Visiting Aida

Last weekend I had the good fortune to visit the amazing Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala, a science museum with a focus on the 16th and 17th centuries, placed in what at the time was the main university building. They have simply amazing stuff in their collections and one of the world's finest examples of an anatomical theatre.

The real reason for my visit to Gustavianum, however, was that the Update Computer Club had placed some of their more rare computers on display, including my old friend AIDA, a DEC 2065 that used to run TOPS-20, no less than two KOM conference systems and a copy of the original Essex MUD. Here's a picture of me hugging AIDA like some hunchback haunting the science museum:

Bad photo, I'm afraid. Taken without flash with my mobile phone.

Here are some much better photos taken by an Update member during the inauguration of their displays at Gustavianum:

http://www.update.uu.se/~jeppe/tmp/vernissage/

Here's a particularly nice one of AIDA:

RAM, CPU and PDP-11 frontend in the grey/terracotta casing to the right. Hard disks in front. Tape drive to the left.

I was a bit disappointed that none of the terminals present were hooked up to anything. It would have been a nice way to present TOPS-20 to people if a real terminal would have been hooked into a small PC running a PDP-10 emulator with TOPS-20 on it.

Update has two similar projects running already: TINA (TINA Is Not AIDA) which is a copy of AIDA running on an emulator and UP, an ITS instance running on a PDP-10 emulator. UP is actually hosting its own HTTP server writting in MacLisp!

After visiting Uppsala I went to Stockholm for the Internet discovery day (see separate post) and the Internetdagarna conference. I was struck down by a temperature on the first day and didn't really recover until days later. I spent a few lonely nights shivering in a hotel room in central Stockholm. In case you knew I was coming to Stockholm and didn't hear from me, that's why.