25 Jul
2020
25 Jul
'20
2:03 a.m.
Mike:
Just looked in more detail at photographs of my
notes in drive box and appears I did verify that
drive motor worked in 1987. Project to get this
drive connected to my C64 got derailed by my
being accepted to medical school a couple of
months after my last interaction with that drive.
Was somewhat surprised to discover that 8" floppy
drive as I thought the Vic20 box had my other
TI99 computer which might have been lost at some
point in last 30 years and multiple moves.
Never had a chance to try reading an 8" PDP-11
floppy in it and no longer have any as all of
them went to Glen Slick in 2008 when he got my
MINC and related hardware. There was an
interesting computer surplus store in Seattle
that I no longer recall name of, but one of
landmarks was a company that sold Buffalo Wipes
nearby. Unfortunately places like this no longer
exist and remember it being crammed full of
various bits of electronics that would have to be
lifted out of way to see what was buried
underneath. Easy to spend a day in there poking
around. Everything was as-is and often just good for parts.
Location you've specified as a means of
transferring drive a good one and a short drive
from Kamloops and one I like doing but
unfortunately limited to Canadian side of border now.
Did run across a couple of 80486 boards today and
must have played with them as found some 80 Mb
HDD's in same box. One was fully loaded with about 8 Mb of RAM!
Boris
A lot of the younger collectors are spending
ridiculous amounts of money on 486 & Pentium
class machines on assorted facebook vintage and
retro groups. I don't get it either, but
everyone has their fetishes and I try not to
judge. Parted out you can possibly get a couple
hundred bucks out of a machine if you get lucky.
I personally might be interested in an 8" floppy
drive, mainly to show my coworkers, some of whom
didn't know such things existed. I'm also
vaguely interested in one of the PDP 11/23s, but
I know it's already been vetoed by my wife
without even asking. ???? Any VT100-compatible
terminals in the stash you'd be willing to part with?
I'm down in Seattle, and occasionally get up
that way while camping, but this year you might
as well be on the moon. Maybe we could arrange
to meet on the border near Oroville and Osoyoos,
and you can throw them across the border.
-mike
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On
Behalf Of Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:36 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?
Have been going through my shop and storage room
trying to see what can get rid of and wasn't
aware of how much old electronics and computers
have accumulated over last 50 years. Should
note that this process has been at insistance of
my wife as a lot of these boxes just got moved
whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked at for decades.
Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3
but then figured someone might want it. Have a
couple of XT systems kicking around somewhere
but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and
considered 68000 processor a far superior
architecture as it was an easy transition from
someone who'd spent most of their time
programming on a PDP-11. Also have early Mac
software, hundreds of 3.5" disks which are
primarily taking up space and all of them have
been copied to HDD's and now run my Mac code
under Basilisk2 was faster than it used to run
on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).
Also managed to find, in no particular order, a
couple of C64's, a TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8"
floppy drive with full documentation that I
faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics
place in Seattle. Also found a box of old
Univac cards which appear to be DTL with
individual transistors and then go on to having
DTL IC's as well as some old IBM cards. Used to
pull transistors and diodes off these to build
my own circuits 50 years ago. Now, with storage
being so ridiculously cheap haven't even come
close to making a dent in the capacity of a 256
Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld
supercomputer of which I'm using the camera
function to create high res images of what I'm going through.
Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with
XT's and progressing upwards. Never liked 80286
and so only collected from 80386 and
higher. Seem to have lots of various parallel
port adapters, disk interfaces as well as
parallel and serial port boards. Was planning
on using these as dedicated processors for data
acquisition but found that technology progressed
faster than my getting around to use them and
it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC
with various sensors for environmental
monitoring or a much less power hungry Parallax
Propellar chip for more demanding data
acquisition applications. (Haven't let my wife
know how many of newer systems I have stashed
away but they take up way less room than old hardware).
Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which
I'll probably have to part with as I haven't
used then in last 15 years. Also have a number
of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but
won't be using them. Lots of old computer books
as well which would be nice to keep but likely
have most of documentation in digital form and
usually back up all important pdf files to separate drives.
The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's
any interest, can post images of what I have on
my web site. Only components I've tested are
disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives
are all old and a number of them didn't take
kindly to be powered off after running for years
and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.
Boris Gimbarzevsky