I’ve done some transactions with CDCO. Not rock-bottom pricing, but can be ordered a la carte.
http://www.cdcotools.com
After months of messing around with Raspberry Pi stuff, I gave up. I think in bits and wiring and can reel off TTL chip pinouts from memory, RPi is all software and trying to write Python code to direct a Linux OS was just too much. Too many layers of software between the inputs and outputs. You mainframe guys would be better at it, I’m a hardware guy with iffy coding skills.
Too funny
@whydontu!
I don't think of myself as a mainframe guy. But I probably was. I did a lot of high level work in Catia, Fortran, and proprietary software. So that shoe does fit.
However, I think of myself as a bit guy like you. My first love was at the hardware level working with sensors, circuits, TTL, cmos, and hardware drivers. etc. That usually meant that most coding was in machine or assembly language.
While most coders would call that binary, I like to say that I actually think in octal! As someone like you would know, octal is 3 bits - a perfect three bits! It is sooooo beautiful! I believe I already posted somewhere else on this forum, if only we humans had only used our fingers to count and left out our thumbs, we might all be thinking in octal today and we would all be so much better at math than we are. (Insert big huge sigh here......)
Please forgive me a short story I love to tell. I once programmed an hp41 calculator to play chess. I did it to enter a competition. A chess board is 8x8. So I converted all the positions into two octal pairs with rules for piece moves and weights for value. The game could be told how far to look ahead and maximum thinking time. It was formidable. But it also turned a light bulb on in my head. I converted all the octal data to decimal for the calculations and then back to octal for the play, and then back to decimal for output. So the program actually worked in octal. And slowly but surely, so did my brain. When the dust cleared, I had a working program and a mind that loved octal. I could do complex math in my head! I didn't win the competition, but I maintain that was only because the judges didn't have any clue about how hard good chess is. They probably compared my program to pacman. That's my story anyway.
The main result though was a lifetime love for octal. Ya, I can do hex and sometimes have to. Binary is a given. But octal will run rings around hex and decimal and that horrible SAE crap we all love so much too!
Sorry for the diversion......
