Ancient Web: Joachim Buss Indexed a Personal Warehouse of Unix Workstations

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

One computer in Joachim Buss's collection used to run a hospital scanner. Another is a DEC workstation whose components were squeezed into an ordinary PC case. They are both listed beside dozens of machines that most computer museums cannot afford to keep powered on.

Visit Joachim Buss's hardware collection.

The catalog, last marked updated in October 2009, sorts machines by manufacturer and processor architecture. Digital Equipment Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Apple each receive sections. It reaches from PDP-11 and VAX systems to MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC and PowerPC workstations.

The larger Vintage DEC homepage identifies Buss as the maintainer and links to ULTRIX freeware, machine documentation, emulator information and benchmarking. Its 2014 update note preserves a recognizable older-web aspiration: make pages readable in practically any browser.

A computer collection with the boot logs still attached

The PDP-11/24 entry is the most memorable. Its owner names the machine FONZIE, lists a 3 MHz processor, 1 MB of memory and a 25 MB fixed disk, then explains that it controlled a CT scanner from 1985 to 2003. Buss reports successfully starting RT-11 and XXDP on it. He also cautions, with obvious affection, that its fans sound like several vacuum cleaners.

Other entries offer something beyond photographs. A modified DECstation 5000/150 runs ULTRIX and Linux/MIPSEL after a motherboard from an older system was installed in an ATX enclosure. The webpage retains a boot log, hardware memory and expansion details, and the author's explanation of which parts were acquired separately.

The SGI O2 page records a 200 MHz MIPS R5000 machine running IRIX, including a hardware-inventory listing copied from the operating system itself. Its owner even measures the computer's electrical consumption.

These are first-person records, not manufacturer-certified test sheets. Specific machines may have changed ownership or configuration after their pages were written. The museum is valuable precisely because it preserves what one collector actually possessed, repaired and observed at the time.

There are no glamorous product videos here. Just unusually detailed notes from the years when workstation names, operating systems and expansion buses were themselves a kind of living technology.

Explore the DEC, SGI and Sun hardware indexes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.