Around a year ago my wife and I went to a local thrift store because she had showed me some pictures of old Commodore computers they had for sale. The owner told me about this estate they had cleared with a huge amount of old Commodores that was now for sale in the store. I ended buying an Amiga A600 HD and Amiga A1200. The A600 worked and we fooled around with it playing old games that was included. The A1200 was sold on since Amigas is not in my main focus.
FIRST LOOK AT THE COMPUTER EQUIPMENT
A couple of days later the owner send me some pictures of another lot that was still home in his barn since he did not thought it would fit in his shop. I thought it looked a little to old to have my interest but we agreed that I would help him selling the equipment to a collector or museum. The device on the picture was a Danish computer from Regnecentralen, a RC 7000 Minicomputer System model 7006.
We finally found a date where I could come by his place to have a look at the equipment. At first I was a bit disappointed because it just looked like a collection of cables, typewriters and old CRT terminals even though it was hidden away like a real barn find and it was hard to see everything at once. After we got most of the equipment outside I could get a closer look at it. I saw the mini computer he send me a picture of that actually looked quite cool with the toggle switches on the front panel. There were also a box full of punched tapes, two teletypes, equipment for reading the punched tapes, a box with an Amiga A600 and a Commodore C64. We agreed that I would bring all of it home and help him sell it. He shortly told me about where he found the things. In a large house where a professor working at a university had lived it was found at his attic. It had all been connected and mounted in a computer rack. Almost like he just took it home after it was discharged by the university to continue working on it at home after work.
UNLOADING AND STATUS OVERVIEW
It took me two trips to his place to get all of it home in my garage. I spend several evenings sorting through boxes, looking up model numbers and browsing through original documentations. Through my research I found out that the Regnecentralen 7006 minicomputer was in fact a rebranded Data General Nova model 2/10 sold under an OEM deal. This was the single most interesting part of the lot. The rest of it is mostly accessories for the minicomputer. Through the connectors on the computer and on some of the equipment I figured out that the punched card reader and the punched tape reader had originally be connected to the minicomputer through some, to me obscure and unknown, connectors. After a closer inspection of the minicomputer I concluded that it seem to be complete with both CPU, RAM, core rope memory, IO control and card reader cards and a RS-232 connection. The only things missing was a broken toggle switch on the front and the key for the power switch.
The more I investigated about the minicomputer the more I wanted to keep it. I reached out to the owner and we agreed that I could buy the complete lot. My intention is definitely not to keep all of it. I hope to sell off half of it to finance the other half. Below is a complete list of the computer equipment I got. Items marked with a * has since been sold.
PARTS LIST OF THE COMPLETE LOT
- *Amiga A600
- *Amstrad GT 65 green CRT monitor
- Boxes with a lot of paper punched tape and cards containing software for the 7006 minicomputer.
- *Commodore 64 including cassette drive and PSU
- *Compucorp Metric 85, Z80 CP/M computer with 2x 5,25″ diskette drives, including CRT, missing keyboard
- Documation RM200 punched card reader
- *Ericsson System 11 terminal with keyboard
- Facit 4070 paper tape punch with manual
- Regnecentralen 500 Paper tape reader
- 2x Regnecentralen terminal 822 CRT+keyboard
- Regnecentralen 7006 Minicomputer from 1973. Rebranded version of a Data General Nova 2/10. Included with a lot of printed documentation and boxes of paper punched tape and cards containing software for it.
- Nova 2 CPU card with 4x 74181 ALUs
- Dataram Corp 16Kx16 62402 RAM card
- Nova 2 8k memory stack
- D-A converter scope control card reader
- Basic IO control
- Regnecentralen tape winder
- *2x Teletype 33 ASR terminal with manuals
- *Xerox 820 computer, Z80
LINKS
FUTURE WORK
In the future I will figure out more about the Data General Nova computer and try to power it on and see if I can make it do anything with all the software that is included on punched paper tape. Lucky for me that others have played around with similar computers.
