Ali Babas cave

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Wed May 13 20:44:09 1998

In a desperate effort to get on topic, I dug this out of the pile...

> I just spent Saturday morning in an Ali Babas cave of old computers
> ranging form a huge 6ft tall by 10 ft wide analogue computer through a
> few DEC machines (see below, and old ICT 1301, a Telefunken TR4 a
> burroughs 1800, a few French minicomputers and quite a number of
> unidentified systems. Included were lots of tape and disk drives, boxes
> of documentationa nd software. Just a dream come true!

French minicomputers...hmmm, those sound interesting. I rarely see French
made electronics here - I would like to see how it compares to other
things. What was the name of the manufacturer?

> Among the DEC machines I saw was a complete PDP-9. How rare are these?

You may never see one ever again!

The 18-bit DEC machines were never a really big hit (they were odd ducks,
mostly made for process control), and really did not survive well at all.
I would venture to say that there are probably less than ten of the 18 bit
machines in captivity today, and that includes PDP-1s, 7s, 9s, 9/Ls, and
the various 15s.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Wed May 13 1998 - 20:44:09 BST