faranth currently holds the record for oldest and largest computer I own... faranth is a PERQ 1, which is a massive 350x700x650mm in size (although the Technical Overview boasts of the machine's "small size and low cost"...)
The PERQ1 has a 14 inch hard drive and an 8 inch floppy. It's got a portrait monitor, 768x1024 pixels in size, which is pretty impressive for a machine designed in 1979! One of the nicest things about this machine is the architecture; it uses a soft-microcoded CPU, so you can write new microcode to give the CPU a different instruction set.
faranth is the focus of a long-term project to write TCP/IP over GPIB code, which would allow faranth to be networked via tiroth. 10Mb/sec ethernet was standard on later PERQs, and was an option for the PERQ 1, but faranth doesn't have this. It does however have the GPIB parallel instrument control bus, which could theoretically be used for networking. TCP/IP code is available for the PERQ running POS, but assumes 3Mb/sec or 10Mb/sec ethernet hardware. What would need to be done is to convert this code, and also to write appropriate NetBSD code for tiroth.
See also my general PERQ page.
faranth was acquired from somebody in Wales (who was fortunately willing to bring it over to Cambridge...) who said they'd had it for a number of years. It is apparently originally from Oxford University. It was SERC PERQ number 169.
So far, just views of the hard disk. More to come, hopefully...
