----- Original Message ----- From: "D. Mynatt" To: "AMSAT-BB" Sent: Friday, December 26, 2008 02:58 UTC Subject: [amsat-bb] An Off-Topic Question
I asked sometime ago in the group, but sometimes things change and stuff comes along so I thought I'd ask again and see if any one had a mini-computer like a PdP-11 with tapes drives and the large external disk drives in the floor boxes.
As I mentioned before, just trying to find a unit to show students the older technologies as well as how to program with Cobol/Fortran.
Using PCs is the best way to do a lot of stuff, but a mini-mainframe is the visually appealing idea.
Just thought I'd ask in case things changed out there!
Dave // DM78qd // KA0SWT
Hi Dave, As a retired Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) employee I am very familiar with the PDP-11 product line (as well as the PDP-8,10,12 and VAX). I don't know how much help it will be but there was (and I believe still is) a computer museum in Mountain View, California that had a number of PDP-11's as well as some PDP-8's and PDP-12's with peripherals such as tape drives, external disk drives and card readers. I know there once was a very good museum in Boston (they had a functional PDP-1) but it may have closed when DEC was sold off to Compaq. I've also heard there was a DEC Museum in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada but I don't know much about it. Regarding the Fortran and Cobol programming languages, I believe there are freeware versions of both available for the windows PC. This wouldn't be like using the punch card system we suffered through back in the day, but they might give your students a feel for the structure of the older languages. 73 Steve .. AI7W