but the official "sources of truth" re: VCF Midwest are the https://vcfmw.org website and the mailing list ( https://vcfmw.org/listsub.html) which everyone should be on (it's unidirectional, spam-free and run by us on our server.) All email sent to the contact addresses on the site go straight to me (or, in some cases, other staff as well) and I usually answer within a day. -jt

Any proprietary interface or message database is anathema to honest communication. And even if they currently have benevolent commercial policies there's always the possibility of another twitter-style regression. Moguls love communication platforms and always have, from Randall Hearst onwards, because they provide the means to control the conversation and resulting attitudes. On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 7:14 PM Liam Proven via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

I will be going to the VCF - MW.  Does anybody have an Emulex QD21 that could dump a hard drive for me?  I ran a uVAX II at home of 21 years.  Sometime back about 2000 or so, I upgraded to a cast-off SCSI disk, which eventually died.  I didn't have a convenient backup solution for the SCSI disk, so the old 600 MB ESDI drive is kind of my most recent backup.  I have a copy of VMS 4.7 on that. It would be great if somebody could recover what is on that drive.  If I were to set up the uVAX II here, I would not have a very good way to get the data off the drive except the serial port - that might take a WHILE! thanks, Jon

On 9/1/23 10:54, Hans-Ulrich Hölscher via cctalk wrote: VMS 4.7 did not support TCP/IP out of the box.  There were add-ons for that.  They DID support DECNET, but I didn't have any other computers that did.  I did have a DEQNA (I think) at one time but don't have it now!  That would make things a LOT easier. Thanks, Jon