This is my first posting to the list. Reading about everyone else's
exploits saving old systems, I have to add what I got myself into this
past weekend.
After responding to a usenet posting about an old computer, I
discovered that the poster (who turned out to be a fellow MIT alum
three states away, a fact at least tangentially relevant to some of
what follows) was about to toss into the local landfill some old stuff
he had stored in his basement. A nice guy, he had offered this stuff
to everyone he knew, but (incredible as it may seem to this list) he
found no takers. Some scheduled home reconstruction required he have
the basement empty by June 1. I volunteered to drive the 3 hours one
way and pick it up. So, for nothing but my time and the cost of gas,
here's what I saved:
1) A Northstar Horizon. Nice condition. With 64k memory and compupro
z80 boards. Plus system software (cpm and northstar dos), hard sector
5.25 floppies, and a cardboard box full of docs, including the system
manuals, misc s-100 books, and even the documentation for Microsoft's
Fortran-80 in its original funky rust colored vinyl binder.
If anyone has any s-100 boards they can spare, and would be willing to
sell, that could help expand this system beyond the cpu-memory-floppy
controller basics it has now, I'd love to hear from them.
2) Two HP-86B's, with cp/m, modem et al cartridges, software for
waveform and circuit analysis, plus another box full of docs.
Unfortunately, no original external disk drives, so here's another
thing I'm looking for, if anyone has them to spare.
3) TRS-80 Model II disk drive system. Has three 8" drives in a single
enclosure. Haven't checked it out yet to see if it works.
4) The guts from both the CADR 6 and CADR 7 MIT Lisp Machines from the
late '70s. These were the basis for the machines later from Symbolics.
Actually, my new found friend decided to keep the steel racks for an
as yet to be determined project <G>. This may have been just as well
because I had no room to haul the two 6 foot tall cases back to my
house. So I had to leave them behind, power supplies still attached.
But I got all the internal boards, fans, cables et al from the lisp
machines, including the two 5 foot tall back planes and a couple dozen
boards measuring about 12" x 18" each. I'm going to try to get the
cases too, but I'm not sure I'll be able to.
The machines weren't running at the time he got them from someone at
MIT. Steel racks or not, I may have just acquired myself a lifelong
mission to search for someone who can make these work, since I'm out
of my league here.
Since this is a list devoted to classic computers, I don't need to go
into details about the couple of 386's, monitors, and one or two
hardware mutants (would you believe a Tandy-DEC hybrid?) that also got
tossed into my Toyota.
Altogether an interesting bunch of stuff.
Frank
Frank Peseckis
frank_at_5points.com
http://www.5points.com/
Received on Mon Jun 02 1997 - 15:12:34 BST