ModComp II on Ebay

[Tony Aiuto]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 1:06 PM, william degnan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Ebay item 272914490265
>
> This is a ModComp IIC I think.  It's all broken up in parts and half
> assembled.
>

That's an incredibly bad set of pictures.

I can't tell if it is really disassembled or if they just did not
photograph it in any meaningful way.
It looks like there are at least 3 cabinets.  Main CPU, standalone disk
drive, tape drive. I wonder if there was a card reader or any other
peripherals.

The boards look like they pull out from the system chassis horizontally,
rather than vertically like my ModComp does. That just seems weird - as it
would be impossible to separate the accordion style board assembly in that
orientation. Again, maybe just really bad photography.

The slanted console of the first photo makes me think this suffered a
serious drop at some point.

There is a lot of corrosion on the boards.



> I don't think new it was barely $18,000 though


Well, that was ~$64K today, so you can't really compare. I don't see to
many of them, so it might win price points for rarity.



> but some day, maybe the
> seller will give up and put up a realistic price.  Who knows what's in it
> exactly but generally it looks like a communications model with a 7 or 9
> track tape unit.


The tty controller board makes me want to agree there.


> The point of ModComp was to build custom systems but if
> the info on this system does not exist on BitSavers, let me know and I will
> scan some docs.  I have info on the part numbers from the photos.
>

I have a full doc set for our ModComp II, but many of the things are
different, so YMMV.


> The ModComp docs talk about IBM system emulation vs. DEC, so think along
> those lines more so, this is *not* a DataGeneral / DEC me-too despite
> looking a little like a PDP 8i
>
> BIll
>