23 Jul
2014
23 Jul
'14
1:57 p.m.
If you are willing to drive, there's an 11/34 in Edmonton, Alberta, right??
Might be as good an opportunity as any. The 11/34 is a nice little example
of a mini; not too small, not too big.
Finding a genuine old mini out in the wild, or having one fall into your
lap like the guys up in Alberta did is a fairly long shot nowadays. It's
just been so long since that hardware could conceivably have been in
production, anywhere. I got my 11/34a back maybe 15 years ago and even
then, I knew I had gotten lucky. Most equipment will be in the hands of
collectors already and convincing them to part with it will be difficult
and/or expensive, LOL.
Tony is absolutely right, you will likely want to focus on DEC because they
were the biggest vendor of minicomputers, there is lots of support out
there in terms of full schematic print sets, ROM dumps, software
documentation, protocol specs, pinouts, etc. Most common parts, you can
still find without too much trouble (for a price). Don't waste time with
IBM stuff because it is all very proprietary and unless the system is 100%
complete and running as decommissioned, you will have very low likelihood
of ever getting it online because you will not be able to get parts or
software.
Data General ran a distant second place behind DEC, you might keep your
eyes out for that, although DG parts, software and documentation are not so
easy to find like DEC stuff is... Honestly I have never, ever seen a piece
of DG equipment in the state of Michigan.
HPs are another make that you may have some hope of finding, depending on
where you look. HP 2000s, 3000s... I would say state of the market is
similar to that of DG; tends to be obscure relative to DEC, but there's
some info out there.
Anything else, I think it would be really an exercise in futility to try to
find them... PR1MEs, TI-990s, etc.
If you are finding the 8-bit home computers dull (and I don't blame ya, I
never found them very interesting myself) there are other, easier avenues
you might follow for interesting projects; it's not too hard (or expensive)
to find the bits to assemble a little LSI-11, at least then you can play
with a real hardware implementation of the PDP-11 instruction set, or maybe
consider S-100, Multibus, VME equipment for a little bit of a challenge.
That's not so hard to find, there's some fun to be had with that type of
stuff.
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Hey guys, kind of burnt out on the micro computer stuff, I want
something that will challenge me. So im looking for a Mini computer of
some sort, PDP or something along those lines, a vaxstation seems
interesting too. Ill be at VCFMW
Let me know what you got, and what you think is best, Im kind of a
noob to them.
I'm goign to get flamed for saying this, but it basically ocmes down to
DEC or somebody else :-)
The advantage of DEC is that they are well-known, there are lot of
manuals, etc. So you will not have problems finding inforamtion on them
The advantage of soemthing else is that they are less well known, so you
will ahve to work thigns out for yourslef in a lot of cases. Which is how
you learn a lot.
Personally I'd avoid IBM. They used a lot of custom ICs, no schematic
sare avialable for many of the minis. Whch would put me (as a hardware
hacker) off them.
But, IMHO, you should grab any machine you can find. My first mini was a
Philips P850 (don't pretend you've heard of it), afiarly rare 16 bit
machine. I had the schematics for the processor and the user manual and
not a lot more This was my first entry into machines built from simple
TTL logic chips, and I learnt a lot .
My second machine as DEC. But perhaps not the best DEC to start with. A
PDP11/45 with MMU and floating point. I did, again, have the schematics
for soem fo it, but I had to modify one of the expansion backplanes to
take th eRAM board it had come with, I also didn't know the instruction
set. Yes, again, I got it workign and learnt a lot.
This was before the web, of course, s o Icouldn't jsut look on bitsavers.
I was figuring out what I could from whatever books/manuals I could find.
You want to think why you want a mini. Do you want a lights-n-switches
panel? Dp you want a procesor built from TTL (or discrete transistors), or
would one using a single-chip processor be OK. What do you intend doign
with it?
-tony