17 Jun
2009
17 Jun
'09
1:17 p.m.
John Foust wrote:
At 11:55 PM 6/16/2009, Brent Hilpert wrote:
There is also the Usenet posting which you forwarded:
Rich Alderson wrote:
> On the other hand, the last PDP-6 in existence was destroyed by the Computer
> Museum in Boston about 20 years ago, so you're one up there.
I have one of his signed PDP-6 gift-shop cards and an email from Gordon Bell
saying these "To my knowledge, the museum has never engaged in gutting
machines for components" From: amartin at denton.zko.dec.com (Alan H. Martin)
>Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10
>Subject: Re: Working for PDP-10 En
>Date: 21 Feb 1996 13:12:21 GMT
>Organization: DEC
>Lines: 27
>Message-ID: <4gf5nl$kun at zk2nws.zko.dec.com>
>References: <DMJ1IM.MuJ at network.com> <1996Feb14.164932.1 at
eisner.decus.org> <aldersonDMsnx7.5vM at netcom.com>
>NNTP-Posting-Host: denton.zko.dec.com
>
>In article <aldersonDMsnx7.5vM at netcom.com> alderson at netcom.com writes:
> >>In article <1996Feb14.164932.1 at eisner.decus.org> stevens_j at
eisner.decus.org
> >>(Jack H. Stevens) writes:
>...
>> >>>How about trying The Computer Museum, in Boston? (also at
http://www.tcm.org)
> >>
> >>Bad idea. The Computer Museum has buried any interesting (read
"36-bit")
> >>hardware. They were given, for example, the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence
> >>Laboratory PDP-6 in 1984, after it was shown at the Fall DECUS Symposia (for
> >>the 20th Anniversary of 36-Bit Computing).
> >>
> >>It has never been made available for public view; as far as anyone can tell,
> >>it has disappeared from the face of the earth.
>
>I'm hazy on dates, but if the 6 in question was donated before the museum's
>move from MR2 to Boston, you ain't likely to see it in one piece ever again.
>They had a garage sale of unwanted items in the MR1 cafeteria one Saturday
>before the move, and were selling a PDP-6 module-by-module. An S6205K
>"Arithmetic Registers" module (1-bit slice of AR/MQ/MB/<light
buffer>) went
>for $7, autographed by Gordon Bell.
>
>I asked him whether read-in mode was implemented as a diode array encoding
>instructions. He said no, and kindly recommended the 6205 as a particularly
>central module to have, instead.
> /AHM
>--
>Alan Howard Martin AMartin at TLE.ENet.DEC.Com
>
The 'garage sale' is documented in one of the Museum's reports
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TheCompMusRep/TCMR-V07.html
At first I thought this was the smoking gun, except it happened
in the fall of 1983 (the 6 was shown at DECUS in June, 1984).
They did disassemble more than one PDP-6 at that time according
to the article.
So, the short answer is they had PDP-6 modules, but not from Stanford's
machine.