RANT Re: PDP-8 on e-bay

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu Jan 21 08:46:48 1999

At 05:28 PM 1/20/99 -0600, Lawrence LeMay wrote:
>
>Hmm, looks like now I need to buy some sort of cloth covering for these,
>since they're become too valuable. My Teraks arent suddenly worth gold
>too, are they? (even though they were very historically significant).

Not that I know. :-) There's still only a small handful of people
I know who have them. I know a guy who has a stash of six or seven,
including color models, in a shack up in the mountains of the West.
I've got between four and six 8510/a, including a 10 meg hard disk.
Price is always a matter between buyer and seller - and who's selling?
I think I paid $1 for my last Terak, from the UW surplus sale.

At 08:07 PM 1/20/99 -0500, Doug wrote:
>
>And the Terak was a PDP-11/03 with
>a bitmapped display around 1979/1980 IIRC. They were quite popular at
>UCSD and UCI, at least.

I can't find my reference at the moment, but I think the founders
told me they built the first Teraks in 1976. The first few years
weren't megapixel machines, though. The easily customizable font
and graphics abilities of the Terak lent itself to the editing of
Russian, Hebrew and Chinese. It also had CAD packages long before
they landed on PCs.

- John
Received on Thu Jan 21 1999 - 08:46:48 GMT