Sea Container Spelunking (Terminal Junkie Part Two)

From: Paul Williams <celigne_at_tinyworld.co.uk>
Date: Mon Jan 21 17:41:47 2002

I was hunting around at work today for manuals for the Lynwood Alpha
that I grabbed at the weekend. I was told to grab a torch and led to a
group of six sea containers out the back of our building. It appears
that we never really throw anything away -- it just gets put into sea
containers. I half expected to find some ex-colleagues preserved in
aspic. "Oh, John? No, he never _really_ left. No one ever does".
Presumably at some point in the future we're intending to load the
containers on board a cargo ship and dump our archives in mid Atlantic.

Anyway, these sea containers contain a treasure trove of old equipment
and manuals. It appears that we used to be into Texas Instruments 990
computers in a big way -- we've still got a bunch of manuals in the
library, but it's a tiny fraction of the files stuffed away outside.
I've a feeling the 990(s) have long since been scrapped, but everything
else is in storage. I found what I thought was a calculator like my
first school one, with red LEDs (a TI-30?), but it was actually a mini
terminal, called a TM 990/301 (I think).

Sadly, no sign of a manual for the Lynwood Alpha, but compensation came
in the shape of operator's and user's manuals for the LSI ADM 3A, ADM 11
and manuals for the Digital Engineering Incorporated Retrographics card
for the ADM 3A. Unfortunately, none of the LSI manuals answer the
age-old question of what "ADM" stands for.

It appears that circumstances are conspiring to make my web site no
longer exclusively devoted to DEC terminals. If anyone wants a manual
for the Data General Dasher D410 I mentioned yesterday, the PDF and TIFF
are online at http://vt100.net/dg/. The User Manual for the LSI ADM 3A
is online at http://vt100.net/lsi/ (proper pages to come later, blah,
blah).

Time to don a hard hat and dig deeper...

- Paul
Received on Mon Jan 21 2002 - 17:41:47 GMT

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