Vintage Computer - A look at new home for the Bugbook Computer Museum's PDP8S minicomputer

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My wife and I arrived in California just fine and the first afternoon 10/23/13 had a really nice visit with Lyle Beckley . We had a wonderful Italian dinner at the end of the day. Great first day's visit. Today we will be meeting up with Bob Rosenbloom and will tour the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View. Gaynell and I are looking forward to seeing it again. Lyle will give us a guided of the museum. He has some of his computer collection at his home including the PDP8S from the "Bugbook Historical Computer Museum". Lyle  is working to bring it back to life as a functional computer. He has it starting to function but not really executing programs --

Good news - Lyle called me 11/08/13 and he now has his PDP8S fully functional.  Follow up email indicated continued work - replacing a few burned out panel lamps. Great work Lyle sure good to know the 50 year old system is now executing programs. 

Lyle Bickley & David Larsen

Some of Lyle's other Computers

PDP8S from our collection

Lyle running Spacewar! on his PDP8 E

Up date on PDP8S 7-18-14
Hi Dave,

I was chatting with Michael from the RICM and was about to ask him to
watch the video on your website of you finding and opening the box
containing the PDP-8/S you sold me. But I couldn't find it on your
website. - (Here is the link to video- Dave)

BTW: Since we last chatted my PDP-8/S has been up and running most of
the time. A couple of weeks ago, another transistor went out - and
memory began to fail. I found and replaced it - and now it's working
100% again. So far I've replaced a total of about 32 transistors and
over a dozen diodes.

I recently went through CPU and memory timings in great detail - and
now they meet all of DEC's specifications.

My 8/S passes all DEC diagnostics - and runs FOCAL w/o a hitch.

Bob build a cool I/O interface for the 8/S (and made one for me, too)
that emulates a TTY, high speed paper tape (partial), A->D, D->A and
incremental plotter. He does the hardware and I'm in the process of
modifying the drivers in FOCAL to support all of the above ;)

I hope all is well with you and Gaynell!

Cheers,
Lyle

David Larsen

^{"by David Larsen"  KK4WW Computer Collector Historian}   
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