PDP 11/44

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:56 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I was going to suggest "in adjusted dollars", but checking $100 in 1998 vs 2009, it only comes out to $130. Not enough to matter (even $100 from 1980 to today is only $256 - barely enough to matter, and more than twice as old). Mine was free in 1999 - recovered after a Y2K project was done extracting information from it. I hope to someday find a disk for it that will hold 2.11BSD, though I suppose going through what I have on hand could work - a UDA50 and either an RA81 or an RA70 (if the RA81 is still good - at least it's not one of the ones with sketchy HDA glue). I would want more than $100 for the CPU in any case, but I don't think I'd fuss if I tried to sell it and it didn't fetch $750. In my experience (local to Ohio, not close to Maynard where DEC machines fell like ripe fruit from the trees from the stories I've heard ;-), the 11/23 and 11/34 are probably the most common PDP-11s to be had from any era, with the possible exception of the DEC Professionals. The 11/03 was common at one point here since they were the cheapest -11 DEC sold for many years, but the mid-1970s was a long time ago, and they have since ascended the right curve of the bathtub-shaped price graph due to age. I wish 11/73s were more common - that's one I still don't have, but only because I never chose to plunk down money for one (I was past the need commercially when they were dethroned). Amongst these, I would class the 11/44 as somewhat uncommon - folks who bought one new needed Unibus for some reason and needed Split I&D (or they probably would have bought an 11/24) and didn't want to spend real money on an 11/70. If they were buying PDP-11s and didn't need Unibus, they probably would have gone with a loaded 11/73. I saw plenty of 11/73s in the mid-1980s, and only 1-2 11/44s ever. They filled a niche, but not a very large one in my observation. -ethan