John waxes nostalgic...

*Probably* the most famous PDP-10 running TOPS-20 was at White Sands Missile Range (USAF)
which was the ORIGINAL host of the Simtel Archive.  You had to FTP to some insanely long
FQDN and 'cd' to the DEC volume, and you had to know these volume names ahead of time,
else you would spend a lot of time reading the files in [000000] and never find
anything...

I called White Sands, out if curiosity, to ask whatever came of it.  I got a guy who was
the primary maintainer of the system, but even 10 years after it's decommissioning, it was
still classified and he would not tell me much.  He did say, that is used a LOT of
electricity and had a huge AC unit, especially since they are out in the desert.  That
core memory really uses the electricity, especially when you get busy writing to memory.

The last time I access it was back in 1992, till the Simtel archive was moved to
oak.oakland.edu which was easier to navigate (UNIX) and faster.

It was the first site I ever FTPed to...*sniff sniff*

jam

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Kelly" <rmk@toad.rmkhome.com>
To: "Julius Sridhar" <vance@ikickass.org>
Cc: "Eric Smith" <eric@brouhaha.com>; <eeh@netbsd.org>; <lars.spam@nocrew.org>;
<vaxzilla@jarai.org>; <port-vax@netbsd.org>; <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: NetBSD/pdp10 ?


> Julius Sridhar said:
>
> >I don't think there will ever be a PDP-6 running UNIX, due to the rarity
> >of the system.
>
> I would say that finding a full-blown PDP 10 would be pretty hard to do
> these days. The Retrocomputing Museum of Rhode Island has one, but they
> plan to run tops 10 or 20 on it. They were lucky, in that it had a complete
> PM before it was put in storage. They plan to bring it up slowly to it's
> full configuration, as they expect the costs for electricity and HVAC to
> be quite high.
>
> The last big user in the US was probably compuserve.
>
> There is/was a company in California that builds systems using modern parts
> that runs PDP 10 software.
> --
> Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com
>