[rescue] WTB: Good 'antique' computer for education

[Brian Hechinger]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 02:22:24PM -0400, Big Endian wrote:
> My fiance is looking for an OLD computer to teach herself some 
> computer architecture.  I'm thinking something with a card cage.  My 
> personal favorite are the VME based sun machines but I'm open to 
> ideas.  I need something where she can get replacement parts cheaply 
> and (relatively) easily.  Would a VAX be good for this?  What about 
> an -11?  How small can I make an -11 or a VAX?  Does anybody have 
> anything they would be willing to let go or a place to get this kind 
> of stuff?  (I wouldn't mind getting a VME sun... Especially not an 
> 4/xxx deskside one)

i'm not exactly sure what you are looking for here, but older QBus vaxen are
fairly easy to come by, as are cards and memory.  PDP stuff is quite a bit
harder to find the bits too, but if you look hard enough it's there.  but i
think of the three choices, the VME Sun stuff is the most plentyful.

as far as how small you can make an -11 or a VAX, an -11 that doesn't need Q/CD
(the dual width LSI-11 CPU cards are perfect for this) will fit very nicely
into a BA11 cage, rack mount, 2U, 4 QBus slots.  i've got an 11/03 in a BA11-M
and if i replace the quad width MFM controller with my dual width MFM controller
i can put an ethernet card in this thing.  not bad for such a small space (CPU,
64K RAM, four port serial [one for console], boot terminator, MFM controller
and ethernet card)

if you do dig up PDP pieces, let me know, i'd be interested to know what you
find.

the other big thing with the PDPs though is you aren't going to find a "modern"
OS to go on them.  your choices are pretty much RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX-11, 2.(9,11)
BSD, and Ultrix 3.x none of which are very new.  :)  to be fair though, Megan
Gentry STILL writes stuff for RT-11 to this very day, but then it's usually
adding device drivers.

is that enough info?  if you need more, ask more specific questions and i'll
see what i can do.

-brian