26 May
2011
26 May
'11
12:24 a.m.
Ok,
My initial brief inspection of boards, I missed one. It's the M8417 which is
the memory board. YEAH!!
So, The back plane is populated by the following boards, From top to bottom:
M8315
M8317
M8316
empty
M8417
empty
M8410
M8411
empty 3 slots
M8433
empty 3 slots
M842
empty
M8655
empty
M8357
It appears its a 20 slot back plane of course, there are a few empty spaces,
is this important on an omnibus back plane?, Or should the boards be
continuous?.
It seems that there are a rat's nest of cables balled up in the back cavity,
so I would assume all cables are present but I will unravel them all
tomorrow.
The console is one of the minimal consoles and not the programmers.
There is a broken latch on one of the floppy drives,
The desk has all four casters, but don't work well, I will need to put it on
a wheeled dolly anyway to move it around. Usually when I acquire a classic
computer in one piece, it means that it was working when taken out of
service. It's when parts are missing (probably cannibalized for other
working units) it usually means the computer did not work. Aside from the
monitor a VT50 (which may show up at another auction) was missing. It even
had some of the pdp handbooks. But alas, not OS/8 diskettes :-(
Cheers
Tom P
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote:
Great Find Tom!
One thing I'm not sure about is weather you have a 12 slot or 20 slot
box. The 12 has one G8016 or G8018, and the 20 slot (which is a LOT
heavier) has two of the regulators. I have memory boards, and if you
need any feel free to contact me off list.
Good Luck!
Paul
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Tom publix <ittybittybytes at gmail.com>
wrote:
So I finally got my hands on a pdp8/a at the
University auction. It's the
omnibus model that's built into a desk and called the Classic, short for
CLASSroom Interactive Computer. I had no idea it was so heavy as it was
loaded for me into the back of my pickup. I discovered it must be real
heavy
as the my F-150 groaned when loaded and when I
came home and unloaded I
almost herniated myself. There it sits, almost complete (without the
VT52)
but has an extra RL01/RL02 board. Is it the desk
that gives it the
weight. I
know the dual RX01 are heavy, but the are the
cage, power supply and
boards
real heavy in these things or is the DESK to
blame. Until I put it on
something that I can move around, it will sit in my driveway. I can run a
terminal cable and an extension cord out to it to maybe boot it up after
I
do some more research on it to see if all the
boards are there.
One thing is not clear.n looking at the board numbers, it seems it
doesn't
have a memory board, but it might have memory
aboard the CPU card. Is
this
right? It uses the newer cmos memory. It has the
three board set that
also
was used in the KIT-1, but it also has a variety
of other boards that
I'll
write down as soon as I can.
Cheers
Tom