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Remember Control Data? The Living Computer Museum wants YOU

Vintage coders required break out the oscilloscopes and revive ancient kit

If you've got a bunch of old computer languages under your belt, the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington, wants you.

It's a job that's definitely not for the faint-hearted: as well as being able to handle old IBM, DEC, HP and Control Data Corporation languages, you'd be expected to help create and debug hardware interfaces to the vintage iron in Windows and Linux.

You'd be expected to build and maintain the ancient operating systems, help out with hardware development, and – because this is low-level stuff – be able to work out what's going on inside the boxes using logic analysers and oscilloscopes.

The duties include helping hunt out the arcana of the computing world, since not only does the job involve running and restoring the iron itself: the spec asks for people who can help locate the applications that used to run on the boxes.

There's also development of emulators of the exhibit machines: for example, emulating the disk drives, printers and displays the old machines expect to see, all the way up to running emulators of entire systems.

After a week of that, whoever wins the job will probably find running backups and monitoring system usage – the more mundane tasks of the sysadmin – quite relaxing.

As El Reg has previously noted, people who understand PDP-11 will be employable in the nuclear power industry for a long time yet. We're always interested to hear from readers that spot other arcane roles.

The job seems to be at least partly sponsored by capital company Vulcan, since it's carrying the recruitment ad. ®

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