"Michael Black" wrote in message
...
"John R. Strohm" ) writes:

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

These guys had this thing to the dump before I even heard about it. To tell
the truth, I'm not so sure I would have wanted to deal with posting it on
eBay, packaging, shipping the beast, all that, even if I had a chance.

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.

Reminds me of something really great from a few years back. I was the
advisor for an electronics specialty Explorer post (basically older Boy
Scouts). Anyway, we were donated a PDP/4. This was an 18 bit machine,
interfaced to the printer and tape with a 6 bit transcode instead of ASCII.

Anyway, as we were first looking over the thing, with it's racks of cards
and beautiful, huge electrolytics in the supply, my assistant advisor taps
me on the shoulder and says "come look at this. See that rack of cards
there? I think it's the accumulator."

Sure enough, 18 cards for the accumulator, 18 cards for the program counter,
18 cards for the M register, one card per bit!

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