Old computers....

[crfriend]

Here's a good visual (in high-definition if your 'Net connection can handle it) of me booting a 1970-vintage Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-12 laboratory instrumentation computer.

It's not exactly running something that would be used in a lab (save for after hours) -- it's a version of Spacewar! that was ported from the 1961-vintage PDP-1 to the -12. It's a vintage-1962 video game. Towards the end of the sequence, there is a "sun" in the center of the screen and two "spaceships" which are pulled into the "sun" by its gravity; normally two players would control the "ships" using the rocker-switches on the front panel and thus avoid the gravity-well.

The boot is actually complete once text appears on the screen (it's what was last worked on) and I move to the laptop to load the game and call it into execution. The "video camera" was actually my good friend Mike's "smart 'phone".

Half-visible to the left of, and behind, the -12 is a pdp8/e minicomputer in an orange and mustard colour-scheme. The colour-scheme on the -12 is really that garish -- this was the late '60s and early '70s! The PDP-12 has the third-best front-panel of all of DEC's computers, numbers one and two belonging to the KI-10 and KA-10, respectively.

[Sinned]

Hi crfrnd,

This is not really in the same ballpark as your computers but we have been moving my youngest son from one house to another and we came across two old computers that we had forgotten about. They are BBC B computers. Here's the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro. Made by Acorn and a most versatile machine. The University of York used them as a viable smart terminal accessing a DEC VMS machine. As far as I know they both work and one has the word processing chip Wordwise+ in it on an expansion board. Also a dot matrix printer and a whole load of games and applications which were loaded from cassette tape. Brings back memories! I do need to test them out as they haven't been used for twenty years. I started my programming training on one and my project on providing solutions to ODE's prior to starting at University in 1985 was written on the BBC B. My undergraduate work was on a PDP-11 running UNIX.

[Big and Bashful]

Hi crfrnd,

This is not really in the same ballpark as your computers but we have been moving my youngest son from one house to another and we came across two old computers that we had forgotten about. They are BBC B computers. Here's the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro. Made by Acorn and a most versatile machine. The University of York used them as a viable smart terminal accessing a DEC VMS machine. As far as I know they both work and one has the word processing chip Wordwise+ in it on an expansion board. Also a dot matrix printer and a whole load of games and applications which were loaded from cassette tape. Brings back memories! I do need to test them out as they haven't been used for twenty years. I started my programming training on one and my project on providing solutions to ODE's prior to starting at University in 1985 was written on the BBC B. My undergraduate work was on a PDP-11 running UNIX.

My first computer was a BBC Model B, loved it and wish I hadn't sold it. I keep thinking of buying one again on Ebay for old times sake and to try out some of the games I still have. I still have the monitor I had to go with it, I think, unless it is for the Amiga 500 I have sitting in the spare room. Yep that's probably it, the Beeb had a TV out didn't it?

[crfriend]

This is not really in the same ballpark as your computers but we have been moving my youngest son from one house to another and we came across two old computers that we had forgotten about. They are BBC B computers. Here's the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro. Made by Acorn and a most versatile machine.

I am somewhat conversant with the BBC micros and have played with them in the past. However, I have always been drawn to earlier machines that you can actually touch and feel -- and understand positively everything about how they work as there is no "magic" involved. In the best of them, you can see what's happening via the lights.

I was very fortunate to occupy a "sweet spot" in the timeline where minicomputers were still in active use and where microcomputers were still very much "toys" and the now-ubiquitous "PC" had yet to be invented. This is me later in life posed with the first computer I ever used seriously -- and, yes, it's the very same individual machine, a Data General NOVA 840 that I got to know very well in secondary school to the point where gate-level hardware-repair was not beyond my capability. Later on, as I got going in my professional career, these were the systems I worked on (complete with a "kiddie-pic" of me from 1986), and one just cannot top those!

The University of York used them as a viable smart terminal accessing a DEC VMS machine. [...] My undergraduate work was on a PDP-11 running UNIX.

I've used VMS, and have several VAXen in my personal collection, but it usually left me somewhat cold. VMS seemed bloated and more than a bit of a resource-hog. That the VAX and VMS killed off my beloved pdp10s may have something to do with my disdain, but the historian in me tells me that the -10 had just outlived its design life and needed to be "put down". The lean and clean lines of the NOVA and the amazing for the time RDOS remain modern favourites. I can see absolutely no point in trying to run UNIX on any machine that isn't a "power-of-2" machine save for the paleolithic version that ran on a PDP-7 at Bell Labs until the perpetrators could port it to a pdp11.

I do UNIX stuff now, and whilst I can't say that I hate it outright, UNIX gets so many things abjectly wrong that if baffles me how it got the foothold it did. Windows is now "VMS, the Next Generation" so the underlying kernel is nice and solid (and it followed the development track of every other Dave Cutler OS), but the latest shell is utter dreck; Microsoft should have purloined DCL at the same time as they did Mica.