Qbus
Veteran Member
No question about it, the PDP-8 and 11 have it all over the Nova. But the cost associated with the DEC hardware is what killed the hobby, at least as far as DEC is concerned for me. Last several years worked with Qbus equipment being that was once a cheap alternative but now that’s starting to get up there. VAX hardware just don’t have the same charm as the primitive platforms running RT-11. By the time you got into RSX-11 or Unix its more like a modern file server or application host.
Don’t see or have any problem with someone selling something to support other working technology, or selling hardware on to another collector or hobbyist, or making a profit. No problem with any of that, but what I think sucks is that hacks buy hardware, sometimes working systems and remove the front panel and junk the rest with the idea of producing wall art or worse yet will somehow acquire working hardware and gut the systems to try to get the most for there money. Often doing things like cutting cables or better yet throwing out things like RL drive slide rails, terminators and cables just so they can flip the drives.
Don’t know, probably just me being bitter because the PDP-11 systems priced there way out of the hobbyist market as far as I am concerned and now somehow feel that anyone who wants to play around with that hardware is subject to looking at museums, running emulators and maybe being lucky while seeing evidence of once good system being reduced to wall art.
Don’t see or have any problem with someone selling something to support other working technology, or selling hardware on to another collector or hobbyist, or making a profit. No problem with any of that, but what I think sucks is that hacks buy hardware, sometimes working systems and remove the front panel and junk the rest with the idea of producing wall art or worse yet will somehow acquire working hardware and gut the systems to try to get the most for there money. Often doing things like cutting cables or better yet throwing out things like RL drive slide rails, terminators and cables just so they can flip the drives.
Don’t know, probably just me being bitter because the PDP-11 systems priced there way out of the hobbyist market as far as I am concerned and now somehow feel that anyone who wants to play around with that hardware is subject to looking at museums, running emulators and maybe being lucky while seeing evidence of once good system being reduced to wall art.
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