On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 09:45:34PM +0000, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
Myself (BJ), John (with homemade biscuits, thanks) MJR, Adam, Kirty, Brett, Peter Onion (with very interesting emulator of a very old mainframe... something begining with E 800 which had very cool graphics and noises).
Elliott 803. Here is a picture of the machine I used to use when I was at school. http://www.g6lvb.com/803.htm
More pictures at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~jacksmth/ell803.htm including a shot of the Calcomp 565 plotter
Ah, these are names I recognise.
An emulation of the 803, or just of the Calcomp plotter? Sounds exciting anyway: I'm most interested. If it might compile on FreeBSD and run in KDE?
I have here various 803B parts, in particular a flexowriter and a Creed teleprinter that might soon have to go for scrap unless someone can find a good home. Not working, but not rusty - could work given a lot of TLC.
All the bins around our Computer Centre are Elliot paper tape bins. I have core planes on my desk. There's not many other places you can point and say "There's a bit ... ".
When I was at University the 'mainframe' was an Elliot 503 on which we could try our hand at programming. My brother-in-law (who is a few years older than me) was at Elliot Automation in Borehamwood involved in the design of the 503 and 803, he then went on to work at English Electric in Stoke on Trent.
I started programming as a job around 1970 on what were then called timesharing systems to which one connected via a 300 baud modem and all I/O was on teletypes or similar. Those new fangled VDUs were just appearing.