Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?

[Boris Gimbarzevsky]

Mike:

Just looked in more detail at photographs of my 
notes in drive box and appears I did verify that 
drive motor worked in 1987.  Project to get this 
drive connected to my C64 got derailed by my 
being accepted to medical school a couple of 
months after my last interaction with that drive. 
Was somewhat surprised to discover that 8" floppy 
drive as I thought the Vic20 box had my other 
TI99 computer which might have been lost at some 
point in last 30 years and multiple moves.

Never had a chance to try reading an 8" PDP-11 
floppy in it and no longer have any as all of 
them went to Glen Slick in 2008 when he got my 
MINC and related hardware.  There was an 
interesting computer surplus store in Seattle 
that I no longer recall name of, but one of 
landmarks was a company that sold Buffalo Wipes 
nearby.  Unfortunately places like this no longer 
exist and remember it being crammed full of 
various bits of electronics that would have to be 
lifted out of way to see what was buried 
underneath.  Easy to spend a day in there poking 
around.  Everything was as-is and often just good for parts.

Location you've specified as a means of 
transferring drive a good one and a short drive 
from Kamloops and one I like doing but 
unfortunately limited to Canadian side of border now.

Did run across a couple of 80486 boards today and 
must have played with them as found some 80 Mb 
HDD's in same box.  One was fully loaded with about 8 Mb of RAM!

Boris


>A lot of the younger collectors are spending 
>ridiculous amounts of money on 486 & Pentium 
>class machines on assorted facebook vintage and 
>retro groups.  I don't get it either, but 
>everyone has their fetishes and I try not to 
>judge.  Parted out you can possibly get a couple 
>hundred bucks out of a machine if you get lucky.
>
>I personally might be interested in an 8" floppy 
>drive, mainly to show my coworkers, some of whom 
>didn't know such things existed.  I'm also 
>vaguely interested in one of the PDP 11/23s, but 
>I know it's already been vetoed by my wife 
>without even asking.  😊  Any VT100-compatible 
>terminals in the stash you'd be willing to part with?
>
>I'm down in Seattle, and occasionally get up 
>that way while camping, but this year you might 
>as well be on the moon.  Maybe we could arrange 
>to meet on the border near Oroville and Osoyoos, 
>and you can throw them across the border.
>
>-mike
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On 
>Behalf Of Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk
>Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:36 PM
>To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>Subject: Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?
>
>Have been going through my shop and storage room 
>trying to see what can get rid of and wasn't 
>aware of how much old electronics and computers 
>have accumulated over last 50 years.  Should 
>note that this process has been at insistance of 
>my wife as a lot of these boxes just got moved 
>whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked at for decades.
>
>Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3 
>but then figured someone might want it.  Have a 
>couple of XT systems kicking around somewhere 
>but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and 
>considered 68000 processor a far superior 
>architecture as it was an easy transition from 
>someone who'd spent most of their time 
>programming on a PDP-11.  Also have early Mac 
>software, hundreds of 3.5" disks which are 
>primarily taking up space and all of them have 
>been copied to HDD's and now run my Mac code 
>under Basilisk2 was faster than it used to run 
>on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).
>
>Also managed to find, in no particular order, a 
>couple of C64's, a TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8" 
>floppy drive with full documentation that I 
>faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics 
>place in Seattle.  Also found a box of old 
>Univac cards which appear to be DTL with 
>individual transistors and then go on to having 
>DTL IC's as well as some old IBM cards.  Used to 
>pull transistors and diodes off these to build 
>my own circuits 50 years ago.  Now, with storage 
>being so ridiculously cheap haven't even come 
>close to making a dent in the capacity of a 256 
>Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld 
>supercomputer of which I'm using the camera 
>function to create high res images of what I'm going through.
>
>Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with 
>XT's and progressing upwards.  Never liked 80286 
>and so only collected from 80386 and 
>higher.  Seem to have lots of various parallel 
>port adapters, disk interfaces as well as 
>parallel and serial port boards.  Was planning 
>on using these as dedicated processors for data 
>acquisition but found that technology progressed 
>faster than my getting around to use them and 
>it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC 
>with various sensors for environmental 
>monitoring or a much less power hungry Parallax 
>Propellar chip for more demanding data 
>acquisition applications.  (Haven't let my wife 
>know how many of newer systems I have stashed 
>away but they take up way less room than old hardware).
>
>Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which 
>I'll probably have to part with as I haven't 
>used then in last 15 years.  Also have a number 
>of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but 
>won't be using them.  Lots of old computer books 
>as well which would be nice to keep but likely 
>have most of documentation in digital form and 
>usually back up all important pdf files to separate drives.
>
>The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's 
>any interest, can post images of what I have on 
>my web site.  Only components I've tested are 
>disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives 
>are all old and a number of them didn't take 
>kindly to be powered off after running for years 
>and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.
>
>Boris Gimbarzevsky