http://wps.com/temp/Black-Hole-02-Sep-2004/ Just a few photos I took. The ND812 (not 811) is visible, the CDP1802 thingies, some Gray Era IBM, etc. Also a pic of Ed (left) and Frank. The search warrant from the latest harrassment [1]. THe LGP-21 at home (mine). The specialized LGP Flexowriter, changes not restricted to keyboard and charset. (Note the black keys -- those of course are the machine's order codes (instructions), eg. "B" is "BRING" (load accumulator from memory). Imagine you have 400 transistors arranged as a calculator, and NO SOFTWARE OF ANY KIND. The hardware is arranged such that, when the machine is executing an INPUT instruction, if you type the following keys B 1 2 0 3 ' the bit pattern generated by those keystrokes *IS* the 'BRING 1203' instruction. Voila! Who needs an assembler or compiler?! The trailing ' character is decoded -- by the INPUT instruction hardware! -- to mean 'stop shuffling characters into the accumulator and proceed with the next instruction in memory' which has the unpleasant side effects that you cannot input ordinary text from the keyboard into the machine, nor input the ' character at all. Every character input must be terminated with ' (aka "CONDITIONAL STOP"). So much for text editing on an LGP-xx machine (a typewriter and salaried secretary was cheaper). If you are clever though, and need to input a data table, say, into a running program, you do so by arranging the data as 'instructions' that go directly into memory, and not input and handled by the target software. At 2500 instructions/sec this is umm helpful. (I'm surprised the space key wasn't assigned this function, but I guess text input wasn't seen to have much use, and debugging with spaces would be a lot harder than '.) tomj [1] Ed's a big anti-Lab (LANL) activist and crank letter writer. During the Wen Ho Lee fiasco, Ed took some old 5" hard disk and put a SECRET sticker on it, left it on his desk (you can see in the photo what that looks like...). Pretty standard junkyard humor. Mr. Lee visited Ed (who was a big supporter during the mess) after jail, so Ed gets to say "Hey Wen, we found your disk drive"). Fast forward to July 04 -- "disk drives missing from the lab!". Likely some Ed-detractor (there are many up there) called the FBI, who shows up one day, and basically takes the joke-SECRET-disk, plus some old cartridge tape. The search warrant was dropped by the next day (so much for procedure). So of course the best recourse is to put SECRET stickers on everything -- which of course Ed has done. (Reported with a lot less fanfare was the later discovery that no disk drives were in fact missing from the allegedly unwatched safe, only some of those fancy inventory stickers, which were determined to have not been applied to any property. The entire episode proving that their system was WORKING, in that they were in fact tracable, after an interval. Anyone who's worked with this sort of property tracing system knows that this is exactly how it's supposed to work, but it doesn't make for glamorous news.) (As an aside, the TV news from Albuquerque said that this year's balloon festival (a zillion annual hot-air balloons ... big event) will have tighter security, apparently to prevent 'terrists' from hijacking them? Using them to bombard citizenry?!)