In the early/mid 60's the Science Club in my high school built a computer of
sorts out of salvaged telephone relays -- more of a binary adder than
anything else (sorry, I was too interested in 20 meters at the time!).

The Computer Museum is out in Mountain View California.

Jack
"Michael Black" wrote in message
...
"John R. Strohm" ) writes:
alt.sys.pdp8
alt.sys.pdp11
alt.sys.pdp10

"xpyttl" wrote in message
...
Talk about bad timing ....

Just a couple of days ago two friends of mine hauled a PDP/8 out to the
dump. Of course, you might not have been able to afford the power to
run
a
REAL PDP/8.

You do realize that there are people who collect these machines, and
have
been known to pay REAL MONEY for them, don't you???


A friend sold a PDP/8 on Ebay for around $3000 US (and since he's in
Canada,
it will be even better for him), just in July. It did have some odd
suffix
(and some oddity about the hardware to go with it), so I'm not sure it
that
drove the price up.

It was his first "home computer", and while he got a good deal on it (I
forget
the story, but I believe he bought it surplus in the seventies). He
was moving, so it seemed like a good time to clear it out.

Oddly, a couple of years ago I pointed him to someone periodically posting
in buy and sell newsgroups looking for such computers. When my friend
contacted him, the buyer was only willing to pay a few hundred dollars.

Sort of to get it back to amateur radio, most people know that Wayne Green
started BYTE, and then later Kilobaud. But in the November 1972 issue of
73 (the thickest up to that time), there was an article about building
your
own computer, from logic gates etc. It was not a construction article,
but
gave quite a bit of detail on what was needed for such a time and place.
Nobody ever seems to mention that article after the fact. I'm still
trying
to decide if the article had any bearing on how things went later. Did
Wayne
print it because he saw things going in that way, or did he just print
it as filler, yet when small computers came along a few years alter, it
helped to direct him to small comptuers?

Michael VE2BVW