How much should I pay for a Decstation VT78?

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Dec 28 09:17:29 2001

--- Sellam Ismail <foo_at_siconic.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Wayne M. Smith wrote:
>
> > I have the opportunity to acquire a Decstation VT78 (basically a PDP-8
> > crammed into a VT52 terminal) but the price seems a bit steep. I've
> > been looking for one for abut 2 years and this is the first one I've
> > come across. It doesn't include the cart or any drives. Any thoughts
> > on how high I should go?
>
> $100 tops. If you want it really bad, $150 ;)

Cool... that's on my wish-list, too (I have almost every other model...
still missing 8/S, 8/f and 8/m)

I've been looking for substantially longer than two years. Some of
my newer stuff came from the local university - they used to use
WPS-8 in some of the departments. The father of a grade-school classmate
of mine would bring machines home to use there as they threw out
one model after another. I managed to get a 42" racked -8/a w/RX02,
a DM-I and a DM-III through him. Even cooler, by the principle of
Classic Attraction, I found the desktop add-on for the DM-I cart at
the surplus barn (marked $5) and on another visit weeks later, I found
the mounting bracket (Free!)

If you aren't familiar with the DM-I, it is a PDP-8 crammed into a VT-100,
typically sitting on a typing-height pedestal with one or two RX02 drives
built in with the drive mechanisms stacked vertically, 2 or 4. There is
usually a keyboard shelf that clips onto holes in one side of the
pedestal. Optionally, there was a table-top that had only one side-panel;
the drive pedestal held the other side up. There was a bracket for the
keyboard slots that held up the edge of the table.

While it would be nice to have the VT78 cart, I wouldn't be unhappy to
get one without. The drives are going to be standard RX drives inside
(I forget if the VT78 used RX01 or RX02), but the packaging and cabling
might be difficult to locate now. If you are lucky, it's the same as
for the DM-I (DB-25 on the drive with a board that runs the pins from
a DB-25 to a Berg-40; DC-37 on the CPU. There were two cables available
for the DM-I - one with one DB25, and one with two. One of these days,
I'm going to make the double-header cable so I can run a second set of
floppies from my DM-I, but that's a low-priority project).

-ethan

-ethan



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send your FREE holiday greetings online!
http://greetings.yahoo.com
Received on Fri Dec 28 2001 - 09:17:29 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:41 BST