* On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 01:23:10PM -0500, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
wrote:
After typing that, it occurred to me that there are
actually
people here who only do this for recreational purposes, and there
are actually people here who had never seen or used (say) a PDP-11
when they were current technology. I suppose I need to wrap my
brain around those concepts.
It really is a diverse crowd.
I have no rational explanation for my love of old DEC equipment. Most
of it is before my time. I grew up in the heyday of home computer
proliferation in the early 1980s, and never touched a computer before
being introduced to a brand-spanking-new Tandy TRS-80 model III in grade
school. But I suspect having seen "real" DEC computer installations at
the University of Connecticut in the early 80s must have had some effect
on me, and probably instilled the curiosity in computer history that
eventually led to a lot of building spelunking in college.
[As an aside, I'm still extremely bitter about what happened to the DEC
collection I and some friends amassed while I was a student at Cornell.
We'd been finding PDP-11s, peripherals, DEC terminals, even a MINC-11,
and had convinced the responsible parties to let us have them for free -
they were just going to the scrappers after all. We'd collected them
together in the common area of our dormatory as an impromptu display,
and to have a nice area to hack on them. Then winter break happened. At
some point over the break, the dorm staff decided it was all garbage and
had the lot carted off and thrown away. I was understandably quite angry
- more at myself than at them. If only we'd put them in our rooms over
the break... ]
-Dave
-Seth