Got old stuff?

[Phil]

"Old stuff" may become gold at any time. When I worked for Plessey electronics back in the 1980s, I was running an early vector-scan electron beam writer which was operated by a venerable PDP-11 running two RK05 disk drives with removeable 14” platters. Eventually, one suffered a catastrophic failure and the company reluctantly agreed to “upgrade” to two equally-obsolete RL04 drives. The local DEC service engineer was in his late fifties and asked if he could keep the good RK05 as we were scrapping it. We asked him why and he replied that he had a PDP-11 system made from scrapped parts in his garage and he had every kind of compatible disk drive except an RK05. We gave him the drive.

Six months later he returned to help us commission a brand-new VAX 11/785. I asked him if he had got the RK05 working at home. He explained that not only had he got it working, but a large multinational had asked DEC to archive a whole room of old RK05 data for them. DEC UK had to admit that they couldn’t do it because they had no RK05 systems left, “…so I told them I had, at home. It was the first of two lucrative contracts for me, and I’m able to take early retirement next month on the proceeds!”

Phil M1GWZ



> On 17 Jul 2017, at 14:24, Samudra Haque <samudra.haque at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/07/17/nasa-computers-tapes-from-apollo-era-discovered-in-basement-late-engineer.html
> 
> Well, you never know. Someone may even make a hollywood blockbuster movie about information that was found on an "old magnetic tape", lost for decades ... or maybe there are movies that use that same plot point already?
> 
> I wonder what type of media did those computers actually use?
> 
> 
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