Some nice videos here on YouTube from the National Museum of Computing in Bletchly Park, UK demonstrating their Straight-8:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyDufWHsNVE[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyDufWHsNVE[/youtube]

I’ve just taken possession of a great haul which was literally sat on a scrap heap ready to go to PDP heaven. Highlights of the find include most of a PDP-8/M, a PC04 paper tape drive, a TD8E simple DECtape controller, an ASR-33 and a H960 rack. Whilst pretty rusty having lived in a barn for a while, most of the bits look to be restorable.

The sad news is that the TU56 that was with the machine got scrapped (brings tears to my eyes!) a few weeks ago although I did manage to recover a pair of motors and the chassis.

Unfortunately the core memory sets have gone from the 8-M, although there is a slight chance I might be able to regain one of them. If not, I will have to build up a solution using SRAM/NVRAM, which whilst not exactly authentic, will get the machine back into the land of the living.

Also, amoungst the haul were a PDP-11/40 chassis, a PRIME rack and disk and a TI-990 mini computer. You can read about these on my other blog

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