For the same reason I spend a lot of money collecting vintage fountain pens when I no longer write anything by hand. I like them.
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The last time I used my fountain pens was the last week before I retired. In my job I wrote notes all day, and tried a lot of different pens. The fountain pens were fun. Now Iām a pencil guy most of the time. They work, and you can tell just by looking at one.
Some old tools and devices are curious, but the complex Rube Goldberg ways we controlled engines were pretty strange. I just finished cleaning and lubing a centrifugal spark advance on a 67 Honda 450. Try and explain that to a 30 year old.
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What about a PDP-11 for $6900?
Depends on what PDP-11. The earlier PDPās all had gold connectors. It might be worth it to strip it apart and melt the gold off the connectors. The PDP-11 and then later Vax were my favorite computers.
I knew a guy who bought an old DEC-10/20 for just that. Took him a couple months to melt all the gold off. Then cost him several hundred dollars to scrap what was left. Still made a hefty profit of about $20k.
PDP-11, Dec-10 and Vax bring back memories. I used all three machines.
I taught classes where the students did their assignments on the DEC-10.
To keep this semi-auto related, there was a statistical package on the DEC-10 called STP. However, I donāt think that software was written by Andy Granatelli. I was teaching an upper division theoretical statistics course and thought the students should do real world problems. I added an applied component to the course where the students used STP. I added STP to the class just as one adds STP to the oil in a car.
Did my undergraduate and graduate as Syracuse University. They had a couple IBM mainframes along with a couple Dec-10 systems. DEC-10 was the preferred system for CS majors.
I worked in DECās VMS engineering for part of my 10 years at DEC. Met Dave Cutler (Chief Architect of VMS and then Mircrosoftās Windows and Azure). Brilliant man. Considered one of the best operating system designers in the world.
Bringing it back to carsā¦for a while he was an avid car racer.
David Cutler | Racing career profile | Driver Database (driverdb.com)
@MikeInNH You really make me feel old. I was through all my graduate work and a faculty member when my institution got the DEC-10. Before we got the DEC-10, the whole university ran everything on an IBM mainframe. Our research and instruction was done on one partition of the machine. Turnaround time was terrible. The DEC-10 certainly made life easier for the computer science majors and their instructors. I was also a research design consultant and having easy access and good turnaround time when I ran statistics software with the DEC-10 made my life easier.
Going from the IBM mainframe to the DEC-10 was like going from a Model T Ford to a Model A Ford. Going to a VAX cluster from the DEC-10 was analogous to going from the Model A Ford to the Ford V8.
I worked on the Vax Cluster team in VMS engineering.
JCL (Job Control Language) to DCL (Dec Command Language aka David Cutler Language). DCL was easier to learn and at the same time more Robust then IBM mainframe JCL. DCL was based off of Basicā¦but great for system control processing. Remember Lexical Functions?
When I worked there DEC was the leader in automotive CAD systems. Ford, GM, Chrysler all used DEC systems for the automotive CAD systems. Engineers loved DEC systems. The founder of DEC (Ken Olson) was on Fordās Board-Of-Directors.
When I left VMS engineering I went to the CAD group working on the Math Library system. It was fun times.
Perhaps even fifty shades of slick.
Not to change the subject but looks like there is now a chip shortage in addition to every other disaster. Looks like some assembly lines are being shut down.
When I went to college the slickest computer available to a student was a slide rule. Whipping through all sorts of formulas to pass mandatory Physics 101 I felt like the king of technology. I guess that was a while ago. I had hair, too.
We had a UNIVAC mainframe at college running programs from card decks. I used a slide rule my first 2 years, they bought an HP-35 when the price dropped from $495 to $395. I learned to love Reverse Polish Notation. Iāve often wondered if RPN is where Poles got the reputation for being backwards. Very efficient calculating method, though. Oh, and I still have hair, I still have that slide rule, and I still have the HP-35.
I went to Nam after High-School . When I got back there were these newfangled things called calculators. I bought one when I started college. It had an LED display.
I donāt know what computer took up the basement of my college building, but it took about 8 hours to process 2 to 300 punch cards.
Everyone wanted to run their deck at the same time. The cure was to go at odd hours.
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In 66-70, we had one computer on campus in the Science Building. Business folks got it once a week to run our marketing programs. I suppose my desk top has more power than that thing had. The only computer in cars though was the driver which of course could need to be re-booted once in a while.
Your phone has more power than that mainframe did.
Same here @MikeInNH. As I recall the Texas Instrument pocket calculator cost me about 100 1970 dollars which were quite difficult to accumulate at the time living on the GI bill. In fact I was so broke and in debt after 3 semesters I had to drop out and move to California to escape bill collectors in order to find a job and pay off the debt. That instrument is laying around here somewhere much like my dwell meters and point files.
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@Rod-Knox . When I first began my college teaching career in the fall of 1965, the mathematics department had two calculators probably from the 1930s. Each one took up the top of a desk. One was operated with a hand crank. The other had been operated with a hand crank, but an enterprising graduate student had removed the hand crank, fitted a pulley, and then rigged up a belt and sewing machine motor from the Singer sewing shop that was used to convert a treadle sewing machine to a motorized machine. This calculator was operated by stepping on a foot pedal. That fall, the department purchased, for about $2000, a Monroe mechanical calculator. It took up a small space on a desktop. In 1972, the department set aside a calculator room and bought some electronic calculators. The sales representative for the electronic calculators offered to sell anyone the Monroe calculator purchased in 1965 for the trade-in price of $15. I bought that Monroe calculator. The calculator room was abandoned a few years later when the price dropped on pocket sized calculators that could do the same thing and students bought their own calculators.
I still have the Monroe mechanical calculator. When I taught the computer hardware course, I would bring the old Monroe calculator into the class when we discussed how the computer handled multiplication. A person canāt see the registers in the computer, but it is done by adding and then doing a register shift, then adding and shifting until the process is complete. The old Monroe calculator does this mechanically and the students, who had never seen a mechanical calculator, got a kick out of watching the old calculator do a multiplication problem in much the same way.
To me, itās been fascinating to see the development of calculators and computers over the last 55 years of my career. Itās kind of analogous to the development of the automobile over my Dadās lifetime. My Dadās parents bought their first car when Dad was 18. It was a Model T Ford and started with a hand crank. The transmission had a low/high pedal. All the way down was low and up was high. To go backwards, the pedal was held in the halfway position and then a separate reverse pedal was depressed. The next car was their Model A with a three speed transmission with a clutch. My Grandfatherās last car was a 1939 Ford V-8. It had a real heater and hydraulic rather than mechanical brakes. My Dadās last car was a 1989 Mercury Sable that had automatic transmission, power steering and brakes, air conditioning, etc. along with fuel injection and electronic ignition.
I think about going from punch cards and submitting a job with 12 hour turn around back in 1969 on a mainframe to later having a terminal in my office to the mainframe so I no longer had to punch cards. Later, I had my own desktop so I didnāt have to share the time on the computer with anyone else. Of course, the processing speed has really increased. I often wonder what automobiles would be like today if over the last 50 years they had seen the same development as computers.