[HECnet] Living Computers Museum

[Keith Halewood]

Hi all,

The RSTS/E business reminded me. I went to the Living Computers Museum last week and it was almost a bit of an emotional experience.
A few things in no particular order:

They appear to have a VAX 6000-400 sitting next to the 785 so I assume that's about to be restored to working order.

There are so many Intel boxes and FPGA-realised interfaces around supplying 'virtual' discs to a number of systems. It's really sad that the number of functional real discs such as RAs, RPs, etc. appears to be decreasing rapidly over time. Bruce said that for one restoration project, they started out with 9 functional RP07s. By the time they'd completed the project, only 2 remained functional.

I didn't ask about HECnet though the elapsed time in discussion about, well, everything else I could think to ask, was over 2 hours.

I played a lot of spacewar/star trek on a TRS-80 Model II (I used to have one) and an IMSAI 8080, probably an Altair original too. Apple ][, e possibly, was as clunky as I remember and how on earth did we ever cope with CRTs? That Osbourne luggable 'portable' was... amazing... CP/M - I'd almost forgotten.

I went into their sorting out room - stacks of disc drives, Commodore 64s, TI something-or-others, calculators (some of the HP RPN favourites I had growing up too). I nearly cried when I saw what looked like an HP 85 computer sticking out from high up on the shelves - I'm sorry I ever sold mine on, doubly sorry that I didn't snap up a refurbished one with QIC-tape replacement on Ebay a few years ago.

I do have some pictures... I'll sort them out.

Keith
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