MINIAC-1 Mystery Cache

This cache has been archived.

Team Dodge Podge: I was in the area doing another cache, and decided to stop in and check on MINIAC. Sadly, I was stunned to see it had been plundered.

All the trade items had been removed, the container closed, and re-hidden as before. All that was left was the logbook, Tucson Thompson's map, a bone from some animal, and, happily, the travel bug.

I removed the container from the site. I really doubt this was done by a non-cacher, as the area is very remote and the cache was well hidden.

My only guess is that someone solved it and decided to help themselves to everything. Oh well, that's the risk you take by putting it out there I guess.

Goodbye, MINIAC. You were fun while you lasted. :(

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Hidden : 8/1/2004
Difficulty:
5 out of 5
Terrain:
2.5 out of 5

Size: Size: large (large)

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Geocache Description:



The cache is not at the above coordinates!


As my ever-patient Sweet-Pea knows, I am a pack-rat. And there's nothing I like to stack up in the garage better than old computers.

So when I was rummaging around the back of an old Army warehouse, I was naturally attracted to some old complicated-looking containers forgotten in the back.

After knocking the dust and dirt off an old mil-spec metal box about the size of a handyman's toolbox, I was surprised to find that the data plate indicated that I was looking at an old, prototype military computer.

Since this was an auction, I bid $10 on the (heavy) box, and as there were no other bidders, won it and took it home. Opening it, I found a tattered bit of the old operator's manual for it but almost all the pages were missing or crumbled to dust. There was only one intact page left. The case was relatively bare, and there was no provision for a keyboard, monitor, or anything like that. There were two rows of eight toggle switches, one row labeled "Code" and the other labeled "Data." There was a single pushbutton labeled "Accept", and a row of 16 small lights underneath. There was a button labeled "Run," and another labeled "Halt."

Me being me, I wanted to see if it still worked. The power cord was cracked and brittle, so I donned some rubber gloves and boots, and plugged it in. Nothing happened. So I unplugged it and opened it up with a screwdriver, reseated the vacuum tubes (!) and tried again. Voila! I was rewarded with a hum as the lights in my house dimmed slightly. The 16 lights began to flash in a seemingly random manner. I had set up my webcam pointing at the box, and was able to capture the following sequence of lights:



After a minute or so of running, there was a sizzle and pop from the machine, and a stinky puff of white smoke wafted up. Everything went dead (including the lights in my house) and I hastily unplugged the machine. Looking inside, I could see that the internals were toasted for good.

In looking at the sparse documentation, it seems to me that this was a very early prototype of a portable compter, to be used by the military for calculating azimuth and distance to a target. The user interface leaves a little to be desired, which is probably what condemned it to the back of the warehouse. I believe that a program still resided in the iron core of the machine, and it was calculating the position according to it's last program. Unfortunately, it's computing days are over.

Before the last pages of the manual crumbled to dust, I was able to determine the following:
The MINIAC-1 apparently had an 8-bit processor, but used a single 16-bit accumulator for its primitive math operations.
It apparently had about 100 bytes of storage.
It was programmed by setting the 'Code' switches to the desired operator, and the 'Data' switches to the desired memory address, and this was entered by pressing the 'Accept' button. 'Run' and 'Halt' did the obvious things.
It has a single register: a 16-bit accumulator that is represented by the 16 individual lights on the front of the machine. Some instructions turned them on, some didn't.

Perhaps the location the machine was calculating is the site of some hidden prize. Who knows? Maybe the preceding information can be analyzed to determine the location!

About the cache: This is no Uber-Micro. The container is a large tool box with plenty of room to hold big stuff. All the original contents are functional electronic devices of some sort, with the exception of a few Sweet-Pea-made Geocaching specialties. The first finder should be pleasantly surprised. Among the items:

A Palm 105 PDA in its original box, with CD and accessories;
A working GPSr;
A working Nokia cell phone (sorry, no service ;);
A NIB cordless home phone;
2 FRS radios;
A scientific calculator;
A digital camera
And some other good stuff! ;)

The terrain will allow a driver with a high-clearance 2WD and some courage to get within a few hundred feet of the cache. Cars might have to stop farther out. This is a cool area and there are other caches not too far away to make a complete day of it.

This is probably the last puzzle cache TDP will do for a while, so we wanted to make it a good one. MINIAC is intended as a tribute to the ingenuity and inventiveness of the Arizona puzzle cachers. We hope you enjoy it.

Oh - BTW, the first cacher to email me the (real) name of the MINIAC theme song gets a free MINIAC T-shirt.

EDIT: For the teams who have found MINIAC-1, your special victory theme song is here: MINIAC-1 Victory Song. You will need Sonique or Winamp to play it. Envision a gleaming "Congratulations!" graphic slowly rotating as it plays.

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