Minutes from the May 2006

Connecticut Robotics Society Meeting:

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My observations on the club trip to the MIT Flea Market – May 21.

Total Attendance: about 15

The weather was good and the flea market was nice. Lots of computer stuff. The MIT museum was great. There were all the MIT robots on display (like Kismet & the robot with the one pogo-like leg that could balance itself). There was a really cool holography section. Then there was the historical computer stuff. They had a "core" memory unit. It had the dimensions of a 4' cube - tons of perpendicular wires with the magnetic doughnuts at their intersections. And a machine like that gave them 16K of memory. Right next to that was an IBM 029 card punch station. When I started my computer career I used one of these things. We used 80 column punched cards in those days that we fed into the card reader by the tray full - that was one way how we got input into the computer.

At the flea market I picked up this cool PC. It's called a Datalux Databrick II. It measures about 12"x6"x2". It has plugs for vga, kb, mouse, 2 serial, 1 parallel, network, and sound. It's a Pentium 233MHZ with 96MB ram and it has a CD and PCMCIA slots. All for just $50. Jake found a set of USB adapters that he’s still talking about today.

Well that's it for now - remember that the last club meeting is June 25th (not the usual 2nd Sunday).

Jim S.