PDP-8/e and terminals in West Sussex, UK

[Tony Duell]

> (It'd be interesting to do a poll on how many systems each of us here has, and 
> how many hours a year each of those systems actually gets run for - I suspect 
> the results would be quite disturbing!)

I suspect I have over 200 machines. Some are simple home micros, others 
are reasonably well-specified minicomputer systems.

I do collect peripherals as well as CPUs. To take a trivial example (and 
it's not rare, it's certainly not a 'holy grail', I spent some time a 
couple of years back restoring an HP7245A printer/plotter (a thermal 
hard-copy device that can both print dot-matrix characters and plot 
vectors). I had to make up alignment tools and so on. I found that as 
interesting and the design as beautiful; as many CPUs.

As regards running time, I tend to concentrate on one particular machine 
(or closely-related family), get it working, and then move on to 
somethign else or go back to a machine I've worked on previously. So in a 
given year, some machine will get run for ocnsiderable periods, some 
might not be turned on at all.

-tony