4 Apr
2007
4 Apr
'07
2:45 p.m.
OK, I bought one of those boards on eBay a few years
ago.
I sent an email to Gordon Bell to establish provenance.
See below. I sent him a picture of the board.
I do not dispute TCM selling boards.
Gordon Bell wrote:
I don't believe the origin can be traced to any
machine, since there were no serial numbers, and the modification level would also be too
hard to correlate with any time or place.
The Museum got a large number of spares and scraps of all kinds from Digital and it was
undoubtedly one of those.
This does nothing to prove that TCM ever had a PDP-6.
Someone else wrote:
>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).
And:
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.
These statements also do not prove TCM ever had a PDP-6. Verbal
testimony from a witness is actually very weak evidence, as any lawyer
knows, especially if not done under oath and from so long ago ("I'm
hazy on dates"). Human memory is often corrupted by age, emotion,
similar events, etc..
Anyway, the last paragraph seems to indicate that a PDP-6 (or parts of
one) never even made it to TCM. If that is the case, people have been
bad mouthing TCM for many years when they shouldn't have. If DEC
scrapped a PDP-6 - the whole story changes, as well as the whole moral
landscape of the situation.
None of this changes my opinion.
--
Will