Recent content by hunterjwizzard

Thats really awesome that you have one of those working. Really hope you can find a proper component at a decent price!

8,000 additional CPUs hitting the market is not going to significantly impact prices. Just parting it out for CPUs and RAM is only one option. The blades themselves probably have some value as aftermarket spares. A lot of that equipment is still in use all over the world. Its doubtful anyone...

Sold for just $480,085.00. The CPUs alone sell for ~$50USD. Times 8,000 processors. Parting out old super computers could be a literal and figurative gold mine.

Is this an actual working PDP-8M or a modern reproduction? Just curious.

Oops, sorry. But those technicians I'm talking about don't service JUST the old PCs in there. They are there to fix the entire machine. The PC is just one component of it(and arguably the one the tech knows the least about).

Actually people do touch them. On a regular basis, in fact. Thats how those million dollar machines stay running for so long: regular maintenance. Its a highly specialized breed of technicians who service those million dollar machines and the PCs that run them. This is also how I got a call one...

Maybe not on that specific board, but I think there's a market for a 486-based board that fits in a modern case and takes modern power components.

Two problems with that: 1) as mentioned the thing is a nightmare; and 2)most of that $219 price tag is the case, screen, battery, and keyboard - all things I sincerely do not need. See now this would also be really cool. Unnecessary. But very cool.

ITX fits in an ITX tower, so I'd take it, but ITX won't mount very many expansion cards. And really that's what attracts me most. Would like something with onboard VGA, then let me add my own everything else.

I think I'd still rather have an ATX board with 16 bit ISA slots.

It is physically *possible* that I have the original card. I have at least one PCI 50 pin SCSI card who's origins I cannot trace. Its plausible it originally came out of that machine and then survived a lengthy series of hardware purges. But I am not entirely sure I want to role those dice.

I had to supply a floppy drive for a hospital machine in like 2019. They don't change ANYTHING on those mamajamas unless they absolutely HAVE TO.

Is it weird that I wish this sort of thing was my day job?

Cool! I appreciate you documenting this forgotten bit of tech history.

Probably what I'll do in that case is get my win2k box reassembled and try to image the drive. At the very least I can see if any files survived, then play around with the image. Getting it to boot in a VM shouldn't be tough. I could also image it to a flash drive and try booting off that just...