We’ve wanted to get TSS/8 running at the museum for a long time. The biggest impediment to running TSS/8 on real hardware in this year of 2019 is the requirement for a fixed-head disk. There are not many RF08s or RF32s left in the world these days, and the ones that remain are difficult to keep operational in the long term.

In February 2016, a wonderful piece of news came to the attention of the international vintage computing community: The source of the original implementation of the Unix operating system, written for the DEC PDP-7 computer, had come to light, in the form of listings for the kernel and several user programs (including the editor and the assembler program). The announcement came from Warren Toomey, founder of The Unix Historical Society (TUHS) in Australia.

In early July of 2019, the power supply of one of our rarest and iconic machines, started to fail. This is the IMLAC PDS-1 originally produced from 1970 to 1972. Despite the efforts of our staff to troubleshoot and replace components, we were soon left with a completely failed power supply.

Hear from LCM+L engineers about the story behind the UNIX v0 restoration project.

We often use RS232 serial communication in our projects. The USB converters are very convenient.

Xilinx FPGA chips have limited memory available.

We are using an Apple ][ keyboard to control our Apple original.

That is the question that one of the blowers in the base of KATIA, our 1967 PDP10-KA was apparently asking itself a couple of weeks ago.

Two 55-pin connectors are available on the PDP-7 SN129. One provides 18 bits of output data, and the other can read 18 bits of input data.

Back in October 2018, our PDP10-KI went down, and it didn’t want to come back up. I ran all the normal diagnostics, and they all worked, but the TOPS-10 would hang when I tried to boot it. That is the definition of Computer Maintenance Hell, Everything works, but the operating system won’t run!

The PDP10-KI went down sometime in the fall, maybe October. This is the machine just to the right of the CDC6500 as you come in the second floor computer room. I noticed this fairly quickly and tried to reboot it, but it would hang when I tried, several times.

Back in January I unleashed my latest emulation project Darkstar upon the world. At that time I knew it still had a few areas that needed more refinement, and a few areas that were very rough around the edges. The Star’s Ethernet controller fell into that latter category: No detailed documentation for the Ethernet controller has been unearthed, so my emulated version of it was based on a reading of the schematics and diagnostic microcode listings, along with a bit of guesswork.

Back in September 2018, we got a new addition to the LCM+L computer collection, but we didn’t talk about it. This was something that we had been looking for for 10 years or more.

In the process of restoring the Bendix G-15, we have discovered a phenomena that degrades the electrical connections which provide bias and signal flow, rendering the computer non-functional.

We received our first ALTO in running condition and after evaluation and testing, put in on the exhibit floor available to the public. One afternoon about a year later, the machine suddenly froze and stopped functioning. It was taken off the floor and evaluated in one of our labs. When it became clear that power supply current was not flowing into random parts of the backplane, the focus shifted to the power supply rails. It was there we were confronted with this phenomena.

In 1981, Xerox released the Xerox 8010 Information System (codenamed “Dandelion” during development) and commonly referred to as the Star. The Star took what Xerox learned from the research and experimentation done with the Alto at Xerox PARC and attempted to build a commercial product from it. 

In my last blog on the CDC, we were having a slow refrigerant leak in Bay 1, and we were waiting for parts. The new parts came, but they were wrong, then they came again, and they were wrong again. Eventually the right parts were delivered, so we took the CDC down yesterday morning to work on the cooling system.

Early in the restoration and troubleshooting of the Bendix G-15 it was noted that tube filament failures occur with some regularity. It is not possible to observe working filaments on all the tube modules, as at least half the tubes have what is call a “getter coating” at the top of the tube, obscuring the filaments.

In the process of troubleshooting our earliest machines, we had to replace large components called electrolytic capacitors. These are located in all the power supplies for any computer. We successfully replaced these devices and got the machines running. Recently though, we have started to see these devices fail once more. They have a finite life of a maximum of 14 years.

The CDC 6500 has led a rough life over the last 6 months or so: way back on the afternoon of July 2, 2018, I got an email from the CDC’s Power Control PLC telling me that it had to turn off the computer because the cooling water was too hot! A technician came out and found that the chiller was low on refrigerant. He brought it back up to the proper level, and went away. Next morning it was down again. ...

As anyone familiar with LCM+L knows, the museum initially grew out of Paul Allen’s personal collection of vintage computers. Many of the larger systems in the collection reflected his own experiences with computers beginning in when he was still in high school. Among the systems he used then were System/360 ...

My last article explained that the DEC 340 Monitor pointed at and shot dots from an electron gun to light up spots on its screen. That was my magic chant, the method of how the DEC 340 drew its pictures as a collection of dots. Every picture a DEC 340 ever showed was made of dots flashed onto its radar tube ...

Previously I introduced my DEC 340 monitor restoration project. I promised then to describe how the DEC 340 monitor worked. I will, but that explanation won’t mean much without some context first. After the context the special magic that makes the DEC 340 different from other computer monitors will be revealed. High ...

My big project this year is to get a DEC 340 monitor working. Here is a picture of one of them. The DEC 340 was a very early and rare computer monitor dating from the mid 60’s used of course, on DEC computers, their PDP series. Two cabinets of rack mounted electronics. The 340 is historic and was used ...

I have 4500 modules in the CDC 6500, and it isn’t always easy to debug them in the machine, because convincing the machine to wiggle its lines so I can check each transistor on a particular module is difficult. In order to make this problem a little easier, I have built a cordwood module tester. It has taken a ...

Minecraft is getting a little stale for me now. I’ve done my exploring, and exploiting. Nothing left but… to look at the database! Each Minecraft world has its own folder in the save directory, with other subfolders and a lot of data files. I noticed that each map created in the world is a separate file, and that file is in GZip format ...

The IBM360/30 gets stuck in a microcode loop. The documentation indicates that a branch should be taken if the Z-bus is zero, and the branch should be taken. The branch is not being taken. A previous annoyance was that the microcode would stop at address 0xB46. As the documentation indicates for that location, ...

Five years ago, when we were getting done with restoring our PDP10-KI, we were running out of working disk drives to run it from. We were down to one set of replacement heads, two working drives, and we didn’t have a source for new ones. We found some folks that said they could rebuild the packs, but it turned out ...

When we last left our hero, he had re-soldered all the Via rivets on one of the 510 “PS”, core memory sense amplifier modules in the CDC6500, and the machine was working. That lasted about a day, and the memory went away again. What was wrong this time? You guessed it, bit 56 in bank 36 was bad again. Third time ...

The IBM360-30 uses Printed Card Capacitor storage for microcode. The cards were created by printing Silver ink on Mylar, or etched copper. 304 cards make up the microcode. I scanned them all. My procedure was to remove one card, clean it, scan it, and then replace it before removing the next card. My original ...