unsubscribe ---------- From: Anthony Clifton To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers Subject: Re: DEC Scrounging & SWTPC 6800 Update Date: Thursday, September 04, 1997 5:21PM (BTW, I'm going to leave this thread public because I think it might be of interest to collectors new to the PDP series and who might run across machines like this.) controller Well the backplane looked about half full roughly. So this is sounding a bit more hopeful. I have $10 a month to spend on this machine for electricity at about 8 cents per kilowatt hour so.... I didn't have ALOT of time to look the machine over but I did look in the back of the cabinet containing the TU80 and the RA80 and saw a sticker that said "30 amps" which I ASSUMED referred to the RA80. I only ever owned RL and RK series drives when I was collecting PDPs in the early 90s...what are the size etc specs on the RA80? A friend of mine and I built an 11/34 system with 2 or 3 RK series drives and an older model DEC 9 track drive. So I'm not completely ignorant but I'm still getting used to the CURRENT state of the art in throwaway PDPs. Aha! This IS sounding alot more hopeful. Basically, if I could come up with a controller to drive modern SCSI drives or something a bit less power hungry, I could probably afford to run this guy at least all weekend every weekend or something like that. Hmmm...I wonder if there's any market for converting 9 track media to more modern forms? It'd only take $60.00 a month, with modern drives, to run the beastie 24 hours... perhaps less. =-) Hmmmm...what's strange is that they claim they upgraded the drive around two years ago. Upgrading TO an RA80 seems a bit strange in 1995. But the front of the drive said RA80 so.... this Sheesh. I guess that's true...the print set for my old 34 was several 'books' of many pages a piece if I recall correctly. Ummm...if anyone has the print set for an 11/84 they'd like to go to a good home then let me know. =-) (If not, I'll probably run across one one of these days.) The machine DOES work apparently and the guy who operated it showed it to me today. He claims that it worked fine when they shut it down 2 years ago (yeah yeah I know) and it's just been sitting in the corner since then. He claims that if I plugged it in, which I didn't have an opportunity to do, it would come right up into RSX. We'll see after next week. One other obstacle is that it all has the funky twisty safety plugs on the AC cords but it's configured for 125 v etc so I'll replace the plugs, like I did on my 34, with high quality normal ones. Anthony Clifton - WireHead Prime