On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 12:52:23PM +1200, Mike Ross wrote: > > Has this ever been seriously considered, or mooted as a possible > co-operative venture for a group of us? >
I see it on the small scale all the time. Such as Rod's new front panels for the 8/e. Or the various replica kits for early micros. One computer I could imagine would sparc interest is a new PDP-6. Not sure how that would materialise. I have a theory as to why it hasn't happened yet though. And that is lack of skill. Take an average sized Swedish town and you can probably scrounge up a fair amount of welders, carpenters, painters and metalworkers willing to work on a fun medium to large scale project such as restoring trains, cars and even whole factories. And given the number of "industry heritage" museums in Sweden it's a fairly big group. But finding the a good sized group of people with the right skills for wirewrapping a large scale backplane and populating it with period correct hardware... much harder I think. There are other problems too, finding a big chunk of metal to machine a new crankshaft is not so hard. Where do you find enough germanium transistors for a PDP-6 (I'm guessing that is what was used, and I'm also guessing that they are less common today, please correct me if I'm wrong) I would love to work on such a project though! /P
