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My twitter profile picture is a picture of my Heathkit PDP-11 system. Yes, I built it all and it all worked perfectly when I turned it on!

https://twitter.com/WalterBright

I loved Heathkit.

(Except the ultrasonic cleaner. That sure was a dud. Sold it on Ebay to some collector.)




With an H-19! I'm jealous... (I gotta get my two H-11A boxes running with the pair of 8" floppies. Another 'rainy day' project!). In the day, I built 3 H-19s to save a few bucks, and that was a LOT of work. Another one which was even more a pain to assemble was the kit form of the ADM-3A. Still, for the time, it was a lot of terminal for the $$.


My coworkers at Boeing thought I was nuts to have bought a 64K memory card for it (maxing it out) for $600. I had to show the card around at work :-)

How sweet it was to have, at last, my very own PDP-11 at home!

Later on I bought a 6Mb hard disk drive, and designed and built an interface card for it, and wrote a bootstrap loader. 6Mb was, like, infinite storage!

The paper taped to the monitor was the screen editing commands for TECO.


George, did you see the Firesign Theatre thread at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27329497

(George Tirebiter was a character in a Firesignt Theatre routine.)




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