Bob Rosenbloom's Vintage Computer Collection
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- čas přidán 30. 08. 2017
- Bob Rosenbloom is one of the prominent collectors of vintage computers in our area. His impressive collection is tucked away in hangars and containers on his remote property, surrounded by giant Redwood trees. Always a treat to pay him a visit.
More details on his website here: www.dvq.com - Věda a technologie
What is even more rare than these computers, is the kind of person that designs and builds new cards for them to show them in all their glory to the new generation! I'm impressed.
I used to work for DEC in NYC as a Sr Field Service Engineer on PDP 11's back in 1978-81 and in Woburn, MA as a Engineer in Field Service Logistics from 1983-85.
I use to write code for pdp-10(s)
I have known Bob for years. He is a great guy and a very smart fellow. Hi Bob!
Here's some information on the Univac 2342B/UYK which shows up a 18:30: This is part of the Poseidon/Trident Submarine Navigation System. The system provides the precise position, velocity, and roll/pitch/heading of the submarine at missile launch so that the missile can accurately land at the target.
This equipment was designed by Sperry/Univac in around 1966 and it replaced the aging NAVDAC computer system used with the Polaris submarines. The 2342B/UYK is not a computer, it is a Serial/Parallel Buffer (SP Buffer).
The old NAVDAC systems all used serial computers with serial interfaces (mostly 24 bit). When the Navy wanted to replace the NAVDAC computer, designed back in the 1950’s, with a modern fast computer with a gigantic 32K of 32 bit memory, it chose Univac to design the CP-890 computer. The CP-890 was a parallel 30 bit computer (32 bit internal architecture which had 2 parity bits) and a 16 channel 30 bit parallel NTDS Fast (Navy Tactical Data System) Input/Output section. The computer weighed about 700 lbs, ran on 400 Hz power, and was designed to fit through a 25” submarine hatch without having to take it apart (hence the 45 degree angle on each corner.)
Since the CP-890 was all parallel, it couldn’t interface with the rest of the Navigation system which was still either serial or analog. Therefore the 2342B/UYK was designed. It’s only purpose was to take the parallel inputs/outputs of the CP-890 and convert them to serial inputs/outputs to the rest of the Navigation system. The 2342B/UYK has two identical redundant buffers, SP Buffer #1 and SP Buffer #2 in it. Either buffer could handle the entire Navigation system.
There was also a 3rd cabinet in this design which handled the analog inputs/outputs, it was called the Analog/Digital Converter and it interfaced directly to the CP-890.
I was in the Navy from 1971, about the time the CP-890 was deployed to the fleet, until 1998. I spent the entire time working on the Polaris/Poseidon/Trident Navigation systems. I spent over one year in training on the CP-890 system back in 1971 to learn how to operate and maintain it. The Univac systems were built to last. The last CP-890 Navigation system was removed from the Trident submarines in around 2007 - the mid 1990’s design and production hardware operated for about 40 years in the harsh submarine environment.
Thanks for the info! It sure is beautiful hardware.
10:29 The main reason to remember Interdata today is that the 8/32 model was only the second model of computer to run UNIX, after the PDP-11. Being architecturally quite different from a DEC machine, it helped UNIX become just about the first useful (non-toy) portable OS.
Man, there needs to be show like American Pickers for vintage computers. This is a sweet collection. Thank you for sharing!
Mark Shaw
American pickers is completely fake though, those two are not even in the antiques game, they are actors pretending :), that show is so ridiculous!, it is based on a British TV show called salvage hunters and that show actually follows a real dealer called Drew Pritchard.
I would totally watch that if it was legit!
Fascinating collection! Some of these items are very hard to come by now. Nice work!
What an amazing collection. I miss the days of working down to component level for repairs!
This is so awesome, I had a PDP 11/23 with a couple or RL02's I think it was for some time in Sweden, picked them from the garbage behind the Chalmers Computer Club (with permission) and did get it all to work and run perfectly, then let it go to make space for other stuff which included a VAX 11/750 which me and friends disassembled and painfully dragged up stairs to the third floor, and it never ran due to a faulty airflow sensor that I plugged incorrectly while reassembling the thing. Ah those were the days. I was a teenager living in a small room in my moms rather small apartment than lol.
Aaawww Tek x-y babies ^ ^ Everything in this video is just so awesome. Thank you so much Marc for taking us here!
Huge collection! He should build a museum!
unless we're planning for a technological dark age, most of it should be scrapped for raw materials
The best way to move forward is learning from the past...
Marc, I've watched this video at least four times. Every time is a new adventure. Thanks so much for bringing this joy to us
The 2540 was the 'standard' reader/punch for the 360s. The department store in Cincinnati where I broke into programming had an IBM 1404 printer - NOT the 1403. Our original on-line credit checking system used a DG Nova 1200 for the CPU. To 'boot' the DG system you place the boot paper tape into the ASR-33 and then you entered a small program in machine code directly via the front panel and hit run. The small program then did the read of the boot paper tape which then loaded the rest of the system from the disk drive.
Fun days!
Very interesting. I worked at NASA in Houston in the early 70s in crew training and flight simulation. I was a tech keeping the Apollo Command Module running. We had 8 General Precision GP-4B running in parallel talking to an IBM 360 with a DEC PDP-8 as an interface. It was my job to go around and "tweak" the core memory current every night--we literally had core memory, with a read, write, and sense wire running through it. Current had to be right, or machine wouldn't run. Ran diagnostics first with a key-in loader, running a boot-strap loader that was on paper tape. Once we got that far it was 10-1/2 inch 1600bpi tapes. We've come a long way, baby!!!!!
Awesome place to be at the time! I wish someone would resurrect that monster simulator. Techworks in Binghamton has part of the LM simulator I hear, but I have not seen it yet.
@@CuriousMarc next project!!!
I wish this kind of stuff was more common in Australia. I am so jealous right now! What an amazing collection. I could get lost for years in those containers, quite seriously!
i know im randomly asking but does anyone know of a method to get back into an instagram account?
I was dumb lost the account password. I would love any tricks you can offer me
@Omari Weston thanks for your reply. I found the site thru google and I'm in the hacking process now.
Looks like it's gonna take a while so I will reply here later with my results.
@Omari Weston it did the trick and I actually got access to my account again. I am so happy!
Thanks so much you really help me out !
@Ethan Adriel Happy to help :D
I work at e-waste recycling ♻️ place in Melbournes NW suburbs. I see some cool stuff. I'd love to save some bits from being shredded. But don't have room such a risk of being a hoarder. Have a few bits inbthe shed though
Now THOSE are computers! It's like the CHM in a box.
remember kids, everybody needs to have a few Geiger counters
How do you count them? Do you need a Geiger counter counter?
Radioactive memory modules
That is some collection. Visiting that place is like visiting a computer museum. When you mentioned the 2216 I was reminded of the first computer I ever got my hands on back in junior high school. It was an HP 2214 complete with punch tape reader, mark sense card reader, and an ASR 33 for printouts. Post high school I wound up being an operator for the schools PDP 11/34. IIRC, the RL02 units I saw in the video are the disk drive units for the PDP machine. Also fun seeing the 029 keypunch machine. I used one of those back in the day. I could type faster on it than on an electric typewriter. I still have a control drum for the machine.
All this treasure... in storage containers in the woods... guarded by one lone but incredibly capable and adorable dog...
That vector display was the coolest thing I've seen all week!
Thank you for the tour! Would love that Univac.
I can appreciate the focus on pdp8. Attach an ASR 33 and feed in Bin and RIM, then basic with paper tape. Back to high school circa 1977-1979. Couldn't resist building one in fpga using Prosser's 'The Art of Digital Design' college textbook (1987). Old paper tape punch patterns are available online, got focal running in 4k. That 11/40 front panel is especially attractive.
That DG Nova .. it is so blue!! One of the first successes of my long career in computers was assisting my dad and his colleges who worked at a local university, figuring out which pins to connect, so we could get the serial port on a scintillation counter to talk to their DG Nova. I think I was probably about fourteen at the time. I also messed about connecting a Bit Pad (a crude digitizer) to talk to a Commodore Pet, which so far as I recall in turn also talked to the Nova and a PDP-11... back in those days, you needed to know as much about hardware as software, to have any chance of getting things talking to each other.
those vector lines in the end look so sick. so sharp
Wasn't alive when any of these were in production, but I still find this stuff fascinating!
You mentioned a couple of times the very nice modular design of DEC machines, going all the way back to the function modules and the "Flip-Chip" circuit cards. The reason this sort of design was so pervasive throughout the architecture of DEC machines can be traced to the direct influence of Ken Olsen himself.
Ken Olsen was a little too late at MIT to have participated in the seminal design work on digital computers (Jay Forrester's core memory, for example). One of the things he focused on was the physical architecture of the existing circuitry, which was entirely designed using vacuum tubes. He was interested in making the functional elements of the machine into individual, independent physical modules that could be built, tested, swapped, etc. He was of course interested in other things too, but this was one aspect of the Whirlwind computer (which became the ANFSQ-7 SAGE mainframe) to which he contributed.
His interest in this perhaps had something to do with his early electronics experience in the Navy, where maintenance and maximizing "up time" of radio and radar equipment, with its fragile and short-lived vacuum tube circuit elements, was a constant challenge.
My impression is that DEC was very much a reflection of Ken Olsen himself. He exerted a lot of engineering and design influence on DEC machines clear through the 1970s, although he was certainly pulled away from the engineering work he enjoyed as DEC became a publicly traded company with an international footprint.
Anyway, that is (I believe) why DEC machines have such a clearly elegant, hierarchical, modular design philosophy that traces from their earliest products right through the PDP-11 and VAX product lines.
I first encountered DEC hardware as a high school student, and I also found the "Flip-Chip" design beautiful and very appealing.
This is so awesome I have no words
This is amazing!
I know nothing about old computers but your video is fascinating.
Burroughs had a business machine that one of the minus ECL logic voltage was minus 2 volts DC. The wire's jacket was marked locomotive wire, the wire was larger than 4/0 gauge. Giant 4/0 wire has about 212 MCM, about 107 mm squared area. The locomotive wire for Diesel locomotives is finer stranded than utility company wire so it can be bent and moved easier. The Burroughs gizmo had 500 MCM wire and smaller 310 stuff. It was bizarre to see Locomotive cable in a computer device
Very interesting collection of machines.
I'm an old DECi field service engineer, DECsystem 20's and VAXs. Interesting to see that old digital equipment, Data General and the other good stuff.
Thank you for your Service to the Collectors Community :) QC
I don't know what you were talking about, but I love it.
In answer to the Panel that you guys did not know what it is. At 2:18 in the video. It appears to be a Data Synchronizer Panel from an IBM 709/ 7090. This would actually be from a IBM 7607 data channel.
Wow, well done! This makes plenty of sense. It looks very much the same style as a 709 front panel. Just found it using your tip, it's an IBM 766 Data Synchronizer panel indeed. The only image that comes up from Google is the one that the CHM has: www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102729201 . It's a recent acquisition from the amazing Paul Pierce donation, must have come with Paul's 709. Thanks again for the ID.
If Bob wanted to sell one of those DEC PDP front panels, I'd love to get it. I spent many happy hours at the console of a PDP 11/45 back in College. Still my all time favorite computer.
Love the core stack in the 8s.
Nova at 1:30 really is beautiful. I love the blue keys Data General Dasher keyboards.
Congratulation !! from Arizona, Great job.
Just Beautiful !!!
simply amazing
Wow, I could watch that Tektronix screen all day.
Some of us did.
Nice collection! Very cool
A Flip Chip used to be a little dried cow hide square that you gave to your puppy as a treat. I think those little DEC cards are roughly the same size and may have gotten that name out of serendipity.
Very nice Mr Rosenbloom.... Regards
Great vid. I didn't realise molex connectors were so old!
I can remember loose flip-chips (~8:05) being sold @ the Boston Computer Museum. Spent many-a-day there in the late-80s to 90's (& was quite sad to see it go!).
The Boston Computer Museum relocated. It is now the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Amazing collection! :)
I miss my PDP 11/45, running RSTS/E!
"Punch-through display"...nice way of putting it. The old colour vector games used beam penetration as well.
I have a piece of industrial PDP-8 related hardware of my own; Kearney & Trecker used to make a PDP-8 based CNC control which they sold with their large horizontal boring machines, and they provided a diagnostic interface in the form of a portable control panel which plugged into the control and stood in for the front panel which a PDP-8 would normally have. Seems a bit odd that they went that route instead of having an internal control panel for the PDP-8 processor.
Would love to meet you and see this wonderful collection up close😁
A beautiful collection. The Inderdata mini is quite interesting actually. The first port of Unix away from the pdp11 actually went to Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, which were 32-bit machines.
The LCM+L has an Interdata 8/32 but they have yet to put it into a functional display, as far as I know.
This guy is great, he loves his pcbs
Ah the Univacs. I remmeber at Wisconsin-Madison in the late 70's going in at 1 AM to punch cards cause us freshman could only get the punches then. Very awesome... still when we got to use UCSD Pascal system with full screen editor it was mind blowing. Some DEC LSI-11 thing I think.
11:57 most wonderful moment of the video
Beautifull piece of equipment...
Fond memories of IBM. For years IBM was my hometown`s (Lex,KY.)second largest employer , only surpassed by the University of Ky. The entrance to the main business park/offices was maybe 6-7 blocks from the street where I lived. We had many friends that worked there, very neat stuff, indeed! That business park is now a cheesy community college, meh.....(But I can get a certification in paranormal research there , dear Gawd!).
IBM is now a cheezy little company, run from India that sells chinese(lenovo) servers that
no one wants.
17:56 The VT52 had an entertaining excuse for a bell sound -- more of a buzzer. I heard of it described as sounding like a 1950s Chevy stripping its gears.
8:54 The 18-bit and 12-bit DEC machines had very similar-looking architectures, apart from the different address length and word length.
NEAT! I love the doggie. I didn't know that there were PDP-8 machines from the blue-switches era. I am fascinated with anything that has "UYK" in the name, but I don't have any experience with that stuff yet. I hope that I can get my Nova 3's hard drive working one of these days.
The PDP-8/E could be had in a variety of front panel color schemes. No big deal, just molded different color plastic, nearly to order [if you wanted say 100 of them]. Also have to get custom silk-screened panels in the same color scheme. Some became "stuck" because they changed the rotary switch mechanism on the hardware card front panel behind, and the switch had different detent angles and it would look wrong to mix and match, etc.
This is was 3 and a half years ago. Did any of this stuff ever make it to The Living Computer Museum and others like he mentioned?
Geez man I couldn't imagine the years of accumulation. Insane
The DEC machines are all fully documented. I make replacement front panels for PDP-8/e /f /m.
IBM 1130 - Learned to program Fortran IV and Asm Langrage''s in 1971-72 In high school
Loading the OS is 3 boxes of punch cards
Me too. I completed a one year night class in computer programming at Taylor's Business College in Melbourne Australia in 1972. They had an IBM 1130 computer with 8K memory, a card reader/punch, line printer and a small disk cassette. We learned Fortran, IBM Asm and a few weeks of COBOL. All that Fortran and Asm never got used in my first programming job. Out of the whole year of class, the 3 weeks of COBOL was what got me my job.
I still have the hard cover version of the assembler text book we used. Looking at it right now. It really brings back old memories.
"elements of IBM 1130 programming" by Wilson T Price.
I still remember the very first Fortran program I wrote was to calculate the factors of numbers from 1 to 500 and print the results.
When I chose my PO Box number at the local post office I managed to get box number 1130.
@curiousmarc we must be similar ages since my first computer experience was also on SC/MP. When you loaded 0xC4 in the video my brain just said "load immediate" just as you said it. My machine was something called a "Nanokit" - South African made. www.retro.co.za/ccc/NANOKIT/ 256 bytes of ram. No ROM - had a front panel to load code. My first programs - like you - a tune player (think I did the school song). And a clock (also by laborious cycle counting). Thanks for taking me back in my memory.
I love the space-age styling. Round everything. Can someone recommend me some computers of that style. I just got an old commodore that looks the part. Holborn would be the holy grail for me but haven't found any.
He had a very complete collection of CES electronics trainers. I guess they’re like a very robust version of the Radio Schack electronics labs kits. Some are straight analog, and some digital. Sort of an analog computer, and they are not altogether cheap, one would run probably 350$. I don’t know about these terminals but the PDP 8 stuff seems almost a standard of the seventies. You might just get more bang for buck factor by going emulation, say with a Raspberry Pi. That way you could implement whatever sort of aesthetic you could imagine into a project box with a monitor in it. Definitely more affordable and much more useful. And Teletypers and punchcard writers and readers are purely mechanical and so they’d be a nightmare to maintain. If I were you and had space, I’d look out for an old Cray supercomputer, or else just find something a little more modern yet still of antiquity, such as a Silicon Graphics Indiego. That’s one that can still be had for next to nothing and is plenty capable today.
So jelly! The oldest computer I have is an HP 9825. Everything else is things like the Apple IIe, Commodore VIC-20, C64, and C128, etc. My collection has far more vintage calculators though. I have an SCM Cogito 240SR and a Friden EC 132 (both wonderful resistor-diode logic machines), a Canon 163, a Sperry-Rand Remington 1259S, a Sony Sobax ICC-600W (that I fully restored myself), a Wang 360SE, both a Casio 121-A and the rebranded Commodore 512 version, a Monroe 344 Statistician, a Commodore N-60 Navigator, S-61 Statistician and so many more. I've even got a few Soviet era machines, like an Электроника 4-71Б. love these old machines!
Nice! HP9825 I have too, but have not gotten the tape drive to work yet. Does your Friden EC 132 work? I have a EC 130 and a 132 on the restoration queue.
Just saw your Cogito video. Very nice!
Thanks! I wish the Cogito was working. It worked perfectly before I moved, so I suspect the problem is fairly simple... It's just finding it inside that machine. The EC-132 needs some work on the voltage multiplier (classic signs of bad diodes), and it has lockup issues when it does subtraction or division or the square root, and it also locks up with large numbers.
Looking at this stuff, you wonder if many of these computers will truly operate again. I'm so glad with have emulators like Hercules. I'm getting back into the IBM mainframe and I have resumed my studies by running IBM MVS 3.8 on Hercules. Running an actual IBM mainframe from the mid 1980's is basically impossible now.
8:27 PDP-5 -- DEC’s first 12-bit machine, precursor to the massively popular PDP-8 range. Which was later on succeeded by the PDP-12, the last of that line.
Actually, DEC’s foray into PCs involved creating no less than 3 families of machines. One of these was the “DECmate”, which was a 12-bit machine. PDP-8-compatible! In the 1980s!
I was hoping to see some of the hardware from my computer career: IBM System 3/10, Honeywell Level 62, Wang VS300. Maybe some of the 96 column keypunch machine. Those long persistence displays at the end of the video make me think of ARTS III air traffic control workstations.
So many tektronix displays!
wow this collection reminds me when I used to be a mainframe leasing and computer dealer!
Those were fun times!!!!! Are you a computer dealer? Do you have a website store?
those card designs made the computers volumetric, made use of space better than these days, its all flat.
8:09 “FLIP-CHIP” was a DEC trademark back in those days.
These looked so impressive and I don't even fully know what they are.
I want to start collecting these types of pre micro PC era. Any good sources or advice on how to begin?
I spent hours tearing apart old computer junk. Who knew it would be worth anything or of any interest in the future? My dad had pieces of an old RCA mainframe and a couple of Harris System tape drives among other salvage. Lots of terminals and a couple drum disk readers and hard drives the size of a small refrigerator. I never had the smarts to make much use of any of it, it was pre-internet days. I blew out my XT PC trying to plug in some old CPM disk drives. Good times.
I can tell you a bedtime story of a lab full of Univac 2000's rewired in a more loosely fashion producing interesting functions.
Please go ahead!
You have some fantastically good looking kids (I'm assuming that's who they are), good job!
Thanks! The boy is Bob's son, and the girl is my daughter. They both look much better than we do :-o
I'm subscribed to a German electronic musician called Hainbach.... and he's always "threatening" us with a video of electronic music from one of those analogue computers..... but I'm still waiting! Would love to get my hands on one of those!
I'm pretty sure that this is the place where Edit-Station 1 is hiding, plotting the implosion of the universe.
The first flip chip boards did use flip chip mounted components, but they quickly switched to using all through-hole components and just kept the name.
Not quite. The HANDBOOKS claimed more were made in the early days than actual. They even came out later with flip-chip- based replacements with the lands incompatible. They were known as the S1A variants. The damn Flip-Chips are so unreliable and you had to do some "solder art" to create the equivalent in 1/4 watt resistors, diodes and capacitors. Many of us have totally empty S1A boards because they were sacrificed to the cause of getting another one to work when one of them on that card failed. There were pretty much only two variant Flip-Chips used in various combinations. Most notably, the really complicated cards such as the R210, R211, and R212 used as the major registers in the "straight" PDP-8 and LINC-8 [btw, he DOES NOT have a LINC-8; I do] all use the no-Flip-Chip variation and were NEVER changed to FLip-Chips. So, no Flip-Chip came later and it was a disaster. So much easier to repair a transistor card. Once in a blue moon it is not the 2N3639B transistor that goes. But when the DCD gates etc were Flip-Chip, the reliability plummets. What a really bad idea!
ALL of these cards always had plated-through holes. You don't have a valid point.
Sorry my reply wasn't impeccably precise. That'll teach me for trying to be helpful on the internet.
Don't sweat it; you had to "be there" to know the difference between what books implied and reality. Without proper discussion on any subject, eventually revisionism ruins any discussion. In this case, the sales people were infatuated with a paper spec and then even took pictures of some of the prototype production lines, assuming that would be representative of the then-current future. But it never happened that way, fortunately!
To add another factoid to explain something, there were cards where the lands were NOT modified and attempts were made to use the dreaded flip-chips. the advantage was that when they inevitably failed, you could just stuff the board identically to the production with the loose components. But the absurd commitment to flip-chips with the needless and pointless artwork revisions just meant that these modules [always identified on the artwork as "S1A" ] were doomed to make long-term maintenance so much harder. We didn't throw them away [yet] but to date, we have adequate spares with the older artwork where applicable. Putting in the loose components without sufficient lands would be a desperation move. If you ever look at a non-S1A and an S1A variant of the same module, you will scratch your head and say why did they bother [as in it aint broke, so why fix it]. Fortunately, most modules do not have S1A flip-chip variants!
I would like to have something between these!
In my nyc computer business i had ibm 360-40, 370-135 and ibm system 3 back in the 1980's
When I had to downsize(because of high nyc office rents) i switched to PC's and dell servers.
I use the Hercules emulator and ibm mvs operating system for my IBM jobs.
The simulated software(on dell laptops and desktops) run 100 times faster than my real
IBM hardware did!! Now ai, cloud, etc, something new everyday!!!
Anyway to get in touch with Bob Rosenbloom?
Where on earth do you find this type stuff? I've always wanted to have a collection.
I love it
I'm loking for an Hp3000 series III with tape and discs...Do you have one to give/sell ?
Can anyone tell me where Bob Rosenbloom is located? I also live near giant redwood trees. if I am near the correct forest, I would love to meet him and see his collection.
Give me a PDP11/23 and a RL02's any day, running RT11/TSX with VT100's, fond memories.
Holy Crap and Systron Donner! My High School guidance councilor Mr. Clark advised me to get into computers in 1972 and gave me some sale info on the Systron Donner's, I suppose to inspire me. Mr. Clark died from cancer six mounts later. I became a draftsman instead, and my skill sets all went obsolete in 1991. I mow grass part time these days to keep body and soul together. Patents 3190554, 672256 .
Holy Frigging Moly ..... TOYS!
This stuff makes my iBook G3 look brand new by comparison.
Wow!
How did I get all this stuff?
All this stuff would still do great as star wars props.
11:57 is the best of the collection
Learned to repair NCR-500 in the US Army
It's too bad that so many EE labs are ditching their analog computers; there is so much that can be learned about dynamic mathematical systems from using them that digital simulations still can't convey as well.
All I have is a GTE terminal with phone from about 85 and some blue modems from who knows when ??
What a great place to visit. But bring lots of $$$ so you can buy stuff Bob doesn't want. I was there this afternoon and saw lots of cool stuff!