PDP-10

The BPA (Bonneville power administration) dumped a bunch of Wang transistor / Core memory calculators in 1977 and a local surplus/scrapper picked them up for sale. The calculator "brain box" was priced out of my budget, Something like $30.00. I did pick up a $5.00 display head with Nixie display and Microswitch keyboard and proceeded to disassemble it for parts. The other regret was a missle control system by I believe, Singer. a small cast metal box with flex backplane and stuffed with gold plated stacked flatpack MCM modules. I fould some amazing components, A zener reference Mil-spec was listed in the mot catalog for $180.00. -jim -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Mouse Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 5:48 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: PDP-10 I think if I were to do unpleasant things to people who ruined working hardware out of ignorance as a kid I'd have to start with myself and follow up with just about everyone who was lucky enough to have hardware to play with at that age. There once existed a rather nice desk calculator, with Nixie - or something indistinguishable from them from what I can recall - display tubes, and some rather interesting guts that I suspect was SSI at most, probably bit-serial or digit-serial or some such. I poked around inside it. By the last I recall of it, it probably wasn't good for anything but harvesting parts, like the Nixies and the keyboard, from. I'm not sure whether I regret meddling with it. I have little doubt I broke it, but I'm not sure what I learned in the process wasn't worth it, though it's been long enough I'm not sure what that covers. I do regret losing the remaining pieces; if nothing else, I'd like to have those display tubes. But, last time I went looking for the remnants, I couldn't find any of them, and that was at least a decade ago, so it's likely in a landfill somewhere. I do have some faint hope it's in the hands of someone who appreciates it.... /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B