It finally happened. My collection far out grew the space I had for it. I finally came to that realization when working on one of them and I had to keep moving racks around so that I could work on it. I was spending more time moving equipment rather than working on it.
I decided that I either had to get rid of a lot of equipment or find
a bigger space for it. I decided to find more space. After
some searching I found a commercial space that was mostly warehouse
with lots of power. It turns out it even has 3-phase so I could
conceivably run the KL-10, but more to the point it's 1450 square feet
of space!
It really hit home how much I collected when on the afternoon that I
signed the lease, I received a call from Penske asking if I needed a
truck since I hadn't rented one in a couple of months. That's a
really bad sign when the rental truck company knows you well enough to
wonder why you haven't rented in a while.
Once I was in possetion of the property, I immediately started
moving stuff from the house. Here and here are the results of moving stuff from my
home office, living room and dinning room. I made many trips the
following week to get as much "little" stuff moved.
The remainder of the collection was moved over 3 days with a lot of
help from friends (and I think they're still friends). It took 4
trips to get everything moved. There was only one casualty (other
than sore muscles). One of the RA81 drives wasn't secured
properly and fell out of the rack onto the concrete.
One comment was that some people pay the gym to get this kind of
workout. My comment was I just pay Penske.
The library contains all of (extra)
media, books and documentation that I have. It will also have any
spill over from the terminal room here
and here. From the
library, is the all important door to the machine room.
The majority of the space is an open warehouse area that contains
the bulk of the collection. Over in a corner is some unracked gear. The following 3
pictures give an feel for the space and what it contains (1, 2 and 3). There are a total of 5 rows of
equipment. Each row can contain the equivalent of 11 racks.
The first row contains the KL-10.
The second row contains a DS570 and VAX6000-520
and a VAX 11/785.
The third row contains a PDP-11/40, PDP-11/45, PDP-11/70 and another PDP-11/40.
The forth row contains PDP-11/10, PDP-11/20, PDP-8/L, PDP-8/e, PDP-8/i and an HP-2116C.
The fifth row contains a second VAX 11/785, PDP-11/24 and various other PDP-11s.
I also put up serveral racks to contain spare
boards and other spares and RK05 packs.
There's finally a corner filled with various stuff.
