5 Oct
1997
5 Oct
'97
6:28 p.m.
William Donzelli <william(a)ans.net> wrote:
Don't worry, I didn't take it personally! It's just that all too
often, I can't promise much better for an artifact than that I'll look
at it, stick it in a folder and then in a file box in my storage
closet. I'm not real happy about that.
As I recall
you wanted some sort of justification and I really
couldn't think of anything beyond "yeah, I'd like to get a look at
that" -- really I figured you would find other respondents who could
offer it better homes.
There is a reason I did that. In a previous giveaway,
NSFnet stuff,
I was flooded by lots of people simply wanting the tape drives and nothing
else (there was one exception). This did not make me very happy, as I felt
that many of the respondants did not care about where these drives came
from, rather that they were free drives. Much of this old NSFnet stuff
(there is more free stuff to come - I unearthed some of the OOB modems,
useful when the network crashed) really does have far more historical
value than actual value. These machines (the RS/6000s with appropriate
other things), numbering 75 or so, were the "Internet" for some time,
and fuelled its explosive growth thru the first part of the 1990s, until
the other ISPs started to appear.
Yeah, I remember the RS/6000 episode, it was shortly after I subscribed to
the list.
I have to admit that I was thinking about those RS/6000s too. But what
I was thinking were the somewhat more mundane questions of how best to get
one out here to California, where I would put it once it got here, and
what I would do with it. See comment above about the storage closet;
I have way too much stuff there already.
Well, with a sufficient number I would be more inclined to put 'em in
use for their intended purpose -- moving IP datagrams around. But
there's probably newer hardware to do that sort of thing while not
needing as much space, cooling, and/or electricity.
OOB modems? Is OOB a brand name or an abbreviation for "out of band"?
I am not saying that the Sphere papers are of real
historical significance
- the company simply did not last very long, and in my opinion, was a
producer of junk - but anything Sphere is very rare.
Yep, and I really couldn't justify (to myself) being selfish about it.
Speaking of NSFnet stuff, I may be able to get some of
the really old
stuff, when the network was built with RTs, token rings, and 56 K DSUs. If
I can get one of the old RTs, would the Vintage Computer Festival people
be interested as a door prize?
Aiyeee, token things! Those also sound interesting, both because
they're RTs (another thing I'd like to dink with, someday) and because
of what they did.
Speaking of old Internet stuff...how many copies of the BBN report
1822 (on the host-IMP interface) do you think are floating around out
there? Wollongong (the mysterious office that I have alluded to in
other posts) had at least two and was preparing to toss both of them, I
think I steered one back toward the library and snagged the other for
my collection.
Back to SS-50:
I have seen very little as well. That says something,
as the boards tend
to really stick out in the crowd. They never reached the popularity of the
S-100 stuff, and was probably made in quantities much smaller than just
about every other bus.
I've found something else that sticks out in a crowd: I/O cards for the
HP 2100-family machines. (No, I haven't forgot about pulling those manuals
for you and Tony, just haven't cleared the space and time to really go
through them.) Today I picked up a TTY I/O MUXR card. The etched part number
is 12584-60136. No manual, but still in its bag. Date-codes on ICs seem
to be 7106, 7123, 7122, 7303. $0.50.
-Frank McConnell