Crazy Eddie's Used Computers

A photo from another universe (April, 1973). From left to right: Larry Clark, Chuck Thacker, Alan Kay, Ed McCreight, and the first operational Xerox Alto ("Bilbo"). Taken on the day the machine came to life.

This Lab-8/e system belonged to a UW chemistry prof, he developed his own variant of Focal ("UW Focal") on this machine and used it to control various laboratory instruments. I'm hoping to get it all running this summer. Just working on getting it all installed in the rack right now, to free up some floor space in the garage!

Made some good progress with the Xerox Dolphin this week. Got the console sorted out with new capacitors and a ton of cracked solder joints fixed up, and got the Shugart SA-4008 drive working again just by cleaning a few connectors -- it boots from disk into the Alto Executive. Backed up the drive over the network using Copydisk. Interlisp starts but hangs a few seconds after loading microcode.

I finally found a workable yoke for my Xerox 1100 (Dolphin)'s console display and I am extremely excited to get a picture out of it (even if it's way too wide and off center... it'll take some tweaking to get it right). The Dolphin was the first system made by Xerox's System Development Department (SDD). SDD later made the Star workstation. Here's a couple of photos of it booting the Alto Net Executive off of the 3mbit Ethernet interface and running a small demo that displays Dave Boggs's face.

Just acquired a very nice set of DEC documentation and man, there's some pretty stuff in there. I'm going to be busy with the scanner this summer...

Mark your calendars: The return of the Vintage Computer Festival: Pacific Northwest is only a month away! I will see you there or you will be square! https://vcfpnw.org/

Over the holidays I started work on an emulator of the General Automation SPC-12 minicomputer (a computer I've become lightly obsessed with over the past few months). I transcribed a listing of "BUS-II" (Basic Utility System) from the manuals and I finally had time this week to work out the remaining kinks in the emulation. Behold, BUS-II in action for the first time in who knows how long: