G'day there,
Although I've been watching this list for a few months now, this is my
first post to the cctech mailing list so I guess I should start by saying
hello from Perth, Western Australia. I've been collecting DEC machines
and Commodore 8-bitters for about eight years now, and I've recently
started collecting members of the Apple ][ and Macintosh family. (While
I'm yet to pick up any big iron PDPs, I do have representatives of DEC's
PDP-11, VAX, MIPS and Alpha families.) I've also managed to pick up
members of the PA-RISC, SGI MIPS, SUN SPARC and IBM RS/6000 families,
though this part of my collection is much less comprehensive.
Anyway, on to the topic of my message --- currently up for sale on eBay
is a set of RSTS/E and DECnet/E tapes. I've been playing around with
RSTS/E, TOPS-20, and earlier versions of VAX/VMS, Ultrix and BSD UNIX
in the hopes of setting up a limited ARPAnet-era free public access
network, and while I do have some RSTS/E 9.2 boxes running under simh,
they're basically standalone. Now, some RSTS/E and DECnet/E tapes have
come up for auction on eBay (see
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/DEC-Software-Kit-RSTS-E-Tapes-More_W0QQitemZ18016620…)
but there are at least two problems: (1) the current set of RSTS/E
9.[257] and DECnet/E 4.1 tapes are listed for AUD 595/795 for Buy It
Now, and (2) I don't have any tape drives older than a TK50.
So, should this auction lapse, and in the off chance that I can obtain
just the DECnet/E tape, I was wondering if anyone here (1) has a 1600
BPI tape drive with which they can image a tape or two, and (2) lives in
Australia. Of course, if anyone already has a copy of DECnet/E that
they're willing to share, I'd appreciate that even more as the seller
doesn't make any guarantees about his tapes' quality or usability.
Many thanks in advance,
Pete