Here's hoping the really unique stuff finds a new home before it's too late! The mountains of documentation especially. Although I'd happily carry all those PC-compatibles away if I was local, heh. So many older x86 components are rapidly becoming harder to find and oddly sought after.
Yes Clint would love it, but I think he might heart attack being overwhelmed by it all lol. I was also thinking of Chyrosran22 who is a keyboard nut, and would have ended up with videos for years on all the different keyboards in that place.
AH! Memory Lane! The first computer I used was a VIC20, then a Commodore 64, then the infamous Radio Shack TRS80 Model 2000. From there it was a 386, 486DX2 with 2 40mb hard drives. When the Pentium 2's came out, HAD to have one. After that I went to work as a computer tech for an Epson authorized dealer. Still have the certificate for each of their equipment. My Brag Book, with all of my licences and certifications has a cat sitting on a VIC20. Thought bubble, "I don't know what this thing is, but it's sure nice and warm". Gave it to my Son. He just looked at me funny. I don't need all that stuff anymore. Nobody needs an old Satcom certificate for something that doesn't exist anymore. It was fun while it lasted.
And i sense both of you are killing most of the readers here by not doing something as simple as putting a timestamp on the things you trying to put fokus on from the vid.(come on' should be a minimum)
@@CB3ROB-CyberBunker err NO! The DEC10 and DEC20 are what you're thinking of, different machines altogether - first multi-user mainframe. The PDP 11 was 16 bit of which MANY models existed: 11/03, 11/05, 11/10, 11/20, 11/23, 11/34, 11/35, 11/40, 11/45, 11/55, 11/60, 11/70, 11/44, 11/73, 11/84 etc. ALL the above I worked on as a DEC Field Service Engineer.
Google and Micosoft Australia should be donating. To sad to watch. I used to have a heap of rare vintage computers and a family member chucked them all while I was away. He thought it was just old crap. (Rare IBM keyboards that are now up near $5000 second hand etc...)
I cannot stand when people try to "clean" your place without your permission. It's so arrogant, thinking they know best for you and they can touch your stuff willy nilly. If that happened to me, I'd probably demand they cough up the cash value of the stuff they threw away. Telstra actually has a telecom museum nearby with tons of old phone/teletype equipment. Looks I better get donating in case they run into money troubles.
I hate when people do that shit as well, one of my ex girlfriends tried to do that too me several years ago while I was at work, trying to throw out some of my spare commodore C64, and C128 stuff, which has become harder to find here in the US over the past few years, but I was lucky to catch her before the trash pickup came the next day, and to say the least it was one of the many nails in the coffin as to why she is no longer my girlfriend lol! my current girlfriend long as I don't clutter up the house, and I keep the shop relatively clean, then she could care less, but there are those times when we are out thrifting, and she does sigh when I find another computer, keyboard, or whatever it might be lol!
It would be awesome, if all those old books, manuals and other paper stuff could be digitized and published in free online catalog. Often when working on old stuff information just can't be found from internet and old information could be almost impossible to get if nobody has stored physical versions and put them on catalog. Sadly scanning and photographing piles of documents is time consuming and often just not done before throwing stuff away.
Henri, I agree but who has the time and energy to do this. Here in Perth we scanned a lot of books with the help of teams from the Dept of Justice. Since then there has not been anyone with the time or inclination to continue with the job. We have sent several scanned docs to people overseas who had requested them, not even a "thank you" back
Linda Epton If I was in Oz, I'd gladly help with scanning stuff. There are plenty of people who very much appreciate your efforts, btw. ;) It's just that geography can be an issue, and I can see how it's hard to find people locally who have the time to help with this. I really hope the majority of it will find temporary (or permanent) storage, if even you have to give some items away, rather than scrapping them.
They need to be a lot more selective in what they decide to save. Stuff like PC clone systems, a lot of the old monitors, random printers/peripherals are really just junk apart from unusual designs and there's a lot they should not have accepted or recycled when they first got it. Probably only a small amount of those piles of documentation are worth keeping - again, needs sorting and looking at it as its received rather than just dumping straight away on a pile in the warehouse! If the actual valuable/rare gear was then properly organised, it would take up a fraction of the space they're using now.
Not to say I don't appreciate the efforts of the society in saving the old gear... I hope they get help in getting properly organised so the precious stuff is safe in the long term. :)
I wish this stuff could be stored better and organized more. I'm actually on the lookout for a late 90s PC case for a Ryzen sleeper build; something like an IBM intellistation.
Do you know how difficult it is to get volunteers. Back in the day when the club started collecting they probably did what we did here in Perth, took everything that we could get our hands on. One never knew what would be worth preserving back then. So much was being cannibalised and trashed and much was being shipped off to China. Now Sydney and Perth have an enormous collection of items that do need to be sorted documented and much of it culled. Who is going to do the job?? In Perth we have piles of old documentation, some if it is publicly listed but no one has the time to scan any more documents and we are constantly being asked for copies of documents from all over the world. When we started collecting I was dumpster diving in the rain saving documentation that is really scarce now.
VAX BI Bus was found in the VAX-6000 series IIRC (VAX was a native 32-bit architecture but the BI bus allowed VAX to map above 40 bits of address space).
Nice one Dave, was good to see you there! A lot of the obvious and easily accessible gems have gone, but still some treasures to be found if you're willing to dig. Look forward to the teardowns.
23:40 Is an IBM 1401 computer. At one time (circa 1960) these were the most widely used systems in the world. Over 10,000 were made, only about 6 left worldwide now. I still have the core memory frame from one of these.
you keep saying there is so much "modern junk" that you'd find in the dumpster or laughing about it...but you got to remember, when Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 was popular, people were tossing out old Apple Mac Classics, IBM 5150s, etc and now those are somewhat desirable computers. Give those "modern junk" computers 10-15 years when Microsoft has screwed Windows up so much or gone strictly to ARM CPUs where ANYTHING written for x86/x64 CPUs won't run...we already have some Windows computers running ARM CPUs and they emulate x86/x64 software....very poorly....
This wont happen anymore, we have emulators for every platform now. What is somewhat precious are esoteric/rare pieces of hardware, not whole common systems.
There's no way Microsoft will switch to ARM. Intel chips has been optimised for consumer and business level needs whereas arm is designed for more embedded and mobile applications.
RSTS an early timesharing system the ReSource Timesharing System. a breakthrough OS which ran in 32KB on PDP-11 computers .. i am one of the many unknown heros of this era.
Great blog post Dave. I went there today and gave a few items a new (temporary) home. Hopefully some serious movers come in and preserve this amazing mountain of computing history. ABC radio interviewed them (and me while they were at it) which should air on Monday and spread more awareness.
movax20h Loved the keyboards on them. Rock solid and required less finger stretching than the 101/102-style keyboards on later models and PCs. Key feature: Instead of a wide gap between sections there was a tactile ridge 1 to 2 mm wide, but easily felt when touch typing.
The DEC RP-06 at 7:36 could only support 200 MB. I know this because I did an awful lot head alignment routines on these at Bell Canada in the 1980s. IIRC, they employed 10 platters but only 18 heads (the top surface and the bottom surface were not used). If you forgot to remove your wrist watch before launching the heads, then you would need a new watch :-)
The typewriter looking device is actually a Remington Bookkeeping Machine. Its a typewriter and adding machine in combination. The counters are used for adding and subtracting numbers. Its a certainly quite hard to find one. i have a model 21 which is a smaller version with less features. Certainly worth saving.
Why isn't there something like that in Perth? :D Good on ya with that Amiga 2000! Some of those old PCs looked interesting to me, but yea, wrong coast for me.
The Australian Computer Museum Society - how appalling they dropped the ball on this, should have been a crowd funding drive weeks ago. - dam I wish I were rich
This issue has been going on for years, everything used to be stored in one warehouse, not four. They have tried to raise money, but they really need a permanent museum, and that means owning the building outright. Government and business are the only ones with that sort of money, no one wants to help. Personally I think they need to move it out of Sydney, property is far too expensive and developers are constantly pulling down anything that is affordable to rent.
They should bring it down to Canberra - the whole of the ACT is crown land - the Gov owns it. I'm sure they could find them an ex-govie building they're not using anymore ;)
It almost makes me feel like crying 😢 like walking through a metaphorical cemetery where you know most of the people 😢 ..... but great blog once again 😉👍
It's so sad that these places are closing. A few months ago, a place much bigger than this was just closed down for good in Silicon Valley without a notice after being 40 years in the business. One day I walked there and saw it was closed and a sign for development to a most likely Google campus 😣
@mipmipmipmipmip DEC were big EVERYWHERE back in the 60's 70's and 80's. Only IBM was bigger. DEC operated in every major country in the world > 150 IIRC. I too worked for DEC as a senior field service engineer in the UK where we had almost 20,000 employees and approaching 200,000 world wide. Bought by Compaq, then Compaq bought by HP. Most of the DEC documentation used to be available online. IIRC much of it is now online via Gordon Bell's computer museum archive (he was DEC's founding engineer before eventually moving to Intel.
@mipmipmipmipmip I was in DEC UK workstation marketing when the Alpha was released. A bit later I had responsibility for the relationship with Computervision's Medusa CAD software development team. We loaned them some of the very first Alpha workstations. When they first started compiling their software they asked us to come and help because they thought there was a problem with the compiler. Turned out that they couldn't believe that the compiling of the whole package was done in just a couple of minutes and was so fast they thought something was wrong! LOL Bearing in mind that Medusa was 2D CAD, you can imagine their delight when one aspect of what they could do was generate a pseudo full surface model and rotate it in real-time because of the sheer speed of the Alpha box! Absolutely superb systems. I liked your clever |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| logo - nice ... A true fan!
Sadly, a lot of this stuff will probably end up in the trash. Not really interested in the modern PC compatible machines, but the old/unusual ones are worth saving IMO.
When Dave walked by the IBM RAMAC it felt a bit like the V***GER scene in Star Trek I... Or maybe like stumbling across the actual Holy Grail in a thrift store. "Hmmm.. interesting cup.... nah looks like junk I'll pass". :) Great video though - super jealous!
It amazes me how some of these computer companies seem to have very little data readily available, given a quick Google search. For instance "Concurrent Computer Corporation." I can find a very small bit about their more recent (last 20 years) operations--including some real time computing and flight simulation stuff. Unfortunately, the history of it seems to have been lost (rather, not published. Certainly, the knowledge still remains within some people and non-digitized documents). I love what some of these vintage computing organizations do in trying to keep the history of these alive in the current era. Unfortunately, after Googling every unusual thing that has arisen in this, it's been made clear that even semi-detailed information is very difficult to find.
It seem like there's an Internet time hole for documenting old systems. Systems that were nostalgic when Internet access became more ubiquitous in the early '90s got documented, while systems that were on there way out at that time got lost. We had a Masscomp-based multi-processor 68030 Concurrent on loan to the UNH-IOL for network interoperability testing in the early '90s. They were specialized multi-processor real-time Unix systems, a bit out of date by the time I got to (briefly) use it. Try searching for "concurrent series 6000".
The Concurrent in this video looks like maybe a late continuation of the Perkin Elmer proprietary multi-processor real-time systems. Makes sense to be sitting next to that Tandem. Specialized, not general purpose, systems.
They do the right thing by saving PC clones etc. Think about if everybody 25 years ago just trashed all the IBM327x because they were nothing special at that time. In 20 years no name grey box desktops will be just as rare as that Intel development system
Too late. IBM terminals are still common as dirt today while late 80's early 90's IBM PC compatibles are by far the rarest computers one can own. The majority of them were recycled into oblivion years ago.
your mystery box is very familiar to me. I worked at Bell Canada. during the mid-1980's we did a lot of flying head alignments on our Tandem / Ampex 300 Mbyte HDD's. replacing lots of heads and realigning them. Ours was a tandem computer fault tolerant non-stop mirrored disk computer environment.
Last year, we had a vintage computing festival in Berlin, and there were people actually putting these old systems on display. One recreated the war room display from the movie wargames on a small tube, another had a fully working PDP-8 there (I was there on early Saturday when they were still setting everything up, and so I got to help lift PDP-8 components into a rack - these suckers were heavy bastards, like 60kg for one module and so on). It was quite the experience! They even had a repair corner. I tried fixing my TRS-80 there, but it didn't work out. But the good thing was, the machine was rather complete, so I found some fans from the other side of Germany, who actually bought it from me for a nice price! They're going to fix it up, and I don't have to worry about it any more. Unfortunately, this festival is only about every 2 years or so, even though I'd love it to be once every year. But I guess, vintage computers don't have that many fans...
10:03 Ah the old Teleray terminals. I used to repair these back in the early 1980s. They were so easy to fix. There were no CPUs in them and were based almost solely on 74 series chips and a few static memory chips, all of which were socketed, and I just had to swap out chips to find any faulty ones. They were pretty good terminals for back then. We had hundreds of them in our organization.
I was distressed to hear about the demise of this collection. Even more depressed about the lack of resources the ACMS had. The OCD me could spend a life-time sorting through this trove, putting things in ever expanding places with ever expanding specificity. Bunnings need to donate a location or three. It seems like a massive loss with very little media attention.
That's what I thought. Like the one that they try to keep up and running in the Computer History Museum th-cam.com/video/PwftXqJu8hs/w-d-xo.html Great!!
I was unaware that the 1401 was in the condemned warehouse. It is probably the single most valuable machine there. It would not be hard to get over $10-15K USD for it from a big iron mainframe collector, possibly much more, and use those proceeds to move and store (and thin out!) the rest...but I do not know at this late hour. I hope they have some sort of plan.
Indeed a 1401, probably with expansion memory, and the RAMAC he read might imply it once had a 1405 disk unit, which would make it pretty darn rare. I hope to heck it gets preserved.
After looking at this video I am worried that the people running it are hoarders rather than people who know how to preserve important artifacts. Sorry if I offend anyone, but the video says it all. If I was in Sydney I would help sort through the important stuff and even pay for a storage unit to keep the VALUABLE stuff safe. With only a week to clear all that stuff out, I am worried a lot of good gear and information will be lost.
You have to love that sign on an old tape drive "Keep this". It was probably put on there the years before the company that owned it threw it out. Nope, it's gone now.
Imre Fabian Oh, I thought it might be a card punching station with modular counter attachments for autoincrementing fields (with way too many counters hooked on just to keep the set with the machine when in the warehouse).
It is so so sad to imagine all that is going down the drain. I'd be glad if something at least similar would be still around here. Wish I could be of help and maybe safe some of that wonderful stuff !
I could genuinely watch this for hours. Brings back memories of our local dump (Recycling Center) in the 90s. Although you wouldn't see many big mainframes like you see here, there was still some rare retro machines to be had. I REALLY hope people try to save as much of this stuff as possible. It would be sacrilege to scrap any of it. (OK, maybe some of the generic beige box PCs can go. lol. Even some of those are rare, though.) I would happily sit there for weeks scanning in those rarer documents and schematics, btw. If there was a similar place like this near me, I would volunteer. Did you see any Silicon Graphics machines there, Dave?
6:00 Yup, those 3278's go for a grand on ebay. Ever get that cramp in the side of your face, when you grin too much or for too long? It's like that; I am geeking out every second of this video. Absolutely amazing tech. Gorgeous built-like-a-brick-shithouse machines. Stuff that is so overengineered, it's straight up art. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing!
We used stuff from Able computing in the 1980s. They manufactured rGate which was a 500-line terminal server (looked like DEC Server) to connect to a the Case-Rixon DCX network. They also manufactured xGate (for connecting to X25 networks) and BlueGate for connecting to IBM SNA networks.
Hope they will find a sponsor in Sydney to store all this amazing stuff temporary. Otherwise a lot of technical information will be lost forever. It's a tragedy.
I think that 4010 was the old storage tube graphics workstation. There were a couple at Caltech in the terminal room in the early 80's. It was almost like using a printing terminal-the screen could only be erased as a unit. When the screen filled up, you'd push the clear screen button, and there'd be a big green flash as the tube was erased.
They used phosphor storage CRTs instead of memory chips to display graphics. I used a similar unit to program a few graphics applications back in the early 1980s.
Looks very similar to the ones I used to program (jumper wires not code) when I was at Uni in the early 70s. SOOO simple to use for calculus problems and 10,000 times faster to program than a digital machine. Dial an input pot with input value/s and instant output of the answers. 😁
When we moved, I had to leave back an old hp 1.5 GHz spectrum analyzer, because it was gigantic and heavy (and loud). That was 14 years ago and I still regret this decision every day
Is it bad that I looked at plenty of those metal cases and thought "I could gut those and build some great stuff in them" Glad you saved the Amiga 2000!
I had a Tektronix 4051 graphics terminal at home when I was a teenager. My dad brought it home from work. It was cool. Weird, with a scope-like storage tube monitor and a DC300 quarter inch tape drive, but cool. It was much like that 4010 you found a manual for. The 4051 manuals looked the same.
Dave, everything that is rare today was once declared as "What is this garbage doing here? This is something I find in the dumpster". Dumpsters make things rare.
13:44 That looks like a standalone 16 channel Micom Data PABX from the 1980s. This little unit seems to have similar boards to much larger switches that could handle up to around 1000 channels and came in large racks. They would present a menu on the users screen allowing them to select which computer they wanted to connect to. It was all based on serial RS232 type connections. We had loads of Teleray terminals on the user end, and later PCs acting as terminals, with a computer room full of Data General, VAX and Pr1me mini computers on the other end. Everything was replaced with Ethernet and proprietary DEC networking around 1990. They fun times.
Earlier this year a large warehouse sales website in Aachen, Germany shut down. They had a crazy inventory as well. I don't know where it all ended up, but they had scopes, single parts and even nightvision systems from tanks.
4:47 - that's a Digital Personal Workstation (DEC Alpha) on the shelves with the old PC-compatibles. Those are quite nice for running VMS as a hobbyist, and they were very expensive new.
It doesn't look like any of them were 14 inch tape reels, and id expect them to be in a metal can, like the tapes that are being archived from the Gemini missions are. That being said, who knows whats in the back, those for sure need to be sorted before they are trashed. But they're most likely just mundane stuff from local businesses or labs.
If only I was not thousands of miles away. I would come with my car emptied out and cram packed to the roof when I finally left. Probably have to make multiple trips.
That is the front panel of an Interdata Model 70 seen at 12:14 (Interdata clone the instruction set of the IBM-360). We used these at Bell Canada in the 1970's decade. It had no OS so the cassette was used to boot the application (or diagnostics)
Awesome! I wonder if some movie studio would be interested in some of that stuff just for interesting looking background props, especially that Andromeda Systems beast. Can't wait for the teardown videos of the gear you found there.
I know right, a lot of those systems would make great props for like a ski-fi movie or something similar. Sad seeing that IBM 1401 just sitting there like that though.
It’s kind of sad... all that gear just rotting away... I worked with about 10% of that stuff in the 70s and 80s. It’s good to see someone is trying to keep the pool of devices and spares, but for how long? If it doesn’t make money for some corporate stuffed shirt - then it will ultimately disappear.
Nice field trip. Thanks for sharing. We got to see everything you did, but didn't have all the sneezing from the dust. What a collection (mess). Appreciate the take along! G'Day
That is such a shame, I hope it is not forgotten and lost. With a tinge of irony, they should make a digital record of all of it, photos at least until/if they go to detail on them. I hope all goes well for them. EDIT: The mech keeb in me would love to get a hold of a bunch of those vintage keyboards, the key caps alone are just gorgeous.
Oh, the humanity! It's always fascinating to see how many different ideas were conceived and approaches were followed that got the us to today. Some great things there, but also some things that rightly deserve to fade into history.
The big white box around 6:17 is an IBM 3725, I think. It took me a while to ID it (even though I have one in the collection). Anyway, I hope it gets saved - we just lost a pair of those a couple months ago to the smelter.
2:41 The machine on its side is an Olivetti Programma 101 Electronic Calculator, from circa 1966. I want SO BAD, but I'm in the US... 19:27 The machine on its side is a Canon "Canola" SE-600 Programmable calculator.
Used to have a room full of those Intel MDS (blue & white boxes at 09.15) in the mid 80s. They were useless - as soon as the room got slightly warm half of them would crap out or the screens would shrink to the size of a postage stamp. Then I actually had to use one in my first job, it was the development system for early car dashboard displays. No idea why they were so big, we later replaced it with a box the size of a paperback.
Here's hoping the really unique stuff finds a new home before it's too late! The mountains of documentation especially. Although I'd happily carry all those PC-compatibles away if I was local, heh. So many older x86 components are rapidly becoming harder to find and oddly sought after.
LGR if you would get your hands on that lot, I think there won't be any content drought from you or rather it will be content flood (^_-)
Yeah give them a bid.
hehe, when he mentioned all the PC stuff, I immediately thought "LGR would make use of those"
@DasMeatloaf i thought "Dave has obviously never visited vogons.org"
Ill bet lgr was drooling watching this
LGR would love this.
Yes, he would
I was going to say the same thing after Dave said he knew nobody that would appreciate IBM-PC compatible computers of the late 80's and 90's.
Send it all to his mailbag.
First person I thought of as well.
Yes Clint would love it, but I think he might heart attack being overwhelmed by it all lol.
I was also thinking of Chyrosran22 who is a keyboard nut, and would have ended up with videos for years on all the different keyboards in that place.
AH! Memory Lane!
The first computer I used was a VIC20, then a Commodore 64, then the infamous Radio Shack TRS80 Model 2000.
From there it was a 386, 486DX2 with 2 40mb hard drives. When the Pentium 2's came out, HAD to have one.
After that I went to work as a computer tech for an Epson authorized dealer. Still have the certificate for each of their equipment.
My Brag Book, with all of my licences and certifications has a cat sitting on a VIC20.
Thought bubble, "I don't know what this thing is, but it's sure nice and warm".
Gave it to my Son. He just looked at me funny. I don't need all that stuff anymore. Nobody needs an old Satcom certificate for something that doesn't exist anymore. It was fun while it lasted.
This is KILLING ME! He walked by a lot of interesting stuff. I think he totally missed a PET clone in the monitor room.
I want to know what that huge box in that monitor room was at 9:59 with a smaller monitor sitting on top. Obviously not just a monitor.
And i sense both of you are killing most of the readers here by not doing something as simple as putting a timestamp on the things you trying to put fokus on from the vid.(come on' should be a minimum)
Didn't even think to rewind the video and see what time it was at, stupid mistake.
6:30 - PDP-11 enginerring drawings. What a score.
Was thinking exactly the same thing. Memories like the corner of my RAM
Those need saving!
Probably extremely rare too. I'm sure the 8 bit guy would like them.
the pdp-11 is a 36 bit system. the 8-bit guy would have to rename himself to the 36-bit-guy.
@@CB3ROB-CyberBunker err NO! The DEC10 and DEC20 are what you're thinking of, different machines altogether - first multi-user mainframe. The PDP 11 was 16 bit of which MANY models existed: 11/03, 11/05, 11/10, 11/20, 11/23, 11/34, 11/35, 11/40, 11/45, 11/55, 11/60, 11/70, 11/44, 11/73, 11/84 etc. ALL the above I worked on as a DEC Field Service Engineer.
Google and Micosoft Australia should be donating.
To sad to watch.
I used to have a heap of rare vintage computers and a family member chucked them all while I was away.
He thought it was just old crap.
(Rare IBM keyboards that are now up near $5000 second hand etc...)
They really should be. This is sooo sooo sad :(
I cannot stand when people try to "clean" your place without your permission. It's so arrogant, thinking they know best for you and they can touch your stuff willy nilly. If that happened to me, I'd probably demand they cough up the cash value of the stuff they threw away.
Telstra actually has a telecom museum nearby with tons of old phone/teletype equipment. Looks I better get donating in case they run into money troubles.
I hate when people do that shit as well, one of my ex girlfriends tried to do that too me several years ago while I was at work, trying to throw out some of my spare commodore C64, and C128 stuff, which has become harder to find here in the US over the past few years, but I was lucky to catch her before the trash pickup came the next day, and to say the least it was one of the many nails in the coffin as to why she is no longer my girlfriend lol! my current girlfriend long as I don't clutter up the house, and I keep the shop relatively clean, then she could care less, but there are those times when we are out thrifting, and she does sigh when I find another computer, keyboard, or whatever it might be lol!
Is that family member alive?
That'd drive me mad. Holy fuck.
I love looking at old stuff like this. Thanks for a great video!
That weird IBM you walked past was THE FIRST HARD DRIVE commercially available - the IBM 305 RAMAC. As soon as you said RAMAC i was jaw on floor
Mijc Osis Same here. Casually walked by the first HDD ever...
To be more precise, the HDD is inside the IBM 305 RAMAC, which is a computer.
@@GRBtutorials But it is also only a RAMAC if the HDD is attached ;)
It would be awesome, if all those old books, manuals and other paper stuff could be digitized and published in free online catalog. Often when working on old stuff information just can't be found from internet and old information could be almost impossible to get if nobody has stored physical versions and put them on catalog. Sadly scanning and photographing piles of documents is time consuming and often just not done before throwing stuff away.
Henri, I agree but who has the time and energy to do this. Here in Perth we scanned a lot of books with the help of teams from the Dept of Justice. Since then there has not been anyone with the time or inclination to continue with the job. We have sent several scanned docs to people overseas who had requested them, not even a "thank you" back
Linda Epton
If I was in Oz, I'd gladly help with scanning stuff.
There are plenty of people who very much appreciate your efforts, btw. ;)
It's just that geography can be an issue, and I can see how it's hard to find people locally who have the time to help with this.
I really hope the majority of it will find temporary (or permanent) storage, if even you have to give some items away, rather than scrapping them.
Have you tried contacting Archive.org? They are big on scanning old documentation, and are able to secure funding for it.
Now that's something for automation; a robot that scans books...
@@eggaweb
They do exist, and Jason Scott probably has a few. ;)
They need to be a lot more selective in what they decide to save. Stuff like PC clone systems, a lot of the old monitors, random printers/peripherals are really just junk apart from unusual designs and there's a lot they should not have accepted or recycled when they first got it. Probably only a small amount of those piles of documentation are worth keeping - again, needs sorting and looking at it as its received rather than just dumping straight away on a pile in the warehouse! If the actual valuable/rare gear was then properly organised, it would take up a fraction of the space they're using now.
Not to say I don't appreciate the efforts of the society in saving the old gear... I hope they get help in getting properly organised so the precious stuff is safe in the long term. :)
I wish this stuff could be stored better and organized more. I'm actually on the lookout for a late 90s PC case for a Ryzen sleeper build; something like an IBM intellistation.
Do you know how difficult it is to get volunteers. Back in the day when the club started collecting they probably did what we did here in Perth, took everything that we could get our hands on. One never knew what would be worth preserving back then. So much was being cannibalised and trashed and much was being shipped off to China. Now Sydney and Perth have an enormous collection of items that do need to be sorted documented and much of it culled. Who is going to do the job?? In Perth we have piles of old documentation, some if it is publicly listed but no one has the time to scan any more documents and we are constantly being asked for copies of documents from all over the world. When we started collecting I was dumpster diving in the rain saving documentation that is really scarce now.
Not quite. The 1.2M floppies on some of the PC systems are certainly worth saving.
If I was in Australia, I would gladly help out. :D Hope you manage to get a few more volunteers so all that lot can be sorted...
VAX BI Bus was found in the VAX-6000 series IIRC (VAX was a native 32-bit architecture but the BI bus allowed VAX to map above 40 bits of address space).
23:20 - "who wants it" - I bet the 8-bit Guy is yelling "me me me!"
I worked on the PDP11/ 20, 34A, 40, 45, 60, 70 computers plus RP05, 6, 7, RK05, RX01 etc.
Me too and many more besides! Did you spot the DEC Alpha System masquerading in a Compaq badge?
Nice one Dave, was good to see you there! A lot of the obvious and easily accessible gems have gone, but still some treasures to be found if you're willing to dig. Look forward to the teardowns.
23:40 Is an IBM 1401 computer. At one time (circa 1960) these were the most widely used systems in the world. Over 10,000 were made, only about 6 left worldwide now.
I still have the core memory frame from one of these.
you keep saying there is so much "modern junk" that you'd find in the dumpster or laughing about it...but you got to remember, when Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 was popular, people were tossing out old Apple Mac Classics, IBM 5150s, etc and now those are somewhat desirable computers. Give those "modern junk" computers 10-15 years when Microsoft has screwed Windows up so much or gone strictly to ARM CPUs where ANYTHING written for x86/x64 CPUs won't run...we already have some Windows computers running ARM CPUs and they emulate x86/x64 software....very poorly....
This wont happen anymore, we have emulators for every platform now. What is somewhat precious are esoteric/rare pieces of hardware, not whole common systems.
Lots of DOS enthusiasts out there!
There's no way Microsoft will switch to ARM. Intel chips has been optimised for consumer and business level needs whereas arm is designed for more embedded and mobile applications.
Apple is already in the process of switching laptop lines to ARM, expect Apple Arm chips in all their computers in next ~5 years.
Hp has multi-processor servers based around the arm architecture
part of that room was in TRON, I am sure of it.
need clip
Some DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) machines did appear in Tron IIRC.
This is the "I have no idea" episode! Real fun seeing those old equipment!! Some of them were still used when I starting working in the early 90s.
Curious Marc needs to see this!
seventhday savior especially the mechanical stuff
Espc the typewriter jobbie..
He could get all the terminals
RSTS an early timesharing system the ReSource Timesharing System. a breakthrough OS which ran in 32KB on PDP-11 computers .. i am one of the many unknown heros of this era.
Looks surprisingly like my house.
lol. Looks like my bedroom.
And mine as well...probably like many here!!
Lots of unhappy wifeys out there...
The smart guys, sold their wives for more server space. :D
@@BillAnt lol
Great blog post Dave. I went there today and gave a few items a new (temporary) home. Hopefully some serious movers come in and preserve this amazing mountain of computing history. ABC radio interviewed them (and me while they were at it) which should air on Monday and spread more awareness.
All those documents look like a job for the Internet Archive.
We need to setup a fund to help move and store this stuff.
justice83. Like a patreon museum thing
6:03 - These IBM 3278 terminals are beutiful.
movax20h Loved the keyboards on them. Rock solid and required less finger stretching than the 101/102-style keyboards on later models and PCs. Key feature: Instead of a wide gap between sections there was a tactile ridge 1 to 2 mm wide, but easily felt when touch typing.
The DEC RP-06 at 7:36 could only support 200 MB. I know this because I did an awful lot head alignment routines on these at Bell Canada in the 1980s. IIRC, they employed 10 platters but only 18 heads (the top surface and the bottom surface were not used). If you forgot to remove your wrist watch before launching the heads, then you would need a new watch :-)
Wow! Thanks for bringing us along! Joining you from Maine in the US.
The typewriter looking device is actually a Remington Bookkeeping Machine. Its a typewriter and adding machine in combination. The counters are used for adding and subtracting numbers. Its a certainly quite hard to find one. i have a model 21 which is a smaller version with less features. Certainly worth saving.
Why isn't there something like that in Perth? :D Good on ya with that Amiga 2000! Some of those old PCs looked interesting to me, but yea, wrong coast for me.
Ofc, LGR and Phil are here! :D
There is: www.aceware.com.au/acms/default.htm
The Australian Computer Museum Society - how appalling they dropped the ball on this, should have been a crowd funding drive weeks ago. - dam I wish I were rich
This issue has been going on for years, everything used to be stored in one warehouse, not four. They have tried to raise money, but they really need a permanent museum, and that means owning the building outright. Government and business are the only ones with that sort of money, no one wants to help.
Personally I think they need to move it out of Sydney, property is far too expensive and developers are constantly pulling down anything that is affordable to rent.
They should bring it down to Canberra - the whole of the ACT is crown land - the Gov owns it. I'm sure they could find them an ex-govie building they're not using anymore ;)
I agree. This stinks of mismanagement...
It almost makes me feel like crying 😢 like walking through a metaphorical cemetery where you know most of the people 😢 ..... but great blog once again 😉👍
It's so sad that these places are closing. A few months ago, a place much bigger than this was just closed down for good in Silicon Valley without a notice after being 40 years in the business. One day I walked there and saw it was closed and a sign for development to a most likely Google campus 😣
When I saw that old computer covered in pigeon feces, I shook my head in disbelief and cried.
oh wow, my high school had a pdp-11 running RSTS/E. i was (4,2) on that beast. fun times.
I used to work for DEC back in the late 70's early 80's as a Sr field engineer
@mipmipmipmipmip DEC were big EVERYWHERE back in the 60's 70's and 80's. Only IBM was bigger. DEC operated in every major country in the world > 150 IIRC. I too worked for DEC as a senior field service engineer in the UK where we had almost 20,000 employees and approaching 200,000 world wide. Bought by Compaq, then Compaq bought by HP. Most of the DEC documentation used to be available online. IIRC much of it is now online via Gordon Bell's computer museum archive (he was DEC's founding engineer before eventually moving to Intel.
@mipmipmipmipmip I was in DEC UK workstation marketing when the Alpha was released. A bit later I had responsibility for the relationship with Computervision's Medusa CAD software development team.
We loaned them some of the very first Alpha workstations. When they first started compiling their software they asked us to come and help because they thought there was a problem with the compiler. Turned out that they couldn't believe that the compiling of the whole package was done in just a couple of minutes and was so fast they thought something was wrong! LOL
Bearing in mind that Medusa was 2D CAD, you can imagine their delight when one aspect of what they could do was generate a pseudo full surface model and rotate it in real-time because of the sheer speed of the Alpha box! Absolutely superb systems.
I liked your clever |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| logo - nice ... A true fan!
Sadly, a lot of this stuff will probably end up in the trash. Not really interested in the modern PC compatible machines, but the old/unusual ones are worth saving IMO.
Wow, that's simply amazing, I hope it all found a new home.
When Dave walked by the IBM RAMAC it felt a bit like the V***GER scene in Star Trek I... Or maybe like stumbling across the actual Holy Grail in a thrift store. "Hmmm.. interesting cup.... nah looks like junk I'll pass". :) Great video though - super jealous!
It amazes me how some of these computer companies seem to have very little data readily available, given a quick Google search. For instance "Concurrent Computer Corporation." I can find a very small bit about their more recent (last 20 years) operations--including some real time computing and flight simulation stuff. Unfortunately, the history of it seems to have been lost (rather, not published. Certainly, the knowledge still remains within some people and non-digitized documents). I love what some of these vintage computing organizations do in trying to keep the history of these alive in the current era. Unfortunately, after Googling every unusual thing that has arisen in this, it's been made clear that even semi-detailed information is very difficult to find.
It seem like there's an Internet time hole for documenting old systems. Systems that were nostalgic when Internet access became more ubiquitous in the early '90s got documented, while systems that were on there way out at that time got lost. We had a Masscomp-based multi-processor 68030 Concurrent on loan to the UNH-IOL for network interoperability testing in the early '90s. They were specialized multi-processor real-time Unix systems, a bit out of date by the time I got to (briefly) use it. Try searching for "concurrent series 6000".
The Concurrent in this video looks like maybe a late continuation of the Perkin Elmer proprietary multi-processor real-time systems. Makes sense to be sitting next to that Tandem. Specialized, not general purpose, systems.
They do the right thing by saving PC clones etc. Think about if everybody 25 years ago just trashed all the IBM327x because they were nothing special at that time. In 20 years no name grey box desktops will be just as rare as that Intel development system
Too late. IBM terminals are still common as dirt today while late 80's early 90's IBM PC compatibles are by far the rarest computers one can own. The majority of them were recycled into oblivion years ago.
your mystery box is very familiar to me. I worked at Bell Canada. during the mid-1980's we did a lot of flying head alignments on our Tandem / Ampex 300 Mbyte HDD's. replacing lots of heads and realigning them. Ours was a tandem computer fault tolerant non-stop mirrored disk computer environment.
that was amazing... just finished watching and heading out to Villawood right now... it's literally 20mins away!!!! Thanks for this video Dave.
Last year, we had a vintage computing festival in Berlin, and there were people actually putting these old systems on display. One recreated the war room display from the movie wargames on a small tube, another had a fully working PDP-8 there (I was there on early Saturday when they were still setting everything up, and so I got to help lift PDP-8 components into a rack - these suckers were heavy bastards, like 60kg for one module and so on). It was quite the experience! They even had a repair corner. I tried fixing my TRS-80 there, but it didn't work out. But the good thing was, the machine was rather complete, so I found some fans from the other side of Germany, who actually bought it from me for a nice price! They're going to fix it up, and I don't have to worry about it any more. Unfortunately, this festival is only about every 2 years or so, even though I'd love it to be once every year. But I guess, vintage computers don't have that many fans...
10:03 Ah the old Teleray terminals. I used to repair these back in the early 1980s. They were so easy to fix. There were no CPUs in them and were based almost solely on 74 series chips and a few static memory chips, all of which were socketed, and I just had to swap out chips to find any faulty ones. They were pretty good terminals for back then. We had hundreds of them in our organization.
This pains me deeply
Should have been more detailed in examining this stuff. Flying by it is not helpful.
I was distressed to hear about the demise of this collection. Even more depressed about the lack of resources the ACMS had. The OCD me could spend a life-time sorting through this trove, putting things in ever expanding places with ever expanding specificity. Bunnings need to donate a location or three. It seems like a massive loss with very little media attention.
That IBM blue box is a mainframe 1401
That's what I thought. Like the one that they try to keep up and running in the Computer History Museum th-cam.com/video/PwftXqJu8hs/w-d-xo.html Great!!
That's exactly what I was thinking. Send it to Curious Marc!
I was unaware that the 1401 was in the condemned warehouse. It is probably the single most valuable machine there. It would not be hard to get over $10-15K USD for it from a big iron mainframe collector, possibly much more, and use those proceeds to move and store (and thin out!) the rest...but I do not know at this late hour. I hope they have some sort of plan.
Indeed a 1401, probably with expansion memory, and the RAMAC he read might imply it once had a 1405 disk unit, which would make it pretty darn rare. I hope to heck it gets preserved.
After looking at this video I am worried that the people running it are hoarders rather than people who know how to preserve important artifacts. Sorry if I offend anyone, but the video says it all. If I was in Sydney I would help sort through the important stuff and even pay for a storage unit to keep the VALUABLE stuff safe. With only a week to clear all that stuff out, I am worried a lot of good gear and information will be lost.
You have to love that sign on an old tape drive "Keep this". It was probably put on there the years before the company that owned it threw it out. Nope, it's gone now.
That Typewriter with the "counters" on it (5:35) looks like a predecessor of the famous "Flexowriter" where those "counters" are paper tape punches!
Imre Fabian Oh, I thought it might be a card punching station with modular counter attachments for autoincrementing fields (with way too many counters hooked on just to keep the set with the machine when in the warehouse).
Seems to be a Remington ledger writer collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/393715
It is so so sad to imagine all that is going down the drain. I'd be glad if something at least similar would be still around here. Wish I could be of help and maybe safe some of that wonderful stuff !
I could genuinely watch this for hours.
Brings back memories of our local dump (Recycling Center) in the 90s.
Although you wouldn't see many big mainframes like you see here, there was still some rare retro machines to be had.
I REALLY hope people try to save as much of this stuff as possible. It would be sacrilege to scrap any of it.
(OK, maybe some of the generic beige box PCs can go. lol. Even some of those are rare, though.)
I would happily sit there for weeks scanning in those rarer documents and schematics, btw. If there was a similar place like this near me, I would volunteer.
Did you see any Silicon Graphics machines there, Dave?
That analog computer.... Man, save that thing!
6:00 Yup, those 3278's go for a grand on ebay. Ever get that cramp in the side of your face, when you grin too much or for too long? It's like that; I am geeking out every second of this video. Absolutely amazing tech. Gorgeous built-like-a-brick-shithouse machines. Stuff that is so overengineered, it's straight up art. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing!
50 bucks for an overhead projector... tell 'em he's dreamin'
Too high or too low. :)
Put it all straight into the pool room
Yeah, I'd take the jousting sticks.
Peter Schmidt What do you want with jousting sticks?
gorillaau: Oh I don’t know, but they wouldn’t come up all that
often
We used stuff from Able computing in the 1980s. They manufactured rGate which was a 500-line terminal server (looked like DEC Server) to connect to a the Case-Rixon DCX network. They also manufactured xGate (for connecting to X25 networks) and BlueGate for connecting to IBM SNA networks.
Hope they will find a sponsor in Sydney to store all this amazing stuff temporary. Otherwise a lot of technical information will be lost forever. It's a tragedy.
For anyone interested, they do have a Patreon page.
Too bad circa 4:43 you missed the nice DEC alpha miata 433/u amongst the no name PCs...
Man, I havent even started watching this yet and I want more of it.
Mind blown!! I drive past this place on the way to work every day!
I want a warehouse full of vintage computers...
I think that 4010 was the old storage tube graphics workstation. There were a couple at Caltech in the terminal room in the early 80's. It was almost like using a printing terminal-the screen could only be erased as a unit. When the screen filled up, you'd push the clear screen button, and there'd be a big green flash as the tube was erased.
They used phosphor storage CRTs instead of memory chips to display graphics. I used a similar unit to program a few graphics applications back in the early 1980s.
I have very fond memories of my college’s VAX system. The first social media I ever encountered!
The analog comptuer is amazing.
Looks very similar to the ones I used to program (jumper wires not code) when I was at Uni in the early 70s. SOOO simple to use for calculus problems and 10,000 times faster to program than a digital machine. Dial an input pot with input value/s and instant output of the answers. 😁
When we moved, I had to leave back an old hp 1.5 GHz spectrum analyzer, because it was gigantic and heavy (and loud). That was 14 years ago and I still regret this decision every day
Is it bad that I looked at plenty of those metal cases and thought "I could gut those and build some great stuff in them"
Glad you saved the Amiga 2000!
I had a Tektronix 4051 graphics terminal at home when I was a teenager. My dad brought it home from work. It was cool. Weird, with a scope-like storage tube monitor and a DC300 quarter inch tape drive, but cool.
It was much like that 4010 you found a manual for. The 4051 manuals looked the same.
Dave, everything that is rare today was once declared as "What is this garbage doing here? This is something I find in the dumpster". Dumpsters make things rare.
Why so quickly thrown out for scrap ? No museum would take a look ? So many questions.
13:44 That looks like a standalone 16 channel Micom Data PABX from the 1980s. This little unit seems to have similar boards to much larger switches that could handle up to around 1000 channels and came in large racks. They would present a menu on the users screen allowing them to select which computer they wanted to connect to. It was all based on serial RS232 type connections. We had loads of Teleray terminals on the user end, and later PCs acting as terminals, with a computer room full of Data General, VAX and Pr1me mini computers on the other end. Everything was replaced with Ethernet and proprietary DEC networking around 1990. They fun times.
25:00 - I still believe it's Mrs Peacock in the Living Room with the Lead Pipe! :)
Those beautiful machines...
That analog computer made me so needy haha dayum
Earlier this year a large warehouse sales website in Aachen, Germany shut down. They had a crazy inventory as well. I don't know where it all ended up, but they had scopes, single parts and even nightvision systems from tanks.
4:47 - that's a Digital Personal Workstation (DEC Alpha) on the shelves with the old PC-compatibles. Those are quite nice for running VMS as a hobbyist, and they were very expensive new.
This is amazing. It's like an anthropological perspective of the technological advancements of mankind.
Man thats heaven for retro tv productions or 80s kids :)
I hope one of those tape that are going in the trash isent a copy of those apollo 11 tape.
given this is in Australia it actually could be...
It doesn't look like any of them were 14 inch tape reels, and id expect them to be in a metal can, like the tapes that are being archived from the Gemini missions are.
That being said, who knows whats in the back, those for sure need to be sorted before they are trashed. But they're most likely just mundane stuff from local businesses or labs.
If only I was not thousands of miles away. I would come with my car emptied out and cram packed to the roof when I finally left.
Probably have to make multiple trips.
An IBM 1401, an interdata and many other very rare machines. Hope this stuff can be saved.
That is the front panel of an Interdata Model 70 seen at 12:14 (Interdata clone the instruction set of the IBM-360). We used these at Bell Canada in the 1970's decade. It had no OS so the cassette was used to boot the application (or diagnostics)
Electrohome was located in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I worked there as a summer student in 1968
There's a fine line between storing and hoarding.. and I think it's somewhere around the "keeping more than one of something" area :).
That big dark grey Compaq was an Alphaserver. Like a DS20 range.
I collect vintage computers. Theres a huge group of us. We like playing DOS games and early Windows games. Emulation sucks for a lot of it.
I agree. Emulation just doesn't feel the same.
OMG... I'm going to catch a plane now..
The board shown at 4:16 is memory module from a DEC PDP-11 (perhaps an 11/44)
Awesome! I wonder if some movie studio would be interested in some of that stuff just for interesting looking background props, especially that Andromeda Systems beast. Can't wait for the teardown videos of the gear you found there.
I know right, a lot of those systems would make great props for like a ski-fi movie or something similar. Sad seeing that IBM 1401 just sitting there like that though.
Actually some years ago, some of the cabinets were used in a movie. Can't remember which one now. John would probably remember
It’s kind of sad... all that gear just rotting away...
I worked with about 10% of that stuff in the 70s and 80s.
It’s good to see someone is trying to keep the pool of devices and spares, but for how long?
If it doesn’t make money for some corporate stuffed shirt - then it will ultimately disappear.
Nice field trip. Thanks for sharing. We got to see everything you did, but didn't have all the sneezing from the dust. What a collection (mess). Appreciate the take along! G'Day
The camera doesn't do it justice, you have to be there.
That is such a shame, I hope it is not forgotten and lost. With a tinge of irony, they should make a digital record of all of it, photos at least until/if they go to detail on them. I hope all goes well for them.
EDIT: The mech keeb in me would love to get a hold of a bunch of those vintage keyboards, the key caps alone are just gorgeous.
Oh, the humanity! It's always fascinating to see how many different ideas were conceived and approaches were followed that got the us to today. Some great things there, but also some things that rightly deserve to fade into history.
The big white box around 6:17 is an IBM 3725, I think. It took me a while to ID it (even though I have one in the collection). Anyway, I hope it gets saved - we just lost a pair of those a couple months ago to the smelter.
22:15 The 8-bit guy would have appreciated those Commodore manuals.
my cell phone has twice the computing power of that whole building!
happy543210 maybe even more
but you do almost nothing with that power compared with the people back in the day which used that stuff
A tiny super computer in your hand, and you use it to send smiley faces to each other. :-)
My prior comment is in reference to this
th-cam.com/video/Q0VGRlEJewA/w-d-xo.html
Bhahaha, right XD
2:41 The machine on its side is an Olivetti Programma 101 Electronic Calculator, from circa 1966. I want SO BAD, but I'm in the US...
19:27 The machine on its side is a Canon "Canola" SE-600 Programmable calculator.
That Zenith monitor was my first real monitor for my Genie II (TRS-80 compatible).
I loved the power switch on that one (turn/click)
Dave start your own EEVblog Museum
He can set it up in the old Altium building. :P
Used to have a room full of those Intel MDS (blue & white boxes at 09.15) in the mid 80s. They were useless - as soon as the room got slightly warm half of them would crap out or the screens would shrink to the size of a postage stamp. Then I actually had to use one in my first job, it was the development system for early car dashboard displays. No idea why they were so big, we later replaced it with a box the size of a paperback.
The post apocalyptic inventor could build so many cool things from all that stuff...