3 Jul
2008
3 Jul
'08
4:07 p.m.
On Thursday 03 July 2008 07:21, Marden P. Marshall wrote:
On Jul 3, 2008, at 7:06 AM, David Griffith wrote:
I built an H11 for a company I worked for back in 1978. Their price for the
whole system was several thousand or so, I forget exactly, but that
included the DECWriter too.
The CPU board came "pre-wired" (I'm guessing because it was a 4-layer
board?)
Just in case anyone's interested,
someone's selling a Heathkit H-11 on
Ebay (#380042473453). Looking at the card cage of the thing, it seems
that Heathkit simply cloned some DEC boards. What's actually going
on?
They didn't clone the boards. They're real DEC boards. It's
basically a dumbed down LSI-11, very similar to something like a
PDP-11/03. from DEC and the rest of the boards in there were
Heath, and I wired 'em,
including the backplane.
We started out with only paper tape with that system, which was great fun
when a storm would glitch the power briefly -- stick the absolute loader tape
in there, type in the bootstrap loader to load that, put the BASIC tape in
and load that, then put in the last tape you'd punched for whatever program
you were working on. After a bit they added a dual floppy drive. All this
with the hard-copy "terminal" being used. Later they got a Zenith terminal
to talk to it with, but that was a bit after I'd left them.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin