On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 05:10:05PM -0600, Jay West wrote:
Richard wrote...
>>Looks like noone else wanted to pay that much either. I don't know
>>where they came up with a price like $1700 for 4 11/04s ($425 ea?),
It's more than _I_ would want to pay for a bare 11/04 in unknown
condition.
To which Pat replied...
>An 11/04 is somewhat more desirable of a machine than the 11/03 is (it's
>UNIBUS instead of QBUS), but you still lack the MMU, and only have a
>calculator-keypad frontpanel instead of a full lights and toggles
>frontpane, and it's relatively slow. So, it's not generally all that
>desirable to people, compared to something like an 11/83, or even an
>11/10, or 11/34.
It's a fine RT-11 box, but so is an 11/23 (which is much more common
and about the same physical size). If you had some Unibus peripherals
you wanted to play with, you could drop a couple in there, but ISTR
there's a small number of empty slots after you install the CPU, memory,
and a console.
I'm not saying it's an terrible machine - I have one myself. There are
just other machines which might be easier to find and can do similar
(11/23) or identical (11/34) things with.
11/04's seem a bit rare to me. And for "curb
appeal" no different than an
11/34.
Agreed.
>I'd guess that if they were actually complete,
and mostly working (but
>without any interesting I/O boards), $150-$250 ea wouldn't be too far
>out of line.
Sure.
I/O boards could dramatically raise the value of the
>system, though... eg, if there were a SCSI controller or something in
>the systems.
Not impossible, but very unlikely. I wouldn't think that someone would
have ever spent that kind of money on a controller for an 11/04 in the
past - perhaps a hobbyist might stuff one in there for fun, but for the
era of the machine, an RX11 or RX211 or RL11 would be much more likely,
or a cable to an RK11.
More to the point, I don't think the auction is a
fair indicator of the
worth of an 11/04, because he bundled 4 of them at a high (total) price.
Perhaps few people want to buy all 4 and spend $1700, but perhaps there is
someone out there that would jump at buying one at 1/4th the price.
Someone? I'm sure there are people out there who would find ~$400 an
acceptable price for a bare 11/04, but, like Jay, I am not one of them.
-ethan
(the one I have used to be a bench-test machine, so ISTR it has 16K of
MOS and never had any mass storage - our test software was shoved down
the serial console into ODT - all standalone MACRO programs - no OS).
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 29-Nov-2007 at 23:40 Z
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Ethan.Dicks at
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