Bill Sudbrink wrote: I you only knew :) I've made some finds in the local trashcan, but three eights? that is awesome, in the original meaning of the word. /P

From: Antonio Carlini Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 10:15 AM Trust me on this: It would pay for a lot more than a new car! Rich Alderson Server Engineer, PDPplanet Project Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell

Anyone heard any more about this 8 in Sussex, no reply from the topic starter. I can only answer for the PDP-7, as far as we know only 2 PDP-7's survived, with a rumour that there might be a third in Australia. One is here - http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/dec/pdp7/agi/ Second is here - http://cc.uoregon.edu/cnews/fall2001/pdp7.html - this has been decommissioned and moved to a museum, where escapes me for the moment. We have a page for PDP-7 info and a list of the 99 known systems of the 120 built here - www.soemtron.org/pdp7.html Regards, Mike Hatch Looking for a PDP-7 (some hope!) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pontus" <pontus at update.uu.se> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 7:27 AM Subject: [personal] Re: PDP-8/e and terminals in West Sussex, UK

I should have remembered that site, I've looked at it just some month ago. Anyway, do you have any more details on serial number 12. The words "Tek Hogskolan" sounds very Swedish (Tekniska H?gskolan). But there are a few of them, perhaps I should get my phone book out and do some investigation :) Regards, Pontus.

From: Mike Hatch Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 2:10 AM While I can get to the top page, I get a "Missing file" page when I try to retrieve anything--and the same page when I click on the "Report a problem" button on the Missing File page. Rich Alderson Server Engineer, PDPplanet Project Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com (206) 342-2239 (206) 465-2916 cell

What do people consider to be the 'holy grails' of classic computer collecting? That is, what machines are : a) Not known not to exist any more -- so we exclude things like ENIAC where there's aboslutely no chance of finding an original b) Sufficiently uncommon to be a 'real find' It would appear form the above that the PDP7 and PDP9 qualifiy. I would add the PERQ 2T4, possibly the HP9831 (the Australian site claims they're very rare, but I am not totally convinced). -tony

Tony Duell wrote: Interesting question. Are we limited to production machines? For me, prototypes actually seem to hold more interest - it's fascinating to see how a prototype evolved into a final product (or how bits of it were re-used in other products), or to see from the various hardware hacks which bits the designers were having trouble making work. Oddball architectures appeal, too - parallel / multiprocessor systems, those which use a secondary processor for bootstrap / monitoring, those which use an uncommon CPU. Then there's graphics-heavy systems - I can always appreciate (and relate to) something with a lot of attached graphics hardware. I'm not too fussy I suppose - I don't tend to go after specific machines, but just see what shows up. Having said that I would *love* a Connection Machine CM2, although I probably wouldn't know what to do with it - but you can never had too many blinkenlights :-) Now that I have the space for it, I do really want to find something *big* to play with - not necessarily rare or anything, but a few cabinets of mini or mainframe would be fun to screw around with (maybe a PDP-11 and some storage / I/O would be nice, then I could perhaps understand what all the fuss is about DEC machines :-) cheers Jules

On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Chuck Guzis wrote: Once you've tried a Sinclair as a doorstop, you'll never want to go back to Packard Bell or eMachines

On Wednesday 05 November 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: That's not quite true. Computers have a much higher heat capacity than air per unit volume, so you probably end up effectively heating the same amount, you just have a "capacitor" like effect that makes the temperature change more slowly. After filling about 1800 sqft of office space to a high density with computers, the effect is quite obvious. I do not run nearly as much or as often as I wish I could. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Chuck Guzis wrote: Maybe that's the thought process that leads to things like the VAX wet bar. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

On Wednesday 05 November 2008, David Griffith wrote: FWIW, the (original) VAXbar was supposedly made out of a VAX that had been stripped of most of its internals for use as spare parts, before the people who modified it got it. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Jules Richardson wrote: Is that just prototypes that made it out of the door in some form or other or any prototypes at all, including cancelled projects? I should have stuck my hand up to claim a prototype wire-wrapped DHV11 a few (hmm, quite a few!) years ago now. I have various boards that were various projects that went nowehere. I have even more documents for project that never got as far as hardware! My VS4000-90 has green wires on it and is an early proto (although only just pre-production ... it does work very well!). My DECnis 500 may have some prototype boards in it (or available for it). But anything after that era that I've been involved in is somewhat less "interesting" as a prototype. I don't have any of the Riverstone SRP cards, but the first pass cards had all the bits on them (although not all necessarily glued on the right way by the factory!). The next pass fixed the issues and worked (IIRC). The rest of the work was just fixing the (soft) logic and the software. So if you have an early proto, it's basically cube art and if you have a later proto, it's essentially a production item (except maybe for the metalwork). Perhaps protos that don't quite make it out of the door ("the market has moved on, this'll never sell") are more interesting. To "map" the development process of anything I've worked on since about 2000 or so, you'd need an electronic paper trail plus emails. The hardware just isn't breadboarded in the same way any more. It does become obsolete much more quickly though! Which means you can more easily acquire kit which (a) was way beyond your pocket but is now free (or almost so) and (b) might actually be useful to you now rather than just "fun". Antonio

On 5 Nov 2008 at 16:53, Jules Richardson wrote: I'd love to have the wirewrap TTL protos of some of the early microprocessors. Do any survive? Cheers, Chuck

On Wednesday 05 November 2008, Tony Duell wrote: Would something like a Purdue Dual VAX count? VAX-11/780s are known to exist, and not exceedingly uncommon, but I'd be surprised to find an intact dual-VAX setup, though I hope to put one together some day.. In any case, I think that most machines from the 1950s or early 1960s (that weren't 1-offs) would fall into this category. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

I would say it would. No. I don't know much about the Purdue hack, but I know it wasn't a 782. The 782 was DEC doing a dual 780 their way; the Purdue machine was George Gobel (I think that was the name) doing it his way. I don't know enough about either way to be comptent to contrast them, but everything I've heard says they are quite distinctly different. (I know this because, time was, I was OS support for a robotics researcher who was using a dual-CPU VAX - a MicroVAX-II with a KA620 added on - and as a result I learned a little about other multiprocessor VAXen.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Patrick Finnegan wrote: Very interesting. I was wondering if anyone here has something like an emulated 11/780 running an appropriate version of BSD accessable. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

DEC deliberately made it difficult to get a KA630 without a MicroVAX around it - as it was explained to me, they didn't want people second-sourcing KA630-based machines. The KA620, which was just a KA630 diddled slightly so that VMS wouldn't run on it, was much more available. (The difference is, P0 and P1 page tables live in physical space rather than kernel virtual space.) But if you _did_ have a spare KA630, you could slap it into any AB/CD slot in a MicroVAX chassis, plug in the ID module and set it for an ID other than zero, and - assuming software - run a dual-CPU MicroVAX. I know about this because, in my time in academia, a researcher at the lab I was working at did just this for robot control - one CPU for the main OS, one to run the control law. (I wrote the (tiny) kernel that ran on the second CPU.) He actually found a hardware bug in the KA620/KA630 IPC hardware - it dropped some small percentage of interprocessor doorbell interrupts. Once located, DEC said it should never have worked at all; the only reason it did was that the board was overdesigned by a factor of something like five or ten - an etch run crossed the whole board and, when combined with the pullup resistor, the signal rise time was usually but not quite always quick enough. The fix was a reduced pullup resistor. I think that, as long as ECOs for KA6[23]0s were available, you could get the fix done for you just by knowing what to ask for; they didn't proactively push it out because most people weren't doing multiprocessor machines, and most of the people who were didn't mind losing a tiny fraction of the doorbell interrupts. (I think it was something on the order of single digits per thousand....) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Could say that about many machines but then something pops up right next door, E.G. the 8/e in Sussex, I know lots were built but how many came into the UK. I know there was a PDP7 within two miles of where I am now, but it's so heavily policed, literally, there's no chance of getting in to check. Would add as "real finds" - SDS 930 series Leo III Elliott 80x series Mike mike at soemtron.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 9:22 PM Subject: [personal] Re: PDP-8/e and terminals in West Sussex, UK >> I guess this has been discussed to death in other places(and here to), >> but given the knowledgeable readers of this list, I'm just to curious >> not to ask. >> >> How many linc-8, PDP-7 and PDP-9 survived? I've only seen one of each, >> and only one in the flesh so to speak. Do they carry any value? or are >> they simply to large for the general computer affectionado? > > What do people consider to be the 'holy grails' of classic computer > collecting? > > That is, what machines are : > > > b) Sufficiently uncommon to be a 'real find' > > It would appear form the above that the PDP7 and PDP9 qualifiy. I would > add the PERQ 2T4, possibly the HP9831 (the Australian site claims they're > very rare, but I am not totally convinced). > > -tony > >

It was, but there is still a surprising amount of kit on the site, I was still installing equipment there in 2003/4. Unofficial photos on the web show the computer room pretty much as it was many years ago, but it appears to be just old PC storage now. They went for localised PDP11's, some of them are still in the control rooms apparently. NGTE did have the knack of removing old equipment and shoving it into old buildings. Mike. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jules Richardson" <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 1:37 PM Subject: Re: [personal] Re: PDP-8/e and terminals in West Sussex, UK

On 05/11/2008 10:20, Mike Hatch wrote: Me :-) I need to make arrangements to pick it up and bring it to York, which won't be immediately, and then I need to find time to clean it up, make sure everything works, and then inevitably fix the parts that don't. I don't even know for sure what boards are in it yet, but it would be nice to get some sort of mass storage on it (RX02 would do, if I can find a controller) and run an O/S for demonstrations. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York