Today we got to visit two donors and preview some of the things they have for us. The first is rehabilitating the 1894 Standard-Times Building in New Bedford, MA. Even in its derelict state, this building is beautiful. We have been offered the paper's old computer systems on the 4th floor. The elevators are gone however and removing them would involve either bringing each rach down a narrow winding staircase for the whole 4 floors, or high level defenestration. The good news is that the donor will bring the equipment to the sidewalk for us to load. The systems are two identical DEC PDP-11/70's that seem to date from the early 1980's. There are two CDC 9766 drives and a nice DEC LP26 printer, plus 6-8 terminals. The systems have not been powered on since 1996. They also seem to bear the name of an aftermarket supplier - Systems Industries?- and some sort of system name, which I cannot remember, but suggests typesetting. Our second visit in East Providence, RI let us view the ca1930-35 Art Deco transmitting facility of WEAN. Although not 100% original, the bulk of the original features are there, including the original black and chrome decor. The original transmitter has been replaced twice, but an 80's era Harris MW-5A is the main unit, with a 40's era RCA as a fully functioning backup. The building itself is cast concrete with the main transmitter rooms flanked by office and attendant's living space. This is truly a beautiful building. As most space is now used for storage, we looked over and were given a Printronix, a GE paper terminal and a Data General Nova 4, all in excellent condition, and an American Anadex printer.

All I call is the beautiful RCA broadcast transmitter logo in red and black. It's either ca 1942 or 1948, but incredibly beautiful. The backside is somewhat reminiscent of an Ardent. It's about 5-6 feet tall and 12-15 feet long, plus an external transformer. Easily 3times the size of the Harris. The Nova is also ex-WEAN, apparently. If only the building could be restored. Some of the glass brick has been replaced with cement block. When we get moved, you'll have to come see the new warehouse. On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, William Donzelli wrote: M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc. Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." - Ovid

--- William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> wrote: My first 11/750 had an SI9900 on it from the day it was used by the original owner. My 11/70s also have SI9900s - they are, in their simplest form, a 5.25"-tall rack-mounted box with cards that talk to hosts (over MASSBUS for the 11/750 and 11/70; over Qbus or Unibus for "lesser" machines), and cards that talk to drives (SMD, as far as I've seen). You can pack several of each kind on their respective sides of the enclosure. The 11/750 controlled two drives and had a total of three cards (one host, two drive) I know they made wads of other, less elaborate, interfaces. The 11/70s also came with SI-badged tape drives, in 60" Corporate-Cab- style cabinets. I haven't seen an OMNIBUS SI controller for Diablos, but the PDP-8/m-based Mass Spectrometer at the Vet School at Ohio State had a different brand of dual-ported controller - the operator would switch a drive to face the -8/m that ran the mass spec, collect samples, then flip the drive to face the -8/m that had the Tektronix terminals, analyze and print the results. I'm sorry I never got that machine when they dumped it - two CPUs, 24K of core each (IIRC), two 4014 terminals, a 9-track mag tape, 4 or 5 Diablo model 30s, and a Xebec? dual-ported OMNIBUS disk controller, all in 4 racks! At least I got to play on it when the mass spec was being torn down and cleaned. :-) -ethan The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo http://search.yahoo.com

--- Jeffrey Sharp <jss(a)subatomix.com> wrote: Hmm... how nasty. I've never used the Unibus interface. I have what I _think_ are a couple of Qbus interfaces (spares from an old SI FS guy), but I've never even installed one to test. I have no such experience, but we had Fuji drives, not CDC drives, and we weren't using a Unibus interface, so YMMV. I doubt it was MSCP unless that was done on the Unibus/Qbus card itself. We used the VMS DRDRIVER on the 11/750 (and its equivalent under SysV and 4BSD, IIRC). One perpetual problem we had was that our big drive was a Fuji Eagle, which does not equate to any DEC drive capacity. Our choices were to ignore massive amounts of storage, or patch the driver. We were dependent on SI for upgrade after upgrade. It would have been a real nightmare, except that our system drive was a Fuji 160MB disk (with the translucent lid) that appeared to be two real RM03s to the VAX. No patches required. As far as the VAX thought, there were a pair of 9762s out there on the end of the cable. I think a Fuji Super Eagle matched up closely enough with something real that you didn't have to patch the driver if you had one of those, but we didn't, so I'm not certain of that. This is a "problem" that MSCP relieves you of (that and manual bad block replacement). The SI9900 would have been *the* way to go for our 11/750 if it had been MSCP. As it was, we never bought any disks beyond the original two spindles (both of which I now have in storage). When we went to expand the machine, we kept its MASSBUS boot drive and added a UDA50 + RA81s (they weren't cheap, but they were physically smaller than the SI9900 + drives, and they were self-contained). If I ever get any SI9900-compatible SMD drives (not SMD-E, AFAIK) in the 8" range, I might drag a controller home from the farm and stick it on a MicroVAX to see how it behaves. I just don't want to be humping around a bunch of Fuji Eagles. They look nice exactly where they are. :-) -ethan The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo http://search.yahoo.com

Hi again, here is the link to my website. I posted a few pictures of the Kenbak-1 and the manual. I will update the page in the next few days with a few stories that I found out about the Kenbak computer history as well as other links related to the Kenbak-1. Here is the link: http://www.computermuseum.20m.com/frame.htm just follow the Kenbak-1 exhibit link on the main page or click on the "computers" button and scroll down to Kenbak. Again if anybody has information about the Kenbak computer or owns one or a manual, please contact me. Herbert

Hi, the pop-ups on my webpage are gone. I apologize for any inconvenience they may have caused. Unfortunately running a real computer museum is not always cheap and has to be done on a tight budget. Stan, donations are always welcome. If somebody wants to sponsor a pop up free webpage for a year it is $23.88 Thanks Herbert Stan Sieler wrote: Caution...besides popping up more annoying popups than I've seen for weeks (I temporarily disabled my pop-up blocker), at least one of the popups offered to install the spyware GAIN -- Stan Sieler sieler(a)allegro.com www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html

Hi Joe! Wow, that would be great! Do you have his email address? Thanks Herbert on 4/15/03 8:51 PM, Joe at rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com wrote:

Re: Caution...besides popping up more annoying popups than I've seen for weeks (I temporarily disabled my pop-up blocker), at least one of the popups offered to install the spyware GAIN -- Stan Sieler sieler(a)allegro.com www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html

Hi Erik, I'm glad you like the site. I'm currently working on the story how the Kenbak got to my museum. I hope I have it up soon. Greetings Herbert on 4/15/03 11:04 PM, Erik S. Klein at classiccmp(a)vintage-computer.com wrote: