My classiccmp non-retirement :-)

Those of you following this list for the last few years know about my "giveaways". I've been getting rid of stuff that has sat in my basement or garage for a number of years without getting touched. In my hardware heyday, I would spend every moment of my free time playing with Q-bus, Unibus, or S-100 hardware. I also had my foot in the water w.r.t. PDP-11 OS releases (in some cases both feet in the water) in the late 90's and got to do a lot of fun things with very specialized classic hardware (CAT machine backprojectors hooked to PDP-11's, for example). But since I got a "steady job" in 2000 running a $10 Billion peripheral, factored in with three young kids, I didn't have the time to treat the hardware well. All of it has gone on to find good homes, and I want to thank the volunteers who helped me get rid of it. There's still a few items but they have owners allocated already :-). I still do tinker with electronics, but my attention as of late is on analog circuitry (often with microcontroller assistance) rather than older bus-based computer systems. I've also acquired a few R-390A's that I'm happy to say are on their way to being cleaned up and restored. (OK, the R-390A has a digital display on the front, but it's not digital electronics!). And I will still endeavor to take care of the PDP-10 software archives, the DECUS PDP-11 and PDP-10 collections, etc. It's been years since any software was donated to those archives so I haven't put a lot of effort into them. But it's good to know that there a are a couple of PDP-10's around the world that are now usefully "up" thanks to the archives. I've made a few attempts to break into the professional archiving world w.r.t. digital media, but so far I've been universally ignored. Of course, those who ignore me would rather just talk about the problem rather than solve it. So maybe that's why I don't register on their radar. You have seen and probably will see me rant and rave on this subject occasionally! So that's my non-retirement. I hope to keep involved and do relevant things into the future, and in the past few months I've been browsing this list more than I did in the early 2000's. Tim.