UoN Computer Science turns 30

Posted <2017-07-18 Tue 16:47> by Aaron S. Jackson.

Today is the day of the University of Nottingham Computer Science graduation. Coinciding with this is the end of the 30th year of Computer Science at Nottingham. To celebrate the department, we exhibited several interesting machines which are related to the school in some way.

Commodore Amiga, since the school had an Amiga lab. Provided by Steve Bagley
Apple Macintosh, also from Steve.
Acorn BBC, also from Steve. Notes on that later.
Sun 3/160, a workstation used in the school some years ago, which Steve managed to get booting with a scsi2sd. It was hooked up to a VT220 provided by Marc Cleave (bnl).
VAXstation 3100/M76, which I brought in, more on that later.
PDP-11/23 from bnl, unfortunately sat idle since we had nothing to boot it from, and people probably don't want to type in octal.
PDP-11/73, also from bnl, hooked up to a TeleVideo 920C.

Funnily the capacitors went pop in Steve's BBC during the event. Someone turned around and said "Your BBC is on fire!". Most likely the capacitors in the power supply, unlikely to be any damage to the logic side.

I was worried about my VAXstation not booting up, since last night it was just crashing every time it attempted to. Fortunately, I grabbed the desk fan from my office and pointed it into the VAXstation. It stayed running for about 2 hours, which is longer than the 11/73 managed to run for (haha bnl, VAXen win again, although there are issues with the disk in that so otherwise the PDP-11 would have won).

Thanks to the following people: Joe Best, Marc Cleave, Viktor Huddleston, Steve Bagley, William Armitage, David Brailsford and Gemma Singleton.

Over all, it was a fun event and feedback from people seems to have been good. There are some photos below which I took, hopefully I can get some of the more interesting machine related photos from the photographer that was there. Credit will be given!