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A casual visit to the Vintage Computer Festival in Wall, New Jersey. Brian Benchoff and I escape to the shore for lunch at the Asbury Park boardwalk, while Bil Herd tells tales to many Commodore fans. A recently restored PDP-8 is unveiled and started up for the first time publicly, as a new addition to the InfoAge Museum. Shorter than the usual vlog, but on the first day most exhibitors are not yet set up, so not as much to see.
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A casual visit to the Vintage Computer Festival in Wall, New Jersey. Brian Benchoff and I escape to the shore for lunch at the Asbury Park boardwalk, while Bil Herd tells tales to many Commodore fans. A recently restored PDP-8 is unveiled and started up for the first time publicly, as a new addition to the InfoAge Museum. Shorter than the usual vlog, but on the first day most exhibitors are not yet set up, so not as much to see.
Fran on Twitter - https://twitter.com/contourcorsets
Fran's Science Blog - http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings.html
Fran's Daily Updates - http://www.contourcorsets.com/daily/daily.html
I have only been to Ross Dock at Fort Lee on the Hudson River.. that was cool Fran.
Never seen any of these old PDP-8 computers before. I still have my Polymorphic POLY 88 computer, which is an S-100 bus based computer that I bought in kit form in 1977.
Ha, ha!! "This session is over." So the power supply turned on, the fans powered up, some lights, but NO COMPUTING!!!
🙂
I used to run and maintain a PDP 8 Classic just like that one, and still have the 8k x 9bit core memory board that we used in it. The core kept us from having to toggle in the bootstrap loader every time we lost power. The nice thing about that early PDP 8 was that you could easily troubleshoot and repair the modules since they were all discrete transistor circuits, and you could also add new functions by adding new cards and wire-wrapping new connections on the backplane.
Reminds me of my days working on Data General Nova minis – about 1976!
I truly wish that I could bottle my tech memories and send them to you. I worked with the PDP-8 for monitoring the Loran-C navigation system signal. I taught vacuum tube xmtrs to NATO students. So much stuff.
This video tells you so much about life.
vcf on my list.
till then ill tinker with trying to rebuild a 8i switch panel i found smashed in a feild grabed al i could carry.
bb 🙂
It was nice to meet you, Fran!
I don't trust electronics I can't see! The guys didn't seem to do anything with that PDP-8, so long as it didn't explode in a sheet of flame, that was enough. Okay!
Thank you Fran and Brian.
They didn't do very much with the PDP-8, like manually key in the 27 instructions(or so) with the paddle switches on the front panel to launch the ASR-33 to read in the real program from punched tape, a copy of which we all carried around in our tool boxes.
Did the computer boot up?