28 Oct
2014
28 Oct
'14
6:57 p.m.
I picked up four 11/60 machines from a place in the late 80s. I still have a complete set
of CPU cards, but threw the last machine away about 10 years ago.
Chuckle. My wife would kill me. I finally got rid of the ASR-37 (you know a real UNIX
teletype complete with a big NEWLINE key and able to interpret those ESC-8 and ESC-9
things that nroff outputs by default) decades ago (RS tells me he left it blocking
someone's car in at Sprint or something, I disavow all knowledge of it).
While at BRL I was the king of the surplus PDP-11. Any time a PDP-11 came up surplus I
recycled it into internet routers. Sometimes I took the older machines for either their
RK05 or RL02 drives, or just the racks. I got a call up from surplus people asking me
about this $100,000 worth of computer equipment I had turned in and needed to come over
and identify.
What $100,000 worth of computer equipment?
It says here "One PDP-11/40 and accessories."
That thing is 16 years old. That's the price the government paid for it then. Do
you know how much a 16 year old computer is worth?
(especially one that had been stripped of just about everything but the CPU box itself).