On Nov 1, 2006, at 11:16 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I once personally diagnosed and replaced a blown diode in a PDP-5.
When it blew, it made an accumulator bit stick on, and the machine
became unusable. That event caused the machine to be retired from
the Caltech Cyclotron. My friends and I found it abandoned many
years later, in about 1978. We fixed, refurbished, and played with
it. The process was very educational.
Most excellent! I bet that was a lot of fun.
The PDP-5 was the predecessor to the PDP-8. The big difference
between the two was cycle time: 10us for the PDP-5 vs. 4us for
the PDP-8, IIRC. Each had 4K x 12 of core memory. It's possible
that machine is still kicking around Caltech; if you're interested
I could make inquiries.
I'm SO interested I can barely put it into words. I am an avid
minicomputer collector, with DEC as my specialty, and the PDP-5 is a
very rare machine. I've restored many PDP-8 and -11 systems, and I
have quite a lot of VAXen (though not so old as to need restoration
per se), and I pet them (and run them!) all regularly.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
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