Jay West wrote, in part:
> I'm the proud new owner of a PDP-11/45! Woohoo! It's even purported to be
> working. Comes in a DEC rack with power supplies, and a whole bunch of what
> looks to be DEC A/D stuff (which I have no interest in and is already spoken
> for by another listmember).
Hoorayyyy! Oh, it always gives a warm spot to my heart to see another DEC
machine saved from the wilderness. :)
> [...] I really never thought
> I'd find one of these "in the wild" these days :)
There were a few things which got me started at this again after a
twenty-year span of "modern" computers. One was seeing Robert Krten's
webpages about the restoration of his 8/I, which reminded me of how much
fun this was (
http://www.parse.com/~museum/pdp8/pdp8i/restore.html). But
another was more irksome...
There was a PDP-11 - I think either an 11/40, or an 11/45; definitely a
beautiful front panel - in a DEC pedestal-mount case(!) in the basement
of the Opera House in Seattle(!!) for several years, in a spot so
out-of-the-way that in fifteen years of working there regularly I only
saw the machine twice. It was used as an auxiliary board for an old
lighting console (a Van Buren lighting console, if anyone cares). I
was tempted, at times, to ask the building staff if they really needed
it around, but a good moment to ask never really came along, and I
figured they had been hanging onto it all this time because they were
still aware of its usefulness.
Well, they recently remodeled the Opera House... and when I asked if
they were planning to keep the machine or sell it or what, I was told
(after finally finding a person who actually knew what had happened)
that they had long since _thrown the -11 away._ They didn't even
send it to the City's surplus outlet, for God's sake; they just _tossed_
it, into a construction dumpster which had long ago been emptied. They
simply had no idea that anyone would think it was useful.
I'm _still_ irked about this... not least of all at myself, for having
waited too damn long for a "right moment" to ask about this machine.
Damn it, damn it, damn it. :(
...There. That's my True Confession(tm).
When I see older computers these days, I've noticed that I no longer
wait for a "good moment" to ask about them. It's not a desire to be pushy
or anything; I'm just hoping to make up for past mistakes. :/
-O.-
[At least it wasn't a PDP-6. :) :) ]
Received on Wed Nov 26 2003 - 14:19:02 GMT