Tony Cole's Cray-1

At 17:30 29-04-98 +0000, Philip.Belben(a)powertech.co.uk wrote: There were folks who took a late-20's/early 30's radio which was built into a beautiful wooden cabinet and turned it into a piece of furniture by gutting it. Then there were the late 40's and early 50's TV cabinets which met the same fate. At least I've rescued several of each of these kinds of receivers for my collection. Anybody remember seeing (or even heard of) the HP250 business computer? Hewlett Packard offered it built in two ways: one was a desk-like arrangement while the other was the standard box-like cabinet on wheels. Electronically, both were pretty much identical except the desk or console style had a CRT display built into it. I've got the wheeled cabinet style 250/30 system with separate terminals (a HP2622 variant). The computer cabinet is the same dimensions as the typical HP7908/HP791x fixed disk drive units. Used the processor from the HP9845 with probably a bit different microcoding to allow multiple users and/or strictly business style useage. Gotta find more on this sometime soon. That's right. I have several 33's. One is an exceptionally clean/unused one I got in 1985 from a group of test equipment from the IBM Endicott plant which was shut down around then. Just right for my DG Nova 1200. It's a noisy thing especially when I used to hook it up to my R390 communications receiver through a terminal unit and listen to RTTY (radioteletype) in the ham bands or commercial traffic elsewhere in the shortwave frequencies. That 33 was probably one of the last 33's built at the TeleType Corp. plant. I can check that out with the folks in the Greenkeys listserver group. --Chris -- -- Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian Jamestown, NY USA Member of Antique Wireless Association URL: http://www.ggw.org/freenet/a/awa/