25 Jan
2004
25 Jan
'04
10:15 p.m.
William Maddox wrote:
I believe it was just a bare CPU. There was some
discussion of a few months
ago.
I caught the tail-end of the discussion just as I joined the list. I
believe it was actually
someone on the list who bought it!
The 8/S is actually very rare machine. Although they had a good run
(comparable
to the Straight-8), the performance was very poor, unlike the Straight 8
that held up rather
well in performance (though not price) against its successors. There
weren't too many of
them saved. From some pictures I saw, it appeared to be an excellent
specimen, too.
Certainly if your interest is "DEC collectibles" rather than a nice running
setup, this machine
would be a valuable one to have. Why do people value the Straight-8 so much
when the
8/E was the pinnacle of the family in terms of the kind of system it would
support?
Certainly, if you just want to run an 8, you'd be best advised to avoid the
Straight 8.
<snip>
I didn't know that the 8/s was that rare, I do know that it was the
economy model and had a horrid
serial architecture that resulted in it's so-called performance.
The straight-8, on the other hand, was a lovely machine, with it's long
toggles and incandecent lamps.
I suspect that my fingers still know how to toggle in the dectape
bootloader from memory.
Damn, Now I want one, and with the Tek 8002, dectapes and a swap drive,
just like the OMSI 8, Beep.
If I did get an 8, it would probably be a 8/E. the straight-8 is a pain
to debug, but with a drawer full of
transistors and discretes, always repairable. Maybe not that one in the
basement :-(
Jim Davis.