All right, now that I have your attention, I would like to give a report of
my amazing weekend trip to Fort Worth.
The most important development of this weekend was my PDP-11
devirginization. Yes, for the year or so that I have been into this hobby, I
have rescued or acquired several PDP-11s. Until this weekend, however, I had
never applied power to one. Many of these vintage machines are sufficiently
different from the PCs I grew up with that learning about them is like
rediscovering the computer itself, starting from scratch. There has always
been a fear within me of not knowing how to operate one of these machines
after applying power to it. Other machines have received no power because I
am waiting for my electronics knowledge to develop; these machines will be
disassembled, tested part-by-part, and reassembled when that knowledge is
sufficient. Despite my inactivity, I have somehow known that I would love
exploring these machines once powered.
That last prophecy has fulfilled itself! I visited Owen Robertson while in
FW, and we powered up his 11/34. He showed me a few things -- how to load
RL01 packs, where the power switch was, etc. -- and we proceeded to play
with the machine. There are problems with the RSX-11M pack he has, so I
loaded up an XXDP+ pack. After printing and reading the help file, I
experimented and was able (after some trial and error) to -- drum roll,
please -- load UPD2 and create another bootable pack with XXDP+ on it!
It would be a minor task for many of you, but it is a major milestone for
me. I am now PDP-11 devirginized.
Owen and I also scoured a few scrapyards in the DFW area. Highlights of our
combined finds:
- DEC TS05
- DEC rack spacer panels, rail slides, etc.
- DG MPT/100 (looks like a TRS-80 Model III)
- DG Nova 3 chassis
- Two Sun 4/110 towers.
- TRS-80 Model III, diskless, with 16KB RAM
(Identical to my first computer except for the extra 12KB :-))
- A Lanier word processor (I believe of the kind Pres. Carter used)
- CBM PET 8032
- Three IBM 5150 PCs
Eric Dittman was going to accompany us but was called away on business.
It's too bad we didn't do this a week sooner. The scrappers had just
finished destroying what was a very nice PDP-11/60. I at least found and
took the unit numbers from the RK07 and RP0x drive.
By the time we were finishing up at the second scrapyard, it was raining
heavily and *muddy*. It will be interesting to see what lives through being
rained upon. Also, as it turns out, a pallet full of desktop 386 PCs isn't
useless after all: you can lay them in puddles and form a walkway to keep
yourself dry(er). We referred to the process as 'uninstalling Windows'.
--
Jeffrey Sharp
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Received on Mon Apr 08 2002 - 01:23:54 BST