It's time for spring cleaning at my house, and I decided to sell a bunch of the old computing stuff and consolidate everything onto one server. So I'm selling my old 1U Supermicro dual Xeon RAID system, my 1U dual 1.8GHz Athlon, and maybe the machine this is running on: a dual 1.2GHz Athlon tower with HW RAID.

I've got several other older Pentium-class boxes I would give away to interested parties. Contact me with the Contact Us button up top if you're interested.

I was never a mainframe guy, except for doing a lot of programming on them in fortran and pascal back in the old days at college and graduate school.

My brother now... he was a mainframe guy. Ken worked for several large banks in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area, programming in everything from JCL to Cobol to RPG. He was a wiz at managing large IBM computers and loved that whole environment.

For Christmas last year, gave him a complete implementation of an IBM mainframe in emulation, including the MVS operating system. It's called Hercules.

Who knew!

Unfortunately, his health has been poor, and I can't report on installing and using this stuff, but that's a different story. I had hoped to playaround and learn a bit of it myself, but may never get around to it.

The package I put together for him has lots of documentation plus complete binaries for running your own mainframe under WinDoze. It even includes the letter I wrote to Ken as part of the Christmas present :)

The coolness factor in this package is huge, and if I were a mainframe guy, I'd be all over it.

So I just uploaded it here and encourage anyone who understands or wants to play with mainframes to give it a go! And please let us know how it turns out.

-Tom

I met Andy Spencer, Administrator (Owner?) of the Retro Computer Museum in Leicestershire, UK online last night. I was a little reluctant to ask him if it was ok to post about our site on his site, but he had no problem with it.

Readers of this post should browse over to the Retro Computer Museum and say hello. He's got a great community and lots of fellow retro fans talking about all manner of old, geeky stuff, with a distinctly British flair.

Altogether, the Retro Computer Museum is a great site with a lot of information about old hardware and software, and I foresee a strong friendship between our communities in the future.

-Tom

I've just upgraded the server to ConcourseConnect 1.0.1, released yesterday.

While we think it works great, there might be a few bugs. If you find them, please report them using "Contact Us" at the top right. This version has numerous bug fixes, and adds a new theme, which I am not using.

Read on for a summary of the changes/fixes...

This site is built on top of the Concursive ConcourseConnect software. It is extremely powerful and includes just about everything one could want for a community/directory/social network.

So what can you do here? After registering, you can not can you have your own blog, forums, wiki and document store, but you can start your own group for a special purpose. I've created one for CP/M and one for TRS-80, but I know there are lots of other old technologies that deserve their own groups.

Some that come to mind are Digital Equipment Coprporation PDP-11 and Vax systems, old Sun hardware and operating system, old UNIX systems, Apple, Commodore, Atari, and who knows what else.

Feel free to register and start a conversation about something that interests you. I know my own interests span systems across the spectrum of mainframes, minis, and micros, operating systems, programming languages and old application software.

Groups have blogs, forums, wikis, document stores, and private messaging, among others. There's lots to play with. Come and play!

It took a while to get things all sorted out, and I'm not quite finished yet, but The Pitlog Community is up and running.

I built a new Linux system to house the site. I'm running Centos 5.3 on a dual Athlon machine with 1GB or memory and mirrored 320GB drives on a Silicon Image RAID controller. I've got 4GB of RAM coming somtime this week, and the system should be nice and snappy when I get it installed.

And that will be it for the hardware and software.

Next comes content, and I have lots of it. I've got huge archives of old UNIX, CP/M, TRS-80, AT&T 3B2, and other computer, programming, and  operating system information. Dozens of GB of it. The trick will be to get it categorized and uploaded. It will take a while, and I'll be doing it slowly.

I'll also be adding content about my own retro projects and hope that soon other retro enthusiasts will join me and make this a real community.

-Tom