How much should I pay for a Decstation VT78?

--- Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> wrote: Cool... that's on my wish-list, too (I have almost every other model... still missing 8/S, 8/f and 8/m) I've been looking for substantially longer than two years. Some of my newer stuff came from the local university - they used to use WPS-8 in some of the departments. The father of a grade-school classmate of mine would bring machines home to use there as they threw out one model after another. I managed to get a 42" racked -8/a w/RX02, a DM-I and a DM-III through him. Even cooler, by the principle of Classic Attraction, I found the desktop add-on for the DM-I cart at the surplus barn (marked $5) and on another visit weeks later, I found the mounting bracket (Free!) If you aren't familiar with the DM-I, it is a PDP-8 crammed into a VT-100, typically sitting on a typing-height pedestal with one or two RX02 drives built in with the drive mechanisms stacked vertically, 2 or 4. There is usually a keyboard shelf that clips onto holes in one side of the pedestal. Optionally, there was a table-top that had only one side-panel; the drive pedestal held the other side up. There was a bracket for the keyboard slots that held up the edge of the table. While it would be nice to have the VT78 cart, I wouldn't be unhappy to get one without. The drives are going to be standard RX drives inside (I forget if the VT78 used RX01 or RX02), but the packaging and cabling might be difficult to locate now. If you are lucky, it's the same as for the DM-I (DB-25 on the drive with a board that runs the pins from a DB-25 to a Berg-40; DC-37 on the CPU. There were two cables available for the DM-I - one with one DB25, and one with two. One of these days, I'm going to make the double-header cable so I can run a second set of floppies from my DM-I, but that's a low-priority project). -ethan -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com