[Beowulf] A press release

[Jim Lux]

At 09:58 AM 7/10/2008, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Lyle Bickley wrote:
>
>>On Thursday 10 July 2008, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>>--snip--
>>>Aye, laddy, 'twas a PDP 1 with sense switches on the front that one did
>>>indeed toggle in the paper tape boot program (to get it to where it
>>>could read from other media), a green oscilloscope-style CRT for a
>>>monitor (complete with crosshatches IIRC), a real teletype console, and
>>>the ability to run simple fortran programs that did beam optic
>>>computations and displayed a simple visualization of same.  The PDP
>>>itself was quite large, and I was told that it "had a few bad bits..."
>>>but that they usually didn't affect the outcome of a computation.
>>
>>I'm on the PDP-1 and IBM 1620 Restoration Teams at the Computer 
>>History Museum
>>(see: http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/). So if the PDP-1 was your first
>>computer (and one NEVER forgets their first computer) you can see it in
>>action (running Spacewar!, Minskytron, Music, etc.) at the CHM!
>>
>>In fact, if your visiting Silicon Valley, I'll give you a private tour!
>
>Cool!  I think TUNL finally got rid of theirs -- always a shame,
>somehow, when a magnificent thing like that dies.
>
>>Funny combination - setting up Beowulf clusters and restoring vintage
>>computers. There must be a lesson here :-)
>
>Vintage clusters?
>
>;-)
>
>    rgb


in classic /. form, should we not now interject:

What about a beowulf cluster of PDP-8s (or -1s or IBM 1130s or...)?

(not that any of those were really "commodity", although there were 
an awful lot of PDP-8i and PDP-11s out there.. not really open source though)

Jim