Also gonna post this to Erik's VCF.
A couple months ago a lady made contact with me over her brother's estate and had two units full of "PDPs" -- she had no further data more than that, and just wanted to make sure that the useful bits went to a good home. I said sure, since it was in Pasadena and reasonably local to me.
Fast forward to today. There were two 9'x16' units stuffed to the gills: untold numbers of RK02s and packs, lots of Professional 380s, some VAXstations, line printers, you name it. Oddly not a lot of terminals, just a VT220 that was in really bad shape, and a VT100 that looked like it was salvageable. Oh, yeah, there were two 11/44s in there also.
We filled our UHaul to the brink and probably saved only about 10% of what was here; I am sorry to say that she needed the units clear, so the recyclers were already pulling up as we left. But this is what we salvaged, in unknown functional status:
- 11/44 with tape, appears to be a TU58. Unknown functional condition, but looks intact, and the cards were clean even though the case was a little grimy. Some of the tapes were on site and appeared intact.
- One RK02 and a crapload of disk packs. Between this and the 11/44, that was about 60% of the UHaul. There was no way we were getting two racks in there, which was sad. There was so much we had to leave behind.
- Three Professional 380s. All physically intact, just hideously dirty. Most have hard disks.
- Three Rainbow 100s (one of them was a plus). Same.
- Three VAXstation 100s. Same. All but one had lots of cable packs, too.
- An insanely heavy Kennedy drive, 71MB. Just for gits and shiggles, since it was huge and had the platters in a clear plexiglas enclosure. Very good shape. Might still work.
- Lots of 8" floppies, a couple LK201 keyboards, a really dirty LA50 printer, a VR260? monitor, the aforementioned possibly salvageable VT100, paper tape, supplies for the RK02.
- Finally, a DECmate II, floppy model only. This one I tested explicitly when I got home, since I love the PDP-8 architecture for sheer freaky insanity. It powers on, but I have no console for it (read on). Outside was grimy, but interior was absolutely immaculate and it looked like it had never been used.
These are now safely in my own, much more organized storage unit. I hope to try to get that 11/44 to power on when I get the power hookups for it in the near future, but the Pro380s and especially the DECmate I really want to get running now. I am told the Rainbows can take a serial terminal, but the DECmate II needs a proper console of a VR201 type or similar. We did not encounter one of these. Anyone got one?
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It's like a really dirty Christmas. In July.
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Hello, you big PDP, you.
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bigred
, 700MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12, 6.5.30
indy
, 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
bruce
, 2x2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 8GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
