Cool.
One of packages that I supported also ran on the "Medium Systems" (B3000
and B4000 at that point). When I needed to run tests on those machines,
I had to drive to the Pasadena office. There was an old-school fish bowl
system operator room though it hadn't been used as such for a long time.
The whole place felt like the remains of another era, which it was.
Back to B1000, several years after the fact I found that, within six
months of when I moved to the Seattle area, Fort Lewis had included some
model of B1800 in a surplus auction. If i had only known ...
On 8/5/23 7:27 PM, Mike Stein via cctalk wrote:
Ah, BBM memories...
My first paying programmer/operator job was on a B260 in the late 60s, the
first Burroughs minicomputer in Canada IIRC. Many years later, after trying
a few other careers including managing a large motorcycle dealership, I
wound up back with Burroughs doing contract programming for series L
machines, B1800s and B80 & 90s, cross-compiling on a B2700 at night when I
had it all to myself. I too had lots of disk cartridges, cassettes, mag
tapes and even punched cards and tapes, many pretty rare today, that I
threw out before I realized that there were actually folks interested in
that old 'junk'.
Still have the operator console from that B2700 though...
On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 8:04 PM Alan Perry via cctalk <[email protected]>
wrote:
My holy grail is a Burroughs B1965. I was one of the last people at
Burroughs (Unisys at that point) fixing bugs in the system software on
B1000 (the only one in the Lake Forest, CA office; all of the sys admins
knew of the B1965 there as "my" machine.). My office was filled with
B1000 removable disk packs (different versions of the OS and release
management of the software packages I owned). I loved working with that
machine.
I have boot and maintenance cassettes and a disk pack that I picked up
on eBay. I should have taken and preserved more stuff before I left.
On 8/5/23 4:30 PM, John Herron via cctalk wrote:
For no personally good reason other than the stigma (and technically
incorrect) being the first PC, the Altair 8800 is my holy Grail. Some
day
I'd like to have a real one but they increase in value at the same rate
as
my income lol so not likely going to happen. It's a neat system though
and
like a lot of people I like blinken lights and flip switches. Still feels
science fantasy to me.
Less systems being around makes all of these popular systems go up in
price
with supply and demand. Not sure what would make the market go down
unless
hundreds were found somewhere and flooded the market. But it's
interesting
as less kids would have heard of any of these systems so maybe history
becomes less interesting and valuable at some point?
On Sat, Aug 5, 2023, 6:21 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <
[email protected]>
wrote:
On 8/5/23 15:58, [email protected] wrote:
Do you have an emotional attachment to it? I just saw one sell on ebay
yesterday for $6100. An e-recycler will have a nice payday on your
Altair.
No real attachment; it was a useful tool for a time. It took an entire
weekend with coffee and little sleep to assemble it. And those really
awful cheap white wires...
I'd have to pull it off the shelf, clean it up and get it working again.
That's not trivial and I have better uses for my time.
--Chuck
