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1999 RCS/RI |
The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island, Inc. hold their monthly Open House on the third Saturday of every month from 10:00am - 4:30pm at their facility in Providence, RI. See the online directions for instructions on how to get there.
On Open House days, the telephone line, (401) 861-1977, is staffed with bona- fide humans who can answer questions about the organisation and give detailed directions to their facility.
Archived calendars for 1998 are available on-line.
We showed off some of the items from the RCS collection including an HP-86 and an HP 9000 Series 300.
We are also invited guests to join us and bring their HP calculators for "show and tell". This proved fortuitous as several pieces of HP gear showed up including a calculator- compatible data acquisition unit and an original HP-35 scientific calculator.
The RCS collection includes a TI System 1500 and several smaller items. The TIs were on display in addition to an assemblage of other systems.
For June we adjusted our open- house schedule to accomodate the people attending the DECUS conference at the Providence Convention Center. We were open from 4:30pm - 10:00pm and displayed the DEC collection and successfully ran the PDP-12 for an appreciative audience.
Topic to be announced.
On display for August were our LINC-8, our PDP-12, our PDP-8/I, and our PDP-8/e.
We actually brought the 8/e system back to life that afternoon!
IBM Application System/Entry 5363 III and InfoWindow terminals.
We had two of the 5363 systems fully operational, and discovered that it should be trivial to get the newly acquired 5362 functioning.
In October, we took a look at the DG Nova, Eclipse and Deskstop Generation machines. The Desktop Generation DG-10 and an Eclipse S/230 were fully operational and a NOVA 840 system was on static display. Common DG peripherals such as disk- and tape drives were present.
In November we featured our two DECSYSTEM-20s, a small single- cabinet DECSYSTEM-2020 and our mainframe- class DECSYSTEM-2065. These two systems represent the last of the PDP-10 line and also the smallest and one of the largest of the breed.
RCS came one step closer to entering the 36-bit world with the succsessful power-on of our KS10. While we lack microcode for the KS10, we have verified that the internal KS bus, the control RAM and the main memory are all functional.
We'd like to thank all those who visited that day. We enjoyed your company and insights.
In December, RCS/RI examined the possible implications of the Y2K "bug".
The open house, in fact, turned into a work session where the members and a few volunteers catalogued and entered several donations of hardware into the collection. Thanks go to the donors and volunteers.
