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Providence Journal
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Note: The following feature article was published in the Sept. 5, 1998 edition of the Providence Journal. It is reprinted here by permission of the Journal. Timothy Barmann also wrote a computer column called Cybertalk which appeared in the Journal.
PROVIDENCE - Tucked away inside an old mill building in an industrial complex near Atwells Avenue is a treasure trove of old, mainframe computers.
These machines, many built in the 1960s and '70s, are now retired from years of faithful service. Some stand as tall as a refrigerator and weigh as much as a small car.
Their glory days are long gone, but they have not been forgotten. The lights on the control panel flicker and their tape drives whir once again, thanks to a group of computer historians who call themselves the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island, or RCS.
The nonprofit group, formed four years ago, has only about a dozen members. But they've managed to amass a large collection of computers, many older than the group members themselves. They collect and restore these digital relics for fun.
"It's kind of like people who restore Model T cars," said Michael Umbricht, a founder of RCS.
Some computers in their collection were used for a variety of tasks, including medical research at a university and assembly line production at a semiconductor company. One was used by engineers to draw plans for construction projects.
They were donated by universities and companies, anxious to replace these behemoths with cheaper, faster, more powerful desktop computers. It's often a bonus to the benefactors that someone will actually make use of their old machines, Umbricht said.
The computers are old and dusty, they can't remember very much, they're loud, they use magnetic tapes instead of hard drives. And they suck up enough power to make your electric bill noticeably higher.
So why would anyone want them?
"To say that nostalgia doesn't figure into the equation would not be truthful," said Carl Friend, one of five board members of the group.
Beyond that, one of the main motivations is to learn how these machines work, said Umbricht, who teaches astronomy at the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium at Roger Williams Park in Providence.
"With these older machines you can see the individual components that make it work, that comprise the machine," he said. "With the lights on the front panel, you can actually see the internal state, see what function it's performing at any given moment."
The group's goal is to restore the computers to working condition. They've had a lot of success, Umbricht said, but the work can be quite challenging.
The oldest in the collection is a blue and gray Packard Bell, circa 1961. Does it work?
"We don't know," says Friend, who by day runs a computer network for an engineering company in Boston. They haven't tried turning it on yet.
There may be some circuit boards missing, but Friend said he thinks new ones can be refashioned with the help of a schematic diagram - the blueprints of the circuits that make up the brains of the machine.
It holds the equivalent of about 12,000 characters of information, surely a luxury in the 1960s. But today, that's about 1/3000 of the memory that a typical desktop computer has.
The computer came from the University of Rochester, which donated several large computers that now make up a large part of the RCS collection.
Last week, Friend and Umbricht agreed to turn on one of their machines for a visitor.
"We should fire up the 12," Friend says, referring to a PDP-12 computer made by Digital Equipment Corp.
In the RCS office, these transistorized contraptions, along with their cables and circuit cards, have overtaken nearly all the floor space. It's there that the group meets every month, sometimes sticking around until midnight to talk and tinker.
The artwork on the walls is appropriate - discarded circuit boards. The "wall of memory" is literally that - a mosaic of obsolete memory boards nailed to a wall.
Umbricht, 33, and Friend, 38, have long ponytails. Friend sports a full beard. The pair could easily be placed in the 1970s, when the machines they admire were in their heyday.
They make their way through the clutter to the PDP-12, circa 1969, which could easily be mistaken for a prop in the old Star Trek series.
The speed of the machine is roughly .85 megahertz. A desktop machine that today costs about $1,000 runs 275 times faster.
"It's very, very slow by modern standards," Friend concedes. "But what the machine was used for, it didn't matter."
Friend opens the green panel on the front of the machine. He turns a key that resembles the ignition of a car. A loud fan spins, lights flash, the machine hums.
It's alive.
There is no keyboard. The computer is programmed by tapping rocker switches in a certain sequence. They have no monitor, so determining exactly what the machine is doing is difficult.
Friend tries - unsuccessfully - to get it to read a magnetic tape, the size of a roll of masking tape.
"It's like firing up an old car," Friend says with some disappointment. "Sometimes they don't go."
Like restoring old cars, this can be an expensive hobby. Though the group gets their machines for free, they pay about $325 a month in rent and utilities. Then there are the pilgrimages they make once or twice a year to pick up unwanted computers.
The five board members each pitch in about $50 of their own money to pay the rent. They make up the rest with flea markets held monthly where the group sells newer equipment donated to them.
Umbricht and Friend say that while the capability of most of these machines have long been surpassed by smaller computers, they were extremely reliable and often could go months or even years at a time without the need to restart them.
"There's a lot to be learned from the old systems and the way they were designed, Umbricht said. "Some of the modern products haven't learned the mistakes of the past."
It's hard to determine the actual value of the collection because there's not much of a market for outdated computers. A promotional brochure the group has from the 1970s advertised the PDP-12 model for $27,900. The group has three of the 725 that were made, Friend said.
But today, these machines are now largely unwanted. The biggest deterrent for would-be collectors is the sheer size of the machines, Umbricht said.
But Umbricht said it's not important to the group how much the machines are worth. Their investment in obtaining and fixing them is not about trying to make money.
"There's a certain enjoyment," Umbricht said, "in taking something that is very old and restoring it and seeing that it actually works when you flip the switch and turn it on."
The next RCS open house and flea market is Sept. 19 at 25 Eagle St., Bldg. 5, Suite 206, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information, call 861-1977 or see the group's Web site at http://www.osfn.org/rcs
Note: The Retro-Computing Society of RI has moved to a new location since this article was published. The new address is 118 Manton Avenue, Suite 411, Providence, RI. The phone number given above is no longer active. For the current open house schedule see the RCS webpage here.