I now have in my possession three PDP-8/Is (only around 4000 were
produced) from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri! They are in
reasonably crusty condition, having been stored in a garage for 10 years
or more, but appear to be all there.
One has no peripherals, one has a DecTape drive and another has the
high-speed paper tape reader. The machine with the DecTape, which is
apparently a Posibus machine, has a custom interface built out of DEC
Building Blocks modules...ALOT of them and is very nifty.
I expect restoration to occupy months or years but is, nevertheless,
quite probable.
In addition, I received a PDP-11/34 without programmers console (just the
plain boot switch console) with an RK05f and an RK05j. It is
tremendously heavy and my assistant and I were nearly (quite literally)
crushed in our attempts to get it on the truck. Our spotter did not
inform of us a dip in the concrete and it tipped backward on us with only
our spotter giving us the necessary force, at the last moment, to lift it
back up. It was highly unpleasant.
I received several boxes of flip-chips, manuals (LOTS of manuals), tech
sheets, blank paper tape still in the box and other items that I haven't
had an opportunity to explore. The boxes were stored in a basement so
there's a fair amount of water damage and a LOVELY musty odor (woo hoo). =-)
I also received an Teletype ASR-33, for which I have manuals fortunately,
in fairly crustated condition. Someone left a tape in the mechanism and,
through the years of being stored in a basement, it has become yellowed,
brittle and has adhered to the unit.
Finally, I received an Apple LISA with the
external hard drive, which
apparently has some electronic problems in the monitor but sound fixable.
I'll have pictures and information on the website at
http://www.retrocomputing.com as soon as I get them unloaded and situated.
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead
Received on Sun Jan 11 1998 - 19:50:11 GMT