DECmate III Acquisition, Arrival & Experience

[cliffmiller]

Bought a DM3 off auction with display and keyboard. Seller said it lived in a closet at his office for years. No floppies, etc, dusty with a missing keycap or two. I’m a sucker for PDP-8’s though shipping a CRT sounds terrible.
Shows up on my front doorstep and the CRT is in thick bubblewrap and seemed intact. Keyboard missing a few more keys but they’re in the box loose however sadly broken. System box looks great except front panel was facing down and is in two dozen shards of plastic.
I collected the loose plastic and keycap pieces in a baggie and hauled it all upstairs. Excitement when I found the top floppy drive contained a disk labelled ‘WPS’!
Connected it all up and of course even faceless, booted and worked fine! I used the remnants of a keycap to press the ‘6’ key to enter the date as 1996.
Both keyboard and system box should have been bubble wrapped but then I appreciate the CRT working after being used in a USPS basketball simulation.
Soooo -
Decmate III floppy images ??? Flashfloppy ???

 

[Chuck(G)]

In my conversion experience, I've found that DECMates were primarily used as word processing systems. (WPS was originally written by Dan Bricklin). You could also run OS/78 or OS/278 on them.
I've done at least several hundred WPS disk conversions from the DMs. The DM 3 used RX50 floppies and there was a DM 3+ with a hard disk.

 

[cliffmiller]

I’ve been successful in booting my 11/23+ off a Gotek/Flashfloppy with images from the internet - is there an archive of DM3 images ready for use with a Gotek replacing the RX-50?
Also using the Gotek on the 11/23 with an RQDX1 a different FF.cfg and jumper setup was used than when running an RQDX3 so that might require some experimentation.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I don't think there are any ready-to-use Gotek images, but who knows?
Apparently, however plentiful, old DECmates are apparently not sought after, given their somewhat hobbled architecture. A shame, really.

 

[cliffmiller]

I don't think there are any ready-to-use Gotek images, but who knows?
Apparently, however plentiful, old DECmates are apparently not sought after, given their somewhat hobbled architecture. A shame, really.

There are a number of functions on the menu auxiliary to word processing that I hope to explore, particularly Terminal Mode - it will be fun if I can use it to run the 11/23+ and the PiDP’s.
I hope to find or to make a disk so I can run OS278, too.

 

[shirsch]

Your shpping damage experience is unfortunately typical these days. Despite my efforts to explain proper packing to the seller, I find advice is almost universally ignored and just about every system I bought from eBay over the past 4-5 years arrived smashed. I now restrict my system acquisition to sellers within driving distance.