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Best home Mainframe

Very random thread:

What is the best mainframe (by your justified opinion) what the best mainframe you can have that one might be able to have at home - e.g. while it might be possible that someone has say a 1401/360 or something at home it isn't likely but might have say a PDP8 or something that they picked up and able to maintain at home that doesn't require that they have mega bucks.
It's a pretty wide-ranging question. Is it more that you want to run a weird OS or that you want exotic looking hardware? Do you want to actually use it for more than a few hours each month?
 
Totally agree it is a wide ranging question. even just from UK to USA. To be honest it was started when I read the post on here regarding someone having a Bendix G-15 just chilling at home (granted in this case not working but stil). Just thought that that person who used to work at comapny x and they were throwing y away. Just a thought experiment as to what that computer could be.
 
"Of course NOS and NOS 2 are the OSs the majority of sites ran. "

Depends on where you were. Sunnyvale rarely ran KRONOS. I was good friends with Greg Mansfield for quite a few years, even after he left CDC for Cray (I introduced him to the pleasures of gelato; he was another fan of Bill Godbout's gear). Only got to meet Dr. Dave once at ARHOPS. SVLOPS/SSD/CPD was primarily SCOPE, as were the big number-crunching customers. The local COMSOURCE operators knew only SCOPE.

That was not unusual for the East/West divide. On STAR, we on the left coast ran STAR-OS, which was really a product of Lawrence Livermore, while Arden Hills often ran the RED system. Never could figure that out.

Did you know that 7600 SCOPE 2 was supported out of SVLOPS, even though there was no 7600 on site? The PLATO people at SVLOPS were logged into some non-local system also. Lots of weird stuff back then.
 
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Oh, I have stories...what killed CDC in my opinion was the deadwood--the "we've always done it this way" crowd. And there was probably no denser population of that line of thought in CPD. SSD was different, as it operated on the Lockheed business model--you worked with your project. When your project contract ended, it was up to you to find a new project or leave. But CPD had too many lifers--some were really good; e.g. Don Nelson and COBOL. Between projects, I was briefly recruited for the SCOPE design team--and left after about two months out of frustration. "You're rocking the boat" I was told.

When SVLOPS finally cycled down, it hit a lot of people hard. One fellow, who I'd worked with for years, committed suicide.

It was ironic that CDC even existed in the middle of Silicon Valley, which was full of risk-takers and innovators. To its credit, the CDC mafia did go on to form several SV startups, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
 
I had a love/hate relationship with the IBM Series/1 when I worked for IBM in the 80s and 90s. Cool looking, and did the job, until they didn't. Always seemed to be a card re-seat issue.
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Another option might be a small VAX, say an 11/730 or 11/750. Still pretty mainframe-looking.

Do be aware that these old systems do drink a fair amount of lightning-juice, so take that into account. At least you won't have to install a chilled water supply or MG sets.

Biggest question: Are you married? If so, would your wife entertain the competition?
In my university days, there was a 730 (or maybe it was a 750) in an electronics lab. It was a little half-rack thing, or maybe two half-racks. It wasn't even on a raised floor.

One big thing to consider is the power for these things. I seem to recall hearing that a 780 needs 3-phase power, but I don't know about its little brothers. Even in 240v-land, I don't think that residential 3-phase power is very common.
 
I also had a fully loaded IBM RT/PC 6150 as my office PC. I had a 6091 display and the 6157(?) tape drive. I had whatever the latest flavor of AIX, that I could get my hands on, running on that beast. I forget how much it weighted, but it took a hand truck to move it. The top of that thing was level with my desk. And since I worked for IBM at the time, I had access to whatever the latest gizmo that came out to upgrade the thing. I miss it......
 
11/750 was single-phase 240/208V at somewhere around 20A for a typical configuration. So you can have one in a residence. We got the 750 instead of the 780 mostly on the basis of bang-for-the-buck and lower power requirements. We eventually had to add a second one, so maybe the 780 could have been the right choice. But yeah, far less impressive visually than a PDP 11/70. No blinkenlights nor flippyswitches.
 
I'm always on the look out for one of the smaller IBM MP3000 systems. Fairly reasonable size, though as I dig into the hobby I'm finding more and more people running the bigger Z's too!
 
... e.g. while it might be possible that someone has say a 1401/360 or something at home it isn't likely ...
No, but this someone did take it into his head to scratch build a Honeywell 200 at home to prove that it was better than a 1401. That was almost fourteen years ago and I still have a way to go. Just don't try this at home yourself! Also as others have mentioned it isn't finding room for the CPU that's the issue but for the peripherals. That problem is still a long way off for me. At least I do now have the all important blinkenlights working although just getting the 35 pound heavy control panel flown over the pond from the USA made a hole in my project budget.
Anything with a visible reel-to-reel tape drive will look like a mainframe, even it's it's interfaced to a Z80.
Some time ago I did correspond with someone in Germany who had a Honeywell tape drive at his home and I sent him some replacement vacuum switches that I happened to have to help restore it but I never heard whether he got it working. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to shift around my home though. I do still have reel motors with hubs and a couple of reels of tape, so could mock up something that at least looked like a drive to put next to the CPU with its genuine blinkenlights and core memory unit. I think that's preferable to a real tape drive and mock up CPU.
 
No, but this someone did take it into his head to scratch build a Honeywell 200 at home to prove that it was better than a 1401. That was almost fourteen years ago and I still have a way to go. Just don't try this at home yourself! Also as others have mentioned it isn't finding room for the CPU that's the issue but for the peripherals. That problem is still a long way off for me. At least I do now have the all important blinkenlights working although just getting the 35 pound heavy control panel flown over the pond from the USA made a hole in my project budget.

Some time ago I did correspond with someone in Germany who had a Honeywell tape drive at his home and I sent him some replacement vacuum switches that I happened to have to help restore it but I never heard whether he got it working. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to shift around my home though. I do still have reel motors with hubs and a couple of reels of tape, so could mock up something that at least looked like a drive to put next to the CPU with its genuine blinkenlights and core memory unit. I think that's preferable to a real tape drive and mock up CPU.
I agree, in the post regarding the 1401 it was more in the spirit of having an original (one could argue how much of one makes it original). I am however of the view to change slightly regarding how common such machines (not on its own the 1401) but as a wide collection computers that are in private hands (1301 ICL, Zebra that was found a few months ago in a German barn, the Bendix G-15 found again in a barn a number of months ago, 1401 in Germany that was purchased in 2009).

I feel the question as I view it (revised) now is that big old machines (if they would be classed as mainframes) because they were so big are likely to be around in private collections or not.
 
I played with the Desktop Cyber. It's just not the same. No card reader, printer, tape drives to make noise. No DD60 to catch your coffee, or scowling CEs to bug you while you're eating your potato chips.
Tom Wolfe was right. :(

I might be interested in a Desktop Star-100, however.
 
I might be interested in a Desktop Star-100, however.

I don't think there were enough made to have people with distribution tapes in their basement.
Same problem for Crays (in addition to SGI deliberately trash-binning Cray old software when they bought them)
Surprisingly, an ETA-10 Unix tape survives.
 
I don't think there were enough made to have people with distribution tapes in their basement.
Same problem for Crays (in addition to SGI deliberately trash-binning Cray old software when they bought them)
Surprisingly, an ETA-10 Unix tape survives.
An ETA-10 lacks the STAR's massive instruction "everything but the kitchen sink" set. It was fun finding ways to use some of the more outré instruction variations. I wrote a line editor in the 1970s to do just that as a lark. It was still in use at ETA in 1984--someone replaced the no-longer-implemented instructions with software simulations.
 
(one could argue how much of one makes it original).
Some time ago I was talking to the maintenance engineer at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park here in the UK and he mentioned that our national Computer Conservation Society do require a specific percentage of the components in a machine to be originals for it to be regarded as a restored machine rather than a replica. I don't know what that percentage is but at least they don't argue about it.

The machine that I am making is a Frankensteinian monster, being constructed from parts of many long dead machines all from the Honeywell 200 range of equipment, but when I started the project I did set myself criteria against which to determine whether I can regard it as a success. The best word to describe what I am building is neither restoration nor replica but pastiche. I am in regular contact with a couple of former Honeywell 200 engineers and if they regard what I am building as genuine H200 technology then that ought to be good enough. It's not ideal and I would love to hear that a genuine complete H200 has survived somewhere in the world but I'm not holding out much hope of that.

Years ago I found on the internet an amusing picture created to show what an H200 used as a home computer might look like. It depicted a family sitting in their lounge with H200 cabinets and peripherals squeezed in between their typical 1950s furniture. As many of the H200 units were in low homely cabinets rather than tallboys this picture worked well but I didn't copy it at the time and haven't been able to find it since. If anyone spots it somewhere then I'd love to see it again. In contrast Honeywell's real concept "kitchen computer" was I believe based on far more advanced technology than in the H200 acquired when they took over CCC.
 
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