The Minicomputer Orphanage

dummy_variable writes: "A friend of mine pointed me to this site, and I thought some people here at Slashdot would probably appreciate it. Quoted from the site: "This is The Minicomputer Orphanage, a place where you can find information on computers from companies no longer in business. It contains sales brochures, reference manuals, and other things. This was started because with the passage of time, these computer systems are just below the Internet event horizon, and there is almost no on-line information on them.""

Comments

the internet horizon

[xeno]

I was reminded about the internet horizon by a recent experience with some ca.1993 network equipment from Intel. Very little documentation and no driver software was available for pre-1995 equipment, and I find the experience rather common with other equipment and software vendors.

In a previous life, I worked with a wide variety of PC hardware, and as a result have _hundreds_ of old (1985-1995) motherboard, drive, NIC, and peripheral manuals boxed up in my basement. I've often thought that I should scan them in (maybe to PDF or OCR->text so that they are text-searchable). However, the rub is that many of these companies are still in business, don't want bother supporting old stuff, and don't want someone else to do it for them, either.

Is there any way I can make these available for people to peruse just as if I had lent them the physical book? They're books, remember. What's the deal with fair use & copying of out-of-print books? Do I have to write an applet viewer that says "I'm sorry, someone else is reading that right now" if there's a simultaneous request for an archival copy of a manual? Better yet, is there a way to legally flip the original and the archival copy so that the physical original is considered the backup for the electronic document?

hmm.

-Jon

Cool. Now where can we find these systems?

[SecretAsianMan]

Now that we have documentation for these systems, where can we find people or organizations that would be willing to donate these types of systems to us for education and historical preservation? I for one would love to have a PDP-8, PDP-11, or a VAX of my own.

--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)

Re:A Golden Age

[localroger]

Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?

I remember them every day, because their designs worked which is something you often can't say of more modern stuff, even when it does run at 1 GHz.

There is also an exponential increase in bloat which usually isn't noticed because the exponent is so very close to 1, just a bit over, and the modern CPUs are so fast. But when you take all the modern lessons in design and try to apply them to a 20 MHz 80186, as one manufacturer I know of has done, and you end up with an interpreter that can only parse a few hundred instructions per second, you might actually think this is normal and somehow reflects a defect in the processor instead of your bloated OO code.

Damn History Blind PFY's

[mindstorm]

At this point in my Slashdot life, I don't care about karma anymore, so I'll rant:

You damn PFY's don't have any history. Quite a shame.

Heloooow?? Did anyone read the headline if this article? It says MINIcomputer! It's a step between a mainframe and a microcomputer. Are you so clueless to think that a TI99 is a minicomputer?! That thing doesn't have its own tape drive cabinet or the same address space as the computers I saw when I was a kid hanging around DEC on snow days.

I know what a minicomputer is because I was exposed to a VAX when I was 10 years old. I hung out a few times at the DEC plants in Salem, NH and Tewksbury, MA when my stepdad brought me in. I sat at a VT100 and played (well tried to) DnD games and chatted with his coworkers using talk.

At a young age, I got to see what very few kids my age got to see: The Machine Room. The experience was almost religious, spiritual. Brightly lit, white walls, raised flooring, awe-inspiring. The white noise of all the computers and the cooling system drowning out any distracting thought. The machine room was a would on its own. You were surrounded by sheer computing power and was one with it.

This expanded my perspective of computing beyond what sat on my desk or what was plugged in to my TV. It also planted the seed of my inner geekdom. I didn't understand fully all the implications of what I had seen... Until I started using the Internet, and later when I became a sysadmin.

I saw glimpses of the future in 1984 which became the life that we live in now: ethernet, e-mail, the laser printer.

I was there when you PFY's were proto-PFY's.

I really feel sorry for those who missed this milestone in computing. I only caught a glimpse of it. I now wished that I saw more at the time.

Please, take some time to learn the history of computing. The micro was in many ways the foundation of the Internet and the precursor to the client-server model of computing. For many people who experienced mainframes and minis either in an academic setting or just being babysat on a snow day: this is a special time for us. It was a time when computing was a priesthood and the machine room was the cathedral. Please respect our history and our memories.