Recent content by BBtheEE

Living near Phoenix, I've often wondered how much mainframe equipment is either buried in a landfill here or in a long forgotten warehouse around here. When I moved here, I scoured several electronics salvage yards but never found anything.

I wish I was savvy enough back then to have learned FORTRAN or one of the other programming languages available on the system (when he bought a system, all of the software/manuals/tapes/disks/paper/cards/etc usually came with it). He had compilers for FORTRAN, COBOL and an EASYCODER assembler...

I was around 13 at the time and just beginning to get more serious about computers. I bought a TRS-80 around '81 and taught myself BASIC and some Z80 assembler. That's a great/hilarious story about the missing "o"! :D As far as building your replica, it sounds like it's the challenge that...

It probably is a coincidence, but I think it's a happy one. :) All of the switches and lights for my project are individually controlled by an Arduino Nano Every. I start a project such as this by writing some test code to make sure everything works before I dive into the meaty code. So far...

BINGO! If it was intentional, it was very clever (and subtle)!

Maybe this will help. :) It's not obvious and I never noticed this until the other day when I turned out the lights in the room:

Has anyone else ever noticed the Easter egg when you press the initialize button? I wonder if that was intentional. :unsure:

They did indeed! The ASR 33 type used a cylindrical printhead but the Honeywell consoles used a rectangular one like this from a model 28 TTY: https://kb8ojh.net/station/teletype/images/Hammer_and_Typebox.jpg There's more here: https://kb8ojh.net/station/teletype/ The print head has 4 rows...

The console keys actually used the same microswitches as the ones used in your control panel, only one per key though instead of two. Each one was wired to one of those large rectangular connectors, if memory serves, and they weren't wired in a matrix like modern keyboards. The wire bundle was...

Arduinos are very handy! That's a great use for one. I've used them in several projects for my customers. I usually write the initial code for them and they like it because they're familiar with them too and can hack the code as their needs change. The "secret sauce" is in the rest of the...

Nice pic! Imagine making ECO changes to that! 😅 I don't recognize the machine. CDC? Cray took that to an extreme and got great results. I read where they were a real pain to wire at the factory as well as rewire in the field.

I noticed that too about the pin spacing being different...I never knew why they did that. The only thing I can think of is that the backplanes for the logic drawers were probably custom and made up of multiple large blocks that held several boards (I don't remember how many boards plugged into...

It's possible, but unlikely IMHO. Certainly not in the field since there was no trace of any lacing (see the first photo), even in the hard to get to areas of the diagnostic panel. I took everything apart and gave it a good cleaning. Honeywell ty-wrapped this thing like crazy, even if only a...

Interestingly, they were tie-wrapped and not laced (thankfully!) Talk about attention to detail...not many people would have known about that!

I found some pics that I took of the connectors. I kept everything, including leftover wires, just in case I ever pull a Rob and try to assemble an H2015! ;) 😁