What's your specialty?

--- Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> wrote: I have four specialties with some overlap: DEC, Commodore, 1970s micros and Motorola 68000 machines... On the DEC front, I have PDP-8s, PDP-11s, VAXen and one Alpha. I'd love to locate some "unusual" DEC machines (not 32, 16 or 12 bits), but I've had no opportunities as of yet. I do have several Flip-Chip PDP-8s and peripherals, both M-series (TTL) and R-series (DTL). Always looking for more stuff from that era. Love to have a PT08 (R-series TTY interface with a W706 and W707 transmit/receive boardset) - got machines with no console TTY. I'd build my own (got prints), but they use strange 700-series (not 7400-series) Motorola chips. The best I could do would be a TTL interface with lots of level converters to get the signals to +/-3VDC for ones and zeros. Commodore stuff encompasses PETs (my first computer), C-64s, VIC-20s, Amigas, etc. Motorola 68000 machines not made by Commodore include NCR, NeXT, Mac, old Suns and the like. It's probably one of the only categories of stuff that I have purged - I gave a pile of S-100 machines including 68K CPUs (prototypes of a product my company never released) to a friend who returned the favor with a SYM-1 and the possibility of another ASR-33, which leads me into... 1970s micros - which for me embraces the 6502 and 1802 over other popular processors of the day. I've never been as enamoured with the 8080 and Z-80 families as with them. I tend to shy away from Atari equipment (no doubt due to my Commodore bias) and Tandy, but I'm happy to have gotten a SYM and an AIM (and still looking for a KIM). If I had to narrow my focus, I'd probably concentrate on machines with a 12-bit CPU, the PDP-11, the 1802 and the 6502 for collecting. I still consider the SPARC and 68K and VAX as "work" processors. I do have some x86 stuff, but it's mostly interesting things (iOpener, Audrey, Planar, etc.) and things active on my network. I do keep a Commodore Colt around, but it has an 8-bit ethernet card and drives my PAL/EPROM blaster. I always enjoyed the fact that I built Amiga hardware using a Commodore PC. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE Valentine eCards with Yahoo! Greetings! http://greetings.yahoo.com