Kiel PDP 10 and RP02/03 disk drives - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

2 Nov 2009

I sort of missed most of the discussion on the Kiel PDP10 but in going thru
some of the dialog I came across this quote from one postings:

...
  The Kiel museum/collectors society who were tracking
the University's
 computing department's "output" for many years saved a complete system
 consisting of two KI10 (not sure, but older than KL10) processors,
 memory, drum memory, peripheral controllers, and some peripherals. About
 25 racks. And a row of RP02/03 disk drives. And tons of cables and
 documentation. That roughly describes what has been kept in basements
 over the last years.
 ...
 They are in touch with the guy who maintained the machine (the guy with
 the lamps). He selected about five cabinets and one RP02 disk drive for
 the exhibition. The exact minimum of stuff that can be called "pdp10
 system, complete". The rest has been given away to collectors. I
 personally saved some stuff (RP drives, RS04 drives, CR10 card reader),
 the biggest part went to collectors who have in mind to get the stuff
 working again. 
I worked on the Memorex 660-1 which is the RP02.

The RP02 (Memorex) and RP03 (ISS) are really significant early hard disk
drives and I would hope the Computer History Museum would be interested in
samples of both.

Can someone give me some status - where have they gone and are any still
available for collecting?  If any are available, I can then work with the
museum to arrange for collecting them.  If they are not available, it would
still be great to know where they are for reference and possible future
collection.

Tom Gardner
Los Altos CA USA