12 Nov
2010
12 Nov
'10
11:14 a.m.
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote:
I'm still irked with myself for disposing of an
Intercept Jr. (with the battery-backed memory expansion) back in the mid-1990s. ?I
hadn't done anything with it since the mid-80s, we were moving, my Spousal Unit was
'helping' me pack.... ?<sigh>
Ooh.
For my (our) purposes, I am definitely interested in
the story of a machine. ?It is often quite helpful in helping others understand the
significance of a particular device ("what would they have ever done with this old
thing?"). ?For instance, our PDP-7 came from the University of Oregon where it ran
experiments in their high energy physics lab; over thirty Ph.Ds were earned with research
done on that machine.
For that exact reason, I wish we'd saved some gear from the AMANDA
experiment (the Linux-based data collection machines were installed
starting in 1998 and decommed a couple of years ago). You could go
through the author list on various papers to see how many PhDs that
gear facilitated.
Tangentally, I have a couple of Intel-chip EISA boxes that are
probably only interesting because they were used as transitional
servers in the history of CompuServe (long chrome-plated steel
enclosures that sat two-side-by-side in a 24" rack, nicknamed "silver
bullets") - they were called "32-bit hosts" to distinguish them from
the 36-bit DEC and Systems Concepts machines that were in overlapping
service at the time. I would loved to have saved any of the 36-bit
gear, but circumstances presented me with some 32-bit gear (decommed
around 2002), so that's what I have (plus one "trinode" enclosure with
three DDV11D backplanes, originally housing a ton of serial gear for
the node-to-node network). I don't know if machines of this sort are
interesting to most people, but since my involvement with CIS went
from a 16-year-old modem user to employee, their
stories intertwine
with my own.
-ethan