Originally published at: Can you dig this groovy berry-colored 1975 computer? | Boing Boing
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The PDP-12 were color ‘coded’ to “avocado”
i think they were influenced by the kitchen applicance industry at the time. tangerine or avocado, with a side order of lemon. Psychedelic sixties still in folks’ memories.
(In my first year of Biochem grad-school there was an analytical ultra-centrifuge still driven by one of these charming old boxes; card after card of discrete transistor circuits - amazing)
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How else to keep the milk cold?
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very nice, have never seen one of these. The first PDP I used was an 11/35, seem to recall the switches were two shades of brown but might be mistaken. The last one was an 11/44, by then the lights and switches were gone. Missed them, but only for the esthetics. Also gone was the core memory. Didn’t miss that. One of those 11/44’s ended up on my front porch…I got it that far (it was heavy) when I realized if I took it into the house I’d need to get it down the basement stairs 
The accounting dept where I worked wrote it off but I was afraid the remaining unit in service would need spares, soo…It stayed there for about two years with absolutely no one ever trying to steal it.
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I made the mistake of sleeping on one of those refrigerated floors once (long story). Not good for the core body temp 
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Although cool looking, in practice people didn’t really use those toggle switches for much, although I think you had to do a bit of fiddling with them when booting up (which you didn’t do often). Typically a PDP/11 ran a multiuser operating system like RSX-11 or UNIX and people connected to it via terminals.
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I bet you’re right. That does seem to look a lot like 1970’s appliance coloring. Much psychedelic, very mosh.
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Much nicer than later cream-white cases that would turn to nicotine yellow even in the absence of any cigarette smoke.
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The ones I worked on, when booting up you would use the toggles to put a very small loader that would address a paper tape reader and eventually the RK 05 disks. It was the RT - 11 OS. We tended to have to do this on a daily basis The switches also had trouble shooting and maintenance applications, but mostly they were cool looking. I tried to get a front panel when they were decommissioned because I thought it would make a nice decorative object but I missed out on that; did get a panel from a Kennedy tape drive though
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Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Can you dig this groovy berry-colored 1975 computer?
Holy shit.
These are all beautiful!!
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Of course it all started with the computer operators wearing groovy outfits.
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I always liked how the Cray Computer was so big, they just made it look like futuristic Ikea furniture.
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Yeah but can it play Zork?
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Well, you needed somewhere to sit while you enjoyed your free case of Leinenkugels that Cray would traditionally include with their supercomputers (both Cray and the Leinenkugel brewery were located in Chippewa Falls, WI).
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Yes, but it’s a little behind on updates and patches.
To: Dungeon Players
From: “The Translator”
Subj: Game Information
Date: 8-OCT-80This is the first (and last) source release of the PDP-11 version of
Dungeon.Please note that Dungeon has been superceded by the game ZORK™.
The following is an extract from the new product announcement for
ZORK in the September, 1980 issue of the RT-11 SIG newsletter:
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It’s perfect that the emulator uses a Raspberry Pi because the original’s color scheme looks like a raspberry pie.
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I saw an empty rack with that color scheme in the surplus store a few months ago. Was tempted to grab it, but my common sense kicked in.
A Raspberry Pi is about 1000x faster in emulation than the 11/70, which was the flagship model back in the seventies.
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Somehow I was thinking it was the Honeywell Kitchen Computer (1969).
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