14 May
2015
14 May
'15
9:20 a.m.
I decided to put the 11/44 on Ebay for $1, no reserve. (currently at
$40.39).
New photos (what is on ebay plus what I took today after opening the
cabinet to see what is in there)
http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/PDP11-44_2nd/
Ebay listing
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Digital-PDP-11-44-/271869650084
Item is pickup only BUT If you can't pick it up but want to make
arrangements to have a shipping company come to pick it up, pack and ship,
I am happy to help but it's on you to make all of the arrangements. I am
available during the work day.
Location - Landenberg, PA which is about 40 minutes South/west of
Philadelphia, about 60 minutes North/east Baltimore, 10 miles or so from
I95 at the MD/Delaware border.
vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm
Bill
14 May
14 May
10:53 a.m.
That's a neat system. Too far away for me to consider buying, but I'm still
enjoying the pictures.
The rust looks scary.. I hope that the PCBs aren't badly corroded. That would be my
biggest worry as a potential buyer of the system. I see some signs of rodent nibbles on
ribbon cables inside the tape drive, but those are easily replaced.
I wonder what that lower card cage is for? It's not for the internal TU58 tape drive,
which is self-contained and uses a plain async serial port.
I think this will be a cool project for the auction winner.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
10:57 a.m.
That's a neat system. Too far away for me to consider buying, but I'm
still enjoying the pictures.
The rust looks scary.. I hope that the PCBs aren't badly corroded. That
would
be my biggest worry as a potential buyer of the system. I see some
signs of rodent nibbles on ribbon cables inside the tape drive, but those
are easily replaced.
I wonder what that lower card cage is for? It's not for the internal TU58
tape
drive, which is self-contained and uses a plain async serial port.
I think this will be a cool project for the auction winner.
--
Good question - not sure what the card cage is used for, I was not
expecting to see one in there when I opened it today. Fortunately the
computer itself is not corroded like the card cage in the bottom of the
cabinet. Worst case you can remove the 11/44 from the cabinet entirely.
Bill
11:30 a.m.
On May 14, 2015, at 07:57, B Degnan <billdeg at
buzz1.com> wrote:
Good question - not sure what the card cage is used for, I was not
expecting to see one in there when I opened it today. Fortunately the
computer itself is not corroded like the card cage in the bottom of the
cabinet. Worst case you can remove the 11/44 from the cabinet entirely.
I think the cabinet is worth retaining and restoring. In my limited experience, it's
easier to find naked DEC computer units than it is to find them in their original rack
cabinets. The internal TU58 is also worth restoring, even if the drives and/or controller
board need to be replaced.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
11:55 a.m.
I think the cabinet is worth retaining and restoring. In my limited
experience,
it's easier to find naked DEC computer units than it is to find
them in their original rack cabinets. The internal TU58 is also worth
restoring, even if the drives and/or controller board need to be replaced.
--
And, it's not that bad really, the pics expose the problems / rust so
people get the full story. Hires photos always make something look worse
than it really is.
b
3:01 p.m.
Hi Bill,
The box on the bottom looks like a BA11-KE expansion box with two 9 slot
backplanes it in. Since the 11/44 has a few DD11-CKs in it, the ones down
below might be for mass storage like a RH11, RK611, TM02 or 3, etc.
Might be worth checking it out. It could up the value some.
Paul
On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:55 AM, B Degnan <billdeg at buzz1.com> wrote:
I think the cabinet is worth retaining and restoring. In my limited
experience,
it's easier to find naked DEC computer units than it is to find
them in their original rack cabinets. The internal TU58 is also worth
restoring, even if the drives and/or controller board need to be replaced.
--
And, it's not that bad really, the pics expose the problems / rust so
people get the full story. Hires photos always make something look worse
than it really is.
b
17 May
17 May
3:52 p.m.
On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Bill,
The box on the bottom looks like a BA11-KE expansion box with two 9 slot
backplanes it in.
Agreed. I finally found the updated picture album (oh, and it looks
like mice got to the TU58 serial cable, but that's easy to replace).
Since the 11/44 has a few DD11-CKs in it, the ones
down
below might be for mass storage like a RH11, RK611, TM02 or 3, etc.
It's a bit fuzzy from the green solder mask, but I think I can make
out "M7299" on the copper of one of the cards, which is, I think, one
of the boards in an RH-11.
Might be worth checking it out. It could up the value
some.
Absolutely.
-ethan
14 May
14 May
12:37 p.m.
On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
> On May 14, 2015, at 07:57, B Degnan <billdeg at buzz1.com> wrote:
>
> Good question - not sure what the card cage is used for, I was not
> expecting to see one in there when I opened it today. Fortunately the
> computer itself is not corroded like the card cage in the bottom of the
> cabinet. Worst case you can remove the 11/44 from the cabinet entirely.
I would definitely recommend keeping the cabinet. The 11/44 really
wants to be in that exact cabinet vs a generic 19" rack.
I didn't see any pics of the lower card cage, but I wonder if it's an
SI9900 or similar. I saw there are two cards of an "SI controller" on
the Unibus. What Systems Industries did was to have a host controller
(Unibus, Qbus, CMI bus...) and a pair of 40-pin cables to a generic SI
controller that worked with everything, that also had individual SMD
or other disk interfaces. I've worked with the SI9900 on a couple of
boxes. For our 11/750, it acted like a DEC controller for RM03 and
RM05-type disks, and even used the same driver, but unless you had
certain models of SMD disk that exactly matched DEC-supplied drives,
you had to patch the drive geometry table each time there was a new
release of VMS (we had a Fujitsu Eagle that was like an RM05 but
larger, so we had to use the patched driver. We also had a 160MB Fuji
drive that was exactly like two RM03s so we could boot from them with
no trouble). I don't know a lot about Systems Industries on PDP-11,
but it has to be similar. That controller might resemble an RH-11 or
something DECish. You just need drives (and cables) to suit.
-ethan
3354
days inactive
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7 comments
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participants (4)
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billdeg＠buzz1.com -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
nf6x＠nf6x.net -
useddec＠gmail.com