Seeing his list of restored devices, including an HP2645, recalled to me how we hacked the original HP2640A glass teletypes to turn them into little desktop computers. 2640s came with a set of self-tests that you could run from an HP3000 minicomputer. Didn't take us kids long to figure out that the role of the HP3000 was to download a string of bytes representing 8008 code, that the terminal ran to test itself. They had 1K byte and 4k byte memory cards in the terminal. So we reverse engineered the 8008s interface to the screen and keyboard IO system, and were soon building little screen games. This was 2 years before the Apple II debuted, and when the only "home" computers you could get were big boxes like the Altair 8800. We basically had stumbled across the PC, but weren't smart or ambitious enough to do anything besides play dumb screen games with it.
This guy is amazing. Of course being a million millionaire help but his skills and experience are something I just dream about.<p>Watch the series where they repair an Alto computer, the disk packs and bring it up. Also repairing IBM 029 keypunch.<p>Amazing. And his colleagues are just as amazing.
I have a couple of machines lurking in my collection which worked fine the last time I turned them on, but that was 15 years ago now... I really should do the research on how to make sure I don't accidentally damage them by powering them on if there's a dried up capacitor lurking in the power supply or something. (One of them is acutually genuinely semi-rare: the ICL 3300 was produced as a prototype but was cancelled before it went into production. The PERQ 1 is older and arguably cooler, but more common.)
If you get into it, it's interesting how many sort of sub-niches there are and the amount of available info. Like, for example, bleaching yellowed plastic...there's a whole "retr0brite" culture. Or being able to recreate old undocumented PAL chips because somebody took the time to feed in every possible input and map the outputs.
I started buying and restoring Commodore computers about a year ago.<p>A Commodore 64 was my first computer and it’s so satisfying diagnosing which chip is bad, replacing it and seeing the computer start up successfully.
I'd love to find an old TI DS-990/10 system. Used one in 1979 for a few years. Good times, implementing Kernighan and Plauger's code from Software Tools in Pascal.