CRT decay

On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, Tony Duell wrote: It's an IMLAC PDS-1. It's perhaps the coolest computer on the planet, but it needs a little work. I pulled it out of a garage on Saturday where it had been sitting for a very long time underneath a dryer vent. The hot moist air greatly accelerated the aging process of the display. The computer itself is built into a desk, and the desktop shielded the guts I'll try to get some pics up on the web, both for the purpose of showing the damage and for bragging. According to the previous owner, it was basically a PDP-1 clone (capable of running SPACEWAR!). According to another source, it might be a PDP-8 clone: << The Imlac was a minicomputer (what you'd call a workstation now) that was sort of an expanded PDP-8 with a built in vector display processor. It was programmed in assembly language. Imlac's big product was a phototypsetting system, CES, which took advantage of the raster graphics to offer a kind of WYSIWYG interface for the typesetting. This was before laser printers. I got the machine from a venerable LISP hacker (same source as the 11/45 Sam mentioned). One of his housemates (the phrase "hippy commune" wouldn't be completely accurate, but you get the picture) was one of the original hackers at MIT. I asked him something about the PDP-1, and he whipped out his PDP-1 manual to verify his answer! Somewhere, it was marked PDP-8, and he explained that that wasn't the model number, it was the serial number! In any case, it'll be interesting bringing the PDS-1 up, and the most obvious component that needs work is the display (and missing keyboard). -- Doug