23 Jul
2020
23 Jul
'20
11:36 p.m.
Have been going through my shop and storage room trying to see what
can get rid of and wasn't aware of how much old electronics and
computers have accumulated over last 50 years. Should note that this
process has been at insistance of my wife as a lot of these boxes
just got moved whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked
at for decades.
Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3 but then figured
someone might want it. Have a couple of XT systems kicking around
somewhere but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and considered 68000
processor a far superior architecture as it was an easy transition
from someone who'd spent most of their time
programming on a
PDP-11. Also have early Mac software, hundreds of 3.5" disks
which
are primarily taking up space and all of them have been copied to
HDD's and now run my Mac code under Basilisk2 was faster than it used
to run on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).
Also managed to find, in no particular order, a couple of C64's, a
TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8" floppy drive with full documentation that
I faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics place in
Seattle. Also found a box of old Univac cards which appear to be DTL
with individual transistors and then go on to having DTL IC's as well
as some old IBM cards. Used to pull transistors and diodes off these
to build my own circuits 50 years ago. Now, with storage being so
ridiculously cheap haven't even come close to making a dent in the
capacity of a 256 Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld supercomputer
of which I'm using the camera function to create high res images of
what I'm going through.
Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with XT's and progressing
upwards. Never liked 80286 and so only collected from 80386 and
higher. Seem to have lots of various parallel port adapters, disk
interfaces as well as parallel and serial port boards. Was planning
on using these as dedicated processors for data acquisition but found
that technology progressed faster than my getting around to use them
and it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC with various
sensors for environmental monitoring or a much less power hungry
Parallax Propellar chip for more demanding data acquisition
applications. (Haven't let my wife know how many of newer systems I
have stashed away but they take up way less room than old hardware).
Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which I'll probably have
to part with as I haven't used then in last 15 years. Also have a
number of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but won't be using
them. Lots of old computer books as well which would be nice to keep
but likely have most of documentation in digital form and usually
back up all important pdf files to separate drives.
The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's any interest, can
post images of what I have on my web site. Only components I've
tested are disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives are all old
and a number of them didn't take kindly to be powered off after
running for years and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.
Boris Gimbarzevsky