All right, now that I have your attention, I would like to give a report of my amazing weekend trip to Fort Worth. The most important development of this weekend was my PDP-11 devirginization. Yes, for the year or so that I have been into this hobby, I have rescued or acquired several PDP-11s. Until this weekend, however, I had never applied power to one. Many of these vintage machines are sufficiently different from the PCs I grew up with that learning about them is like rediscovering the computer itself, starting from scratch. There has always been a fear within me of not knowing how to operate one of these machines after applying power to it. Other machines have received no power because I am waiting for my electronics knowledge to develop; these machines will be disassembled, tested part-by-part, and reassembled when that knowledge is sufficient. Despite my inactivity, I have somehow known that I would love exploring these machines once powered. That last prophecy has fulfilled itself! I visited Owen Robertson while in FW, and we powered up his 11/34. He showed me a few things -- how to load RL01 packs, where the power switch was, etc. -- and we proceeded to play with the machine. There are problems with the RSX-11M pack he has, so I loaded up an XXDP+ pack. After printing and reading the help file, I experimented and was able (after some trial and error) to -- drum roll, please -- load UPD2 and create another bootable pack with XXDP+ on it! It would be a minor task for many of you, but it is a major milestone for me. I am now PDP-11 devirginized. Owen and I also scoured a few scrapyards in the DFW area. Highlights of our combined finds: - DEC TS05 - DEC rack spacer panels, rail slides, etc. - DG MPT/100 (looks like a TRS-80 Model III) - DG Nova 3 chassis - Two Sun 4/110 towers. - TRS-80 Model III, diskless, with 16KB RAM (Identical to my first computer except for the extra 12KB :-)) - A Lanier word processor (I believe of the kind Pres. Carter used) - CBM PET 8032 - Three IBM 5150 PCs Eric Dittman was going to accompany us but was called away on business. It's too bad we didn't do this a week sooner. The scrappers had just finished destroying what was a very nice PDP-11/60. I at least found and took the unit numbers from the RK07 and RP0x drive. By the time we were finishing up at the second scrapyard, it was raining heavily and *muddy*. It will be interesting to see what lives through being rained upon. Also, as it turns out, a pallet full of desktop 386 PCs isn't useless after all: you can lay them in puddles and form a walkway to keep yourself dry(er). We referred to the process as 'uninstalling Windows'. -- Jeffrey Sharp The email address lists(a)subatomix.com is for mailing list traffic. Please send off-list mail to roach jay ess ess at wasp subatomix beetle dot com. You may need to remove some bugs first.