Any interest in "newer" hardware, software? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

25 Jul 2020

Mike:

Just looked in more detail at photographs of my 
notes in drive box and appears I did verify that 
drive motor worked in 1987.  Project to get this 
drive connected to my C64 got derailed by my 
being accepted to medical school a couple of 
months after my last interaction with that drive. 
Was somewhat surprised to discover that 8" floppy 
drive as I thought the Vic20 box had my other 
TI99 computer which might have been lost at some 
point in last 30 years and multiple moves.

Never had a chance to try reading an 8" PDP-11 
floppy in it and no longer have any as all of 
them went to Glen Slick in 2008 when he got my 
MINC and related hardware.  There was an 
interesting computer surplus store in Seattle 
that I no longer recall name of, but one of 
landmarks was a company that sold Buffalo Wipes 
nearby.  Unfortunately places like this no longer 
exist and remember it being crammed full of 
various bits of electronics that would have to be 
lifted out of way to see what was buried 
underneath.  Easy to spend a day in there poking 
around.  Everything was as-is and often just good for parts.

Location you've specified as a means of 
transferring drive a good one and a short drive 
...
 from Kamloops and one I like doing but 
unfortunately limited to Canadian side of border now.

Did run across a couple of 80486 boards today and 
must have played with them as found some 80 Mb 
HDD's in same box.  One was fully loaded with about 8 Mb of RAM!

Boris

...
 A lot of the younger collectors are spending 
ridiculous amounts of money on 486 & Pentium 
class machines on assorted facebook vintage and 
retro groups.  I don't get it either, but 
everyone has their fetishes and I try not to 
judge.  Parted out you can possibly get a couple 
hundred bucks out of a machine if you get lucky.

I personally might be interested in an 8" floppy 
drive, mainly to show my coworkers, some of whom 
didn't know such things existed.  I'm also 
vaguely interested in one of the PDP 11/23s, but 
I know it's already been vetoed by my wife 
without even asking.  ????  Any VT100-compatible 
terminals in the stash you'd be willing to part with?

I'm down in Seattle, and occasionally get up 
that way while camping, but this year you might 
as well be on the moon.  Maybe we could arrange 
to meet on the border near Oroville and Osoyoos, 
and you can throw them across the border.

-mike

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On 
Behalf Of Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:36 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?

Have been going through my shop and storage room 
trying to see what can get rid of and wasn't 
aware of how much old electronics and computers 
have accumulated over last 50 years.  Should 
note that this process has been at insistance of 
my wife as a lot of these boxes just got moved 
whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked at for decades.

Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3 
but then figured someone might want it.  Have a 
couple of XT systems kicking around somewhere 
but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and 
considered 68000 processor a far superior 
architecture as it was an easy transition from 
someone who'd spent most of their time 
programming on a PDP-11.  Also have early Mac 
software, hundreds of 3.5" disks which are 
primarily taking up space and all of them have 
been copied to HDD's and now run my Mac code 
under Basilisk2 was faster than it used to run 
on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).

Also managed to find, in no particular order, a 
couple of C64's, a TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8" 
floppy drive with full documentation that I 
faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics 
place in Seattle.  Also found a box of old 
Univac cards which appear to be DTL with 
individual transistors and then go on to having 
DTL IC's as well as some old IBM cards.  Used to 
pull transistors and diodes off these to build 
my own circuits 50 years ago.  Now, with storage 
being so ridiculously cheap haven't even come 
close to making a dent in the capacity of a 256 
Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld 
supercomputer of which I'm using the camera 
function to create high res images of what I'm going through.

Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with 
XT's and progressing upwards.  Never liked 80286 
and so only collected from 80386 and 
higher.  Seem to have lots of various parallel 
port adapters, disk interfaces as well as 
parallel and serial port boards.  Was planning 
on using these as dedicated processors for data 
acquisition but found that technology progressed 
faster than my getting around to use them and 
it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC 
with various sensors for environmental 
monitoring or a much less power hungry Parallax 
Propellar chip for more demanding data 
acquisition applications.  (Haven't let my wife 
know how many of newer systems I have stashed 
away but they take up way less room than old hardware).

Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which 
I'll probably have to part with as I haven't 
used then in last 15 years.  Also have a number 
of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but 
won't be using them.  Lots of old computer books 
as well which would be nice to keep but likely 
have most of documentation in digital form and 
usually back up all important pdf files to separate drives.

The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's 
any interest, can post images of what I have on 
my web site.  Only components I've tested are 
disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives 
are all old and a number of them didn't take 
kindly to be powered off after running for years 
and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.

Boris Gimbarzevsky 