In mail ID number 9707221139.AA13838_at_alph02.triumf.ca, Mr. Tim
Shoppa laments:
> What I'm amazed at is that I've got several thousands pounds of
> Data General Eclipse S/130's up here in B.C. - machines with full
> toggle-and-light front panels - and I'm unable to give them away.
This is a crying shame. For plain beauty, the S/130 rivals, and
to some, outranks even the much-vaunted IMSAI. For raw speed in a
minicomputer the 16-bit line from DG was virtually without peer.
Yes, some late -11s surpassed the raw power of the Nova instruction
set, but it was years behind DG.
We'd better save these machines while we can; Data General was,
at its zenith only about 20% of the size of DEC, and its install-
base was similar in scope. These machines are _not_ common, remain
useable today, and are a joy to look at and run. Don't let the
opportunity pass.
> Are classic minis, including PDP-11's and DG mini's only items for
> the junk heap?
I, for one, certainly hope not.
Part of the misconception about minicomputers is that they take
up huge amounts of space. Yes, individual examples are larger than
the average microcomputer; however, minicomputers stack nicely, can
be stored very compactly in rack-mounts, and being squared off, can
occupy corners very well. They're not as space-intensive as one
might think. They're usually faster than most micros, too.
While minis don't, right now, get the blast of attention that
machines like the IMSAIs do (why is that machine so popular? War
Games, maybe?), they are a valuable link to computing's history
and they're disappearing from existance very quickly. Without
Mr. Shoppa's efforts, better than a dozen of these wonderful
systems would have been shipped to the scrappers without a second
thought. And that would be too bad.
______________________________________________________________________
| | |
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA |
| mailto:carl.friend_at_stoneweb.com | |
|
http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum/ | ICBM: N42:21 W71:46 |
|________________________________________________|_____________________|
Received on Tue Jul 22 1997 - 08:45:31 BST