Cannibalizing 36xx's

[miller@cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller)]

Well, after years of faithful service they've decided to surplus our
beautiful old 3600 as well as three 3640's.  Amongst the four of them,
all the `boxes' work, but 3 consoles are dead and 1 marginally works (I
was able to tweek the picture straight, but its too wide. If I try to
reduce the horiz width enough, it it goes out of sync)  

It's a shame for these to completely disappear.  I'd love to have one
for my home workstation.  It would have been nice to buy the scraps and
assemble something.  But the way government surplussing works is a bit
mysterious.  I cant directly buy it; I suppose that the idea of one of
the original users buying it back may appear suspicious.  And it's
impossible to establish if/when/where the things would show up at
the auction.

My alternative was to keep them from surplussing the one working 3640
and use it as a home workstation.  It's got 2 140MB disks, and so can be
shoehorned into a standalone mode with a small lmfs.   Of course NIST
will no longer pay any money to modify or repair it.  And since I wont
own it I dont want to spend anything either!  Plus, since the console
symptom looks like a fading component, it may die soon anyway.

So, the Q's

  1) The box says 20Amp, and has the old huge power plug. But there aint
no way that's drawing 20 amps.  (is there?) Anybody know how much it
really draws? 

  2) I need to connect to the outside world -- in particular back to
NIST.  The 3600 has one of the newer 9track drives and built-in modem.
If I cannibalize these from the 3600, is there anyway that they can be
attached to the 3640?  They dont have to be internal (the '40 already
has the 2 drive slots filled), they can sit on top of the cabinet for
all I care.  

  3) any opinions on the monitor?  BTW: It has the monitor where you
remove the full case; the other 2 (broken) ones have the removable top
panel --- I forget which is which philips/moniterm -- in any case it
would appear that I can't mix & match between the three to get a healthy
monitor.

Any other comments are welcome.
Thanks for your indulgence in my self-indulgence.

bruce
miller@cam.nist.gov