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I picked up this a little while ago and got it working in about two hours. This is not a ham radio or other specialist set. This was a standard (albeit high-end) communications receiver in its day. I also have a bunch of old computer stuff. Most of it is stored such that it'd be a pain to get pictures of. At one point a friend and I were going to open a computer museum, but drama happened. I still have some of what would have been exhibits. I have a couple examples of the PDP-11 and a PDP-10. Here's a "new" paper tape reader/punch. It was meant to use either paper or mylar tapes.  I have a PDP-11 software development kit in paper-tape form. It's 4 boxes of tapes.  The tapes are still readable. The reader uses a serial interface, so with a USB-to-serial converter you can read them. Here's one of them copied to my desktop PC.  I'll have to dig around and see what else I have pictures of.
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Dec 21, 2012 15:24
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Pham Nuwen posted:The PDP-10 was a pretty kickass system too. If you use Linux and have ever wondered why Emacs keybindings are just a bit different than other Unix tools, or why RMS seems to love Info so much instead of man pages, check out ITS. That's the pre-Unix OS he used on a PDP-10 and, like many things about RMS, has maintained a rose-tinted view of throughout the years. The funny part is that TECO EMACS keybindings are different from GNU Emacs keybindings. Most notably anything that uses ^Z is different because on ITS that summons your job's superior job, usually the HACTRN.
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Oct 25, 2014 01:30
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Lazlo Nibble posted:
How far away from central Illinois are you? I have a PDP-11 with an RX02 drive, so in theory I could image those disks. I'd just have to plug everything in and make sure it all still works.
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Nov 28, 2014 00:07
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You can have my IRC when you pry my keyboard from my cold dead hands!
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Aug 25, 2015 16:29
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Bulgaroctonus posted:I still miss my stinky 500 lb beast organ. Obsolete or not. If you still have the corpse, you could try visiting the local ham radio club. They probably have at least four grumpy old men capable of repairing it who will probably work for beer.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:07
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What about actual punch clocks, are those obsolete yet? At a prior employer we had one of the old mechanical clocks until 2003-ish, when he "upgraded" to a computerized punch clock that used your fingerprint to clock you in and out so people couldn't punch for their friends. The clock fed its data into a web-based status board that the boss would watch like a hawk, because if you were not there and visibly busy working on something you were literally stealing time from the company and he expected to be compensated. We had to punch out for any breaks, including smoke breaks, and if the boss found you being insufficiently busy he would punch you out with his administrative access code and you would not be paid from then until you were allowed to clock in again. One of my projects was supposed to be a program that monitored web usage via the proxy server logs and automatically punched someone out if they visited websites on the blacklist (myspace, etc) but that never happened.
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Sep 27, 2016 07:21
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Kwyndig posted:If you were expected to continue working after being punched out that's illegal, by the way. Once you were clocked out you had a strike on your attendance record so it did not matter if you stayed and worked or went home; You were already in poo poo. As far as I can remember everyone stayed and worked though. I'm pretty sure if you left you would not be coming back. This was in Illinois so he could do pretty much whatever he wanted. Toward the end a lot of people were working unpaid overtime just trying to keep the place afloat. Any job in a recession, any port in a storm. Magnus Praeda posted:I have a feeling that employer is one of those "labor law is for suckers" types. Very much so. The company ceased to exist about two years after the events described, for a variety of reasons. Low employee morale was a large factor. I was the first person in the door to set up before the place opened and the last person out the door when it closed. Really sad to see something you invested so much time and effort in get run into the ground. We sold offline computer training, which probably is also obsolete. The business model is certainly failed.
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Sep 28, 2016 07:50
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Trabant posted:It's only tangential, but funny (at least to me): Obviously I was not alive for this. Back in the Cretaceous Era (1969) when computers were becoming a corporate "thing", Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center wanted a PDP-10. These were 36-bit machines made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which were exceedingly popular in research circles. I really do mean "exceedingly". A large fraction of the arpanet was made up of PDP-10 sites. They were fast, relatively reliable, easy to work with, and much cheaper than a comparable IBM. This made them almost as popular as breathing. Xerox didn't make anything remotely like it, so the researchers thought they wouldn't have any issues buying one. Unfortunately, just as the paperwork was being filled out, another branch of Xerox announced the acquisition of a computer manufacturer that DID have products "comparable" to the PDP-10 - Scientific Data Systems, or SDS. The problem was that the SDS equipment stank out loud. They were slow, expensive, difficult to work with, and unreliable. This was why they were failing in the market and why Xerox was able to buy them out. PARC wanted a PDP-10, not a SDS. Of course, as soon as the paperwork for the PDP-10 purchase was filed the request came under fire - Xerox could not be seen buying hardware from a now competitor, that would be admitting defeat! They would use SDS or nothing. The researchers went back and forth with their corporate overlords but one in particular refused to budge - Max Palevsky, the former owner of SDS, who was now Xerox management. The request was denied with prejudice and implications made to the effect that anyone who did not embrace the SDS product line wholeheartedly would be dismissed. Dissent in the ranks would not be tolerated. Thus foiled, the researchers took a different tack. Being a research center, they started a project to design and build a new computer for their internal use. This was approved. With this approval in hand, they got the publicly released documentation for the PDP-10 and built their own clone of it from scratch at great expense. The result became the main computer of the research center and Xerox's gateway to the arpanet, the Xerox MAXC - pronounced "MAX", after Palevsky, whose ego and pride had denied them the machine they wanted. The SDS division went on to be a complete flop. Palevsky left Xerox after three years. The SDS division was closed two years later, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The MAXC ran another ten years after that, well into the 80s, before being replaced by newer equipment.
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Aug 12, 2017 07:05
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Keiya posted:The PDP-11, on the other hand, doesn't belong here yet. It's still in operational use, notably in GE nuclear power plants in Canada. As far as I know the only PDP-10s in use anymore are hobbyist machines... but I wouldn't be surprised to hear there's still one or two performing some critical function somewhere. PDP-11s aren't just still operational, they're still building new ones. Same for the PDP-8. They implement the processor, memory, and storage devices in modern parts, then provide the standard UNIBUS/QBUS interfaces to whatever custom equipment you might have. They're not exactly common, but they are out there. As for PDP-10s, the Living Computer Museum has several examples in more or less continuous use. Mine is still in working order, but I don't have any storage devices for it. There's a Massbus disk replacement project underway, but I haven't checked in on it in awhile. The last one in actual commercial use that I know about was replaced with an emulator and turned off in 2010-ish.
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Aug 12, 2017 08:13
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Pham Nuwen posted:I always wanted a PDP-10, but the space and power requirements, plus the sheer scarcity, means the best I got was an 11. Where do you keep yours, and what OS are you running on it? There's four models of PDP-10 that were sold by DEC. I'm not going to cover Jupiter or Dolphin (those were never released) or the various clones (MAXC, Foonly/Super Foonly, SC-40, etc). Before we get into those, we have to mention the PDP-6. The PDP-6 was the PDP-10s immediate parent. It was a slightly bigger and somewhat slower machine, but set the standard for most of the processor architecture and instruction format. No PDP-6es exist today, with the last known example disappearing decades ago in some inter-museum shenanigans. There are accusations it was parted out and sold as scrap, but the people involved aren't alive anymore so it's doubtful we'll ever know what really became of it. A "rack" here is the standard DEC "business" rack size. Your PDP-11 is probably in one of these, unless it's a MicroPDP or a loose BA box or something. It's basically the standard computer rack size, 5 feet and some odd inches high, with a few inches to either side for cable management. The first PDP-10 is the KA-10. This was the slowest model. It had a discrete logic processor that came in 4 racks, which required industrial cooling and lots of 3-phase power. Each memory "board" was a rack, each IO device was a rack, and the disks were huge washing machines. These are the second rarest, with only two known to still exist. One is in a museum and the other a private collection. It has lots of blinking lights and switches. It would be difficult to fit this into a normal office, let alone a private residence. The second is the KI-10. This was the upgrade from the KA. It's still a discrete logic processor but it was denser than the KA and much faster. It still came in 4 racks but required slightly less three phase power and cooling. It used the same IO devices and disks as the KA. These are the rarest model, with only one known to still exist. It belongs to LCM and they are restoring it to working order. It has the best lights and switches. You still aren't fitting one in a house unless you're very rich and/or very crazy. The third is the KL-10. This was the fastest, the peak of PDP-10 development. It had a microcoded ECL processor which came in two racks. A big chunk of the first rack was a PDP-11/45 whose job it was to load firmware and software into the KL and manage its slower IO devices. IO devices were no longer separate racks, they were now large boards installed into the processor racks. Disks however are still huge washing machines that want many amps to operate. KLs are the third rarest machine, there's somewhere between 6 and 12 that still exist. It has only a handful of lights and switches. You could conceivably stuff one of these into a house, but you'd be dedicating a bedroom or basement to it. Power and cooling expenses would be your major issue. The original KL power supplies were very inefficient by even 80s standards and used lots of 3-phase power to make lots of single-phase power to run the machine. This resulted in the creation of several types of aftermarket PSU replacements that allowed it to run on much less 3-phase power (or large but not absurd amounts of single-phase power) instead. Compuserve, being a large user of PDP-10s, manufactured and sold the most popular type. The last is the KS-10. This is the type I have, the smallest and last PDP-10 to make it out of DEC. It was somewhere between a KA and KI in performance because of its built-in cache. With the cache disabled it was slower than a KA. It had a microcoded TTL processor that came on two large boards installed in a modified PDP-11 processor box. The box was installed into a single rack along with another "expansion" box that held the IO devices. It had an Intel 8080 microprocessor in it whose job was to load firmware and software into the KS, similar to the PDP-11 used in the KL. It used about 1000 watts of standard single-phase 120 volt AC power and expected normal office air conditioning. Disks were washing machines at first, but later disks that were about the size of a full-tower PC came along. Tape drives were still racks. There's probably 20 or 30 of these still in existence, maybe more. You can easily fit one into a normal home or office. Mine was in my living room when I had an apartment. Two people can comfortably move a KS as long as there's no stairs involved. There are three commonly available PDP-10 OSes. DEC sold TOPS-10 (which was called MONITOR initially) for all four machine types and TOPS-20 for the "Model B" KL and KS. TOPS-10 was your typical 1970s timesharing system and had very minimal system requirements, and TOPS-20 was a later 80s design that was much more user-friendly but required much more memory and disk space. The third operating system is MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System, or ITS. The ITS was originally made for MIT's PDP-6, and then the KA-10 came along it was ported to that. Later the MIT KA became a KL, and ITS was ported to the KL. Later still the KL was replaced by a KS, and ITS was ported again. I originally planned to run the ITS, but it didn't work out for reasons beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say I never had a working set of disk and tape drives necessary to bring up the machine properly. I bring it up to the console firmware every other month or so to make sure it stays in working order and to clean out all the cobwebs and dust. The Living Computer Musem people are working on a modern replacement for the original disks which might let me actually run my machine. I haven't checked their progress in awhile though.
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Aug 13, 2017 00:31
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I got in poo poo at work once because I changed the 4050 on the sales floor to say "INSERT 25 CENTS" and one of the salesdroids put a quarter in the cooling vent then complained to management the printer stole his quarter.
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Sep 2, 2017 18:09
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