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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

At last night’s meeting of the PDP-1 Restoration Project, we actually used WREC to reform four capacitors out of two of the Type 728 power supplies. In the process I found and fixed a few minor bugs. I need to get a new release (0.02) together. I started compiling a ChangeLog from [...]

Started looking at adding real-time graphing to WREC. The most obvious choices appear to be the gtkplot component of the GtkExtra library, or Guppi. Guppi development seems to be stalled, and I didn’t see any example code or documentation describing how to do the sort of stuff I want. (I noticed that [...]

A preliminary release of WREC is now available. There’s a tarball on the web page, and a link to information about the subversion source code repository.
WREC Reforms Electrolytic Capacitors using an SCPI-programmable power supply. WREC was written for use on the Computer History Museum PDP-1 Restoration Project, but should be useful to reform [...]

On Tuesday I started a new project, WREC. WREC Reforms Electrolytic Capacitors. We’re going to use it for the PDP-1 Restoration Project at the Computer History Museum.
I’m trying to finish coding WREC and debug it in time for the 7-JAN-2003 meeting of the PDP-1 Restoration Team.