[ARC5] OT. Where old stuff goes .... (Was deathwatch for radio shack?)

Fri Sep 26 20:24:50 EDT 2014

  On the topic of trashing good stuff - Geoff Linthorne was a comms
  officer with the Australian RAAF.

  He was in charge of the deep space tracking radar - a 35 ton dish that
  would rotate 270 degrees in a short period of time.
  (Maybe 1 or 2 seconds).  The feedback mechanism used to track the dish
  used a set  of engraved lines filled with gold on a glass disk.
  This thing could "see" a 6 inch object on the nose of a Neptune bomber
  120 miles out to sea.

  When the radar reached the end of useful life it was offered to the
  Western Australian university.
  The uni  took too long to figure whether they could house and maintain
  the system.
  A dozer dug a BIG hole in the ground, and that's the resting place of
  the deep space radar unit at Canarvon.
  That is - the dish, hydraulic system and 18 bays of rack-mounted
  control gear.  (sigh)

  Lots of good gear is dumped because it's obsolete or can't be
  maintained.

  I have a complete SOL system in the attic - it's probably working.
  But - what would some-one do with a microcomputer with a 3MHz clock,
  64k RAM that ran FORTRAN?
  The OS was "neat".  It was based on Unix - 22 system calls, all the
  the same memory location.
  The entire OS (create a file, "kill" a file, read to a file, write to
  a file, name a file ....) occupied 12k bytes - including a 4k file
  buffer space.
  The file system had no knowledge of a keyboard, printer, screen -
  these devices were all "files" - aka Unix.

  Beat the socks of CP/M or MSDOS.  Now it's junk.  (sigh)

  73 de Les Smith
  vk2bcu at operamail.com

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014, at 09:41, Gary Pewitt wrote:
> About 15 years ago I was given a number of Chromemco computers, NOS, 
> from an out of business store.  There were 3 Z-80 CP/M machines with 
> S-100 buss, one Chromix server with an 80 meg hard drive that would have 
>   cost $35,000.00 if it had sold, and a a neat little CP/M machine with 
> a built in chess program that I can't recall the model.  There were a 
> bunch of terminals and drives and all sorts of cables and manuals. 
> Probably about 100 grand at retail prices.  I also picked up a 3B2-400 
> Unix machine with 4 hard drives, two tape units, and  two floppies in an 
> expansion box plus several cartons of 8" floppy programs, operating 
> system discs, and cartons of blank 8" floppies.  All that and much more 
> I can't remember, all gone now.  As a LAN admin for the Defence 
> Logistics Agency I must have sent over 400 computers to DRMO none of 
> which were defective in any way.  We upgraded constantly starting with 
> 286's working our way through 386's, 486's, and pentiums.  I did manage 
> to give some to the Army recruiters next door but almost all went to 
> DRMO where they were tossed into giant dumpsters and trashed.  What hurt 
> me the most was when we replaced our Motorolla Four Phase mini computer. 
>   It was built like a Swiss bank vault about 6 feet long and I had to 
> tear it down and haul it to the dump.  It had a Winchester 30-30 hard 
> drive with two 30" platters in a 200 lb aluminum casting.  I couldn't 
> get them to donate it to anyone and I couldn't save it for myself.  I 
> almost cried over that one.  All that colossal waste.
> 
> On 09/26/2014 10:49 AM, Kenneth G. Gordon wrote:
> > On 26 Sep 2014 at 7:27, Mark K3MSB wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Brings back memories.   I used to have an RX-02 dual 8 inch floppy disk drive
> >> from DEC.   Somewhere along my various job moves I gave it to a friend that
> >> was into old computers.  I wonder if he has back problems now....
> >
> > The University of Idaho surplus recently had an old IBM hard drive for sale: it
> > has a 1/4 HP motor on it and must have weighed at least 50 lbs. I was very
> > tempted to buy it and save it as an historical object.
> >
> > The very first microcomputer I ever worked on or with was a Southwest
> > Technical Products "kit". 1 K (that's K) of RAM for that thing cost $1500.00.
> >
> > I also remember one of the first microcomputer hard drives: it was a 5 mb
> > drive that cost $4995.95. It was sold by Radio Shack as part of their Model 2
> > business system.
> >
> > Gee...
> >
> > Ken W7EKB
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