This page was written in 1998, and had its last significant update in October 1998. It's
clearly completely out of date. I don't intend to update it; I'll replace it with something
else sooner or later.
I've been in the industry for a while, and in the course of time have picked up a lot of old
and weird hardware. When I moved back to Australia I threw away some of the less interesting
stuff, but I brought a lot with me. The following photos show how the hardware was housed out
in the shed waiting for me to build an extension to the house. The extension is now finished,
and most of this hardware is in the Mike Smith Memorial Room, but
after many years it's still not complete. The text of this document is effectively frozen as
of October 1998. You'll find more up-to-date information linked from my
home page and diary.
The most interesting things here are:
What I thought was a PDP-11/73. I've now been told that it's an LSI-11/73 (in other
words, a processor version with LSI CPU. I'll take photos of some of the boards some time).
It just says DEC DataSystem on the front.
I was given this just before I left Germany, and I've never turned it on. It has 2 MB memory,
3 RL02 disk drives (two of them are not installed yet, they're still in one of about 1000
boxes in the shed), a TS05 9" tape drive and an Ethernet board. As a member of
the UNIX Heritage Society and
SCO private Ancient UNIX
licensee, I have access to a number of old UNIX versions, including the Seventh Edition and
2.11BSD, which I intend to run on the machine once I have space to install it. In the
meantime, I run 2.11BSD on
the Begemot p11 Emulator
on my FreeBSD system, and get performance slightly
better than the original PDP-11 hardware, so I'm told.
If you want to try out this “machine”, telnet to pdp11.lemis.com and log in as user
guest, password HUPS?!. Please behave yourself, and don't post this
information elsewhere. If I find any signs of abuse, I'll change the password. Contact me if
you have any trouble.
A Tandem LXN “workstation”, 68020 based, 4 MB memory. It's on the left
in the picture above. This was Tandem's first UNIX box, back in 1986 or so. I keep it mainly
because it's the only device I have which will write QIC-24 tapes.
Also in the picture you'll see a few relics of Tandem's first machine, the Tandem/16,
retrospectively christened the NonStop I. The box up against the monitor is a maintenence
panel, with which you could single step the micromachine (the T/16 was a microcoded machine)
and pinpoint faults. We used it a few times, but most of the faults we found were in the
maintenence panel.
On top of the TS05 tape unit are two boards from a Tandem/16. The top one, dated about
June 1978 based on the chip codes, is the MEMPPU, the second board of the processor pair. It
handles virtual memory (MEM) and I/O (Peripheral Processing Unit). Underneath is a Universal
Interface board, full of SSI TTL chips and signifying (almost) nothing.
This isn't the only stuff I have, but the rest is in even more of a mess. I recently
inherited a number of old Sun and HP workstations, as well as a VME-based MIPS box. Here are
the conditions in which they have to live:
