Pictures I took of some of the exhibits at the Festival
(Click on a picture for a larger version.)
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Every imaginable type of floppy disk from 2½" to 120 MB! |
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Digi-Comp II re-creation. digicompii.com |
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MOnSter 6502, running a game. It is a transistor-for-transistor working replica of the 6502 microprocessor, and was reverse-engineered from the actual die. Due to the gate capacitance of the discrete MOSFET transistors, it only runs at 60 kHz. |
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A close-up of the MOnSter 6502. MOnSter6502.com |
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Anyone need spare parts for a PDP-8? |
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BlinkenBone: Program a PDP-11/70 over a reanimated front panel. |
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This was my booth. The large (48"x36") poster described my
ST-2900 system and the
UFDR hardware and software for capturing
data from old floppy disks. I exhibited my ST-2900 System 3 with two borrowed external 5¼" floppy disk drives. I used a Toshiba T2400CS (1994-era '486 notebook computer) with Windows 95 running HyperTerminal as the serial terminal. The ST-2900 was running the FLEX and OS-9 operating systems. A Windows 7 laptop computer was used to connect to the UFDR hardware and run its software. |
Read the PDF copy of my poster, which
explains what my display was all about.
(On June 22, 2024 I displayed a reduced size version of my poster at the
Retro-Computing Expo '24.)
You might also find the complete 2018 festival program interesting.
I had several very enjoyable conversations about my floppy disk reader project at the festival.
Unfortunately, the "Living Computers: museum + labs" facility closed its doors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, never re-opened, and is now permanently shut down.
As of 2018-Jun-29 I had already imaged 130 of my old 5¼" floppy disks with the UFDR hardware and software. Most of them captured with zero read errors on the first try! Of the rest, after cleaning the drive heads, re-reading the tracks that had errors, and tweaking the software digital PLL decoding coefficients used in the post-processing software, all remaining errors were eliminated! Not bad for disks that were 25-37 years old!
So far the analog signal recording hasn't been needed for "fixing" read errors. It has been interesting to see how the signal amplitude sometimes varies significantly, yet the drive is still able to successfully extract all the pulses.
Now I have started the process to analyze and organize the files read from the floppy disks, and create web pages to document my old projects.
Some of the museum's computers on display.
Many are available for the public to play with.
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The famous Cray 1 supercomputer. This unit is not functional. |
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Wiring of the Cray 1 -- looks like a rats nest! |
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DEC PDP8/e mini-computer system. |
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Control Data 6500 supercomputer. |
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Xerox Sigma 9. |
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IBM 029 Keypunch. I punched thousands of cards on a machine like this while studying at B.C.I.T. 1974-1976. |
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DEC PDP-7 computer. |
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My friend Jeff using the Xerox Alto, in my opinion the world's first "modern" personal computer. |
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Kenbak-1 computer (TTL, serial memory), SCELBI-8H 8008 computer, homebrew Intel 4004 board. |
On Sunday morning, before the museum was open to the public, Cynde Moya, the museum's Collections Manager, gave some of us a tour of their huge basement storage area and restoration work areas. These pictures show only a very tiny portion of what we saw. Fascinating!
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I think these are LGP-30 vacuum tube computers. |
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??? |
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IBM 711 punch card reader. |
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Card cages with lots of cards. |
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Neat wiring, but very dense! |
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In need of lots of TLC. |
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Data General Eclipse minicomputer? |
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Rows and rows of disk drives. |
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Lots of spare chips. |
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Rows and rows of tapes. |
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Punch cards. |
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Shelf after shelf of microcomputers of every description. |
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HP 2100S minicomputer. Similar to the HP 2100A I used at B.C.I.T. 1974-1976. |
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Large (in dimensions, not storage capacity) hard disk drive. |
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Restoration work area. |
Last revised 2024-Jul-28 12:06 PDT.
Copyright 2018- David C. Wiens.