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On 2012 Mar 7, at 2:35 PM, Dennis Boone wrote: I thought delivery - even halfway around the world - was on the order of a half-hour.

Since the listing has been withdrawn, I can't tell what the listing was actually of. The original posting suggested a computer, but later postings seem to imply something else. And I don't get the reference to hip waders either, does this have a US-specific meaning perhaps? Regards Rob

On 3/7/12 3:29 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote: It was a relisting of the $100,000 Autonetics D17B computer frame. I suspect the REAL reason they pulled it was because he had his phone number in the listing.

Hip Waders basically equal Wellies, except they tend to go up further. Zane At 11:29 PM +0000 3/7/12, Rob Jarratt wrote: -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ |

On Thu, 8 Mar 2012, DC wrote: "Unfortunately, access to this particular item has been blocked due to legal restrictions in some countries. We are blocking your viewing in an effort to prevent restricted items from being displayed. Regrettably, in some cases, we may prevent users from accessing items that are not within the scope of said restrictions because of limitations of existing technology. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay." So please either don't post non-working links (it's an *international* mailing list!), or make the contents available in some fashion. Christian

On Mar 9, 2012, at 12:30 PM, DC wrote: Seconded. There's no indication that it might not be available to foreign readers until they chime in and say, "Hey, this doesn't work." Short of checking through an international proxy every time (which doesn't seem that reasonable, and you can always view it through one if you wanted), it's all a guessing game. I'd stop well short of suggesting you move somewhere else, though. - Dave

On 3/9/2012 3:54 AM, Christian Corti wrote: I think that's asking too much. How are link posters supposed to know (or even test) that a link might not work in a specific country, with a specific browser, or on a specific OS? -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com

and he just relisted it as I was typing the other message. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Minuteman-I-Missile-Guidance-Computer-Nuclear-Warhe… On 3/7/2012 3:29 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote:

The drum / disk is present, and may be complete. Not worth 100k, but worth more than scrap value. Jim On 3/8/2012 10:15 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

That is correct, sir. Interesting with the relisted auction again. Wonder what change was in the auction, I guess the seller closed it or revised something for ebay to be happy? I agree, I think it would be an interesting donation to a museum or such. Wish the memory was installed, that'd be neat to see. --- On Thu, 3/8/12, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On Mar 7, 2012, at 6:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Which is, in fact, what worried me when Al started talking about the "Minuteman User Group". - Dave

or and First off, there were no "memory banks" on this machine (e.g., it didn't have any form of non-volatile memory such as magnetic core) other than the disk. The entirety of its storage, working registers (with exception of some flip-flop-based registers which would lose their content when the machine was powered off anyway) was on the disk. Erasing the disk (without destroying the timing tracks) would "remove" the military's code/data. (I put remove in quotes due to discussion below). The real question is, did the military actually put a program on the machine that would securely erase the data without chance for recovery as part of the de-mil process? As we know, simply writing 0's or 1's all over a disk doesn't necessarily make the data that was there before unrecoverable. It takes some pretty sophisticated code to really erase a drive and still leave it usable afterwards using software only. I doubt that back in those days they went to the level required to actually make the data unrecoverable by someone with forensics technologies of today. If one of the disk drives in pristine form were found, and it had been "erased" by the military back in the day, it would be my guess that it might be possible to recover some or perhaps all of the content of the disk prior to its erasure using forensics technologies. That'd certainly be interesting, for sure...and might get someone in trouble if they actually succeeded in recovering the code. Even today, it's my guess that the targeting calculations are something that the government would rather still be kept secret. My guess that any machine that ended up in a school environment would have had enough cycles of different data on the disk that it would be unlikely that anything could be recovered. I suppose that it is possible that the military created a device that would hook up to the drive and would effectively erase the register and code tracks through hardware (rather than writing code to do it). That might make the recovery of the data less likely. It's all supposition, because certainly the military would not have had any interest in releasing the means by which the machine were de-militarized. In order for the machines to be usable once they were released for donation to schools, the disk couldn't be bulk erased, or the timing tracks would have been erased, rendering the machine unusable. So, either the military just loaded up a program to erase as much of the disk as possible (by writing junk to the disk, eventually destroying the erasing program itself), or through some external hardware that performed the erasure, or maybe they simply didn't bother (probably unlikely). Tough to say at this point in time, unless someone out there actually has experience dumping out the disk of the machine when they were first received in the schools. It took quite a bit of work to get these machines to be usable in a practical way -- there were some articles written about how to interface these things to various peripherals to make them functional as a general purpose computer. In their original application, they really only connected to sensors and actuators when installed in the Minuteman I missile. There was an umbilical that a console device of some kind (as well as I/O typewriter and paper tape reader/punch) could be plugged into that would allow programs to be loaded, modified, and the machine tested out, but I don't know if the external devices that connected to this I/O umbilical were included with the computer when they were donated to schools. A report from the Minuteman Computer User group indicates that some folks at Tulane university had one of the machines that they had built a number of I/O interfaces for including a Friden Flexowriter, paper tape reader/punch, and some sort of "control console". That might indicated that the military only provided the computer, and none of the support stuff that they used for loading code onto them, as well as performing testing, etc. There were over 1000 of these computers made, and it's unclear how many of them ended up in universities. It's doubtful that all of them ended up in the education system. The question is, what happened to the rest of the machines that didn't make it into the education system? Were they destroyed (e.g., bashed to bits by soldiers with sledgehammers, run over by heavy equipment)? Maybe some of them "went home" with military folks to play with? Were these machine de-militarized? Hard to say. Needless to say, it'd sure be interesting to find out if the machine for sale on eBay actually has the drive intact. It'd be really interesting to see what's on it. It'd take a bit of engineering to build circuitry to pull the data off of the drive, but not unreasonable to do. Some read amplifiers with proper thresholds to detect 0 and 1, some head selection logic, and a pretty basic microcontroller could certainly extract the raw data. I just hope that what is left of this machine (not much since it appears to be pretty much gutted other than the disk) ends up in the hands of someone who will know how to handle it properly, and go about seeing if the disk can be refurbished and made to run again. Rick Bensene

What is the ebay item #?

While doing some more searching on the Minuteman I (Autonetics D-17B) computer, I found this publication: http://books.google.com/books/about/Input_Output_Interfaces_for_the_D17B _Bus.html?id=M2r_NwAACAAJ] It'd be interesting to find this publication, though some quick searching around doesn't seem to be able to find any copies available for purchase anywhere. Rick Bensene

Looks like the original is at Fort Belvoir, Va.: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD0785128

I was really surprised it wasn't before. Words like "bomb" and "missile" in listings probably ring alarm bells at eBay. You're not even allowed to sell anything to do with firearms. I imagine they have rules about missile parts as well. On 3/7/2012 2:43 PM, Ian King wrote:

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Dave McGuire wrote: Because the auction listing called it a missile, and never explicitly stated that it no longer had a warhead! In fact, reading it, it looked like they were trying to imply that it was the whole thing!

Konrad Zuse did the opposite: he allowed the German military to believe his Z4 relay computer was actually part of a missile system, in order to obtain transportation out of Berlin. See pages 91-92 of his autobiography at http://bit.ly/zFLLF8 and his son's version of the story at http://bit.ly/xrcdKq.

I had some discussions with the fellow yesterday, Douglas. I think he updated the auction based on that. It is clear he is trying to reach out and push the buttons of someone who sees a unique conversation piece, and not a computer artifact. My biggest complaint about his listing was pointed out by Allison, and that was that it looked like it was drug out of a ditch. He has a lot of skin in the game, and if he wants to sell something like this should make a much better presentation than the ebay photos. As one says, the web / internet is forever, so anyone who grabbed these photos and stored them has a pretty unflattering snapshot of the state of this thing. He deals with antique furniture and other things that sell when they look good, and as much as he has into this, should treat the presentation of both the facts, and the image in a high quality fashion. Obviously the update to the auction was silly, and full of errors, not a good update. I'd like to wish him success but I don't know how to help him if he won't listen. Clearly noone here would want it for anything like the value he places on it, but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. If he finds it, it potentially raises the value of all older computers if it is done right. If it is done like PT Barnum doing it, it probably won't help much. Again I'm coming from the angle of hoping that the value of our collections could be recognized and placed at a level above E-waste and metal scrap. On 3/7/2012 4:11 PM, Sam Onella wrote: