The Ware for March 2007 is shown below. Click on the picture for a much larger image.

I will be seriously impressed by anyone who can get this one. This was rescued from a discard pile at MIT back when I visited as a pre-frosh in 1992. I wasn’t too big on the campus tours–they were so boring and always showed you the stuff they wanted you to see anyways–so I went out on my own and nosed my way into every EE-related building, sticking my head into labs, offices and lectures unannounced. I eventually wound my way to the Media Lab and naturally I gravitated toward the machine room and let myself in, and found this in a pile of boards to be discarded. The guy there was friendly, told me what it was, and let me take it home and it’s been a prized posession since. It’s not a prototype board; from my understand this was used in a “production” machine. Back then it wasn’t so uncommon to see wire-wrap in a production machine! There’s still an old Symbolics machine hanging out at CSAIL somewhere, I think, that was wirewrapped.

Thanks to everyone who played last month’s Name that Ware. There’s a certain satisfying sense of closure in discovering the origin of an old ware you’ve had in your closet for a long time. It’s even neater to know that I had something as classic as a board from a PDP-11 hanging above my desk when I was a kid, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

It’s a hard choice to pick one winner, so I’m going to pick two: Nicholas and Phil, congratulations! email me to claim your prize. The link to the bitsavers page in particular is really neat; I’m bookmarking that one. I’m glad that someone is going around collecting all the schematics and code that ran on these classic machines, and I’m even more glad that I haven’t heard of any lawsuits from copyright holders trying to milk the last dime out of some dead documents. I guess the sad part is that I don’t really see a bitsavers happening for any of today’s machines or chips. I wonder if in twenty years we’ll look back at these funny old Pentium chips and simply shrug our shoulders and go, oh well.

The ware for February, 2007 is shown below. Click on the picture for a much larger version.

I have had this ware since I was a wee lad, since I was probably just over a decade old, but to this day I don’t know what it does. I used to hang it over my Apple ][ in the basement where I would hack late into the night, writing assembly and BASIC code to control little hand-built robots and voice synthesizer cards. Clearly, the ware is from a DEC machine of some type, but I don’t know which one or what it does. I figured maybe this would be the right place to get answers to such mysteries from my youth, so here it is! Hopefully someone will be able to tell me what this relic did.