26 Oct
2009
26 Oct
'09
4:06 p.m.
From: Allison
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 1:13 PM
[ responding to Tony Duell's comments regarding "Never run again" ]
The ususal reason for that pronouncement is the
backplane is summarily
messedup beyond belief. In some cases due to shorts or other "errors"
large sections of wire wrap being cooked. (I presume this is an early
10 and not a 20). That also means that any board plugged into it is
suspect as well. Many hours of proble and verify, unpowered!
This is almost certainly a KI10-based system, so a very early DECsystem-10.
(The marketing name was coined for these systems, to move away from the
small-system connotation that had overtaken "PDP-x".)
Repairable yes, lots of work big time yes. Worth
fixing during it's
commercial days, rarely.
In commercial days, a backplane that screwed up (a Technical Term(TM))
would have been pulled and returned to the factory. I saw that done on
a KL10 at Stanford.
At a minimum it should be kept intact as an example if
parts cannot be
used to restore another.
Absolutely.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/