I was admiring this list of cool artifacts, thinking I had none, then remembered in the corner I have a 64K PDP11 core plane, which, when it failed, had a V6 kernel image in it.

Now, that was 50 years ago, so magnetic donuts or no, that image is long gone, but it's still fun to think about.

Also, I have a DECTape from the late Jim McKie, somewhere, but I forget what was on it.

I still have my "documents for use with ..." book, and the BSTJ, but so do many of you ;-)

Finally, somewhere, I also have a budget page from a document I found in a dumpster at Murray Hill. This would have been 2007, or so, when lots of people were leaving and lots of offices were being "dumpster lobotomized"; I saw the doc in a dumpster and ripped out that page. It seemed of interest.


On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 7:27 PM Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 18:35 Greg A. Woods <woods@robohack.ca> wrote:
At Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:10:28 +1000, Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts?
>
> An original, hand-wire-wrapped Jerq board, later renamed Blit because of
> marketing. Also the original mouse, made by Prof Nicoud's lab and signed by
> him on the bottom.

The mice that came with the DMD-5620s, the Dépraz Mouse, "Made in
Switzerland" (one of mine says "Type D 85 / P") looks very similar.  I
have one in an original AT&T package too.

Ah yes. Mice. I still have two new-in-their-boxes DEC Hawley puck mice. VSXXX-AA, with two rollers.

They kept tracking reliably whereas the ball variant always got gunked up and skipped, but our DEC mice tended to succumb to Nettrek disease, where the left button would get clicked to death, and the replacements were inevitably the ball version.

I never managed to source a wheel version at the time to just carry with me. Got two years later, planning to give one to a friend a few months older than me for his collection. Cancer intervened and he is several years gone now, alas.