The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 family of 16-bit computers.
On May 30, Chris Osborn alerted me on Twitter about a Reddit post announcing a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11/34A computer system available for free in Indio, CA, about an hour and a half away from where I live. That sounded right up my alley, so I contacted the owner to see if I might be the lucky guy to adopt it.
Back in February, I was contacted by somebody who found my web page and thought I might be interested in some old computers in his company’s basement. The company turned out to be in Culver City, within reasonable driving distance from my home in Riverside, and I ended up purchasing both of the computers. One is a Data General Nova 3, installed in a rack cabinet with a hard disk drive that has one fixed platter and one removable platter. The other is a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11V03-L, which is a combination of a PDP-11/03 and an RX02 dual 8" floppy drive mounted in a short rack cabinet.
In my pile of PDP-11/44 chassis, I noticed that one of their front panels is different from the others. Its metal backing wraps around the edges of the plastic panel, and it has "-01" added to the end of its part number. I wonder why this design change was made?
Here are some pictures of my new heap of old Digital Equipment Corporation RL02 hard disk drives. They store 10 megabytes on a removable 14 inch platter. I’ll be using some of them in my PDP-11/44 project. I don’t have much to say at the moment… I’m mostly just posting these so I can refer to them in mailing list discussions.
I recently learned of a computer collector up in Santa Clara, CA who was moving to a new location, and who needed to get rid of a lot of his vintage computer equipment that he had in storage. He had already moved the good stuff that he was keeping, but he offered up piles of gear for free to anybody who would haul it away on some specific days. I didn’t want to drive up there myself at the time, but one of my friends at work suggested that one of his daughters and her boyfriend lived nearby in Tracy, and they might be willing to grab a truckload of equipment and bring it down south next time they drove back to visit him.
Everything all came together, and we met at a restaurant near my home on Saturday to transfer the loot. The haul consisted of four PDP-11/44 chassis and on ASR-33 teletype!
SUBSCRIBE