My classiccmp non-retirement :-)

[Jules Richardson]

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 10:24 -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
> >>>>> "Al" == Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> writes:
> 
>  Al> I've been ranting for a while now that people are saving the
>  Al> iron, but not the software that ran on it. It's surprising how
>  Al> little is even left from late 60's IBM 360s (incl the systems
>  Al> themselves), which was the most popular large computing system,
>  Al> and how MUCH has been saved from DEC (thanks to the efforts of
>  Al> collectors and CHM).
> 
> Perhaps because DEC computers were fun and 360s were not?

One thing we find here is that it's a struggle to get anything from the
late 60's / early 70's that isn't DEC. Bear in mind that most of our
bigger systems tend to come from companies who have retired systems
lurking in storage, not from invididuals.

I don't know why, but generally it's only the DEC stuff that's survived
from that era (of the large machines). Maybe it's that other companies
of the time disappeared whereas DEC kept on going and continued to
supply hardware - and so there was less incentive to hang on to the old
hardware "just in case" when systems were upgraded?

We were lucky to get that PR1ME 750 recently; it's the only large PR1ME
I've known of in the last couple of years - yet they must have been
*reasonably* common at one point.

We do have various 60's / 70's hardware (Elliott / Digico / Marconi /
BCL)  (and a BCL Susie and a Norsk Data system on the way at some point)
but non-DEC stuff is hard to come by. 

Even bigger stuff is even worse, although it's possible that some
financial houses and defence places still have large ICL mainframes and
the like tucked away in storage.

>  Al> I'm starting to think that there is going to be a pretty strange
>  Al> view of computer software in the future, since there is so MUCH
>  Al> that was saved from DEC, and almost nothing from Burroughs,
>  Al> UNIVAC, NCR, and Honeywell (the last member of the BUNCH, CDC,
>  Al> seems to have a fair amount saved, though)

On that front, we are more fortunate with documentation - we've got a
*lot*, including non-DEC stuff, for that sort of era (but typically just
fragments that people have hung onto as souvenirs, not complete doc
sets). It's just a shame that so much of the non-DEC hardware seems to
have vanished. Given the crowded nature of the UK, I doubt much of it is
lurking in the hands of private collectors.

> Then again, there are even darker spots.  Some time ago I went looking
> for documentation about some Philips computer and found absolutely
> nothing -- not just for the model I wanted, but nothing for any model
> at all.  About the only thing I could find was a picture of a cover
> page of some manual (in the Google cache, though the website itself no
> longer had it).

Yep, that's been my experience too when I was looking for info on my
P3800 - there's nothing out there for Philips at all it seems (at least
not for their larger machines) :-( 

cheers

Jules