🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>, he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) writes:
> Instead of scrapping our old computers, we (comp.sci.dept Utrecht Univ)
> want to archive them and maybe in 5-10 years time put them on display.
> 
> I would like to get in contact with people running such a scheme or
> actually running a 'computer museum'.
> 
> Mail to 'he...@cs.ruu.nl' if you have any experience with such things.

Sure, our Computer Centre runs a computer museum now. They
have a couple of IBM mainframes! :-) :-) :-)

Seriously, I have done the same thing. We moved buildings
a couple of years ago, and everyone told me to junk our
original micro lab, etc. Instead I've squirreled it all
away for the day when the first prof mutters "we should
never have thrown that out". Then, out will come the SWTP
PC, the original Apple II, The Kim board, the 6800
processor development kit, etc. Boat anchors? Maybe, but
important not to forget. Heck we have the Soroc terminals,
the Hazeltines, the old Decwriters, a few bits and pieces
of out Data General Eclipse and Nova III's (we had eight
wired together to form a dedicated parallel processing
machine long before the current generation "discovered"
the field. In my day, son, you wrote to a special memory
location in assembler to reboot the cluster and handled
your IPC by hardwired shared memory...


I've got the 300 baud modems, the flex O/S software
diskettes, the PDP-11 service manuals, the bits and pieces
of core memory, the spare PDP-11 UNIBUS card cage, the Vax
11/730 CPU in a half-height cabinet, a few 40 Meg disk
packs, the paper tape reader, .....


For what it's worth, our CC (really nice, people, really
they are) actually still have all the bits of their 704.
Their Director has promised to take me down and show me
one night, we just haven't had the time.


I'm sure if I put out a display now, someone will complain
about the waste of valuable space. Five or ten years from
now they'd all be kicking themselves. Somebody has to
protect the School from the heathens. I vote for computer
museums.


				- peterd


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+-------+ 	Peter Deutsch		McGill University
| u # u |	pet...@cs.mcgill.ca	School of Computer Science
|/\/\/\/|	
|  a a |	"As God is my witness, Andy. I thought that turkeys
 \  a  /	could fly!"
  \___/                           - Mr. Carlson, in WKRP in Cincinatti...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaking of computer museums, how many are there?  I have been to
the one in Boston myself, and have heard that there are similar
collections in the Smithsonian and someplace in London.  Any
others?

While I strongly approve of the idea, I found the Computer Museum
in Boston to be a bit dull.  All of the displays were set up and
labeled for computer-illiterates.  None of the dinosaurs on
display were actually working, and they were described in only
the most general terms.  The room with working computers featured
equipment that was neither state-of-the-art nor old enough to be
interesting for its own sake, and all of the programs running
were either games or "This is a word-processor!" type stuff.  The
most interesting item on display was Danny Hillis's tick-tack-toe
computer made out of Tinkertoys.  Of course, it was sealed away
so that no one could touch it.

Imagine going to a museum of old cars where all the displays had
labels like "This is a steering wheel,"  "This is the engine, it
makes the car go!"  After wandering around the old heaps you get
to go outside and see a real 88 Nissan or VW Beetle actually in
operation!  That's what the computer museum is like.

I realize that trying to keep a vacuum tube monster operating is
far beyond the budget and capabilities of any museum.  But I
think they could make some good displays with things like working
papertape readers, hands-on elementary logic circuits, timelines,
and exhibits designed to show just how far computing capabilities
have come since the early days.  Instead of letting the kids play
games they could run on a Nintendo, why not let them type a few
of their own punched cards?  Use a slide rule?  Run an "assembly
language" program? (I'm thinking something like Core Wars, here.)
Wire a simple plug board?  Talk to a Lisp interpreter?  Run a
10-line Fortran 66 program?  (Remember, most visitors have never
seen any programming language except BASIC, but I assume that
many or most have used PC's.)  Debug an adaptive mesh Godunov
scheme written in Intercal?  (Maybe this is a little unrealistic.)

Seriously, though, it might be possible to write an interesting
fluid flow demo where visitors could position objects in the flow
with a mouse and then watch the machine plot streamlines around
the obstacles.  With conformal mapping you can compute potential
flows in a few seconds on a Sun 3/50, but for more interesting
flows we'll have to wait a few years before we can do it in real
time.  How about letting people position planets and stars with
a mouse and then watch Newton's Laws do their stuff?

Well, enough babbling.  It just seems a pity to me that they took
a great idea and then dumbed it down far enough to insult the
intelligence of even a PC-literate.

Louis Howell

#include <std.disclaimer>

In article <1990Aug3...@bert.llnl.gov> how...@bert.llnl.gov (Louis Howell) writes:
>Seriously, though, it might be possible to write an interesting
>fluid flow demo where visitors could position objects in the flow
>with a mouse and then watch the machine plot streamlines around
>the obstacles.  With conformal mapping you can compute potential
>flows in a few seconds on a Sun 3/50, but for more interesting
>flows we'll have to wait a few years before we can do it in real
>time.  ...

When I was at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a couple of months ago,
they had an exhibit called "Beyond the Limits:  Flight Enters the Computer
Age."  There were some flow demos running there on some Silicon Graphics
boxes.  I don't recall how interactive they were, but they did seem to have
the standard particle trace stuff there.

They also have NCAR's old Cray-1 on exhibit.  To show you how blase one can
get after being exposed to supercomputers for a few years, up close and
personal, I didn't even notice the damn thing until the woman I was with asked
me "what's that?" :-)

							spl (the p stands for
							personally, I like the
							old rocket planes,
							myself...)
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (408) 646-2752 (subject to change at random)
NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93940
"You're okay," said Honeysuckle.  "The dogs like you."
			- Charles Bukowski, "How to Get Published"

In article <1990Aug3...@bert.llnl.gov> how...@bert.llnl.gov (Louis Howell) writes:
>While I strongly approve of the idea, I found the Computer Museum
>in Boston to be a bit dull.  All of the displays were set up and
>labeled for computer-illiterates.
>
   [stuff deleted]
>
>I realize that trying to keep a vacuum tube monster operating is
>far beyond the budget and capabilities of any museum.  But I
>think they could make some good displays with things like working
>papertape readers, hands-on elementary logic circuits, timelines,
>and exhibits designed to show just how far computing capabilities
>have come since the early days.  Instead of letting the kids play
>games they could run on a Nintendo, why not let them type a few
>of their own punched cards?  Use a slide rule?  Run an "assembly
>language" program? (I'm thinking something like Core Wars, here.)
>Wire a simple plug board?  Talk to a Lisp interpreter?  Run a
>10-line Fortran 66 program?  (Remember, most visitors have never
>seen any programming language except BASIC, but I assume that
>many or most have used PC's.)  Debug an adaptive mesh Godunov
>scheme written in Intercal?  (Maybe this is a little unrealistic.)
>

Some other stuff I'd like to see in a computer museum: Fractal
demos, let then navigate through Mandelbrot's set. Or have then
play the prisonner's dilemma against the computer. Show how secret
messages work.

The exposition should encourage interaction. A computer is but a tool;
who would go see an exposition of crewdrivers?

Also because it is a tool, it will interest the general public only
if they see how it contributes to other fields (mathematics, graphic arts,
metereology, medecine, psychology, and I could go on for pages).

You don't need much computing power for most displays so AppleIIs would
do fine. But most importantly, the machines will be of little interest
if we don't keep the software that goes with it.

>Well, enough babbling.  It just seems a pity to me that they took
>a great idea and then dumbed it down far enough to insult the
>intelligence of even a PC-literate.
>

I haven't seen the museum, so I'll hold back my comments.

>Louis Howell
>
>#include <std.disclaimer>

Disclamer: Universite de Montreal is not responsible for my delirium.
--
---
Philippe Hebrais                    heb...@IRO.UMontreal.CA
                                    ph...@MirkWood.CAM.ORG
 FREE CANADA                        uunet!philmtl!iros1!phaze!mirkwood!phil

he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) and
pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
writes about retiring old computers to museums rather scrapping them.

Here in Stockholm, STACKEN, the computer club at the Royal Institute
of Technology, has collected, restored, and re-installed old computers
for many years now. We specialize in old DEC computers, mostly DEC-10s
and DEC-20s. The last time I looked into our CCCC (Colossal Cave
Computing Center) there was:

MIT-AI:	DEC-1080	(down)  The DEC-10 from the MIT AI lab
KLEO:	DEC-1091	(down)  A KL-E CPU
ODEN:	DEC-1099	(down)  2-CPU KL-10 SMP
KISTA:	DEC-10		Top-10, 2-CPU KI-10 SMP (will get 3 CPU's)
	DEC-2020	(down), for running ITS
FREJA:	DEC-2060	Twenex, for Twenex fans
ALEX:	VAX-11/780	4.2BSD, Unix machine for TCP/IP, Usenet, Mail...
HELENA:	PDP-11/34	(down), for RSTS/E fans
ELVIRA:	PDP-11/45	(down), for RSTS/E fans
	PDP-11/23	RSTS/E, real-time control of the cooling machines

The above info is somewhat sketchy and about a moth old. Disks: about
20 RP06 and 7 RP07. And we have tons and tons of other computers. E.g.
two Lambda from LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc), one PDP-9, one PDP-15, one
PDP-12 and countless PDP-11s, some of which are to be used as
front-ends to the DECsystem-10's and DECSYSTEM-20's.

We have a large computer room, which we have build ourselves. Floor
space and power (don't ask) couresy of the Royal Institute of
Technology. It is imperative to create good relations with the local
univeristy, computer center or whatever. If you

As you can see, we specialize in old DEC computers. What we most hotly
want is a PDP-6. Not a lot of them were built, but it's a historically
significant architecture. "The most wonderful known to man", as the
fans have it. (Hi there, MRC!)

If you know where to find a PDP-6, or have equipment (ANY equipment!!)
to be thrown away, contact Stacken at the address below, or
start/contact a local computer club. Saving these machines is more
than like restoring old warbirds or steam locomotives; it's fun,
educational, and these machines are the pioneers of the information
age.


Send money, equipment, membership requests etc to

	Stacken
	c/o NADA, KTH
	10044, Stockholm
	Sweden

KEEP'EM UP AND RUNNING!


-- 
Per Lindberg (The Mad Programmer)   !      __!__
Front Capital Systems, Box 5727,    !  _____(_)_____  Ceci n'est pas une Piper
11487 Stockholm, Sweden. 8-6611510  !     !  !  !

In article <15...@front.se> p...@front.se (Per Lindberg) writes:
>he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) and
>pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
>writes about retiring old computers to museums rather scrapping them.
>
>ODEN:	DEC-1099	(down)  2-CPU KL-10 SMP

If you ever get this system up - can I have it? It's a fun system to
play with. Except when it crashes. Then it's not much fun. Ho hum...









 
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p...@front.se (Per Lindberg) writes:

>he...@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning) and
>pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
>writes about retiring old computers to museums rather scrapping them.

>Here in Stockholm, STACKEN, the computer club at the Royal Institute
>of Technology, has collected, restored, and re-installed old computers
>for many years now. We specialize in old DEC computers, mostly DEC-10s
>and DEC-20s. The last time I looked into our CCCC (Colossal Cave
>Computing Center) there was:

[Fascinating list deleted.]

Did anybody save a GIER?  Now there was a historic system!

Another thought on the preservation of computers: with all the modern
graphics capabilities, it should be possible to preserve *architectures*
even if you can't save or get running the actual machines.  One could
simulate consoles and other interfaces fairly readily today, and give
people the ability to see what it was like to program some of the old
beasts.  It ought to be fairly easy, for example, to simulate an IBM
650 console on a Sun workstation, bi-quinary lights, ten-position rotary
switches and all; other windows could simulate the 026, the 533 and the
402, so all the steps in program preparation and running could be
duplicated.  This would make historic technology available to a
wide range of students.  My list of candidate machines for "virtual
preservation" would include:

IBM 650 (more computing breakthroughs than any other machine)
LGP-30 (computing to the student masses; a PC the size of a food freezer)
GIER (for the love of Algol)
IBM 7090 (second to the 650 for breakthroughs)
Honeywell 800 (for its sheer weirdness)
Burroughs 220 (just personal)

and the DEC machines listed above.

boe...@sctc.com (Earl Boebert) writes:

[..]

>Did anybody save a GIER?  Now there was a historic system!

If you mean the Danish machine (the one with the, errhhm, 9 pass ALGOL
compiler to execute in 2KWords of core), YES YES YES.

The Danish GIER Club has a lot of these systems (6 or 7, I've heard).
Some of them should actually be in working order.

At the Danish Technical University, the students Electronics Club
has the only functional RC4000 (successor to GIER (?)) in existence.

Of course, machines as these are really very easy to maintain. You have
the diagrams, some old wirings bords, and *voila*, you can build any piece
that goes wrong, from scratch. We're currently trying to get the matrix
computation unit made for the Danish Institute of Meteorology for use on
the RC4000 up and running. Tough, since we have to re-wrap the 40 
odd cards needed for the interface.... .

Fortunately, disks and tape units are farily standard, so we simply hook in
one of the spare units when anything goes wrong.. .

	Jens
Jens Tingleff MSc EE, Institute of Computer Science, Copenhagen University
Snail mail: DIKU Universitetsparken 1 DK2100 KBH O
"It never runs around here; it just comes crashing down"
	apologies to  Dire Straits 

The Computer Museum actually does have a punch card machine
accessible, though it is a bit hard to find.  And there's a machine
running Logo for those who want to sit down and try a little
programming; a better choice than Fortran 66 in my opinion.

And not all the demos are mindless.  I particularly liked the
Symbolics that finds routes between any two street addresses in Boston
and verbalizes the directions (with hints such as "watch for the pink
building on the left"!), the machine that attempts to play harmony with
you on the keyboard, and the computer drawing program.

Still, it would be neat if they had a few ancient machines running.
Can hardly blame them for focusing elsewhere, though.

					-- Scott Turner

In article <82...@aerospace.AERO.ORG>, s...@aerospace.aero.org (Scott "TCB"
Turner) writes:
|> The Computer Museum actually does have a punch card machine
|> accessible, though it is a bit hard to find.  And there's a machine
|> running Logo for those who want to sit down and try a little
|> programming; a better choice than Fortran 66 in my opinion.
|> 
|> And not all the demos are mindless.  I particularly liked the
|> Symbolics that finds routes between any two street addresses in Boston
|> and verbalizes the directions (with hints such as "watch for the pink
|> building on the left"!), the machine that attempts to play harmony with
|> you on the keyboard, and the computer drawing program.

I'm pleased to hear that they've expanded in the right directions
since I was there.  I don't remember any of this stuff from about
2 years ago, except for a very large pen plotter that was continuously
drawing cityscapes the whole time, and may be what you mean by the
computer drawing program.  Was the punch card machine working or
just sitting there collecting dust?

I think the main point is that computers are dynamic objects, not
just lumps of metal and plastic.  Who really cares about seeing a
large ugly box with lots of tubes if it can't actually DO anything?

Preservation of actual working hardware may be difficult, but I am
quite attracted to Earl Boebert's idea of virtual preservation, i.e.,
simulate an old computer on a new one.  This would preserve the
"look and feel" of an architecture even if keeping hardware working
were prohibitively expensive.  An ENIAC would be more expensive to
build today than the original was, but it should be possible to
simulate one, right?  Anyone know how the thing was programmed?
My guess is some kind of plug board, but that's just a guess.  Now
imagine Xeniac running on your Sun, with mouse buttons in place of
the plugs...

Does anyone know what the first stored program computer was?  I'm
sure we could simulate its machine language, or assembler if it
had one.  I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already written
a simulator for PDP-11 assembly language in C, an amusing turnabout
if there ever was one.  I can just see some history student in 2050
writing about the dawn of the computer age, running a PDP-10 simulator
written in C on a C simulator written in the current language of
choice.  (Fortran '43 ? :-)

Flame me if you will, but I wouldn't mind having a simulator for a
TRS-80 with Level 2 BASIC and 16K RAM, which was THE cool machine
to have when I was in high school.  I still have printouts of some
(not all, sigh) of the programs I wrote for it, as well as Lunar
Lander, B-1 Bomber, and Star Trek!

For preservation of this type to really be successful, both docs
and software for these old systems must also be preserved.  Any
popular programs written after 1980 are probably safe, since thousands
of packrat users have copies of source code on line or on floppies.
(I still have every significant program I wrote since starting college
still on line, and my available disk space is expanding much faster
now than I can write.)  Whole operating systems may be tougher.  I'm
sure early versions of UNIX still exist somewhere, but where?  That
would certainly be of historical interest.

--
Louis Howell

  "A few sums!" retorted Martens, with a trace of his old spirit.  "A major
navigational change, like the one needed to break us away from the comet
and put us on an orbit to Earth, involves about a hundred thousand separate
calculations.  Even the computer needs several minutes for the job."

Another thought I just had:  If anyone actually writes an ENIAC simulator,
it should have an option, settable by the user, of blowing a tube every
ten minutes or so.

The Science Museum did have one example of virtual preservation on
display when I was there, now that I remember.  They had an old PDP-whatever,
the same model Space Wars was originally written for, sitting next to
a modern machine running an identical, or at least similar, Space Wars game.

Around 1978 I wrote a life program for the TRS-80.  One day I started it
running on a glider gun before school started.  Around third period I
came back to check it, and it had fired off one complete glider.  In
Xlife today a glider gun wriggles faster than you can see and shoots
off a stream of gliders like a machine gun.

--
Louis Howell

In article <82...@aerospace.AERO.ORG> srt@aero.UUCP (Scott "TCB" Turner) writes:
>Still, it would be neat if they had a few ancient machines running.
>Can hardly blame them for focusing elsewhere, though.

They used to have a PDP-1 on display that they fired up for playing spacewar
on special occasions. (Definitely the best version of spacewar I have 
played :-).  Unfortunately, they needed place for those interactive graphics
demos, so the 1 went into storage...
/mike


\|/ Michael L. Ardai     ar...@bu-pub.bu.edu   
--- ---------------------------------------------------------------
/|\ ...!sun!teda!ardai (preferred)

When I was there (around Christmas 1988), there was an image-recognition
program running on something or another -- you stuck one of several provided
shapes under a camera, the box grabbed a frame, did edge-detection on it,
and printed "this is a triangle" or such.  Not amazingly amazing, but
interactive.  There was also a core simulator running on a GIGI, which I
would dearly like to get the sources for.

>Who really cares about seeing a
>large ugly box with lots of tubes if it can't actually DO anything?

The people who go to "trade shows" and "conferences".

>were prohibitively expensive.  An ENIAC would be more expensive to
>build today than the original was, but it should be possible to
>simulate one, right?  Anyone know how the thing was programmed?

At first, it was handwired, kinda like the IBM-style "plugboards".  Later
they adapted a couple of huge "function tables" (a big board with a bunch
of switches) for use essentially as a PROM.

>My guess is some kind of plug board, but that's just a guess.  Now
>imagine Xeniac running on your Sun, with mouse buttons in place of
>the plugs...

>Does anyone know what the first stored program computer was?  I'm
>sure we could simulate its machine language, or assembler if it
>had one.

That all depends on what you call a stored-program computer, and whether or
not you recognize the ABC heap.  When I took a History of Computing class the
instructor had an EDSAC simulator that ran on a microvax, and we were supposed
to write a program of some sort of it.  He decided that since not everyone in
the class could get to a vax (untrue, actually), that he'd have us mail
our programs to someone who would run them.  Of course, mine never ran, and
the assistant who ran them would just say "it doesn't work", so I didn't
see it actually running.




--

beak is                                                          beak is not

In article <82...@aerospace.AERO.ORG> srt@aero.UUCP (Scott "TCB" Turner) writes:
>
>And not all the demos are mindless.
>
	Thank you, Scott! I'm surely not mindless. :-)

	Generally speaking the best place to seek for VERY old
	and VERY weird machines is Soviet Union. You should not
	trust me but I've hacked machines from relays and gas-filled
	tubes, transistors and (of course) all generations of ICs
	(I'm 25 years old). Now I'm hacking 486; but the PC right
	to me is a Soviet clone of DEC Professional 350 with a 5Mb
	hard disk (it REALLY works! I've ported Unix to it ;-)
	I've seen a ternary machine /with logical 0s, 1s and -1s!/
	(SETUN', this weird one mentioned by Knuth in "Art of Prog.")
	BTW, someday I'll choose a bit of time to tell you a whole
	lot of funny stories about Soviet machines and Soviet hackerdom.

	Hello from Moscow!

	Vadim Antonov
	DEMOS, Moscow, USSR
	(It is NOT a joke!)