At 1:27 AM -0500 11/10/06, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote: Don't be, they're still around in industrial settings. They just keep working so why spend the money to replace them. They're still around in various settings, industrial, scientific, business, etc. They're used for such things as electron microscopes, spectrum analyzers, controlling parts of nuclear plants, etc., PDP-11's are still big business. In some cases it's because they're still working, why spend the money to replace, in others it would simply cost more to replace than it does to keep them running (typically places where qualifying new HW/SW can cost insane amounts of money). Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On 11/11/06, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote: Nice setup. I don't know how useful the 128K of RAM is under OS/8, but I remember there was a bit of support for it under RTS-8. ISTR you could roll your own application-level support for memory above 32KW, but OS/8 itself wouldn't twiddle KT8A registers, except, perhaps, for a 96KW RAM disk. Does anyone have any clearer memory on this? (I have a KT8A and 128KW MOS board, but haven't used them in too long to remember details). Ow! It _is_ a larger PDP-8 setup than most. -ethan

Dave McGuire wrote: I'll help if I can grab one of the rk05's.... -brad

Jerome Fine replies: I don't have any estimates as to how much "insane" might be, but as a wild guess, from 10 to 1000 times the actual cost of the associated software and hardware for the actual system. So if a typical PDP-11/73 system might have cost $ 20,000.00 new (back in 1985), then the complete application, including associated software and hardware interfaces might be from $ 200,000.00 to $ 20,000,000.00 for just one subsystem. At Ontario Hydro, a typical 3,000 Megawatt station might have cost $ 10,000,000,000.00 to build, so the PDP-11/73 system would be only a small, but critical sub-system. Jay - did you get my reply. Why did you want to contact me? Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.

You wrote.... Yes, I did get your reply... I'm swamped... I will get back to you soon as I get a moment of time. Jay

Paul Anderson wrote: grrr... sorry bout the wasted electrons folks.... was supposed to go private.... doh ! -- Curt