On Wed, 18 May 2016, Ben Sinclair wrote: Hee hee. I thought so, or perhaps I was just looking for company in my mock-misery :-) That thing looks rad. It's partially made from wood. Bonus. Aww man! Hehe, right on. Are you going to run NeXTStep or something else on it? Did you get a color framebuffer by chance? True, but the 7000 had an interesting form factor and shape. I loved by 8000, though. -Swift

In my case nothing too spectacular, but I do rather wish I had kept the MIPS DECstation 5000/240. Regards Rob

On Wed, 18 May 2016, George Currie wrote: Grrr! I hate when folks do that! I don't really know why, but anytime someone talks about scrapping old kit for the gold, I get irritated. I know, it's their stuff, and they can dispose of it how they want. To me it's like buying a Stradivarius violin and scrapping it for the sprucewood. -Swift

On Wed, 18 May 2016, Benjamin Huntsman wrote: Whoa. That's a really "cute" machine. What are those drives in the front, flopticals or just cool looking 3.5" floppies ? I'm looking at this: http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/photos/hp_hp150_1.jpg -Swift

On Wed, 18 May 2016, Jarratt RMA wrote: There have been a few minor changes in the disks, mostly the shutters, over the years. 1) The first one that I saw did not have a shutter. I don't know whether that was intended, or merely a shortcut to try to get the first engineering samples out the door. 2) The next ones had a manual shutter. Manually slide it to open, manually slide it to close. 3) The first ones that I saw on an HP150 I think may have been "pinch" disks. If you slid the shutter open, it latched. Or, if you banged the disk on the table (which couldn't have been good for the life of the shutter latch) Some computers opened it automatically. When you took the disk out, the shutter was still open. There was a spot on the corner of the disk to "pinch" that released the shutter, and it closed. Some were labelled, "PINCH", some just had an arrow pointing to the pinch spot. 4) When automatic shutters (as used now) appeared, many of the disks still had the arrow pointing to the pinch spot. 'Course now that was "to show you which side of the disk goes into the drive". Some of the early disks had a breakout tab for write-protect, before they went to the slider.

I am not sure I should read any more of this thread just before I head out to the Dayton Hamvention (http://hamvention.org). I no longer want to bring anything to put up for sale. I may need to have the spouse take away my wallet. Thought the amount and quality of vintage computers has been on the decline over the years, you still never know what ?I really deserve that? item will show up in the flea market. Jerry

My regret list is quite long but at the top are: 1. Three Apple 1 computers including one in the box with all the extras and a personal letter from Steve Jobs telling what keyboard to use with it. 2. A working Bendix G-15 that was in my classroom in the early 1970's. 3. A working Burroughs B-3300 4. A Univac Short Code manual from 1952 And soon I can add to the list my entire collection as it is moving to a new home next month.

I may have access to one. I do have the disk drive for sure. Actually on D-17, and a I think a spare set of boards. Not eyeballed it though. On 5/18/2016 3:32 PM, Pete Lancashire wrote:

On Thu, 19 May 2016, Pete Lancashire wrote: Being born and raised in Texas (and Alaska, too a bit) I have friends and family who really live for shooting holes in things and/or setting them on fire. I'm not as bad off as them, I only do such things once a year or so. Last year, I had the opportunity for a bit of a reunion. Of course, being a special occasion, one of my more colorful (and frankly fun) uncles wanted to take me out and celebrate my being in town and also his own divorce. He told me he'd sued his ex-wife to get her to give her car back to him (he bought it for her right after the divorce... long story). It was a gaudy Honda Del Sol with a bunch of fru-fru including .... mag wheels (and thus my hand is revealed). He wanted to put it back to stock and re-paint it. So, he pulled the ghetto-style magnesium wheels off. We took two of them (still in good condition, but he didn't care) out to the part of the local landfill where people do the needful with firearms. After his divorce, he got himself a Barrett .50 and he wanted to show it off (at $6 a round, ouch). So, we first shot an old toilet. Me with a 22/250 and him with The Fifty. Uhh, he "won" for sure (the thing just exploded). Then we started shooting up the wheels. It was awesome. One shot sends a wheel up about 8' in the air and then it bursts into blinding-bright flame. Of course, then the other folks shooting out there wanted to come over and take shots. Eventually, they were blackened shredded blobs. The moral of the story is, magnesium is cool and rednecks with guns *can* be fun in the right setting. -Swift

Things I wish I had not gotten rid of... Convex computer PDP-8S Perq 1 Xerox 8010 (x5) Singer system 11 proto boards Singer 1654 calculator prototype Friden 7102 ascii terminal Intel iPSC Peter Wallace Mesa Electronics

On Thu, 19 May 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: I got lucky on the list maybe a year ago and Bob Rosenbloom helped me get my Q-bus VAX itch scratched again ... I've got a microVAX III+ now and a microVAX III as well. I've done a pretty good job of rebuilding my stash of Q-bus spares ... but I'm still down a SCSI board and I've never seen another microVAX I around... Ah, well, the KA655 is more functional ;) I loved this box and it was the only desktop PS/2 (really, the only Intel x86-based machine) I had ever intended to really preserve as an exhibit. It had the P60 processor complex (with FDIV bug!) and I had just totally loaded it down with all my best MCA finds accrued over the years. XGA-2, dual SCSI buses, dual Ethernet, Token Ring, etc. I even found a MCA FDDI card I had intended to install in the machine, but never got round to it. OS/2 would drive the little front panel LCD in a cool way. Probably won't have the chance to get another one without paying mad money these days. Now, huge was the PC Server 500! ;) It was a neat little thing and it had probably the best laptop keyboard I have ever used. Just awesome. It sat in the trunk of my car for years and got carelessly chucked out during a clean-out. I miss it now ... it was just about the perfect vintage for a DOS box for a number of applications and it was rock-solid, too. Arg. Yeah, this one was a custom build using a PM6100av as a base, with the 486 DOS card out of a 6100 DOS Compatible that I scrapped out. It was a tight fit, but it all worked! Fun little novelty for the time ;) I still have a (plain) PM6100 DOS Compatible (with dead PSU) and also a PDS Reply 486 DOS card for the Quadra 800 ... I haven't been able to get either one of them working again, to my chagrin ... I'm still working on it. It's tricky to line up just the right version of the System with the right version of the DOS card software. The primary value in these to me was that they were built on the rather obscure Clipper CPU. I never was able to use them because I didn't have a monitor, keyboard and mouse and there wasn't enough documentation around to even figure out if and how to use a serial console with them ... my recollection is that Intergraph was not very hobbyist-frendly. I never had any CLIX media and no other OS ever supported them. I do wish I still had an example of a Clipper CPU (and I pop up and look for them occasionally) but to make up for it, karma gave me a cheap MVME181 a few years back so I suppose my collection is down one strange RISC chip and up another ;) Oh, just an empty BA123 enclosure ... no boards or drives but otherwise complete with Q-bus backplane, PSU, console bulkhead ... pic here: http://www.netbsd.org/images/machines/vax/microvax2-ba123.jpg The guts were the aforementioned lost microVAX III ... I had moved the cards and disk into a smaller BA23 cabinet so it took up less space and used less power ... I was running it fairly regularly at the time ;) Best, Sean

On 19/05/2016 18:07, "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: I have a MicroVAX I too, it's the only machine I've got with an RQDX2 controller and I think it doesn't work. Last time I powered up I just got an @ prompt. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

One thing I still get a pang of regret about was throwing away a working VT180 back in '97 or so. Work didn't want it and I just didn't have the room for it so in a skip it went. Countless VAX4000s also went skip-bound. I priced one of them up before it went, when it was new it cost ?95k. That still stings a bit too. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

On Thu, 19 May 2016, Pete Turnbull wrote: Those look really cool. I remember seeing them in computer mags when I was uhhh, 7 or 8 years old. Drooled. I still have 2 Indys. One R4600/200 and one R5000/180. I also have a Challenge S with an R4600 in it. These are easy to warehouse, but I probably need to hoard up some Dallas clock modules for them, since they often go bad and lose their MAC. Hmm, I always thought the "paper white" terminals were the neatest of the monochrome terminal ilk, but I'm not sure if any DEC VTs were ever made that way. Oh man, I threw away a bunch of serial and SCSI cables at one point only to have to buy the same ones again years later. Ugh. Agreed. I have some dream of building a nice man-cave with individual 2-3 workstations setup at any given time for me to tinker on and a full bench off to the side to work-on/fix stuff. However, then I wake up in suburbia and remember how much the price per sq/ft is, now that real estate is back in the stratosphere. -Swift

- Gave away a PDP 8/F for free - Sold a Tektronix 31 which I now regret. - Did not take a free Apollo DN10000 and an also free PDP11/44, both because of space constraints. - Had to leave around 7 Philips P856/P857 minis in the trash, only kept one and the core memories of the others But then we all have our stories.. Jos

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 10:54 PM, Eric Christopherson < echristopherson at gmail.com> wrote: I thought of the most recent one, probably about a year ago. It was before I had gotten into this community and thereby had my horizons broadened; so at the time all I cared about was working Commodore, Sun, and NeXT stuff, with maybe a little SGI interest. It was a local Craigslist posting I saw: Harris 800 super-mini computer circuit boards - $1 (Janesville) 4 full sets of working circuit boards for the Harris 800 super-mini computer, including CPU. Like I said, I didn't care much about getting non-working stuff (or stuff that would only work if I had a whole super-mini to put it in), but because it was Harris (which I previously mentioned wanting) I was sort of interested. But I never called; was worried about the size of the collection and the actual price (not really $1 I assume). I finally called a few months ago but just left a voicemail, which was never returned. I called the number again just now to see if the set had in fact been sold or given away, and got an actual human. I asked if the boards were gone and she said yes, and I said did someone actually take them, and she said yes. Not a really chatty person. I'm kicking myself for not asking where they came from in the first place, but I feel like if I called back now with that question I'd seem like a pain in the butt.

On Wed, 18 May 2016, N0body H0me wrote: Yes, this was the king daddy M68k classic-mac, IMHO. I wanted one of those. I saw them at several customer sites in the 90's and I thought they were a bit bean-counterish, but still cool. Whoa. Bizarre. That thing has a huge power supply for a machine that size. There is also massive capacitor in there (I think that's what that is). I'm pro/for/cheerleader for any kind of computer that looks like stereo equipment. I've always wanted a machine with Vue meters for CPU and RAM capacity :-) http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/MP_P/M6809/6809_side.jpg Another 70's "made outta wood" box. Shame I wasn't old enough to appreciate all those. Those were awesome. I was so jealous of friends/cousins who had them. My cousin had some C64 game that had enhancements for the 128. It was little wizards running around teleporting through pentagrams and shooting fireballs at little devil dogs. I can't remember the name, but it rocked on the 128. I remember playing that and being in awe of the 128 (hey, I was probably 10 or so). -Swift

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Geoffrey Oltmans <oltmansg at gmail.com> wrote: Gah! Spoke too soon, I'd also like to have one of the few Amiga 1000s back and also a DEC Pro/350 that my Uncle gave me when it became obsolete for him.