Finally it’s here, my eagerly awaited PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation.

My very own DEC PDP-11/23

A very nice guy named Pontus had one left over which he was willing to give away if I came to pick it up. Said and done, now I’m a proud owner of a DEC PDP-11/23 from 1979. Today I powered up my PDP-11 for the first time with XXDP, next I’m going to see if I can get CP/M running on it. In the end I hope for some kind of Unix, but one step at the time. Hopefully my books on PDP-11 that I ordered on Amazon will arrive soon.

DEC System 20 @ Update, University of Uppsala

This very nice guy who gave me the PDP-11 is also a member of the computer club Update at University of Uppsala and invited us to a guided tour of their collection of old computers.  It was love at first sight when I saw their DEC System 20 lined up in the corridor and I couldn’t resist taking some photos to bring with me home.

Check out my gallery for more pictures of there two beautiful computers.

PDP-11/23

DEC System 20

One of my customers has taken all of their AlphaServers out of use and since I just adore these servers I asked if I could have them. To my delight they agreed. Today me and my fiancé together with a good friend and co-worker went to my office and our data center to bring them home. Now I have a piece of computer history at home, what I got my hand on is following:

• 1x Digital AlphaServer 4100
• 2x Compaq AlphaServer ES40
• 1x Compaq AlphaServer ES20
• 3x Digital DSBA356-RD
• 1x Digital Something RAID Array

Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998 and later Compaq was bought by HP. During this whole time the Aplha processor architecture was developed and manufactured until April 27, 2007 when the most recent AlphaServers reached their end of general availability. At this time HP had developed the Itanium processor together with Intel to succeed the Alpha processor. However the AlphaServers are still supported by HP until sometimes during 2012, but according to HP the end of support might be delayed.

Even though AlphaServers has it’s own processor architecture the AlphaServer run various operating systems. It will run a bunch of UNIX based systems, first of all it’s designated Tru64 UNIX but also Linux and BSD. It also run OpenVMS – a mainframe-oriented operating system which despite it’s name is not an open source software product. To much surprise some of the AlphaServer models also run a version of Microsoft Windows NT specially ported to the Alpha processor architecture by DEC.

My gallery is nowhere close to finished, but you could see some pictures at: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/saving-a-piece-of-history/