Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News

The Minicomputer Orphanage 48

Posted by Hemos from the keepin'-it-retro dept.
dummy_variable writes: "A friend of mine pointed me to this site, and I thought some people here at Slashdot would probably appreciate it. Quoted from the site: "This is The Minicomputer Orphanage, a place where you can find information on computers from companies no longer in business. It contains sales brochures, reference manuals, and other things. This was started because with the passage of time, these computer systems are just below the Internet event horizon, and there is almost no on-line information on them.""
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Minicomputer Orphanage More

The Minicomputer Orphanage

Comments Filter:
  • Finally, a place where my much ignored Apple Lisa can be cared for and loved.
  • Who would adopt a supercomputer anyway?



    If you love God, burn a church!
  • Think about all the poor platforms that just couldn't make it. And think of all the poor companies that had to fold cause their platform didn't make it. It's actually kinda sad sniffle, sniffle
  • This site, plus www.abandonkeep.com [abandonkeep.com] brings a tear to my eye. i remember the commodore system we had in first grade (i actually went to a public school with money for a computer(!)).... We did graphic plotting on it. So proud when i made my first american flag bye plotting red white & blue.......

  • nevermind, abandonkeep went down. I am shocked. Anyone know any other good abandon software distributers?

  • (think patent invalidation)
  • Bring back LOGO! What couldn't that turtle do?

    ---
  • My school already has one of those! It's called a Mac-Lab!
  • I got a piece of hardware I can't find any information on anywhere. I have a Contel Minicomputer. It looks like this weird 4 way 386 setup with about a 200MB SCSI HD.

    It has a front panel LCD, and a key switch in the front you have to insert a key and turn to boot the machine. If anyone has any information please email me. I will be willing to buy manuals, etc if the price is reasonable. I will post their content on the web, or provide space on a webserver to do so. It functions somewhat, but it is beginning to show signs of failure, and I want to diagnose some problems and get it to its full glory.
    I would like to post the startup output, but slashdot's "Lameness Filter" says I can't. Apparently it is a junk character post, whatever the hell that means.
  • but I can't garantee I won't moleste it.
    Thank you
  • I was in high school when these boxen were being sold. Hardware was so expensive, and was the limiting factor in a computer setup, that people almost didn't consider software as meaningful... a better processor, more RAM address space, upper and lowercase input, color graphics, floppy disk availability, a serial interface: these were the points that drove the purchasing decision.

    A hundred companies flowered trying to find the mix that would sell consumers. Within 5 years, the playing field had changed: software drove purchasing decisions... if you didn't have Visicalc, you didn't sell. Almost none of the hardware makers got rich, but many software makers did.

    I fondly remember programming the Wang PC with 8K, the Pet vs Apple Flamewars, the ultimate 10 Meg(!) Corvus HardDisk, the highspeed Mountain modems (300 baud,) and cool printers (Epson bi-directional dot-matrix.) We programmers knew intuitively that our job was to wrap the hardware in device-independant drivers. We did it, and commoditized computer manufacture.

    Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?

  • the internet horizon (Score:3)

    by xeno ( 2667 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:28PM (#425109)
    I was reminded about the internet horizon by a recent experience with some ca.1993 network equipment from Intel. Very little documentation and no driver software was available for pre-1995 equipment, and I find the experience rather common with other equipment and software vendors.

    In a previous life, I worked with a wide variety of PC hardware, and as a result have _hundreds_ of old (1985-1995) motherboard, drive, NIC, and peripheral manuals boxed up in my basement. I've often thought that I should scan them in (maybe to PDF or OCR->text so that they are text-searchable). However, the rub is that many of these companies are still in business, don't want bother supporting old stuff, and don't want someone else to do it for them, either.

    Is there any way I can make these available for people to peruse just as if I had lent them the physical book? They're books, remember. What's the deal with fair use & copying of out-of-print books? Do I have to write an applet viewer that says "I'm sorry, someone else is reading that right now" if there's a simultaneous request for an archival copy of a manual? Better yet, is there a way to legally flip the original and the archival copy so that the physical original is considered the backup for the electronic document?

    hmm.

    -Jon

  • Cool. Now where can we find these systems? (Score:3)

    by SecretAsianMan ( 45389 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:35PM (#425110) Homepage
    Now that we have documentation for these systems, where can we find people or organizations that would be willing to donate these types of systems to us for education and historical preservation? I for one would love to have a PDP-8, PDP-11, or a VAX of my own.

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)

  • Re:A Golden Age (Score:3)

    by localroger ( 258128 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @07:42PM (#425111) Homepage
    Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?

    I remember them every day, because their designs worked which is something you often can't say of more modern stuff, even when it does run at 1 GHz.

    There is also an exponential increase in bloat which usually isn't noticed because the exponent is so very close to 1, just a bit over, and the modern CPUs are so fast. But when you take all the modern lessons in design and try to apply them to a 20 MHz 80186, as one manufacturer I know of has done, and you end up with an interpreter that can only parse a few hundred instructions per second, you might actually think this is normal and somehow reflects a defect in the processor instead of your bloated OO code.

  • It scared me to see how many of these systems I have actually had experience with, including the TI980 and the Varian. Conspicuous by its absence: UYK-7, that workhorse of the military, both at sea and in the air.

  • There's also going to be a tradeoff between complexity, control, and efficiency. You can get the most efficient code possible by writing everything in straight assembly - but no sane person would try it. (I have a friend who claims to know someone who writes Win32 compliant code in straight assembly. Don't believe it....)

    In order to design really complex anything, you need more robust and compartmentalized designs - that's what OO gives you. The tradeoff in speed and resource consumption is obvious, but if we didn't make that tradeoff we'd all be stuck with blinding fast BASIC interperters.
  • That is if you make a sensible post and if you don't it still counts in the number of posts and and therefore the traffic. Slashdot should be thankful to you. Keep up the good work. You add spice to our lives.
  • Argh! Obviously, too many people spread the word abount Abandonkeep, and some organization heard about it, so for the good of our society, they went after Abandonkeep and the damage it does by distributing 5+ year old programs.

    Thank god! I mean that site only stocked abandonware, and gave a link for any title that could still be purchased. Yet another abandonware site shut down, while the more damaging "warez" scene is still going strong.

    This is why I don't mention my best abandonware sites. Its a selfish reason, but the less people who know about them, the longer they survive.

    Here's to Abandonkeep. May you rest in peace.

  • I seem to recall seeing an application for win32 written in assembly. It did something to all of the files on your computer - ah, yes. It looked for certain bad libraries often installed by advertisers - the kind of dll that gets slipped in every now and then that you really don't want.

    This bad boy flew. It zipped around my drive like a car doing the indy 500, minus the expected crashing. Of course, writing a program that does the act of going through the drive like that takes 2 hours or so of coding in C++, but is probably thesis material in assembly. Still, though. Fast. Ya.

  • Did an eBay search and only got one hit for 3 NASA Program Payload Pins [ebay.com], one of which is described as "ASCZ Contel Delta II Built by GE Astro Space", so maybe a couple of years of searching the bowels of General Electric might turn up something.
    Doing a google on contel turned up some stuff indicating that contel got bought by GTE or split up between GTE and GE.
    Good luck. I fear you will need it.

  • If by "Gould" you're referring to the Gould 32-bit superminicomputers, then

    1. your comment was not necessarily off-topic, the moderation it got to that effect nonwithstanding;
    2. I don't remember, offhand, when they ditched those machines. I think Gould had bought SEL (Systems Engineering Laboratories, or something such as that), makers of that line of superminis, but the 1960's-to-1990's page in Gould's history stuff on their Web site [gould.com] doesn't mention it - it just mentions that, in the mid-1980's, "The overhaul and restructuring of Gould had proven to be financially disappointing. Many of the newer businesses the company acquired had failed to generate the earnings levels of some of Gould's more steady industrial businesses, which had been divested. As the financial condition of the company deteriorated, various business units were sold to generate cash.", and I suspect the computer business was sold or shut down then.
  • Man you did graphic plotting? All we ever played was that lemonade stand game...
  • CDC 6500 assembler manual plus lots of textbooks from the 1971-5 timeframe. Remember Snobol4, Algol, and Pascal? Still have the specs. Also my original Purdue MACE user manuals. Someday I should go out into my garage and see exactly what I do have. I'd like to donate them all to a good home someday. I would certainly hate for all that history to end up in the trash on that faraway day I am no longer around to protect them from my wife....
  • I remember that app - OptOut [grc.com]. Never had it crash on me, though. It should be noted, however, that even though it may have been written in assembly, most of it wasn't in assembly - since it's (dynamically) linked to your standard Windows libraries (KERNEL32.DLL, GDI32.DLL, ADVAPI32.DLL, COMCTL32.DLL, and SHELL32.DLL to be exact). The core of the program may have been assembly, but most of what it actually did was through Win32 library calls, most of which are written in C (I believe).

    The simple fact is, as you allude to, writing something in 100% assembly is, for the most part, foolish - you cut down on stability and development time for a small gain in speed.

    (It's a lot easier to muck things up in assembly... like the time my "print random colored characters" assembly homework program became a "change the screen to random modes" because I set some value wrong - forget which one. It was pretty funny to watch though... looked weird, screen blinking with all this weird garabage all over it. Thankfully the "quit on keypress" portion worked...)

    Personally, I don't believe OptOut would be any faster than a similar program written in C. In fact, I'd bet that the C program would be more stable, and more useful, since it would be much more easy to extend in new ways. (Especially for finding new spyware, which is what OptOut was designed for.)

  • Oh Yes! Us warmongers would love to see a site dedicated to the military compters. UYK-7, BSY-1, BSY-2,

    I remember working on the WLR-8 EW system with Core memory on my second sub. My first boat, The USS Sculpin SSN-590 (built around 1959) had a fire control system that was copied off the WWII German U-Boats - the FC system was all synchros and servos that kept track of a target's relative position, speed, course which was eventually fed directly to the torpedos. This was a system for real men, nowadays we let the computers do most of the thinking for us. Ahhhh, the good ole days..... See the Sculpin [cshore.com]

  • Damn History Blind PFY's (Score:5)

    by mindstorm ( 105447 ) on Friday February 16, 2001 @09:19PM (#425123) Homepage
    At this point in my Slashdot life, I don't care about karma anymore, so I'll rant:

    You damn PFY's don't have any history. Quite a shame.

    Heloooow?? Did anyone read the headline if this article? It says MINIcomputer! It's a step between a mainframe and a microcomputer. Are you so clueless to think that a TI99 is a minicomputer?! That thing doesn't have its own tape drive cabinet or the same address space as the computers I saw when I was a kid hanging around DEC on snow days.

    I know what a minicomputer is because I was exposed to a VAX when I was 10 years old. I hung out a few times at the DEC plants in Salem, NH and Tewksbury, MA when my stepdad brought me in. I sat at a VT100 and played (well tried to) DnD games and chatted with his coworkers using talk.

    At a young age, I got to see what very few kids my age got to see: The Machine Room. The experience was almost religious, spiritual. Brightly lit, white walls, raised flooring, awe-inspiring. The white noise of all the computers and the cooling system drowning out any distracting thought. The machine room was a would on its own. You were surrounded by sheer computing power and was one with it.

    This expanded my perspective of computing beyond what sat on my desk or what was plugged in to my TV. It also planted the seed of my inner geekdom. I didn't understand fully all the implications of what I had seen... Until I started using the Internet, and later when I became a sysadmin.

    I saw glimpses of the future in 1984 which became the life that we live in now: ethernet, e-mail, the laser printer.

    I was there when you PFY's were proto-PFY's.

    I really feel sorry for those who missed this milestone in computing. I only caught a glimpse of it. I now wished that I saw more at the time.

    Please, take some time to learn the history of computing. The micro was in many ways the foundation of the Internet and the precursor to the client-server model of computing. For many people who experienced mainframes and minis either in an academic setting or just being babysat on a snow day: this is a special time for us. It was a time when computing was a priesthood and the machine room was the cathedral. Please respect our history and our memories.
  • Good god, where did you get THAT thing?? I haven't seen one in over 10 years. When I last had to deal with one of those little critters was just after the Contel Computer Company split off from Contel and was re-named to Versyss. Before that, the company was called CADO systems. Actually, the old CADO machines I serviced were pretty amazing - they could get 4 simultaneous users on an 8085 based system. Yup, a 2MHz, 8 bit CPU. Boy, am I dating myself here.

    IIRC, the OS on your mini is some ugly thing called CADOL. The last machine new machine I remember them making was called the Hawk or something - that was an ugly amalgum of Unix and Cadol in the same box, using 2 386 processors. Actually, sounds like you have one of these ugly beasts.

    Do a Google search on "Contel Tiger", Versyss, or you may even try contacting these guys [cbcs.com] - they used to sell those things, and may have a manual or 2 laying around.
  • Is my memory going? Don't know about the Honywell 6180, but I thought I remembered that the GE 635 and GE 645 were 48-bit machines instead of 36-bit as one of the articles says. GE also made a line of 24-bit machines, the PAC-4000 line, of which the PAC-4020 was probably the best known. The PAC-4000's were process control machines, but the IRS bought a bunch of them starting about 1966, and most of them were still in service as late as 1986. By all means, the wrong box for the job. The PAC-4000 was superseded by the Honeywell TDC 4200, TDC 4400 and TDC 44000, which used the same relative-addressing instruction set.
  • What's the story on the moderation here? I expressed my willingness to restore and preserve these machines that are important parts of the history of computing. I'm sorry, but I don't see this as trolling of any kind.

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
  • Is my memory going? Don't know about the Honywell 6180, but I thought I remembered that the GE 635 and GE 645 were 48-bit machines instead of 36-bit as one of the articles says.

    Your memory may be going; the item on the multicians.org site about the GE 635 [multicians.org] says:

    635

    General Electric's competitor to the IBM 7094 in the 1965 time frame. Like the 7094, the GE-635 had a 36-bit word, 18-bit addresses, and programmable data channels with direct memory access.

    and the item on the 645 [multicians.org] says:

    645

    The computer system that Multics first ran on, produced by General Electric. Derived from the GE-635, a 36-bit word machine with accumulator, quotient register, and 8 index registers like the 7094. Basic execution speed was about 435 KIPS.

    The 6180 was also 36-bit (its instruction and register set was largely a superset of the 645's, although I seem to remember the base register set was a little different - instead of pairing two base registers, so that you had 8 base registers but only 4 base pairs, you had 8 double-width base registers; programs that used the base pairs worked on either, but I think programs that tried to use the base registers independently rather than as part of a pair might not have worked).

  • A minicomuter is definitely is not, but technically--in a way--it is the baby cousin to the TI990/4 minicomputer. The 16-bit 9900 CPU in the TI99/4 and /4a used a subset of the instruction set in the 99000 CPU of the TI990/4 -- I think the link in the article mentions that connection.

    Of course in many ways the little 99/4a was a piece of crap. It had a nice BASIC (and really nice extended BASIC option) and obviously a CPU with potential, but came only with a whopping 256 BYTES of system RAM. The rest of it (16K) wasn't actually system RAM--it had to be accessed through IO calls to the 9918a video chip (very very slow). Also, as full-featured as the BASIC was, I think it was DOUBLE INTERPRETED (BASIC->GPL->binary)! What were those engineers smoking and where do I get some of it?

    Of course, I think there were RAM expansion cards that were directly addressable by the CPU, which helped immensely. In any case, there are some old machines (micros, minis and mainframes alike) that should be forgotten, or at leased ony remembered for their mistakes...
  • Many years ago, the Mindset was introduced. I can't remember the year, but I remember drooling over an article in Byte covering its features. It looked like a typical x86 box, but had some extra graphics hardware (my recollection is sketchy at best). I do remember rather wanting one, but that article was the last I heard of the thing. It had a very short lifespan. Pauvre little Mindset. Does anyone recall any details?
  • I remember as a child, before anyone had a personal computer, the very first desktop computer I ever saw.

    I was wandering through the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, Manitoba and there against a wall, where once there had been nothing at all, was (literally) a pedestal. Upon this pedestal lay a small desktop computer. I don't even remember what kind of computer it was (I think it may have been a TRS-80, but I'm not entirely sure).

    It was running a simple game (written in BASIC, although I did not know that at the time) in which the "computer" was thinking of a number from 1 to 10 and you had three tries to guess it.

    There was no sign describing this strange contraption, and I have a vague recollection of inadvertently stopping the program somehow.

    In retrospect, seeing my first computer on a pedestal in a museum seems somehow... prophetic. On one or two levels, even. :)

  • Although I think you're overreacting a bit, I do agree with your "priesthood" metaphor.

    Long before the internet, when all my programming was done in EDU27 BASIC on a PDP-8 with 16K using cards marked with pencil, I remember a time when I could sit in a restaurant (or any other public place) and, if someone even mentioned the word "computer", my head would snap up from my notes and I would glance around to see who it was. That was a very rare event, indeed.

    Most of the time I would try to eavesdrop to determine whether or not they knew what they were talking about. :)

    Nowadays people just can't appreciate a christmas tree made out of hundreds of asterisks. The magic is gone...
  • Yes, it's a cheesy anthropomorphisation.

    I know that Helsinki Institute of Technology has several old machines which they may not _by law_ get rid of. For example they have a couple of large Pr1mes (the head of the department 15 years ago's previous job was Pr1me's Finish sales representative...), and a couple of ancient analog things the size of a small fridge.

    As time goes on, these things will become rarer, so I think that forcing peope to keep them is quite a good idea. You can't get them back after they've gone.

    FP.
    -- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
  • I have an SGI Iris 3120 in perfect working order.

    It's an awesome machine, about 1 cubic meter, built around a whooping 16MHz 68020. It comes with a bulky 19" graphical monitor, a keyboard and optical mouse. It is loaded with an almost full copy of "GL2-W3.6" (the pre Irix SGI Unix) complete with a C compiler but lacking manpages. (no X11 though, that came later with Irix :( )

    If anyone has documentation (or a system tape with the manpages) for that box, I would be glad to buy it off him. I regularly try the SGI newsgroups but haven't found anything...

    I also have the very first RISC workstation ever sold (DEC) but that one will soon be happily be running NetBSD :)

  • I dug an old Systime machine out of a skip (read 'dumpster' across the pond) many years ago. The card frame was badly damaged, so a friend and I stripped it down and hauled the cards and PSU away. I still have some bits from it kicking around.
    It appeared to be some kind of PDP-11 clone, with boards about the size of a paperback book and two edge connectors (iirc). There were a couple of boards the full length and height of the machine (possible about 18" by 10"?), one of which had about a dozen AMD 2901 bitslice ALU's on it.
    Does it sound familiar to anyone?

    Two years ago, another retro-geek friend and I hauled away a Transit-load of PDP-11's from St. Andrew's University. Our load was:
    A PDP-11/34 (psu dead) in a rack the size of a shower cubicle
    Two 11/84's in a rack the size of a four-drawer filing cabinet
    A printer the size of a motorbike packing crate
    Some "washing machine" disk drives (I forget, are the RK05's the ones that look like dustbin lids, and the RK11?'s the stacks of aluminium platters in a perspex fruitbowl?) and disks
    *MILES* of cable
    Some manuals.
    If you hire a blue Transit van from Mitchell Self Drive in Aberdeen, take the one with sagging rear springs and smile... :-)

  • we got a few computers ancient enough for that page, they are called linux boxes
  • computing today is kind of boring no?

    chow - who learned how to program on a pr1me mini...

  • They are important to me and I even saw links that led to pages talking about them. Computers that are important to me:

    Atari 8 bits (specifically the 800 XL, my First Personal Computer EVER!)

    Apple ][ (who didn't play with one of these back in the late 70's and early 80's! I remember learning how to do animation on these....yeah it was blocky, but it was cool)

    My Leading Edge 286 machine, my first IBM compatible (I loved this machine! I went through college with it! Leading Edge made great clones...where are they now? Biggest thing I remember about this machine was it was the heaviest computer I ever owned. Totally metal case and the keyboard could break a person's head open.).

    Those were my early machine I messed with. Now I play with a Multiprise 2000 (S/390 machine), of course PC's, A couple Ultra 30's and maybe soon a RS/6000 server (for TSM at work). I work IN a computer room. All day, everyday. I see vestiges of computers like those on the minicomputer site in this room. When I was first hired, we had a ES/9000 machine, and several 486 based servers. We have come a long way. By the way, Xerox still uses PDP-11 chips in some of their printer controllers. I run a BIG Xerox 4890 printer and it has a PDP based controller. You thought 8 by 3 filenames were too short? Try 6 by 3's and you cannot change the extension, it must be some type that Xerox uses (FSL, FRM, LGO, JSL, JDL, PDE amongst the types....there are more, but those are the ones I use the most). I believe Xerox even uses some of the Alto like technology in their big printers as well. Their bigger machines use a interface VERY similar to what I saw in Pirates of the Silicon Valley, and other sources depicting those Alto's. Heck I even here that some traffic light manufacturers still use 8085 processors in their controllers. These are slowly changing. Xerox is starting to use Sun machines to run their printers (the above to Ultra 30's are controllers for DP-65's.). Things you wouldn't imagine using PC technology probably do now. Things are changing, but some of the old machines still are useful.

  • I needed a new user manual for my abacus
  • You never know where those old chips might turn up. I have an AMD 8088-1 that came from the controller for the light rack on top of a police car.

    Mandrake 7.2 and KDE 2 for me? for free?
  • someone actually coded an 8-bit browser for the commodore. it really does rule.
  • In one of my recent blunders, I removed lots of jumpers from a working motherboard for which I did not have the manual. So, after a LOT of searching, I discovered what it was, an ABIT AH4T. However, ABIT did not have the manual on their sites, no matter how much I looked. And unfortunately, their "moved manuals" site was down.

    Anyway, after a lot of searching, I came across a rather large file (for a dialup user, 9.2MB) that looked promising, so I spend 30-45min downloading it. It said it was an archive of motherboard jumper settings. And it was! Over 14,000 devices, not just motherboards. You name it, and it's not currently easily available, and it's likely there. For your convenience, I've placed it here: http://downloads.members.tripod.com/ahaning/th99fr ee.tar.gz [tripod.com]. I encourage those with fast connections to mirror this. Enjoy!

    (Oh, and yes, I was able to get the settings for my board. Of only board makers would have more often printed that information on the board somewhere. Whoopie for the internet!


    kickin' science like no one else can,
    my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
  • The simple fact is, as you allude to, writing something in 100% assembly is, for the most part, foolish - you cut down on stability and development time for a small gain in speed.

    Well, I write a lot of stuff in assembly or in other higher level languages over assembly, and this is just wrong.

    Writing something in 100% assembly increases stability once you've got it working, increases development time (because, as you point out, it's harder to get it working), but trades off for an enormous increase in speed.

    IME badly written assembly (that is, quick without a lot of optimization, but by someone who keeps his references straight and doesn't put values in the wrong places) is always noticeably faster than any higher level language no matter how smart the compiler.

    I have reverse-engineered some code in the controller I mentioned and it consistently dereferences things it uses in high speed interrupts by 2 or more levels -- that's a 50% or more speed hit no matter how you cut it, and more than that if you judiciously use a few register-level variables. This is the cost of OO languages which must use a lot of dereferencing to achieve their high level of abstraction. A 50% hit may not sound like much until you make the mistake of using it in an instrument with a 6-level interrupt system.

  • "I think your historical perspective is more limited than it should be, then."

    I am aware of computing history in a broader sense, not just DEC. DEC was part of my life then and I'm writing about it. And, yes, I was reacting to all the immature trolling. Instead of dropping to their level, I wrote something passionate and literate.

    "Also, lose the religious overtones."

    When was the last time you read prose or 19th century literature?
    Relax, it was a metaphor and I was being literate. Read the post as a op-ed nostalgic memoir. Remember what Baz Lurhman said about nostalga.

    "People are gonna say you're an old fart."

    Feh. Truthfully, I had a hellish childhood, nothing will age you faster. That stepdad who took me to DEC also gave me a near nervous breakdown when I was 13. I've done a lot of living for 27, it's a lot in Internet time. ;-) Once you hit 26, caffiene poisoning takes its toll and Zoloft takes the edge off.
  • I do not see any path out of this morass. I'd love to see something like a Library Of Congress archive of out-of-print manuals, to keep them accessible.

    At least with these old devices, there was printed documentation. These days, it's all .PDF (if docs exist in the first place), and my hopes are not high on retrieving them if a modern device goes out of production. The number of times I've run into the situation that you count on being able to retrieve something from a bookmark, only to find the document is no longer there, and conversely, that I find myself with an archive of .pdf's that I've got not clue of what it's all about, and what it's status is...

  • I bought my VAX 400-100 for $75 when I left DEC..er..Compaq in 1998. It has served me for MANY years. In DEC, it was known as AXEL.

    The reason they charged me $75 was for the VT320. The VAX I could take for free, but some VP's secretary took a look at the VT and said "You're buying a monitor!". After trying to convince her I couldn't hook it up to a PC and run Powerpoint on it, I relented and paid the $75.

    My VAX runs VMS 6.2. One of these days, when the price of electricty comes down, I'll put it back up on the net. Till then, it and its 500MB (why do you need more?) disks will sit in the closet.

    AXEL::FOLEY

Slashdot Top Deals

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov

Close