I went to a grandpa-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's scrapyard Saturday.
It was one of those disappointing wish-you-were-here-a-month-ago
visits. Yes, the guy did have a bunch of Univac stuff. The key
word here is 'did'. About a month ago, he loaded it onto 16
pallets and sold it to some people "from China". He said some of
it was "never taken out of its original crate". Please give me a
second to cause bodily harm to myself. :-(
The first cool thing I found was a set of old air traffic control
radar stations. They had been out there a *while* and weren't in
good condition at all, but they were cool to look at.
I found the twisted remnants of what was apparently an old Four
Phase switches-and-blinkenlights mini. It looked like it had been
out there for several years also. Underneath the layer of grime,
the central processor (about the same size as a BA11 box) seemed
mostly intact except for a missing faceplate. Anyone know what set
of computers this could be? Even though it's hosed, is it a rare
enough find that I should buy it and salvage what I can?
Next find was called a Raytheon 703 Central Processor. It looks
like it has light-up pushbuttons instead of LED/lamps and switches.
>From the lights it looks like it has a 16-bit word size and 15-bit
addresses. Anyone know what this is? It looks to be in decent
condition. Should I pick it up?
I found several highly OEM PDP-11 systems that looked like they
were some kind of radar controller computer. Unfortunately, the
cabinets looked like they had been picked up by the nearby crane
and dropped to their present location (i.e., smashed to hell).
I'll investigate further when I can bring a can of bug spray to
take out the integrated hornet nests.
Final find was a set of MicroPDP-11 BA23s, in various states from
complete to completely stripped.
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss_at_ou.edu
Received on Mon Jul 02 2001 - 00:29:16 BST