Be a Computer Crusader!

The Retro-Computing Society of RI will be featuring the Cray Jedi at the next open house on Saturday July 19th at our facility in Providence. This fall is our 20th anniversary. (If you are looking for gift ideas we prefer the modern platinum to the more traditional china.)

A short time after our group formed we made arrangements for a private tour of The Computer Museum in Boston. Our member Carl has a detailed write-up of the visit and the collection that we saw. Not long after our 1996 visit TCM closed and the collection was moved to a new home on the west coast which became the Computer History Museum.

A Data General poster depicting the Nova and Eclipse minicomputers as superheros.
From the collection of the Computer History Museum.

Another of our members created The Retro-Computing Lab Millspace Tour which gives a nice snapshot of what we were doing between late 1996 when we moved into the Eagle Street facility and mid-1998 when the page was last updated. Warning:

This page may take some time to load if you are viewing graphics.

There are nearly a dozen 300 x 200 pixel images on John's tour page, some of which are larger than 20 KB. At that time I was using a 9,600 bps modem so it would have taken about 4 minutes to load the entire page back then...

VAX-11/750

There is an archived RCS webapage from 1997 that describes KRONOS:: which was the VAX-11/750 "supermini" that I was using as my home computer at the time. I paid more per month for electricity than I did for dialup internet. The washing machine sized cabinet is just the CPU. Disks and tape drives were in three separate cabinets. I've done some work on the system to reconfigure the I/O and we'll be powering this up later in the summer.