Re: Sounds like my house
Ah, memories.
When I was at uni, the computer club met in the physics lab, and one week I noticed a DEC thing sat on a stair landing with a notice on it "free to good home". Not long afterwards, I was re-introduced to it in a friend's room - yep, he'd grabbed it. I think that was a PDP-8.
The story i was told was that this had been declared redundant many years before, but one particular lecturer refused to let it go as is was so good for teaching computing fundamentals - the ability to toggle switches, single step it, and see what was going on by watching the lights. This lecturer was on holiday for a couple of weeks, so the rest fo the department took the opportunity to get rid of it while he wasn't there !
So whenever I visited that friend, we'd always end up sat rewinding rolls of tape while we talked !
I still remember some of the details. The processor alone was about 3feet of 19" rack, it had not just punched tape - but .... drum roll ... hard disks, two of them. I believe each disk held something like 32k words of data. And as well as the slow punch and reader on the floor standing teletype (ASR33 ?), this beast had both high speed punch and reader - so it could create chad far more effectively. Two full height 19" racks, and just enough room to still get his bed in.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
