LSI-11 and other goodies available cheap/free in Silicon Valley

From: Ran Talbott <ran_at_netgate.net>
Date: Fri Aug 8 09:24:00 2003

My apologies for the tackiness of posting a "for sale" ad to a list
where I'm not a regular, but this seems to be the best hope of finding
a good home for this stuff.

I'm about to become another of those "Silicon Valley refugees", so I
need to get rid of a bunch of "formerly useful" and "maybe someday"
items so I can spruce up the house and put it up for sale. Many of
them will be of interest to classic computer fans. These are the ones
that I think are "on-topic" here:

1. A lot of LSI-11 parts.

   One DEC chassis (BA-11N, I *think*) with a minimal front panel and
       about 8 hex slots.
   Enough boards to build 2 or 3 working systems. CPUs: an 11/03, an
       11/23, an 11/73, and a fourth one whose model I forget (I think
       it's a different flavor of 11/73, but I'm not sure). Multiple
       dual-wide RAM boards (and a 128KW quad-wide one in the garage,
       somewhere, I hope). Various DEC and non-DEC serial cards.
   An MTI MLV-11 MFM controller, with two Syquest drives and about 10
       10-megabyte cartridges.
   A prototype of a UDA50 clone with a couple of ESDI drives (I think
       they're 760Meg, but don't hold me to that. They were "pretty
       big" 10 years ago, when I was working on it ;-). I'm pretty
       sure there's a QDA-50 to run it, too
   Assorted cables and other parts.

All of the boards should be good: they came out of systems that were
working back in my DEC-peripheral-consultant days, and were properly
stored in anti-static bags. The Syquest drives were never especially
wonderful as a family, but these seemed to work fine while I used them,
and I think the odds are better than 75% that at least one of them will
work. And the odds are better than 90% on the UDA clone.

My preference is to have someone come by and pick up the whole lot for
$100 (trade offers will be considered: there are a few small items,
like hard drives to revive a couple of old PCs, that I need). If that
doesn't happen, I'll recycle the drives, and sell the boards by mail.

The other items are "free to good home", but I'd appreciate it if you
offered something in exchange (like an IDE hard drive or CD-ROM for the
PCs I'm fixing).

2. A Mac II, with MMU (so you can run Linux on it ;-), 8-bit color
card, and one of the drives with a bad case of the infamous stiction
problem. I have a couple of possibly-good replacement drives, but
never got around to trying them.

3. An "OS/2 starter kit", including Warp 3, Warp 3 Connect, some
aftermarket books with CDs, a few Hobbes archives on CD, etc. If
nobody local claims this, I'll mail it to someone willing to pay the
postage.

4. DC-600 tapes: an assortment of a couple or three dozen. Nearly all
used (though generally not heavily: most were distribution tapes that
I used once or twice for backups), but a few still shrink-wrapped. If
nobody claims the lot, I'll sell the new ones by mail.

5. A Tandon 1/2-height 8" floppy in a Corvus enclosure (model FLP-1). I'm
about 90% certain this was working when it went into storage 10 years ago.

6. A Voterm II. Condition unknown: somewhere on its journey through the
surplus food chain, it got whacked in a way that smashed its fuseholder,
and I never got around to trying to fix it. From what little I was able to
find on the web, I gather that this is something of a rarity, so I'll
entertain requests to ship it if nobody claims it locally.

I'll check the list archives for replies, but it's probably better to
contact me directly at netgate.net (userid "ran") to save bandwidth. I
have a pretty fascist set of procmail filters in place, but putting the
word "zaurus" at the beginning of your response will get you past them.

Thanks,

Ran
Received on Fri Aug 08 2003 - 09:24:00 BST