Notices by Crazy Eddie's Used Computers (fvzappa@mastodon.sdf.org)

Ten ancient D-cells in this 1960 Tektronix 321 'scope I picked up today, and not a single one has leaked. Gonna go buy a lottery ticket now, today's clearly my day...

Found an old IBM pamphlet I scanned nearly a decade ago; Square-D used it in 1957 to allay their employees' fears that the new RAMAC system that was being brought in to help with accounting would replace them. It's cute! The last page has the following on it, and stands in stark contrast to the use-cases that OpenAI and others are proposing for their Large Language Models.

This is a new one for me, I've seen some interesting bodge jobs but this one inside a Visual 50 terminal is maybe the goofiest way I've seen to piggyback an extra resistor. It's an odd combination of temporary (the clips) and permanent (the resistor permanently soldered to the other end).

A couple of months back I scored a rare "QBus Music Board" off eBay. I don't know a ton about it -- it was made at DEC but was never an official product and I don't know why it was made or for whom. But it's neat -- it has two AY-3-8912 PSGs to make fun tunes with. I've never found any documentation or software for it but it wasn't too hard to figure out the registers. So I did what any of us would do, I wrote a device driver for 2.11BSD (PDP-11) for it, and whipped up a VGM player. Enjoy!

It's the right thing to do.

The Berzerk cab I got earlier this year has made it home, I plan to get it all back together and get it working in the next few weeks. Monitor is missing (CRT got necked by a previous owner and tossed out) but I have a replacement. One of my favorite arcade games of all time.

Picked up yet another project this week, a Heathkit GR-295 color TV, c. 1967 or so. Came with the original assembly manual used by the person who built it back in the day. CRT tests good! Love me some Heathkit, and this'll make a fun TV to play Atari on once I get it going again.