List charter mods & headcount... ;-)

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 10:08:58PM -0400, Teo Zenios wrote: I started so long ago, some of the machines were new (Quest Elf, PET, C-64, VIC-20, Amiga) and some of the machines were still in somewhat common usage (PDP-8, Qbus PDP-11, PC-XT...) For example, I bought the Elf kit and the PET in the late '70s, new, the VIC-20 and C-64 in the early '80s, new, and several Amigas in the mid-to-late '80s, also new. My first PDP-8 was in 1982, and two years later, I got a five or six-year-old PDP-8/a for free (and then spent thousands of dollars of upgrades for it - RL8A, KT8A, MSC8-DJ (128KW)). I was buying PDP-11s to use for contract work in the mid-1980s that were between five and eight years old to write software for the 11/73 w/Fuji Eagle that my customer just paid many thousands of dollars for. I just didn't throw them out when I was done (11/23 w/RLV11, 2xRL01 + borrowed RL02, LPV11, LA180, DLV11-J, VT220, etc.) I rescued several VAXen from my former employer when they closed, and continued to provide (paid) support for our customer base for almost two years. Many of my DEC purchases have been commercially motivated, not hobby motivated, but when the job was done, I still had the toys. I did pay a bit of money for one elusive model - a PDP-8/S (but I know several people who picked them up 20 years earlier for $50 or less). What has changed over the last 25 years for me is that some machines I could never have afforded new have come to me for free, and some machines that I never would have considered owning when they were new, were cheap enough that they were worth playing with for a bit before moving on. I guess I didn't come into the collecting hobby - it kind of fell on me. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Jun-2004 02:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -50.5 F (-45.9 C) Windchill -81.7 F (-63.2 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 10.9 kts Grid 026 Barometer 685 mb (10436. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html