Re: PDP-11/70 in Yates Center, KS

> > Even longer than me. I started in May 1986 (yes,
it'll soon be 21 years 
> > of computer collecting here )
> 
> About the same time as me.  Before that I had home
micros since about 
> 1980 but usually only one at a time, and they were for
day-to-day use, 

At the time, I had one home computer, a TRS-80 Model 1,
which I'd owned 
from new. Oh, and the MK14 that I'd had before that, and
which I'd 
interfaced to homebrew porjects. Oh, and a Casio AL1000
calculator, 
Teletype ASR33, and a few other bits. But not really a
collection.

What started me off was an advert in Wireless World
magazine. A company 
in Cambridge (where I was studying at the time) was selling
ASCII-encoded 
keyboard for pounds 4.00 (IIRC). I was making a homebrew
machine at the 
time and decided to get one (that was long before the days
of cheap PC 
keyboards in every computer shop).

Wanyway, when I got to said company, they also had a Philips
P850 
minicomputer for pounds 25.00 (I was told it was
essentially the scrap 
metal value). I knew nothing about it, I didn't have any
minicomputers, 
etc, bnt it looked beautiful with its lights-and-switches
panel. So I 
bought it (complete with the user and service manuals!), and
got it back 
to my student room (This involved me going into the local
taxi company 
and saking for 'a car with a boot big enough to put a mini
in'. I got 
some very odd looks as they assemed I meant a Mini car...)

Anyway, after looking at it a bit, I realised that while
museums (at the 
time) were preserving some of the 'firsts' in computing,
nobody was 
bothering with the once-common minis and micros, and that
unless 
something was done, 20 years (then) of computer histroy
would simply 
vanish. So I did something. A couple of hundred machines
later, I am 
still doing something.

-tony