Subject: RE: Anyone collect Dec/Compaq Alphaservers or VAXen? From: "Rod Smallwood" <RodSmallwood at mail.ediconsulting.co.uk> Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:00:06 +0100 To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org> Now there's a story. ...

Luckily (or unluckily) I had moved on from DEC by 1985 so I was not a witness to its sad demise.

Better made products you could not want for. Despite having worked with PC's for many years. I could never see how they became preferred over central unit plus terminals for general business use.

My modest collection has beeen accrued of the last couple of years. Apart from the 11/94's (Some potato head stole the CPU cards before I got to the machines) the rest of it is running/will run. I need KDJ 11 processors for the 11/94's. They are expensive and even those intended for 11/84's are silly prices.

I also have three small Sun systems (I can't resist quality engineering)

Rod -----Original Message----- From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Allison Sent: 02 October 2007 14:46 To: cctech at classiccmp.org Subject: RE: Anyone collect Dec/Compaq Alphaservers or VAXen? Consider my leg pulled. :) No. I did get some small amounts of odd items from DEC salvage before it was shut down. Mostly things like H751A power controllers, power supplies and TU58 drives and boards. The one uVII (BA123 VIDSYS::) was a parting gift(I paid 100$ for it with DOCS and licenses) during the days of blood. For those that don't understand the post 1991 sell off of parts of DEC, that's when the DIGITAL logo went from blue to burgandy. The other was built from scrounge. VIDSYS:: is still setup for DECnet area 56.920 (one area in OGO was 56) and HIPPY:: was area 63.390 (hidden area for DECnet overflow). My 11T03 which is now the 11/73 was a gift from my boss at DEC. I kept it in the lab area for years for those odd projects but by late 80s it was obvious it was getting used less and less. He suggested "when are you going to scrap that thing?" I bring it home (on property pass) which I did. A year later when it was time to confirm and renew the property pass his answer was "what 11?". The remainder were mostly rescues. The bulk of the uVAX3100s came from UV Waterloo over 10 years ago on a if you take one you take them all and I was the only one willing to take a huge pile of uVAX3100s plus cables, VT320s VS2000s, TK50s, several TLZ04s.. Took two seperate 400mile round trips with a pickup truck filled to capacity. A fair number of those got redistributed to others as sixteen uVax3100s take a bit of space. The rest are also rescues from various seperate trips. Usually if the system is incomplete I jump on it and clean it up and restore it to life from spares. The few pending systems are due to my activities in amateur radio this year and now that I'm done with the bigger projects it's back to machines. I don't do Ubus-11s, big VAX (780s and the like) and unfortunately PDP-10/20s as most are too large to handle or power here. Also I've reached the point where excess do get passed on to others as I don't store any large number of systems either. I try to manage my collection. Those excess sometimes get cleaned up board added and moved along so they are operable and don't end up in the trash or worse. I like to power them up and play and that's incompatable with storage. There are a few small items like extra VT320s (white, green and amber), VT100s, H19, DECMate-IIIs I keep in the garage on rotation but I can and do run them there as well as it's warm enough in the winter and very dry. I keep those out there mostly to make it easier to move other stuff around in the room. What seperates me from museum is I use them, reconfigure and expand them them to suit my wishes or for fun. However, junking them is out of the questionas even basket cases are salvaged for any and all usable parts. FYI: if anyone needs parts for PDT11/1xx systems I have many CPU, memory and IO boards I'm not ever going to use. Someone took a bunch apart and then later gave me the box of boards. (ugly mutter mutter cuss cuss.) I mostly do DEC and CP/M based systems (s100, totables, SBCs) but I do have a few oddballs. For some reason the MIPS based DEC hardware never got my attention nor have the PC/clone(intel) based systems like Rainbow and VAXmate. I did have PROs (350s and 380s) but gave those away to concentrate on Qbus. Allison and PS