[GreenKeys] Fw: Re: Teletype and electronics........

[Rokumon Cat]

--- On Thu, 4/11/13, Rokumon Cat <rokumoncat at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Rokumon Cat <rokumoncat at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Teletype and electronics........
To: COURYHOUSE at aol.com
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2013, 6:06 AM







Good lord...
 
I had a PDP-8 once. Won it in a GSA sealed bid auction... for five dollars. I did not realize it at the time, but the 5 foot rack that held the PDP-8 and "floppy drives (8 inch) was not the only thing that I won. Seems the GSA in their generosity failed to advise the bidders (me) that there were ten of these things that looked like washing machines in size and weight came with the PDP-8. They were hard drives... along with a multi-hundred pound box called the "hard drive starting sequencer" that would start the hard drives one by one, so that the starting current of the motors would not blow the mains. They (the GSA) advised me that I had 48 hours to remove these treasures or that I would be fined 25 dollars a day for storage.
 
To make a long story short, I rented a flatbed truck with a tommy lift, got the (deleted) things home and stashed them in my basement. I actually started several of the hard drives. Though I never was a line boy at a passenger airport, I suspect that the sound of a 747's engines spooling up was quite similar to that of the hard drives both in tone and SPL. The heat that came out of those things was also similar to the jet's engines.
 
With my basement stuffed with antiquated computer junque, I decided that I needed to use this stuff for something. That was in January of one of the coldest winters of the 90's. Then on one of the coldest nights of that cold winter, my furnace naturally suffered from a burned out blower motor. Fearing the specter of frozen pipes and catcicles, I turned on three of the drives. Kept my basement uncomfortably hot, and my first floor nice and toasty, and the second floor bearable.
 
That was the only and best use that I ever came up for the thing. That spring, I gave it to a kid for the hauling it away.
 
 
Best,
 
Joe



 




...had it hooked to my  PDP-8 
 
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