rarest computers. was: RE: Xerox Alto Restoration + Emulation

Hi ben A good picture of it can be seen at: http://www.omahug.org/vcf40/v02.jpg ( the Wyse terminal is not original ) It was used as a processing unit for a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. This did chemical analysis. The upper part of the panel is related to the data acquisition while the lower part is the blinking lights part. Mine has 12Kx20 of core but they also had a 24Kx20 setup with an expansion chassis. The 12K core comes in 3 stacks. Most used a hard disk but mine is floppy bases. I'm always looking for more programs to run on this ;) Sellam has another one of these and there is a fellow in England that has one as well. These are the only remaining machines that I am aware of. These were in competition with the Varian machines of the time. Nicolet was one of the last manufactures to make core bases processors and made processors for use on subs because of cores resistance to radiation. The instruction set is funny as well. It used the typical conditional skip instruction of the time but the ALU was interesting because it used a 5 port input. It has hardware for doing multiply and divide because it's primary output was the result of doing FFT's on the data input. Fast multiply and divide are desirable. I have running a BASIC ( with matrix operations ), an assembler, an editor and several games. I also have a floating point package as well and some diagnostic programs. Any more specific questions? Dwight