Yes there is a PDP 10 front panel and Kenbak on Ebay

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Apr 5 10:32:51 CDT 2019


    > From: Guy Dunphy

    > What I want to know is, how do front panels of historic computers so
    > often get separated from the rest of the computer?

I suspect it probably happened a while back, before the start of the vintage
computer movement; you need to look at the decisions from the perspective of
back then. (As an example, back then, I was offered the complete PDP-11/45 of
my old group. I was up to my neck in contemporary, important, alligators - I
was on the IESG of the IETF at the time - and didn't have the time to deal
with saving it and moving it to my house; so I let it go - a loss I regret
terribly now.)

Here's what probably happened: the machines were about to be scrapped, and
saving the whole machine wasn't practical - often, in part, because those
machines were _huge_. (The CPU _alone_ of a KA10 would fill an entire room of
a normal house.) So, one has a limit to what one can do. So the choice is to
save the front panel alone... or to save nothing.

	Noel


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