[geeks] NIRVANA

Ken Hansen geeks at sunhelp.org
Mon Apr 9 10:18:32 CDT 2001


Speaking of things of old, anyone have any idea what I can do with a DEC Pro-350? It is fairly complete (512K RAM, large HD, extended bit map option (COLOR!) and all the other bits needed to run)?

If you are not familiar with it, DEC released this desktop PDP 11/23+ machine in 1983 to address technical personal computing, the Rainbow was for non-technical users (and supported *both* CP/M and MS-DOS, after a fashion), and DecMate was for pure word processing (really a PDP/8 in a tiny box).

I know I could run PO/S on it (a dangerous name for an OS, IMHO), or even Venix Unix (the license key is in the public domain, VentureCom walked away from the software *binaries*), but I really don't have the time or interest.

Also, I don't have the Ethernet card for it, so anything above SL/IP may be quite hard to accomplish.

Any thoughts/interest in this box? I have manuals, Toolkit, Languages (FORTRAN, anyways, maybe more, don't recall now).

Ken
(new to Geeks - I guess I belong/deserve to be here ;^)

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Bradford [mailto:mrbill at mrbill.net]
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 10:16 AM
To: geeks at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [geeks] NIRVANA


On Sun, Apr 08, 2001 at 11:54:26PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> So, other than the cray and lineotronic, what other toys did you witness?

Actually didnt see the linotronic; I think it was down in the basement.

Lessee, notable things in both the warehouse and the haus:

FOUR crays (five if you count the one in the warehouse)
Four BBN IMPs (think "old Internet history")
couple of SGI Onyx machines
PILES of NeXT gear
Scanning electron microscope
3-4 FULL racks of PDP-8 and PDP-11 gear
stack(s) of DEC boxes 

etc, etc, etc.

I think I was drooling the whole time.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX
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