Christie's auction

From: Ashley Carder <wacarder_at_usit.net>
Date: Tue Feb 15 19:03:23 2005

> Well, Ashley, in case you haven't noticed, the restoration project that
> you're currently undertaking is pretty fascinating as well ;)
>
> It's not where you are, it's what you're doing with what you've got.

Well, yes, it's been very interesting to me and somewhat interesting
to some of the other folks who were heavily involved with the system
25+ years ago.

Besides the old HP Plotter, I've pretty much reproduced the system
that I set out to reproduce, and I've recovered some machine readable
copies of stuff I thought was forever lost/trapped inside a buggy RK05
pack or a ratty old yellow paper tape. Now I just need to get some
more programs loaded from the hardcopy. I'm still planning to get the
old crew together for the Wofford Witch reunion. One guy is overseas
and won't be here until May or June, so that gives me time to get the
plotter figured out and hooked up so I'll have the full suite of peripherals
all working. Even the age 65+ retired director of computer center /
professor is going to drive down (about a 2 hour drive) so he can show
us the tricks of the trade and tell us stories about running a PDP-11/40
timesharing system in an academic environment for 13 or 14 years. He
also has stories from the days when academic computing was an ASR-33
sitting in a room by itself, where you dialed in to a remote system several
states away. It should be interesting.

I've met a lot of helpful folks online and right here in the CCTalk list. I
could not have pulled it off without the help of many others. It's been a
big task hunting down all the equipment and interface boards, components,
terminals, drives, etc.

I'll stop rambling. That's a problem with folks from the southeast. They
tend to ramble endlessly. And they talk slow. When I'd travel to NY or
California, folks always wanted to listen to me talk so they could hear the
slow southern twang.

> > I like the southeast, but there just ain't much computer history going
on
> > around here. I had to do my PDP-11 project mostly by myself while
> > consulting with lots of manuals from Al's site and consulting with the
> > experts in California and elsewhere.
>
> Thank gawd for ther Internet, eh? :)

YES!

> I relied heavily on the Internet to get my PDP-11 working. It wasn't
> because I didn't have the manuals myself: I do but they're all boxed away
> and disorganized, and accessing them online was more convenient, even
> though they're just a few feet aroound the corner :/
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival

Yes, much thanks to Al's bitsavers.

Even though my project has been interesting, it would still be much fun
to be involved in a project with others who know the hardware side more
intimately. I will continue to follow that PDP-1 project online.

Ashley
Received on Tue Feb 15 2005 - 19:03:23 GMT