Highlights of the meeting included: 1) the delivery of over 200 cubic feet or several tons of old documentation, library and release tapes, and spare parts from Michigan; 2) the cabling and subsequent testing of the Xerox Sigma 9. Considerable time was spent sorting the documentation and a ten year plan to scan and otherwise preserve it was discussed by Bob Ollerton and Joe Chisolm. Documentation in the process of being scanned was greatly missed, particularly the Sigma 9 logic equations, pin lists, and pin index. A Xerox Sigma extender board was also not located.
This Xerox Sigma 9 came from the GM Tech Center near Detroit and was used at Andrews University 1984-94. It has peripherals from that era including 16Mb MOS memory unit, Belo-Box disk subsystem, and Telefile I/O cluster with tridensity tape drives. However, a couple RADs, and Teletypes are also on display. Plans to write the diagnotics to the ESDI disks via a PC are being considered since the tape drives need more restoration work.
Various Xerox vendors like Honeywell, Bull, Tymshare, Modutest, Telefile and Symmetry/Belo-Box and their workers such as Gene Zeitler, Sam Edens, Dave Kieper, Dave Belo, Larry Wilbur, and Walt Dietiker were discussed.
Old technologies such as old/new style, Ampex, and Telefile core memories, Wang and Potter tape drives, CDC disk drives, various line printers and teletypes, the Telefile 3281 disk controllers, and Xerox 550's, 560's, and 530's, and Telefile T-85 computers were discussed at length. Bob's use of automatic google searches to look for new information on these old computers, their supporters, and users was also discussed.
Sigma 9's bolted into shipping containers and used to collect battlefield data at Nellis? Air Force Base in southern Nevada were also discussed. Old rumors of Sigma in trucks in Vietnam were reviewed.
The following, undated, article was of some interest.