another weekend tale: northstar, hp, cadr 6 & 7, et al

This is my first posting to the list. Reading about everyone else's exploits saving old systems, I have to add what I got myself into this past weekend. After responding to a usenet posting about an old computer, I discovered that the poster (who turned out to be a fellow MIT alum three states away, a fact at least tangentially relevant to some of what follows) was about to toss into the local landfill some old stuff he had stored in his basement. A nice guy, he had offered this stuff to everyone he knew, but (incredible as it may seem to this list) he found no takers. Some scheduled home reconstruction required he have the basement empty by June 1. I volunteered to drive the 3 hours one way and pick it up. So, for nothing but my time and the cost of gas, here's what I saved: 1) A Northstar Horizon. Nice condition. With 64k memory and compupro z80 boards. Plus system software (cpm and northstar dos), hard sector 5.25 floppies, and a cardboard box full of docs, including the system manuals, misc s-100 books, and even the documentation for Microsoft's Fortran-80 in its original funky rust colored vinyl binder. If anyone has any s-100 boards they can spare, and would be willing to sell, that could help expand this system beyond the cpu-memory-floppy controller basics it has now, I'd love to hear from them. 2) Two HP-86B's, with cp/m, modem et al cartridges, software for waveform and circuit analysis, plus another box full of docs. Unfortunately, no original external disk drives, so here's another thing I'm looking for, if anyone has them to spare. 3) TRS-80 Model II disk drive system. Has three 8" drives in a single enclosure. Haven't checked it out yet to see if it works. 4) The guts from both the CADR 6 and CADR 7 MIT Lisp Machines from the late '70s. These were the basis for the machines later from Symbolics. Actually, my new found friend decided to keep the steel racks for an as yet to be determined project <G>. This may have been just as well because I had no room to haul the two 6 foot tall cases back to my house. So I had to leave them behind, power supplies still attached. But I got all the internal boards, fans, cables et al from the lisp machines, including the two 5 foot tall back planes and a couple dozen boards measuring about 12" x 18" each. I'm going to try to get the cases too, but I'm not sure I'll be able to. The machines weren't running at the time he got them from someone at MIT. Steel racks or not, I may have just acquired myself a lifelong mission to search for someone who can make these work, since I'm out of my league here. Since this is a list devoted to classic computers, I don't need to go into details about the couple of 386's, monitors, and one or two hardware mutants (would you believe a Tandy-DEC hybrid?) that also got tossed into my Toyota. Altogether an interesting bunch of stuff. Frank Frank Peseckis frank(a)5points.com http://www.5points.com/