On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
My parents,
too. ?In high school (1982), I had a PDP-8/L and a PDP-8/i
in my room. ?Still have them. ?The fun part was wheeling the empty
H960 rack down the street when I moved into my first college
apartment.
My childhood seems so deprived by comparison.
Combination of opportunity and luck - I've posted many times on that
-8/L. Because I had that, I knew what an -8/i was when I saw it
(because I had the 1968 Small Computer Handbook). I was called in to
"fix the mainframe" and found that mostly, it was just 60% of the
bulbs being burned out. At $2.50 per bulb from 1-800-DIGITAL, the
previous owner decided to let me haul it away rather than pay that
much in materials.
I learned more than one lesson that day - one of the most enduring is
that there's plenty of room in a VW Microbus for two DEC racks and the
stuff that goes in them. ;-)
-ethan
P.S. - I still have the Microbus, too.