I took these pictures at DSAA: Project DELTA in room 360 DuPont Hall at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. The slides were processed in November, 1973. (It's stamped on the slide mount.) They were probably taken with a Kodak Retina I-a bellows camera with flash bulbs. (They could have been taken with a Canon TX SLR and a small electronic flash, although I don't think I got that camera until later.) Anyway, please forgive the picture quality (not to mention the composition and the lack of visibility of the people; I was an engineering student, after all! :-)
Click on a picture to see a 600dpi version. (I'll try to replace them with 1200dpi versions later so that you can zoom in and look for the spelling error that DEC made on the 11/50 front panel!)
Our new PDP-11/50 being brought up:
Left to right is the
TU10 9-track 800bpi magtape drive,
TU56 dual DECtape drive,
the RP03 disk controller?
RS11 fixed-head disk drives (hidden in the cabinet) and controller
(note the lights at the top of the cabinet),
and a PC11 high-speed paper tape reader/punch above the CPU.
In front of the CPU, an RP03 disk drive is visible,
and the white shape in front of the disk drive is
a Centronics 132-column upper-case dot matrix line printer.
I think that the people studying manuals arrayed on the floor are
Dan Grim and Ron Reisor.
The RP03 disk drive
and LA30 console of the PDP-11/50:
You can see the top of the disk heads between 10:00 and 11:00,
just above the black bar that divides the front glass from the top glass.
There is grey fan-fold paper tape with a DEC label,
probably a diagnostic program,
on the table to the right of the drive.
The console of the PDP-11/50:
The keys are in the switch and it's turned to POWER
but the ENABLE/HALT switch is down (halted).
Our old PDP-11/20 when it was still running RSTS-11:
Debbie Persoleo is in the background using the OpScan-17 scanner to scan survey or test forms. Left to right is the ASR-33 console TTY, LP11 80-column upper-case drum line printer, RK05 cartridge disk drive, RS11 fixed-head disk drives (hidden in the cabinet) and controller (note the lights at the top of the cabinet), and TU56 dual DECtape drive above the CPU. On the table are a couple of DECtapes to the left of the pencil sharpener, the CM11 card reader, a fixed-keyboard CRT (Datapoint?), and a SuperBee CRT from Beehive Medical Electronics.
The paper cutter was used to shred password lists before disposal
(we didn't lose any fingers, but don't try it yourself;
there isn't any need to do it that way now since it is now easy to buy paper shreaders)
as well as trimming the feed holes from the edges of listings
or from end sheets to make scratch paper.
Photographs Copyright © 1998 by Aron K. Insinga. All rights reserved. Reproduced on the Project DELTA web site with permission.