shawn@eddie.mit.edu (Shawn F. Mckay) (04/17/91)
Howdy, we currently have a DecSystem 20/65 sitting gathering dust in our machine room. We dearly love the machine, but its too expensive to keep running and the RP06 drives are really fragile at this point. We are told the '20 can run on eagles, this would make it much more realistic to try to keep her running, does anyone know anything about this? We have 2 eagles and 4 RP06 drives (we hope w/a 1 pack PS: we might be able to come up enough to make an eagle bootable???). We are also wondering about any other type of drive we can hook up that would be more solid (perhaps available in surplus, or real cheap?). We are not above taking some of the more useful/hard to get parts off your hands, esp if you are local. If you have some '20 stuff you think might help, please toss us a line. And, in planning for the day we do lay her to rest, (we hope w/ some help a long way off), we are looking for a DecSystem '20 emulator. Seems only logical someone MUST have written one by now. Anyone seen or heard of anything along this line? We are not picky, we are happy to take a KA/KL/KS10 emulator and by adding a PDP11/40 emulator we might be able to kludge something, so we are also interested in PDP11 emulators (Unibus models). Any language base would be considered a wonderful pointer, ideal would be something semi-portable, but we are about to embark on this as a side project, and would rather not invent the wheel if someone has already done this, or major parts of it. We are also interested in anything along this line I may have missed, its only a hobby project, but its a project a few of us 'old timers here are very interested in getting going. It would be nice to share this part of history and help to keep its better ideas from just fading away. Finally, please forward this message along to anyone you know who loves DecSystem 20's, we welcome new members to this part time effort, either local or remote if we get something running we will probably have a fairly liberal account policy to permit old timers a chance to enjoy, and new people a chance to learn. Any help/pointers greatly appreciated. - Shawn