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The 2003 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 organization and give detailed directions to their facility.
Archived calendars for 1998, 1999, 2000 2001, and 2002 are available on-line.
In January RCS/RI will feature several of its systems that use Digital's UNIBUS interconnect. Included in this will be active work on a rare UNIBUS A/B switch connected to a pdp11/44 and a VAX-11/750.
February's open house will feature the Honeywell H-316 minicomputer. This machine is a relative of the ruggedised H-516 which saw service in the early days of the ARPANET. H-316s were used as interface processors in the late days of the ARPANET.
March will feature Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-8 line. The PDP-8 is a 12-bit computer widely, but incorrectly, regarded as the first minicomputer. One model of the -8, the -8/S, was the first computer to break the $10,000 price barrier.
Much of what happened on the 15th was board testing in a group effort between the Rhode Island Computer Museum and RCS/RI. We tested many boards, several chassis, and power supplies. The resulting components will assist in the restoration of at least a few PDP-8s.
RCS/RI's Packard Bell pb-250 is celebrating its 42nd "birthday" this year. The machine is a serial-logic computer with delay-line memory that was built in 1961 and served until the early 1980's as a laboratory computer.
This day saw the successful testing of the pb-250's power supply in preparation for a full-scale power up in the months to come. The PSU is a very interesting contraption in that it uses "magnetic amplifiers" (transformers with a separate reverse-wound winding) as regulators instead of tne more familiar series-pass or ferro-resonant types. All the electrolytic capacitors are in good shape, as are all the other components.
Future work to be done before the pb-250 can run again includes a full power-on test and the restoration of the Friden Flexowriter console terminal. The pb-250 is interesting for an early 1960s design in that it lacks a "conventional" console and that everything is performed through the Flexowriter. This presaged the "modern" notion of "soft consoles" by better than a decade.
May will feature some of the computers in the RCS/RI collection that were used for laboratory instrumentation. These include their operational PDP-12, a LINC-8, a lab-K and several other machines.
General purpose open house.
July will feature optical networking using the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Ethernet over fiber.
Storage tube displays, terminals and scopes from Tektronix. Visit Dave Fischer's Vector Graphics Terminals for more information.
The Data General Desktop Generation DG-10. Visit Carl Friend's Minicomputer Museum for more information about Data General computers.
The Electronics Associates Inc. (EAI) Precision Analog Computing Equipment (PACE) model TR-10 which is a general purpose analog computer. This desktop system dates to the early 1960's and utilizes germanium transistor circuits. Images scanned from the TR-10 manuals can be found at the RCS works in progress website. Also, visit the Analog Computer Museum for information about other EAI computers.
The Friden Flexowriter, which is the console for the pb-250 from Packard Bell Computer.
Each December, RCS/RI celebrates its anniversary. This year marks their 9th year of existence as a working group and their Iron (6th) Anniversary as a non- profit corporation. This month we will continue work on the systems that were the featured topics of the previous open houses.