Today Guy and I removed the KW20 Master Oscillator from my KL10 (PDP-10 CPU, part of DECSYSTEM-20), so that it can temporarily be used in his KL10 until he can fabricate a suitable replacement.  As we removed the KW20, I couldn’t help feeling  a little like Dr. Chandra in the book and film 2010, sequel [...]

The annual Computer History Museum Volunteer Appreciation Day was this past Sunday.  As usual, a good BBQ lunch was served.  The museum staff gave us an update on the plans for the next two phases of development, including the Timeline of Computer History which will be the main exhibit area, a raffle for door prizes, [...]

The Computer History Museum’s PDP-1 Restoration web site is now open to the public. Thanks go to the CHM staff for putting together a nice site, and to the rest of the team for their tireless efforts to make the PDP-1 live again, and to keep it working.
On the page of still photos of [...]

For quite some time now I’ve wanted a color printer, especially one that can handle B-size paper (11 x 17 inches), and one that can print onto printable CD-R and DVD-R media. Traditionally CD-R printers have been very expensive, even though most of them are just modified consumer inkjet printers. I haven’t found [...]

Boing Boing reports on GLTerminal, a program to emulate an old video terminal (green or amber screen, text only, with various commonly seen screen distortions).
It looks pretty cool. The article says that people are hacking on it, but even with Google I can’t seem to find the source code. Anybody know where it can be [...]

I’m really looking forward to the Vintage Computer Festival 8.0, coming up next weekend (November 5-6, 2005) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I’m not exhibiting this year, but it should be a lot of fun. I think the Homebrew Computer Club retrospective should be quite interesting, and there are [...]

The DEC PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum has a Type 30 Precision CRT Display with a Type 33 Symbol Generator. The Type 33 allows the computer to more quickly display small symbols (typically characters) using a five by seven dot matrix. The symbol is specified by two 18-bit words. Working [...]

Al and I urgently needed a way to read old HP 9144 cartridge tapes. These are mechanically standard DC600 or DC615 tapes, but have an HP-unique format. Al hooked up a PC with an IEEE-488 interface card, and I voluneered to write code to read the tapes. I had no idea what [...]

I went to the annual Computer History Museum Volunteer Appreciation Day today. As is now traditional, there was a delicious catered barbecue lunch, a trivia contest (in which I won a movie pass for two), a drawing for door prizes, and presentation of service pins. This year the volunteer tee-shirts are red with [...]

The interview seemed to go fairly well. I forgot to ask when the article is expected to show up in print.