From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Fri Jul 1 03:51:30 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 04:51:30 -0400 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac Message-ID: yes smecc saved one... I do not see a lot of them around anymore.... In a message dated 6/30/2016 6:40:37 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, terry at webweavers.co.nz writes: My classic/vintage computer activity has taken a back seat lately but I did find a machine I had on the "classic" list for some time. It's now part of the collection. http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/imac.htm Some would say this is not vintage, classic or collectible (and so shouldn't be discussed here). However, these are all subjected terms which can be (and are!) argued about at length. To me it's a noteworthy model which had some impact on personal computing (notably by helping put Apple back in the game). Vintage? At only 18 years old perhaps not but a classic and collectible? As time goes by I would say yes. Terry (Tez) From holm at freibergnet.de Fri Jul 1 06:40:57 2016 From: holm at freibergnet.de (Holm Tiffe) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 13:40:57 +0200 Subject: Who is using an Dolch (DLI) Logic Analyzer? Message-ID: <20160701114057.GA63436@beast.freibergnet.de> Hi all, I've got an Dolch C100D Analyzer with an bunch of Probes lately, And I'm lookinffor someone that has an Dolch LA with an Disassembler Option - ROM installed and is able to read out it's contents. I Do habe an C100D analyzer, got it w/o any documentation but the LAM3250 docs available at the uni Stuttgart fits alsmost exactly. It seems, that most of the Dolch LAs are internal powered from a Z80 so it is'nt unlikely that the Options will fit in different models. I'll get two Dolch 64300 tomorrow, one for repair..disassemblers included, but the 64300 has ROM cassettes for plugin. Kind Regards, Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Freiberger Stra?e 42, 09600 Obersch?na, USt-Id: DE253710583 www.tsht.de, info at tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741 From billdegnan at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 08:41:01 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 09:41:01 -0400 Subject: FOCAL-65 for the 6502? In-Reply-To: <062a01d1d1fb$9ea22d00$dbe68700$@gmail.com> References: <061601d1d1ee$755bff00$6013fd00$@gmail.com> <062a01d1d1fb$9ea22d00$dbe68700$@gmail.com> Message-ID: > > > > > > I seem to remember an OSI version/docs. I may have the docs for this if > anyone wants me to investigate... > > Bill Degnan > twitter: billdeg > vintagecomputer.net > ----- > > I'm interested, Bill. Thank you for checking. > ----- > > So far, I have not found it. I have a lot of unlabeled notebooks to browse through From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 09:00:00 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 10:00:00 -0400 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:09 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: > My classic/vintage computer activity has taken a back seat lately but I did > find a machine I had on the "classic" list for some time. It's now part of > the collection. > http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/imac.htm Cool. > Some would say this is not vintage, classic or collectible (and so > shouldn't be discussed here). However, these are all subjected terms which > can be (and are!) argued about at length. I would say that it is. It's an iconic machine that runs a no-longer-mainstream and does represent an inflection point in Apple's long history. > To me it's a noteworthy model which had some impact on personal computing > (notably by helping put Apple back in the game). Exactly. > Vintage? At only 18 > years old perhaps not but a classic and collectible? As time goes by I > would say yes. I also encompasses some interest design elements - the shift to color definitely stands out, as does that terrible mouse. I happen to have one myself. I should dust it off and fire it up and check what OS is on the disk. -ethan From mj at mjturner.net Fri Jul 1 09:54:57 2016 From: mj at mjturner.net (Michael-John Turner) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 15:54:57 +0100 Subject: AIX from Motorola In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160701145457.GD22778@saucer.turnde.net> On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 02:19:54PM +0300, Plamen Mihaylov wrote: > Anyone have Motorola based AIX installation cds at least 4.1.4r4 or newer? Did you manage to find a copy? If not, I _think_ I have a copy somewhere so can take a look. I assume this is for a PowerStack? Cheers, MJ -- Michael-John Turner * mj at mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/ From jwest at classiccmp.org Fri Jul 1 10:05:31 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 10:05:31 -0500 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00a101d1d3aa$03208920$09619b60$@classiccmp.org> Terry wrote... > Some would say this is not vintage, classic or collectible (and so > shouldn't be discussed here). However, these are all subjected terms > which can be (and are!) argued about at length. To which Ethan replied: ---- I would say that it is. It's an iconic machine that runs a no-longer-mainstream {OS?} and does represent an inflection point in Apple's long history. ---- Exactly. Agreed. Very well put. J From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 10:24:18 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 11:24:18 -0400 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: <00a101d1d3aa$03208920$09619b60$@classiccmp.org> References: <00a101d1d3aa$03208920$09619b60$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Jay West wrote: > Terry wrote... >> Some would say this is not vintage, classic or collectible (and so >> shouldn't be discussed here). However, these are all subjected terms >> which can be (and are!) argued about at length. > > To which Ethan replied: > ---- > I would say that it is. It's an iconic machine that runs a no-longer-mainstream {OS?} and does represent an inflection point in Apple's long history. > ---- > Exactly. Agreed. Very well put. Yes. OS. Thanks for catching that. Seems that several characters got dropped from that post (should say "It also encompasses..." -ethan From ian.finder at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 13:41:24 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 11:41:24 -0700 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass Message-ID: I know a few list members who have been doing this, after fixing CRT cataracts. Was that glass additionally leaded to cut down on X-rays at all? Is there a risk to that? These are mostly black and white CRTs. -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 1 13:43:58 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 14:43:58 -0400 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> > On Jul 1, 2016, at 2:41 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > I know a few list members who have been doing this, after fixing CRT > cataracts. > > Was that glass additionally leaded to cut down on X-rays at all? Is there a > risk to that? > > These are mostly black and white CRTs. From what I remember, the concerns about X-rays didn't appear until the higher acceleration voltages used in color CRTs. I'm not sure if it's significant even there, unless you're worried about lawyers rather than reality. paul From ian.finder at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 13:46:29 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 11:46:29 -0700 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> Message-ID: That was my thought too- color CRTs are where this really mattered- which is why I mentioned black and white. I am not overly concerned, someone in the IRC channel I'm in asked and I thought I'd ping. Even then, in a color CRT without any lead shielding, I'd bet the emissions pale in comparison to any kind of real medical X-ray. On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 11:43 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > > On Jul 1, 2016, at 2:41 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > > > I know a few list members who have been doing this, after fixing CRT > > cataracts. > > > > Was that glass additionally leaded to cut down on X-rays at all? Is > there a > > risk to that? > > > > These are mostly black and white CRTs. > > From what I remember, the concerns about X-rays didn't appear until the > higher acceleration voltages used in color CRTs. I'm not sure if it's > significant even there, unless you're worried about lawyers rather than > reality. > > paul > > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Fri Jul 1 13:44:43 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 18:44:43 +0000 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I know a few list members who have been doing this, after fixing CRT > cataracts. > > Was that glass additionally leaded to cut down on X-rays at all? Is there a > risk to that? It probably was leaded glass, but mono CRTs only run at about 15kV on the final anode. I don't think you get much of an X ray risk from that. The older TV CRTs (at least in the UK) had a separate implosion guard that was either a sheet of laminated glass, or later on a tough plastic sheet or 'bowl'. I don't think those (particularly the latter) would be much of an X ray shield, nor do I ever remember seeing warning about X ray hazards when repairing such sets (which might involve running the CRT out of the cabinet, and thus without the shield in place. Colour CRTs might be a different matter. AFAIK all the ones used in the UK TVs had integral implosion protection so there was never any suggestion that they could be run without that. And they run at 25kV EHT. I do remember reading that the EHT rectifier diode valves and shunt stabiliser triodes in early colour TVs gave off enough Xrays to be dangerous, I never saw similar warnings about the rectifier valves in monochrome TVs. -tony From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Fri Jul 1 13:58:18 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 14:58:18 -0400 Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg Message-ID: <1e8a0.63e72d75.44a8174a@aol.com> Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg for the computer display at SMECC! Also want any promo material, artwork, manuals etc etc etc.... drop me a line offlist with a title of SMECC Packard Bell please to _couryhouse at aol.com_ (mailto:couryhouse at aol.com) thisis what we are looking for http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg In a message dated 7/1/2016 10:49:36 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, js at cimmeri.com writes: Computers don't (yet) have voting rights. :-) But you're defining "spirit" and listing criteria by which a machine is appropriate or not. A PS/2 with an 80386 running Windows 3.1 is acceptable, whereas a Packard Bell with an 80386 running Windows 3.1 is not. Yeah, you and I would cringe at a PB being discussed, but maybe there's someone out there who really is fond of their PB. So as Terry ("Tezza") acknowledges, terms like "landmark," "classic," "collectible" are subjective (but I don't think "vintage" is subjective -- that term is usually set by age alone). This is why it's just easier to use a single criteria -- age -- and leave it at that. Why is age acceptable everywhere else in collecting, but not here? Otherwise, someone (the list owner?) has to pontificate over a list of acceptable computers. Good luck with that. - J. From toby at telegraphics.com.au Fri Jul 1 14:03:09 2016 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 15:03:09 -0400 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> Message-ID: <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> On 2016-07-01 2:46 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > That was my thought too- color CRTs are where this really mattered- which > is why I mentioned black and white. > > I am not overly concerned, someone in the IRC channel I'm in asked and I > thought I'd ping. Even then, in a color CRT without any lead shielding, I'd > bet the emissions pale in comparison to any kind of real medical X-ray. Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for months or years and the latter is momentary. --Toby > > On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 11:43 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > >> >>> On Jul 1, 2016, at 2:41 PM, Ian Finder wrote: >>> >>> I know a few list members who have been doing this, after fixing CRT >>> cataracts. >>> >>> Was that glass additionally leaded to cut down on X-rays at all? Is >> there a >>> risk to that? >>> >>> These are mostly black and white CRTs. >> >> From what I remember, the concerns about X-rays didn't appear until the >> higher acceleration voltages used in color CRTs. I'm not sure if it's >> significant even there, unless you're worried about lawyers rather than >> reality. >> >> paul >> >> >> > > From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Fri Jul 1 14:05:34 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 19:05:34 +0000 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> , <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: > > I am not overly concerned, someone in the IRC channel I'm in asked and I > > thought I'd ping. Even then, in a color CRT without any lead shielding, I'd > > bet the emissions pale in comparison to any kind of real medical X-ray. > > Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for > months or years and the latter is momentary. I am not convinced that the effect is purely cumulative anyway. In other words, a lower intensity (and lower energy) beam for longer might not do as much damage as a brief pulse from a high intensity, high energy source. Silly example (using visible light, not X rays), I can look at the output of a normal red LED for many hours without any eye damage. But shining a high power laser in my eye for a fraction of a second would blind me. -tony From js at cimmeri.com Fri Jul 1 14:27:16 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2016 14:27:16 -0500 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: <5776C414.4080400@cimmeri.com> On 7/1/2016 2:03 PM, Toby Thain wrote: > On 2016-07-01 2:46 PM, Ian Finder wrote: >> That was my thought too- color CRTs >> are where this really mattered- which >> is why I mentioned black and white. >> >> I am not overly concerned, someone in >> the IRC channel I'm in asked and I >> thought I'd ping. Even then, in a >> color CRT without any lead shielding, >> I'd >> bet the emissions pale in comparison >> to any kind of real medical X-ray. > > Not a very good comparison because one > is pointed at your head for months or > years and the latter is momentary. > > --Toby The body can handle very low-level, constant radiation. This is self-evident as radiation exists pretty much everywhere naturally -- at a very low level. It gets problematic either above a certain constand level, or with sudden (or instantaneous) higher doses. Dose over time matters, but there is apparently some cumulative effect as well. - J. From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 1 14:30:31 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 15:30:31 -0400 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: <5776C414.4080400@cimmeri.com> References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> <5776C414.4080400@cimmeri.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 1, 2016, at 3:27 PM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: > > > > On 7/1/2016 2:03 PM, Toby Thain wrote: >> On 2016-07-01 2:46 PM, Ian Finder wrote: >>> That was my thought too- color CRTs are where this really mattered- which >>> is why I mentioned black and white. >>> >>> I am not overly concerned, someone in the IRC channel I'm in asked and I >>> thought I'd ping. Even then, in a color CRT without any lead shielding, I'd >>> bet the emissions pale in comparison to any kind of real medical X-ray. >> >> Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for months or years and the latter is momentary. >> >> --Toby > > The body can handle very low-level, constant radiation. This is self-evident as radiation exists pretty much everywhere naturally -- at a very low level. Self evident except to those weirdos who cling to the "no safe level" myth. A very nice myth if you're a dishonest lawyer -- it pays the bills. paul From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 1 15:08:28 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 13:08:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> , <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: > Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for > months or years and the latter is momentary. On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, tony duell wrote: I am not convinced that the effect is purely cumulative anyway. In other words, a lower intensity (and lower energy) beam for longer might not do as much damage as a brief pulse from a high intensity, high energy source. The "pro-nuclear" community calls it the "LNT" ("Linear No Threshold") premise. How much of the health damage of early color TV was due, not to the hardware, but to the quality of the content? (USA networks were/are clearly worse than BBC) From austinpass at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 15:28:32 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 21:28:32 +0100 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB Message-ID: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> I'm trying to preserve my Acorn ADFS 3.5" discs. To this end, I've purchased a KryoFlux "Pro" board and a new-old-stock ALPS floppy drive. I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM and everything *seems* to be working. However, the .adl images I create are all 0KB in size. I've created a profile to match the discs I'm reading (256byte sector size, tracks 0-79, MFM encoding, interleaved sides). Recording the flux transitions captures data, but when I run the resultant data back through DTC I get the same. Any ideas? -Austin. Sent from my iPad From toby at telegraphics.com.au Fri Jul 1 15:40:31 2016 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 16:40:31 -0400 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: On 2016-07-01 4:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: >> Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for >> months or years and the latter is momentary. > On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, tony duell wrote: > I am not convinced that the effect is purely cumulative anyway. In other > words, > a lower intensity (and lower energy) beam for longer might not do as > much damage as a brief pulse from a high intensity, high energy source. Granted. But this is all well studied, we can just look up the numbers and the science. Probably something people using unshielded CRTs are best motivated to do. --Toby > > The "pro-nuclear" community calls it the "LNT" ("Linear No Threshold") > premise. > > How much of the health damage of early color TV was due, not to the > hardware, but to the quality of the content? > (USA networks were/are clearly worse than BBC) > > > > From toby at telegraphics.com.au Fri Jul 1 15:42:04 2016 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 16:42:04 -0400 Subject: Toss your TV - was Re: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: <87c1816e-4247-dc95-0fb6-64ade1b70819@telegraphics.com.au> On 2016-07-01 4:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: >> Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for >> months or years and the latter is momentary. > ... > > How much of the health damage of early color TV was due, not to the > hardware, but to the quality of the content? > (USA networks were/are clearly worse than BBC) The content has only deteriorated since then. --Toby From drlegendre at gmail.com Fri Jul 1 20:27:27 2016 From: drlegendre at gmail.com (drlegendre .) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 20:27:27 -0500 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: " I do remember reading that the EHT rectifier diode valves and shunt stabiliser triodes in early colour TVs gave off enough Xrays to be dangerous" This is true. I have here an old HV octal-base tube rectifier that came out of a color set. The vacuum envelope itself is encased in a second outer envelope, which seems to be made of something like 3/16" lead. The outer envelope carries multiple warnings about x-ray emissions, and instructs you to avoid arcing the anode to the case, or causing any other sort of mechanical shock or damage as it may reduce the x-ray safety. Of the countless thousands of tubes I've sorted, this is the only one I've ever come across. On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Toby Thain wrote: > On 2016-07-01 4:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > >> Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for >>> months or years and the latter is momentary. >>> >> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, tony duell wrote: >> I am not convinced that the effect is purely cumulative anyway. In other >> words, >> a lower intensity (and lower energy) beam for longer might not do as >> much damage as a brief pulse from a high intensity, high energy source. >> > > > Granted. But this is all well studied, we can just look up the numbers and > the science. Probably something people using unshielded CRTs are best > motivated to do. > > --Toby > > > > > >> The "pro-nuclear" community calls it the "LNT" ("Linear No Threshold") >> premise. >> >> How much of the health damage of early color TV was due, not to the >> hardware, but to the quality of the content? >> (USA networks were/are clearly worse than BBC) >> >> >> >> >> > From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 1 21:31:29 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 19:31:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote: > I'm trying to preserve my Acorn ADFS 3.5" discs. To this end, I've > purchased a KryoFlux "Pro" board and a new-old-stock ALPS floppy drive. > I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM and everything *seems* to be > working. However, the .adl images I create are all 0KB in size. > I've created a profile to match the discs I'm reading (256byte sector > size, tracks 0-79, MFM encoding, interleaved sides). > Recording the flux transitions captures data, but when I run the > resultant data back through DTC I get the same. > Any ideas? "everything *seems* to be working" Have you tried using the drive without the Kryoflex? Have you confirmed that your kryoflex setup is working with anything that it is KNOWN to work with? I think that Acorn is a "normal" IBM/WD style MFM, but I'm not sure. So, the first step is to determine whether the Kryoflex is not working right, or whether it is a problem with Acorn format. Therefore, make some .adl files from 720K PC-DOS floppies. If THAT process fails, then go to the Kryoflex forums with THAT problem, since it removes all variable other than your computer, your drive, and your Kryoflex. If that works, then lets look at other potential problems with the Acorn compatability with it. For example, if the Acorn was using a WD controller chip, there is a possibility that it started writing soon enough after index that the system isn't ready. Do you know the physical format that your Acorn disks are using? Can you read sectors from them with stock PC hardware? (INT13h; if sector size other than 512 bytes, then INT1Eh also) What capacity are they? Do you know for sure that the recording on these disks are intact? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From gtoal at gtoal.com Sat Jul 2 01:55:15 2016 From: gtoal at gtoal.com (Graham Toal) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 01:55:15 -0500 Subject: Edinburgh folks heading for TNMoC, BP in Aug Message-ID: Hi folks - if any of the folks I used to know are still on this list (Tony Duell? Pete Turnbull? Jim Doran? Jules Richardson?), I just wanted to let you know I'll be visiting TNMoC for the first time on 11th Aug. I mentioned this on the Edinburgh Computer History Project list and a few of the old Edinburgh hands will be coming along to make a day trip of it. If anyone is going to be in the neighbourhood and wants to say hello while we're there, let me know (or subscribe to our Yahoo group for updates) We had an Edinburgh connection with BP through Donald Michie, and I believe a bunch of our old computer center hardware (2976?) ended up in a shed at TNMoC. Best regards, Graham (PS I was never gone, I just don't post much.) From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Fri Jul 1 13:57:28 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 14:57:28 -0400 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac Message-ID: <1e84c.2128ec94.44a81717@aol.com> Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg for the computer display at SMECC! Also want any promo material, artwork, manuals etc etc etc.... drop me a line offlist with a title of SMECC Packard Bell please to _couryhouse at aol.com_ (mailto:couryhouse at aol.com) thisis what we are looking for http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg In a message dated 7/1/2016 10:49:36 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, js at cimmeri.com writes: Computers don't (yet) have voting rights. :-) But you're defining "spirit" and listing criteria by which a machine is appropriate or not. A PS/2 with an 80386 running Windows 3.1 is acceptable, whereas a Packard Bell with an 80386 running Windows 3.1 is not. Yeah, you and I would cringe at a PB being discussed, but maybe there's someone out there who really is fond of their PB. So as Terry ("Tezza") acknowledges, terms like "landmark," "classic," "collectible" are subjective (but I don't think "vintage" is subjective -- that term is usually set by age alone). This is why it's just easier to use a single criteria -- age -- and leave it at that. Why is age acceptable everywhere else in collecting, but not here? Otherwise, someone (the list owner?) has to pontificate over a list of acceptable computers. Good luck with that. - J. From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Sat Jul 2 05:44:36 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 10:44:36 +0000 Subject: Edinburgh folks heading for TNMoC, BP in Aug In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Hi folks - if any of the folks I used to know are still on this list (Tony > Duell? Pete Turnbull? Jim Doran? Jules Richardson?), I just wanted to let I am still here, although not posting as much as I used to. Mainly becuase much of what is discussed here are things I know nothing about (machines that are rather too modern for me, emulators, etc). -tony From dave at 661.org Sat Jul 2 08:00:40 2016 From: dave at 661.org (David Griffith) Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2016 06:00:40 -0700 Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg In-Reply-To: <1e8a0.63e72d75.44a8174a@aol.com> References: <1e8a0.63e72d75.44a8174a@aol.com> Message-ID: <41319A63-1581-470D-BEB4-911572CA6F58@661.org> On July 1, 2016 11:58:18 AM PDT, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > >Actually we want this Packard Bell >http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg > for the computer display at SMECC! > >Also want any promo material, artwork, manuals etc etc etc.... > >drop me a line offlist with a title of SMECC Packard Bell please >to _couryhouse at aol.com_ (mailto:couryhouse at aol.com) > >thisis what we are looking for >http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg > > > >In a message dated 7/1/2016 10:49:36 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, >js at cimmeri.com writes: > > >Computers don't (yet) have voting >rights. :-) > >But you're defining "spirit" and listing >criteria by which a machine is >appropriate or not. A PS/2 with an >80386 running Windows 3.1 is acceptable, >whereas a Packard Bell with an 80386 >running Windows 3.1 is not. Yeah, you >and I would cringe at a PB being >discussed, but maybe there's someone out >there who really is fond of their PB. > >So as Terry ("Tezza") acknowledges, >terms like "landmark," "classic," >"collectible" are subjective (but I >don't think "vintage" is subjective -- >that term is usually set by age alone). > >This is why it's just easier to use a >single criteria -- age -- and leave it >at that. Why is age acceptable >everywhere else in collecting, but not >here? Otherwise, someone (the list >owner?) has to pontificate over a list >of acceptable computers. Good luck with >that. > >- J. It seems that museums have traditionaly sought the best artifacts. I feel they should also exhibit crap from time to time to remind visitors of history's wrong turns. -- David Griffith dave at 661.org From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Sat Jul 2 09:39:23 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 15:39:23 +0100 Subject: what's vintage? was Re: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: References: <5776AD30.9000502@cimmeri.com> <201607011800.u61I0eov54657784@floodgap.com> <5776B773.4040809@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 02/07/2016 14:58, Liam Proven wrote: > On 1 July 2016 at 20:33, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> ...and numerous clones. This email is being run through a server >> running Ubuntu on a headless Orange Pi PC. At $15, I'll probably buy a >> few more. > > That's one thing I don't get. The RasPi is interesting because it can > run so many OSes, and more are appearing. One of mine runs Lubuntu, > sure, but the other has RISC OS. I also want to play with Plan 9, > FreeBSD, Interim, I'm wondering if I can learn enough to port Oberon > or even Inferno. > > It's a computer. It can run lots of OSes. > > All the others, AFAIK, run Linux and nothing else. As such they're of > little interest to me. > As ever one English word can have more than one connotation. "Vintage" is no exception. If we dispense with the wine allusion then a more general usage could be "the best example of its type" Adding some kind of chronological definer such as "in the 1960's" would help. Having defined our terms of reference we can then move on to make our choice. Clearly, even with agreed parameters, one person might offer more than one example as a candidate. A group of people will almost certainly produce a selection of answers. So as to if a computer is vintage or not is an opinion. A preponderance of one computer type or model might indicate some group agreement. Rod Smallwood From dkelvey at hotmail.com Sat Jul 2 09:40:19 2016 From: dkelvey at hotmail.com (dwight) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 14:40:19 +0000 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> , Message-ID: I suspect the warning about arcing was that it could damage the regulator. The voltage would increase, increasing the Xray level. Depending on the metal being hit by electrons, it take a minimum level before Xray emission starts. As I recall, the regulator on a color TV was intended to keep it below that threshold. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk on behalf of drlegendre . Sent: Friday, July 1, 2016 6:27:27 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass " I do remember reading that the EHT rectifier diode valves and shunt stabiliser triodes in early colour TVs gave off enough Xrays to be dangerous" This is true. I have here an old HV octal-base tube rectifier that came out of a color set. The vacuum envelope itself is encased in a second outer envelope, which seems to be made of something like 3/16" lead. The outer envelope carries multiple warnings about x-ray emissions, and instructs you to avoid arcing the anode to the case, or causing any other sort of mechanical shock or damage as it may reduce the x-ray safety. Of the countless thousands of tubes I've sorted, this is the only one I've ever come across. On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Toby Thain wrote: > On 2016-07-01 4:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > >> Not a very good comparison because one is pointed at your head for >>> months or years and the latter is momentary. >>> >> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, tony duell wrote: >> I am not convinced that the effect is purely cumulative anyway. In other >> words, >> a lower intensity (and lower energy) beam for longer might not do as >> much damage as a brief pulse from a high intensity, high energy source. >> > > > Granted. But this is all well studied, we can just look up the numbers and > the science. Probably something people using unshielded CRTs are best > motivated to do. > > --Toby > > > > > >> The "pro-nuclear" community calls it the "LNT" ("Linear No Threshold") >> premise. >> >> How much of the health damage of early color TV was due, not to the >> hardware, but to the quality of the content? >> (USA networks were/are clearly worse than BBC) >> >> >> >> >> > From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 09:53:08 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 07:53:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg In-Reply-To: <41319A63-1581-470D-BEB4-911572CA6F58@661.org> References: <1e8a0.63e72d75.44a8174a@aol.com> <41319A63-1581-470D-BEB4-911572CA6F58@661.org> Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, David Griffith wrote: > It seems that museums have traditionaly sought the best artifacts. I > feel they should also exhibit crap from time to time to remind visitors > of history's wrong turns. It took a little while before Edsels became collectible. Yugo From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sat Jul 2 10:10:54 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 17:10:54 +0200 Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg In-Reply-To: References: <1e8a0.63e72d75.44a8174a@aol.com> <41319A63-1581-470D-BEB4-911572CA6F58@661.org> Message-ID: <20160702151053.GB25845@Update.UU.SE> On Sat, Jul 02, 2016 at 07:53:08AM -0700, Fred Cisin wrote: > On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, David Griffith wrote: > >It seems that museums have traditionaly sought the best artifacts. I feel > >they should also exhibit crap from time to time to remind visitors of > >history's wrong turns. > > It took a little while before Edsels became collectible. > Yugo What was wrong with the Edsel? besides.. you know, looking like a c**t. /P From wdonzelli at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 10:42:13 2016 From: wdonzelli at gmail.com (William Donzelli) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:42:13 -0400 Subject: Running CRTs without implosion protection glass In-Reply-To: References: <9B5C6AD3-AD60-4A33-90E4-5283ADD1AAB1@comcast.net> <08e9c5f4-1f47-5725-5146-021e9d11bf40@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: > Depending on the metal being hit by electrons, it take a minimum level > > before Xray emission starts. As I recall, the regulator on a color TV > > was intended to keep it below that threshold. The whole color TV xray scare was mostly just that - a scare. Even the old "roundie" color sets did not pose a hazard under normal operating conditions, but the scare was intense enough to cause the 3DR3 and 3DS3 tubes to appear for a very short time. They are now somewhat scarce, so do not pitch any you find. The jacket on the tubes is a lead impregnated rubber. The issue is if the regulator stops working, then a set might go haywire enough to cause x-rays to form - but in real life, this would generally kill the whole set, or make it unwatchable enough that the viewer would generally turn the set off. So basically under freak conditions, some x-rays can be present. -- Will From spectre at floodgap.com Sat Jul 2 10:52:51 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 08:52:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: what's vintage? was Re: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: from Liam Proven at "Jul 2, 16 03:58:44 pm" Message-ID: <201607021552.u62FqpqS3342370@floodgap.com> > This email is being run through a server > running Ubuntu on a headless Orange Pi PC. This E-mail is being run through a server running AIX on a 2-way POWER6 (an IBM p520). > At $15, I'll probably buy a few more. At $10,000 when I bought it (used!) in 2010 ... I, uh, ... I did get a spare backplane for it recently which was around $1800. However, the outside backup spool is a VM slice running FreeBSD because I needed the redundancy; I used to have a peering arrangement with some of my friends and buddies in different geographical areas but they've all stopped running their own local hardware. This may well be the last tank I own and operate. The next iteration might just be one of those cheap ARM things. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Optimization hinders evolution. -------------------------------------------- From jwest at classiccmp.org Sat Jul 2 11:43:21 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:43:21 -0500 Subject: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: <5776AD30.9000502@cimmeri.com> References: <57769A57.7060207@cimmeri.com> <201607011632.u61GWFqv17302848@floodgap.com> <5776AD30.9000502@cimmeri.com> Message-ID: <000001d1d480$d833a260$889ae720$@classiccmp.org> Js wrote... ------ Otherwise, someone (the list owner?) has to pontificate over a list of acceptable computers. Good luck with that. ------ Actually, given the number of years (decades) of doing exactly that - I have had very good luck with that and it has worked well. But since it's subjective, it's easy to "move forward". The issue is - setting a specific age, or a specific list of computers, or any one of a number of objective criteria - will leave some people out, and may well need to change over time. And if there is a specific list, any time a change is suggested there will be endless (and flammable) debate. One example - there are machines that I would now consider ok topics for discussion here that I would have never allowed 10 years ago. There are also machines that I would find it hard to believe would ever be on-topic, no matter what their age. Another example - if a longtime listmember that always discusses and contributes well to very on-topic machines one day asks a question about an intel i7 machine - I'm likely to let that slide. A specific list or age precludes that. As a result, what I have done and will continue to do - is make a subjective assessment based on the specific post, what I suspect most of the listmembers feel at the time, the posters proclivity for off-topicness, etc. This is one of those cases where I think subjectivity on my part makes for a better community and user experience than a hard and fast list or age cutoff. If I am (or ever) start doing a bad job of that the users will leave in droves, or stage a mutiny - which I'd deserve at that point. My own (current) thought is that whitebox PC's will never be on topic. Maybe one or two someday might be considered historically important in some way, or have introduced a feature that became important, or gathered a specific following. But that day isn't today. We'll see in another 5 or 10 years perhaps. Best, J From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 13:37:04 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:37:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote: > Genius. Clever? yes. Genius? no, or you would have to count too many of us. > But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com file to > have a header. > http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 NO. A .COM file is a pure image of memory, starting at location 100h. The "header" or "zero page" or "program segment prefix" is generated on the fly during the loading of the program. (There is a lot more to know about it) The Zero Page is 256 bytes of data structures. Among those are a copy of the command line (placed at 80h), and, if there was a filename as an argument on the command line, a fully parsed File Control Block for that filename (placed at location 5Ch) (There is a lot more to know about it) The first thing that I did in CP/M was to create a zero length program. it seemed intuitively obvious as a needed capability. Didn't everybody realize that and do it? It never occurred to me to try to SELL it! In those days, there was almost an assumption that price would be proportional to program length. For those who wanted "source code" for it: SAVE 0 A:JMP100.COM (SAVE was one of the five CP/M internal commands, ERA,REN,DIR,TYPE) Since program loading created the data structures from 0 through 0FFh, but 0 bytes did NOT alter the TPA (Transient Program Area), it provided a way at the command line to do a jump to location 100h, which could sometimes restart or regain control from some kinds of program crashes. Headers for executable came along with MS-DOS. (already present in many/most operating systems other than CP/M & MS-DOS) In MS-DOS, a .COM file is STILL a pure image of memory, starting at location 100h. But, an MS-DOS .EXE file is the form of MS-DOS executable that DOES have a header. The .EXE header starts with "MZ". Having a fixed beginning lets the computer recognize which files are .COM and which are .EXE without resorting to filename. 'Course that does prevent you from creating a .COM file that starts with DEC BP POP DX since that will be indistinguishable from the marker of a .EXE file. Why "MZ", instead of something else, maybe even something that would NEVER be used in a .COM? Initials of Mark Zbikowski. Who was he? As little is known about him as is about Howard Fullmer ("Parasitic Engineering" and chief engineer for Morrow) The result is that at the MS-DOS command line, if you type something, the command processor (COMMAND.COM) checks its list of internal commands. If found, it executes it. If not found, it looks for that a matching filename with .COM, and executes it. If not found, it looks for .EXE and executes it. If not found, it looks for .BAT and executes it. If not found, it gripes. ("BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME") (There is a lot more to know about it) If what was found was .COM or .EXE, then it starts by looking at the first two bytes of the file. It actually DOES NOT MATTER if you rename or MIS-name a .COM as .EXE, or MIS-name a .EXE as .COM! The differentiation is done by whether the first two bytes are "MZ". MIS-naming a .EXE .COM will cause it to be found (and run) before one with otherwise same name with .EXE extension. Do you need examples of why you might want to? (There is a lot more to know about it) If it is not "MZ", then it creates a program segment prefix, loads the file into RAM starting at 100h, and jumps to 100h. If it IS "MZ", then the .EXE loader processes the header of the file. .EXE was present in MS-DOS since before release of 1.00, I seriously doubt that his earliest ports to MS-DOS were "before the EXE file format existed". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 13:43:33 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:43:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: <5777FE96.8010704@sydex.com> References: <5777FE96.8010704@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: > Of course, this only works when the program doesn't clobber its own > initialization code (to reclaim memory), which a lot of programs did in > those memory-limited days. OR, as part of the program's initialization code (starting at 100h) it clears the areas of the TPA used for holding the data/text/etc. that the program is working on. > Regardless, neither CP/M-80 nor MSDOS requires that a .COM file have any > particular structure--even MSDOS will try to run a zero-length .com file > without complaint. It was difficult to convince my students that they could not rely on memory being zeroed out before their programs ran. "Yes, it worked. Good start. But will it work RELIABLY if you run it again, or run it after somebody else's program runs?" -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 13:50:16 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:50:16 +0100 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: Thanks for the feedback Fred. The Kryoflux Forums are admin-approval-only and I've been waiting a couple of days for that to happen. To the best of my own knowledge it's a pretty standard MFM, as the computers featured the Western Digital 1770 and 1772 controllers. The specific discs I'm trying to image are 800KB "double density" designed for the 32 bit ARM based computers. I can't find any 720KB PC floppies, but I'll follow the methodology with 1.44MB HD ones to see where it takes me. -Austin. On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 3:31 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: > On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote: > >> I'm trying to preserve my Acorn ADFS 3.5" discs. To this end, I've >> purchased a KryoFlux "Pro" board and a new-old-stock ALPS floppy drive. >> I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM and everything *seems* to be >> working. However, the .adl images I create are all 0KB in size. >> I've created a profile to match the discs I'm reading (256byte sector >> size, tracks 0-79, MFM encoding, interleaved sides). >> Recording the flux transitions captures data, but when I run the >> resultant data back through DTC I get the same. >> Any ideas? >> > > "everything *seems* to be working" > > Have you tried using the drive without the Kryoflex? > > Have you confirmed that your kryoflex setup is working with anything that > it is KNOWN to work with? > > I think that Acorn is a "normal" IBM/WD style MFM, but I'm not sure. > > So, the first step is to determine whether the Kryoflex is not working > right, or whether it is a problem with Acorn format. > > Therefore, make some .adl files from 720K PC-DOS floppies. > If THAT process fails, then go to the Kryoflex forums with THAT problem, > since it removes all variable other than your computer, your drive, and > your Kryoflex. > > > If that works, then lets look at other potential problems with the Acorn > compatability with it. > For example, if the Acorn was using a WD controller chip, there is a > possibility that it started writing soon enough after index that the system > isn't ready. > > Do you know the physical format that your Acorn disks are using? > Can you read sectors from them with stock PC hardware? (INT13h; if sector > size other than 512 bytes, then INT1Eh also) > What capacity are they? > > > Do you know for sure that the recording on these disks are intact? > > -- > Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com > From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 13:51:35 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:51:35 +0100 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: I'm coming to the same conclusion - command line the way to go! Dumping the flux transitions (the "raw" mode your describe) certainly produces data, but I'm in the same boat when it comes to using DTC to put it in a readable image format. -Austin On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 3:06 AM, Jason T wrote: > On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 3:28 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > > I'm trying to preserve my Acorn ADFS 3.5" discs. To this end, I've > purchased a KryoFlux "Pro" board and a new-old-stock ALPS floppy drive. > > > > I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM and everything *seems* to be > working. However, the .adl images I create are all 0KB in size. > > A 0kb file - or one smaller than expected - means that the DTC program > was not able to make sense of some (or in this case, all) of the flux > transitions in terms of the format you selected. If I don't know what > I'm dealing with, I found it useful to read the disk in "raw" mode > first (where it makes a large file for each track) and then set DTC > against those flux files until I found the right combination of > settings to produce an image. A lot less wear on the disk and drive > vs. attempting to translate on the fly and failing a lot. You'll want > to get to know the command line options intimately - the GUI can't do > it all. > > Their forums are very useful for sorting out disk format details - > whatever you're reading, there's usually someone who has tried before > and gotten help. Here's a post on Acorn ADFS: > > http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=849 > > (I know nothing of Acorn, so that may not be what you're trying to do.) > > All DTC settings matter. In many cases, the order of the settings > matter, a lot. I've spent many hours banging my head against the > desk, only to find I had switched to flags around. > From jwest at classiccmp.org Sat Jul 2 13:54:47 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 13:54:47 -0500 Subject: kryoflux Message-ID: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> Does anyone have experience with reading in then writing out flux transitions with a Kryoflux on an 8? floppy drive as well? If that is known to work reliably I?m buying one :) Kryoflux?s next project should be the same thing but for ? mag tape. I think Al did something like that years ago, but an off the shelf product for ? tape would be spiffy. J From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 13:58:47 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:58:47 +0100 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 1 July 2016 at 22:28, Austin Pass wrote: > > I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM > > > A *VM*? > > Oh, come on. Be serious. If you're troubleshooting hardware, use > hardware. No blasted VMs. I'm amazed anything worked at all via a VM. > > Also, 8.1 is relatively speaking obsolete and unpopular. I'd suggest > W10 as it's a free download, for the rest of this month at least. > > -- > Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile > Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven > MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven > Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) > Thanks Liam. Although in this particular instance I have a high degree of confidence that the use of a VM (Parallels on an iMac running 10.11) and Windows 8.1 isn't the root of my problems. I can download firmware to the Kryoflux and calibrate it successfully. I can also pull raw flux transitions from the disc to a dump file, and watch the histograms plotted in the GUI whilst it does this. Had to pack the interesting stuff away this evening as I needed the space for modern stuff (fully loaded C7000 BladeCenter for anybody wondering exactly *how much* space ;-) but I'll have another go tomorrow morning if the kids will leave me alone for long enough. Apologies for the top-posting in my other two replies to the list. I did it without thinking as I'm using the Gmail web interface. -Austin. From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 14:04:17 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 20:04:17 +0100 Subject: kryoflux In-Reply-To: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> References: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Jay West wrote: > Does anyone have experience with reading in then writing out flux > transitions with a Kryoflux on an 8? floppy drive as well? If that is known > to work reliably? I?m buying one :) > > > > Kryoflux?s next project should be the same thing but for ? mag tape. I > think > Al did something like that years ago, but an off the shelf product for ? > tape would be spiffy. > > > > J > > It is known to work Jay. People use one of these http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.html to convert 50 pin to a PC-type 34 pin Shugart pinout that the Kryoflux needs, but it can control the drives and will dump the stream file. -Austin. From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sat Jul 2 14:10:10 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 15:10:10 -0400 Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg Message-ID: <7b72b.5091acb9.44a96b92@aol.com> Not just any Packard Bell... just this one. it has a place due to form and design, certainly not performance. http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg Please let me know if you find one. Ed Sharpe archivist for SMECC In a message dated 7/2/2016 7:53:14 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, cisin at xenosoft.com writes: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, David Griffith wrote: > It seems that museums have traditionaly sought the best artifacts. I > feel they should also exhibit crap from time to time to remind visitors > of history's wrong turns. It took a little while before Edsels became collectible. Yugo From lbickley at bickleywest.com Sat Jul 2 14:12:33 2016 From: lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:12:33 -0700 Subject: kryoflux In-Reply-To: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> References: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <20160702121233.2607d5d9@honcho.bcwi.net> On Sat, 2 Jul 2016 13:54:47 -0500 "Jay West" wrote: > Does anyone have experience with reading in then writing out flux > transitions with a Kryoflux on an 8? floppy drive as well? If that is > known to work reliably? I?m buying one :) Yes, I've used it with both 5.25" and 8" floppies. I have not (yet) been able to correctly write RX02 floppies - but it's my understanding that others have. I have successfully copied RX01 diskettes (via capture/write). > Kryoflux?s next project should be the same thing but for ? mag tape. > I think Al did something like that years ago, but an off the shelf > product for ? tape would be spiffy. That would be terrific :) Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From lbickley at bickleywest.com Sat Jul 2 14:14:44 2016 From: lbickley at bickleywest.com (Lyle Bickley) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:14:44 -0700 Subject: kryoflux In-Reply-To: References: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <20160702121444.2c5ba5d6@honcho.bcwi.net> On Sat, 2 Jul 2016 20:04:17 +0100 Austin Pass wrote: --snip-- > People use one of these http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.html to convert 50 > pin to a PC-type 34 pin Shugart pinout that the Kryoflux needs, but > it can control the drives and will dump the stream file. That's exactly what I've used... Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 14:25:08 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:25:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote: > Thanks for the feedback Fred. > The Kryoflux Forums are admin-approval-only and I've been waiting a couple > of days for that to happen. > To the best of my own knowledge it's a pretty standard MFM, as the > computers featured the Western Digital 1770 and 1772 controllers. > The specific discs I'm trying to image are 800KB "double density" designed > for the 32 bit ARM based computers. I can't find any 720KB PC floppies, > but I'll follow the methodology with 1.44MB HD ones to see where it takes > me. Although there will be a slight loss of long-term reliability (not an issue here), you can cover the media sensing hole of a 1.4M diskette and format it into 720K FORMAT B: /F:2 FORMAT B: /F:720 FORMAT B: /T:80/N:9 (all do the same thing) Then copy some files to it, so that there will be something interesting to see. That will be similar enough to the Acorn diskettes (if we are right about the details of the Acorn format). AND, then if those don't work either, then the Kryoflex forums won't get sidetracked into thinking that it is an Acorn issue. I think that THAT would be inevitable if you don't separate out whether the problem is with Kryoflex V Acorn! Is the capacity of the diskette 800K? or is that merely the name of the type of the diskette, with an actual capacity of somewhere between 640K and 800K? If the actual capacity is 800K, with MFM, then it would probably be 80 track, double sided, with either 10 512 byte sectors or 5 1024 byte sectors per track. (can't get up to 800K with "normal" WD style MFM with 256 bytes per sector, and 512 byte sectors are a little tight) If so, then it should be feasible to copy sectors from those disks in MS-DOS on a 5150 or 5160, using INT13h. Don't know whether it could be done in Windoze8. AFTER you get it working for all functions that you need with simple stuff, you should be able to do 8" with it. The 8" interface and behavior is virtually identical to that of a 5.25" 1.2M! Only a few pins need rearrangement on a 50 pin to 34 pin cable. If you want to WRITE to 8", then you may want to also deal with TG43. There is a commercial adapter (FDADAP) for that, which would also take care of the rest of the cabling. Be aware that power supplies are not standardized for 8"; you'll need to make your own if you get a drive without one. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 14:44:18 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:44:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: [Howard Fullmer] > https://books.google.cz/books?id=WDAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=Howard+Fullmer+parasitic+engineering&source=bl&ots=vR97Abpe-n&sig=PkbTWlbiUCJDMt4iyl80Mu7Tds0&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Howard%20Fullmer%20parasitic%20engineering&f=false At the Second West Coast Computer Faire, Fullmer and George Morrow presented a paper advocating the radical concept of trying to STANDARDIZE S-100! He was a major part of all of the S-100 standardization efforts. But, I remember him working out of his house on Hearst Street?, peddling "Shuffleboard" - a sandwich board inside the TRS-80 for memory relocation, linked with a sandwich board inside the expansion interface for 8" drives. About 20 years ago, I saw a mention in MicroTimes?? that he had died, and I can't find any confirmation. From jwest at classiccmp.org Sat Jul 2 15:22:32 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 15:22:32 -0500 Subject: Actually we want this Packard Bell http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl; _3.jpg In-Reply-To: <7b72b.5091acb9.44a96b92@aol.com> References: <7b72b.5091acb9.44a96b92@aol.com> Message-ID: <000401d1d49f$76e47fb0$64ad7f10$@classiccmp.org> Ed wrote... --------- Not just any Packard Bell... just this one. http://www.smecc.org/itemsklkljl;_3.jpg it has a place due to form and design, certainly not performance. --------- IMOO.... no place at all. If it had some kind of cult following, or lots of people remembered it, maybe. But I doubt most people (let alone collectors) would look at that and say "oh, I've seen that before!". Now... maybe as an example of how hard mfg's tried to differential via terrible case designs... ;) J From billdegnan at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 10:57:37 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:57:37 -0400 Subject: what's vintage? was Re: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: References: <5776AD30.9000502@cimmeri.com> <201607011800.u61I0eov54657784@floodgap.com> <5776B773.4040809@sydex.com> Message-ID: > > >> >> As ever one English word can have more than one connotation. "Vintage" is > no exception. > If we dispense with the wine allusion then a more general usage could be > "the best example of its type" > Adding some kind of chronological definer such as "in the 1960's" would > help. > > Having defined our terms of reference we can then move on to make our > choice. > Clearly, even with agreed parameters, one person might offer more than one > example as a candidate. > A group of people will almost certainly produce a selection of answers. > > So as to if a computer is vintage or not is an opinion. > A preponderance of one computer type or model might indicate some group > agreement. > > Rod Smallwood > > Couldn't have said this better myself. Absolutely agree. I very much understand that the majority sees "vintage computing" to mean more than the sum of the dictionary's definition, but doing so does not adapt well over time. If a person writes instead 8-bit vintage computing, 60's mini vintage computing, Apple vintage computing, and so on would be more correct...In short if one adds a modifier before "vintage computing" a lot of the clarification problems go away. -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From billdegnan at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 11:19:02 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:19:02 -0400 Subject: FOCAL-65 for the 6502? In-Reply-To: References: <061601d1d1ee$755bff00$6013fd00$@gmail.com> <062a01d1d1fb$9ea22d00$dbe68700$@gmail.com> Message-ID: Turns out I was wrong...It was Forth that I remember seeing, not Focal. The only Focal I have is on my PDP 8, I still have more docs to look through. I have a lot of OSI stuff and if it exists I bet I have it. I did not check but I have manuals for OSI Forth if anyone finds them worth scanning. b On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 9:41 AM, william degnan wrote: > >> > >> >> I seem to remember an OSI version/docs. I may have the docs for this if >> anyone wants me to investigate... >> >> Bill Degnan >> twitter: billdeg >> vintagecomputer.net >> ----- >> >> I'm interested, Bill. Thank you for checking. >> ----- >> >> > > So far, I have not found it. I have a lot of unlabeled notebooks to > browse through > -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From bob at cave.net Sat Jul 2 10:37:56 2016 From: bob at cave.net (Cavebob) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:37:56 -0400 Subject: Excessive Bounces In-Reply-To: References: <040e01d1d3bb$6f440990$4dcc1cb0$@ntlworld.com> <001101d1d3fb$4d91d530$e8b57f90$@classiccmp.org> <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> <04b201d1d463$d0b5ef10$7221cd30$@ntlworld.com> Message-ID: I have had the excessive bounce problem several times in the past using my sbcglobal.net account. I switched to my own private server and have not had a problem since. It turns out that ATT's anti-spam initiative can be fickle and at times a bit draconian. Bob From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 2 11:32:36 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 09:32:36 -0700 Subject: what's vintage? was Re: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac In-Reply-To: References: <5776AD30.9000502@cimmeri.com> <201607011800.u61I0eov54657784@floodgap.com> <5776B773.4040809@sydex.com> Message-ID: <5777ECA4.6030906@sydex.com> On 07/02/2016 08:57 AM, william degnan wrote: > Couldn't have said this better myself. Absolutely agree. I very > much understand that the majority sees "vintage computing" to mean > more than the sum of the dictionary's definition, but doing so does > not adapt well over time. If a person writes instead 8-bit vintage > computing, 60's mini vintage computing, Apple vintage computing, and > so on would be more correct...In short if one adds a modifier before > "vintage computing" a lot of the clarification problems go away. In my lifetime, I've seen the word "vintage" go from the conventional use of "pertaining to wine produced from a specific year's harvest of grapes" to "something old, but of unspecified age". After all, the "vin-" in the word indicates the wine connection. One can have a vintage 2015 Bordeaux, but apparently not a vintage computer of the same age. Like Humpty-Dumpty's "impenetrability", it can mean whatever we want it to mean, I suppose. --Chuck From robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com Sat Jul 2 08:15:31 2016 From: robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com (Rob Jarratt) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 14:15:31 +0100 Subject: Excessive Bounces In-Reply-To: <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> References: <040e01d1d3bb$6f440990$4dcc1cb0$@ntlworld.com> <001101d1d3fb$4d91d530$e8b57f90$@classiccmp.org> <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <04b201d1d463$d0b5ef10$7221cd30$@ntlworld.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West > Sent: 02 July 2016 10:37 > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' > > Subject: RE: Excessive Bounces > > I did dig into this for Rob, as well as a smattering of others that got disabled > yesterday early am. > > Almost 100% of the email addresses that get disabled due to excessive > retries are Hotmail, aol, and yahoo. Those email providers are well known as > "less than reliable" to many servers, often because they are major sources of > spam. > > Of those bounces, almost 100% of them were due to DMARC/DKIM > mechanisms. I view DMARC/DKIM as less than useless. First, they are far > from universally implemented - so most valid email is not DMARC/DKIM > "protected". Second a large percentage of the spam in the world *IS* > DMARC/DKIM "protected". > > What is odd to me, many of the email addresses (list members) that get > dropped due to excessive retries are listmembers who *DO* get list traffic > for a while before getting occasionally disabled. I would bet that what is > happening most of the time is that their ISP maintains a flock of MX hosts and > at one time decided to implement DKIM/DMARC but then realized it's a bad > idea and removed it from service but forgot to do that on one or two of the > flock. Thus... by happenstance once in a while your email hits that particular > mx host and gets toasted. The reverse is certainly possible - that they are > "beta testing" it on a few of their MX hosts but not wanting to do it > everywhere. > > Please, let's not go into a long thread of the merits of SPF/DKIM/DMARC... > I'm just letting folks know what is probably responsible for most of the > "subscription disabled..." stuff. > I have no competence to judge the merits or otherwise of these mechanisms, so I won't say anything about it. What I would say though is, if this affects a fair number of people, could the list server be configured to be a bit more tolerant of bounces? Regards Rob From stark at mit.edu Sat Jul 2 11:54:22 2016 From: stark at mit.edu (Greg Stark) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 17:54:22 +0100 Subject: Excessive Bounces In-Reply-To: References: <040e01d1d3bb$6f440990$4dcc1cb0$@ntlworld.com> <001101d1d3fb$4d91d530$e8b57f90$@classiccmp.org> <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: Well with yahoo domain having a hard fail specified it looks like it's too stay. The typical troublemaker with yahoo mail is lists modifying message bodies or subject lines. Those practices will gauge have to end (and frankly it can't be soon enough imho). That said the usual consequence is that messages *from* yahoo through the list get binned for Gmail users or anyone else who enforces DKIM. I've noticed Gmail has started marking messages in Spam with the reason why they're there and when they first started a *lot* if them were due to signature fails. There are very few these days which make me believe the lists I'm on have changed practices. Certainly yahoo hasn't rolled back their dns records. So unpredictability makes since sense as the bounces you see will be very dependent on the domains *sending* the messages and their dns records. If you have a thread with a couple yahoo uses talking back and forth you could well see a series of bounces from users on servers that respect Yahoo's dns records requesting a hard fail. -- Greg From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 2 12:49:10 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 10:49:10 -0700 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5777FE96.8010704@sydex.com> On 07/02/2016 10:29 AM, Eric Christopherson wrote: > Genius. But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com > file to have a header. > > http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 Of course, this only works when the program doesn't clobber its own initialization code (to reclaim memory), which a lot of programs did in those memory-limited days. Regardless, neither CP/M-80 nor MSDOS requires that a .COM file have any particular structure--even MSDOS will try to run a zero-length .com file without complaint. --Chuck From lyndon at orthanc.ca Sat Jul 2 13:24:16 2016 From: lyndon at orthanc.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 11:24:16 -0700 Subject: Excessive Bounces In-Reply-To: <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> References: <040e01d1d3bb$6f440990$4dcc1cb0$@ntlworld.com> <001101d1d3fb$4d91d530$e8b57f90$@classiccmp.org> <000701d1d445$5438de20$fcaa9a60$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <37C4499F-4FAB-4F61-9699-F88490DC8898@orthanc.ca> > On Jul 2, 2016, at 2:37 AM, Jay West wrote: > > Of those bounces, almost 100% of them were due to DMARC/DKIM mechanisms. I > view DMARC/DKIM as less than useless. First, they are far from universally > implemented - so most valid email is not DMARC/DKIM "protected". Second a > large percentage of the spam in the world *IS* DMARC/DKIM "protected". Amen. DMARC is an abomination that must be made to die. DKIM is useful, in an advisory sense. DMARC just outright breaks decades of standardized email protocol behaviour. From echristopherson at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 12:29:05 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 12:29:05 -0500 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Genius. But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com file to have a header. http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 From lproven at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 09:01:23 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 16:01:23 +0200 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 1 July 2016 at 22:28, Austin Pass wrote: > I've hooked it all up to a Windows 8.1 VM A *VM*? Oh, come on. Be serious. If you're troubleshooting hardware, use hardware. No blasted VMs. I'm amazed anything worked at all via a VM. Also, 8.1 is relatively speaking obsolete and unpopular. I'd suggest W10 as it's a free download, for the rest of this month at least. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 14:24:58 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 21:24:58 +0200 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2 July 2016 at 20:37, Fred Cisin wrote: > Initials of Mark Zbikowski. Who was he? As little is known about him as > is about Howard Fullmer ("Parasitic Engineering" and chief engineer for > Morrow) Fascinating stuff as ever, Fred. Thanks. BTW... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski & https://books.google.cz/books?id=WDAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=Howard+Fullmer+parasitic+engineering&source=bl&ots=vR97Abpe-n&sig=PkbTWlbiUCJDMt4iyl80Mu7Tds0&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Howard%20Fullmer%20parasitic%20engineering&f=false -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 14:27:01 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 21:27:01 +0200 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 2 July 2016 at 20:58, Austin Pass wrote: > Thanks Liam. > > Although in this particular instance I have a high degree of confidence > that the use of a VM (Parallels on an iMac running 10.11) and Windows 8.1 > isn't the root of my problems. I still wouldn't trust it for something as hardware- and timing-sensitive as this. And I'm typing on a Mac, and yes, I have a Windows VM on it too. > Apologies for the top-posting in my other two replies to the list. I did > it without thinking as I'm using the Gmail web interface. (?) So am I. Its bottom-posting support is fine. Hit Ctrl-A, trim, reply. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cctalk at beyondthepale.ie Sat Jul 2 16:15:46 2016 From: cctalk at beyondthepale.ie (Peter Coghlan) Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2016 22:15:46 +0100 (WET-DST) Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: "Your message dated Sat, 02 Jul 2016 12:25:08 -0700 (PDT)" References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> Message-ID: <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> > > Is the capacity of the diskette 800K? or is that merely the name of the > type of the diskette, with an actual capacity of somewhere between 640K > and 800K? > > If the actual capacity is 800K, with MFM, then it would probably be 80 > track, double sided, with either 10 512 byte sectors or 5 1024 byte > sectors per track. (can't get up to 800K with "normal" WD style MFM with > 256 bytes per sector, and 512 byte sectors are a little tight) > The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it appears that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. There are more details here: http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats Regards, Peter Coghlan From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 2 16:38:04 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 14:38:04 -0700 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> On 07/02/2016 02:15 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: > > The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it > appears that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. > There are more details here: > > http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats Since I don't have an Acorn, I'm a bit in the dark about all of this talk about Kyroflux. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a legacy PC floppy controller? I've copied RX02 disks using the Catweasel. Tim Mann wrote a nice set of utilities to do just that. --Chuck From bear at typewritten.org Sat Jul 2 18:14:01 2016 From: bear at typewritten.org (r.stricklin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 16:14:01 -0700 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> Message-ID: <8A0256F2-87FF-46E5-BAAB-7ADA7C2A3D7F@typewritten.org> On Jul 2, 2016, at 2:38 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > Since I don't have an Acorn, I'm a bit in the dark about all of this > talk about Kyroflux. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a legacy PC floppy > controller? Indeed ImageDisk works just fine to read and write every standard (non-copy-protected) ADFS and DFS format disk I've encountered. ok bear. -- until further notice From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 17:51:30 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 15:51:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> Message-ID: > On 07/02/2016 02:15 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: >> The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it >> appears that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. >> There are more details here: >> http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats . . . and the "F" and "F+" would require a "high density" drive (not clear from that chart, but probably 1.4M) On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: > Since I don't have an Acorn, I'm a bit in the dark about all of this > talk about Kyroflux. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a legacy PC floppy > controller? I agree. It seems like it to me. I don't the the Acorn file system, so couldn't extract files. But reading sectors should not be a problem, although there are certainly SOME things that Acorn could have done that would confound an NEC FDC. If the sector headers are "normal", then INT1Eh (to set the sector size), followed by INT13h should work. But, if OP can get his Kryoflex setup to work with DOS 720K, then the Acorn 640K and 800K should be doable. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From mhs.stein at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 18:00:11 2016 From: mhs.stein at gmail.com (Mike Stein) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:00:11 -0400 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> Message-ID: <83C15C6A63CD436EAD7E867A654ED943@310e2> On the porch looking at your cabinet and my chair. Thanks. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Guzis" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Saturday, July 02, 2016 5:38 PM Subject: Re: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB > On 07/02/2016 02:15 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: > >> >> The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it >> appears that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. >> There are more details here: >> >> http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats > > Since I don't have an Acorn, I'm a bit in the dark about all of this > talk about Kyroflux. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a legacy PC floppy > controller? > > I've copied RX02 disks using the Catweasel. Tim Mann wrote a nice set > of utilities to do just that. > > --Chuck > From spacewar at gmail.com Sat Jul 2 18:00:33 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 17:00:33 -0600 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Eric Christopherson wrote: > Genius. But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com file to > have a header. > http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 Multiple people independently invented the zero-byte CP/M program, which is obviously the shortest possible useful computer program, but I'd never before heard of anyone succeeding, or even attempting, to sell the program. From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 2 18:04:31 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 16:04:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Peter Coghlan wrote: > The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it appears > that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. There are more > details here: > http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats Thank you! Note: the use of the term "quad" density in this chart is not the same as, but a more rational use of the term than, the misuse that was prevalent in the days of 640K - 800K 5.25" CP/M From rwiker at gmail.com Sun Jul 3 01:25:24 2016 From: rwiker at gmail.com (Raymond Wiker) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 08:25:24 +0200 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On 03 Jul 2016, at 01:00 , Eric Smith wrote: > > On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Eric Christopherson > wrote: >> Genius. But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com file to >> have a header. >> http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 > > Multiple people independently invented the zero-byte CP/M program, > which is obviously the shortest possible useful computer program, but > I'd never before heard of anyone succeeding, or even attempting, to > sell the program. I think the original implementation of /bin/true was a zero-length file, while /bin/false worked by not existing at all. From axelsson at acc.umu.se Sun Jul 3 08:56:38 2016 From: axelsson at acc.umu.se (=?UTF-8?Q?G=c3=b6ran_Axelsson?=) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 15:56:38 +0200 Subject: StorageTek 2920 9-track manual or instructions wanted (And a bit about rescuing a Nord-1) In-Reply-To: <30e02f9a-4603-51b0-e878-8675464105bc@bitsavers.org> References: <9b3b6c45-aad6-a122-7456-928d132cadc3@acc.umu.se> <93e093b5-4793-9556-f225-5ebfc6b9d7f8@bitsavers.org> <30e02f9a-4603-51b0-e878-8675464105bc@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: Hi and thanks for all the help I got! Both on the list and via email directly. A couple of days ago I did a quick test of the drive and I was able to load tapes, both manually and with automatic tape loading. It's a really nice drive. BPI were detected automatically so the drive seems to be i good condition. I haven't been to my storage yet since I saw the new documents scanned by Al, but from the pictures I have taken it looks like it is a SCSI-drive, the other interfaces uses two cables instead of one. Whenever I get some time to spare I will try to get the drive connected to a linux computer. It is possible to run the 2920 both as singel ended and differential so I should have a lot of different interface cards to choose from for the PC end. It looks bright right now. :-) The reason I haven't responded before is that I got busy with a rescue of a NORD-1 computer in southern Norway. It took 28 hours to fly down to G?teborg to meet up with a friend already in the south, drive to Norway, load the computer in my friends van and drive it back to Ume?. I hope my reason for the lack of interest in this thread is excusable. :-) The computer is the first model made by Norsk Data AS, it has serial number 47 and was built in the summer of 1972, equipped with 32 kword of core memory. It's one of my dream machines and it is almost complete. :-D http://www.ndwiki.org/wiki/NORD-1_Serial_47 G?ran Den 2016-06-29 kl. 22:22, skrev Al Kossow: > Well, this is fun. Same part number on the manual, but different sets of interfaces > defined. I found the one that has SCSI in it, and will try to get it uploaded later today. > > I don't appear to have the schematics for the SCSI version. > > On 6/29/16 1:11 PM, Al Kossow wrote: >> >> On 6/29/16 12:58 PM, Shaun Halstead wrote: >> >>> I believe JP Hindin has the service docs (and one of the drives) from my >>> shop, though they may be inaccessible at the moment. >>> >> there is one version of the maint manual up under stc on bitsavers now. it turns >> out I have several other versions, and the manual for the formatter >> >> From austinpass at gmail.com Sun Jul 3 07:41:40 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 13:41:40 +0100 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 10:15 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: > >> Is the capacity of the diskette 800K? or is that merely the name of the >> type of the diskette, with an actual capacity of somewhere between 640K and >> 800K? >> >> If the actual capacity is 800K, with MFM, then it would probably be 80 >> track, double sided, with either 10 512 byte sectors or 5 1024 byte sectors >> per track. (can't get up to 800K with "normal" WD style MFM with 256 bytes >> per sector, and 512 byte sectors are a little tight) >> >> > The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it > appears > that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. There are more > details here: > > http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats > > Regards, > Peter Coghlan > > Thanks everyone. All working now - there were two issues at play. 1) Wrong settings for DTC. Used the linked-to document to change to 1024Byte sectors, tracks 0-79 and sectors 0-5. I record the stream file of flux transitions as before (a preference in any event) and when I process it with the aforementioned settings I get an 800KB .adl image file. This mounts up in an emulator very nicely: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hjgz3416htlryrm/Screen%20Shot%202016-07-03%20at%2012.19.15.png?dl=0 2) The initial disc I used was an original disk for a game - SWIV. I suspect that it either uses some interesting copy protection mechanism or the media is faulty. The above method works for 9/10 discs but not the one I originally selected for testing. Lesson learned - use known good media or a selection of suspect ones. -Austin. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 3 11:12:16 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 09:12:16 -0700 Subject: kryoflux In-Reply-To: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> References: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <1322a8b9-092f-2d77-2262-541f63e74ac9@bitsavers.org> On 7/2/16 11:54 AM, Jay West wrote: > Kryoflux?s next project should be the same thing but for ? mag tape. What tape drive? You'd either have to pick one old enough that they still had separate formatters, or have mods to pick off the data before the decoders. There is also the problem of direct control of the transport. Qualstar 105x would probably be the one i'd try, since it is still sort of common, and not insanely expensive to still buy used, is pretty simple, I have a couple of dozen of them, and I've modded one where I've mounted a 7-track head. This is also needed for 4-track fixed-head 1/4" tapes. I have a couple of old Kennedy drives that I was just thinking about modding to read all 4 tracks in parallel. Then, it's just a forward and backwards pass over the tape, the same as you do on 1/2". I have a huge backlog of tape at CHM, so this is pretty high on my list to get done this year. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 3 12:20:25 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 10:20:25 -0700 Subject: kryoflux In-Reply-To: <1322a8b9-092f-2d77-2262-541f63e74ac9@bitsavers.org> References: <000001d1d493$34e37d20$9eaa7760$@classiccmp.org> <1322a8b9-092f-2d77-2262-541f63e74ac9@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <8027c343-6950-fba1-d7a4-0b4e10db6f8e@bitsavers.org> The STC scanning project timing is interesting, since the 3400 manual I just did describes a pretty sophisticated read channel for NRZI and PE data recovery. On 7/3/16 9:12 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > I have a huge backlog of tape at CHM, so this is pretty high on my list to get done > this year. > From fritzm at fritzm.org Sun Jul 3 14:04:33 2016 From: fritzm at fritzm.org (Fritz Mueller) Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 12:04:33 -0700 Subject: Early PDP-11/45 backplane SPC power In-Reply-To: <5772DBEE.8050106@fritzm.org> References: <5772A6BD.5080402@fritzm.org> <5772C756.3080507@fritzm.org> <5772D1CA.2010509@fritzm.org> <5772D5C3.2010204@fritzm.org> <5772DBEE.8050106@fritzm.org> Message-ID: Just a follow-up here: Marty over at vcfed.org took a look at his 11/45, and he does have +15 (+12 in his case) to CU1 on slots 26-28. His notes indicate a wire from slot 15 (because of his setup he can't conveniently inspect his backplane). It's not clear whether this is from factory, and ECO, or a user mod. Marty's machine does not have power to CA1 either, so it really does look like this is a typo in the DEC docs. From pete at dunnington.plus.com Mon Jul 4 03:43:25 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (pete) Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2016 10:43:25 +0200 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 03/07/2016 00:51, Fred Cisin wrote: >> On 07/02/2016 02:15 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: >>> The original ADFS had 16 sectors of 256 bytes per track. However, it >>> appears that more recent ADFS formats use 5 sectors of 1024 bytes. >>> There are more details here: >>> http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Disk/Format/Formats > > . . . and the "F" and "F+" would require a "high density" drive > (not clear from that chart, but probably 1.4M) Yes, they do. The rest of the ADFS formats use ordinary DSDD drives. > I don't the the Acorn file system, so couldn't extract files. > But reading sectors should not be a problem, although there are > certainly SOME things that Acorn could have done that would confound an > NEC FDC. > > If the sector headers are "normal", then INT1Eh (to set the sector > size), followed by INT13h should work. Acorn formatter s/w doesn't write the optional "index mark" before the first sector so some PCs have trouble understanding Acorn disks. -- Pete Pete Turnbull From cclist at sydex.com Mon Jul 4 10:46:14 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2016 08:46:14 -0700 Subject: Disc Imaging / Kryoflux - Acorn ADFS 800KB In-Reply-To: References: <14A94621-ECAE-4BCA-A274-D8B8F444CD0A@gmail.com> <01Q23224R7CU00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <5778343C.6010003@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577A84C6.4070607@sydex.com> On 07/04/2016 01:43 AM, pete wrote: > > Acorn formatter s/w doesn't write the optional "index mark" before the > first sector so some PCs have trouble understanding Acorn disks. > If that's a problem on a PC (today it rarely is, but it was in the days before the "A" revision of the 8272/765 came out, it's a simple matter to simply block the index signal off the drive cable--it's not needed for sector reads. --Chuck From pete at dunnington.plus.com Mon Jul 4 03:24:56 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (pete) Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2016 10:24:56 +0200 Subject: Edinburgh folks heading for TNMoC, BP in Aug In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <97af4c68-b3da-6852-9118-4cedef9c6ce7@dunnington.plus.com> On 02/07/2016 08:55, Graham Toal wrote: > Hi folks - if any of the folks I used to know are still on this list (Tony > Duell? Pete Turnbull? Jim Doran? Jules Richardson?), I just wanted to let > you know I'll be visiting TNMoC for the first time on 11th Aug. Long time no see :-) I'm still "here" though out of the UK at the moment, but back in about 10 days and maybe interested in meeting up. -- Pete Pete Turnbull From plamenspam at afterpeople.com Tue Jul 5 01:28:58 2016 From: plamenspam at afterpeople.com (Plamen Mihaylov) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 09:28:58 +0300 Subject: AIX from Motorola In-Reply-To: <20160701145457.GD22778@saucer.turnde.net> References: <20160701145457.GD22778@saucer.turnde.net> Message-ID: > Did you manage to find a copy? If not, I _think_ I have a copy somewhere so can take a look. Not yet. It will be great if you find the cd(s). > I assume this is for a PowerStack? I'm need the media for MVME2600/3600/4600 series. Any Motorola branded AIX >= 4.1.4r4 will work on it. Regards, Plamen On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Michael-John Turner wrote: > On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 02:19:54PM +0300, Plamen Mihaylov wrote: > > Anyone have Motorola based AIX installation cds at least 4.1.4r4 or > newer? > > Did you manage to find a copy? If not, I _think_ I have a copy somewhere so > can take a look. > > I assume this is for a PowerStack? > > Cheers, MJ > -- > Michael-John Turner * mj at mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/ > > From tothwolf at concentric.net Tue Jul 5 07:29:20 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 07:29:20 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Repairing a Supermicro P6DLF motherboard Message-ID: I'm currently in the process of repairing a Supermicro P6DLF motherboard which suffered shipping damage and I'm trying to find anyone else who might have one. I can't find any photos of one of these boards online (except for the one I recently purchased) and the board I have shows possible signs of prior rework that I'm trying figure out. The electrolytic capacitors on this particular board at locations CE1 and CE6 have Sanyo OS-CON 220uF 10V polymer parts (purple sleeve and appear to be 10SA220M) fitted and the solder work was done by hand. The joints were completely defluxed/cleaned, but the leads were hand sheared down into the solder joint. All of the other electrolytic capacitors on this board are Sanyo CG series 1000uF 16V (green) that were wave soldered. I suspect two of the Sanyo CG series parts were replaced at some point by a prior owner with the SA series polymer parts. According to the SA series datasheet, the largest 10mm diameter part is 220uF 10V, which may be why those were installed. I haven't used one of these boards since the late '90s when I built a workstation with one, and I can't remember with 100% certainty that Supermicro didn't use a few polymer parts on these boards. If anyone else has one of these boards and can physically check it to see what parts are installed, it would be really helpful. Many of the original Sanyo CG series parts were trashed on my board when it was shipped in one of those thin USPS Priority boxes, so I'm going to end up replacing all of them. If the two OS-CON parts turn out to be not original, I'll fit the correct value parts in those two locations while I'm at it. From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 5 09:28:02 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 15:28:02 +0100 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through Message-ID: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> I guess this is on-topic. http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-s ource-code/ From mtapley at swri.edu Tue Jul 5 09:22:44 2016 From: mtapley at swri.edu (Tapley, Mark) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 14:22:44 +0000 Subject: The infinitely profitable program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <46E5933B-3740-46BC-B317-2652B91D931C@swri.edu> On Jul 2, 2016, at 1:37 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote: >> Genius. > Clever? yes. Genius? no, or you would have to count too many of us. > >> But I would have thought CP/M would at least require a .com file to >> have a header. >> http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 > > NO. > A .COM file is a pure image of memory, starting at location 100h. > The "header" or "zero page" or "program segment prefix" is generated on the fly during the loading of the program. > (There is a lot more to know about it) Fred, I tried for years to understand the difference between .COM and .EXE. One post of yours, and it?s clear. Thank you! > The first thing that I did in CP/M was to create a zero length program. it seemed intuitively obvious as a needed capability. > Didn't everybody realize that and do it? > It never occurred to me to try to SELL it! In those days, there was almost an assumption that price would be proportional to program length. I would urge caution in this regard. Depending on the distribution of the dots on the price/length plot, it?s not inconceivable that a least-squares fit would result in you having to PAY people to accept your program, depending on where the line crosses the ?price? axis ?. > For those who wanted "source code" for it: > SAVE 0 A:JMP100.COM > (SAVE was one of the five CP/M internal commands, ERA,REN,DIR,TYPE) ?. uh oh. Too late. :-) - Mark From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Jul 5 09:48:47 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 10:48:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: M7237 KJ11-A Stack Limit Register scans Message-ID: <20160705144847.4FCC918C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> There was some recent discussion of the need for M7237 (KJ11-A Stack Limit Register) boards, and I said I had one, and could scan it (for the PCB traces - they aren't in the FMPS) if someone wanted to duplicate it; I had a request for same, so scans are now online, here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Stuff.html It will be a little bit of work to produce PCB artwork, since some of the traces dive under chips (and I'm not about to lift the chips :-), but from the prints (in the 11/40 print set, page 112) it should be easy to work them out. Noel From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Tue Jul 5 23:06:37 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 00:06:37 -0400 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through In-Reply-To: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> References: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <577C83CD.60706@compsys.to> >Dave Wade wrote: >I guess this is on-topic. > >http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-source-code/ > Check From jwest at classiccmp.org Tue Jul 5 22:38:44 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 22:38:44 -0500 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through In-Reply-To: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> References: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <000d01d1d737$e5a4a200$b0ede600$@classiccmp.org> Yep, that's on topic, and a fantastic read/view. Thanks! J From cctalk at snarc.net Tue Jul 5 23:36:46 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 00:36:46 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article Message-ID: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> All about some of the earliest people to write books using word processors. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/?platform=hootsuite From cctalk at snarc.net Tue Jul 5 23:41:31 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 00:41:31 -0400 Subject: VCF West exhibitor deadline -- Friday Message-ID: <577C8BFB.5070208@snarc.net> VCF West is Aug. 6-7 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. There are 25 exhibitors so far. Want to add to that total? Please click here -- http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ -- the deadline is this Friday at midnight. From mikew at thecomputervalet.com Wed Jul 6 08:15:32 2016 From: mikew at thecomputervalet.com (Mike Whalen) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 08:15:32 -0500 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article In-Reply-To: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> References: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> Message-ID: This was fascinating. Thanks for posting. On Tuesday, July 5, 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > All about some of the earliest people to write books using word processors. > > > http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/?platform=hootsuite > From ed at groenenberg.net Wed Jul 6 11:05:04 2016 From: ed at groenenberg.net (E. Groenenberg) Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2016 16:05:04 -0000 Subject: 'CHAS' single board computer In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <61549.10.10.10.2.0.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> Hi. I recently acquired a 'CHAS' single board computer containing a Motorola 68000 processor. It contains a keyboard and 2 roms (have not powered it up yet). See the picture at http://www.groenenberg.net/download/pic/CHAS.jpg I have googled for documentation or any other information, but no result. Anybody know more about this computer? Ed -- Ik email, dus ik besta. BTC : 1J5fajt8ptyZ2V1YURj3YJZhe5j3fJVSHN LTC : LP2WuEmYPbpWUBqMFGJfdm7pdHEW7fKvDz From cisin at xenosoft.com Wed Jul 6 15:59:35 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 13:59:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article In-Reply-To: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> References: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> Message-ID: [glitches and inaccuracies] It talks about Isaac Asimov being given a TRS80 in 1983, and even has a picture of a TRS80 model 1 (SAME picture as Wikipedia, without the correct monitor, and missing the CPU/EI cable and no drives). In 1983, the model 1 had been discontinued for years, completely replaced by Model 3, so a model 1 was highly unlikely. Yes, those of us who HAD model 1s still used them, but there were no new sales. In fact, since the PC (5150) came out in August 1981, and by the end of the year had Wordstar, TRS80 model 1 seems highly unlikely. And it wasn't 1983, either. http://www.blastr.com/2009/11/google_uncovers_asimovs_s.php points to an Infoworld story in June 1982 https://books.google.com/books?id=dD4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&dq=isaac+asimov&lr=&as_pt=MAGAZINES&pg=PA15&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false wherein it is revealed that sometime prior to THAT, Radio Shack had given him a Model II (8" drive, "business" machine) By September 1982, he was doing ads for Radio Shack. http://mentalfloss.com/article/72995/isaac-asimov-radio-shack-pitchman says May, 1981. It also says that he continued to use his TYPEWRITER for first drafts, and THEN re-entered into Scripsit. (But it mentions not trusting 5.25" drives, and ModelII had 8"!) Model II is way more likely. You'd have to not only be as crazy, but also as stupid as I, to use a model 1 for book writing. And 1982 is more credible. It is the latest that a TRS80 would have been appealing enough. By 1983, he would have gone PC. By the end of 1984, Apple would have tried to grab him, with Macintosh. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From echristopherson at gmail.com Wed Jul 6 10:03:28 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 10:03:28 -0500 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article In-Reply-To: References: <577C8ADE.9030803@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 8:15 AM, Mike Whalen wrote: > This was fascinating. Thanks for posting. > > On Tuesday, July 5, 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > > > All about some of the earliest people to write books using word > processors. > > > > > > > http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/?platform=hootsuite > > > Note: I was a little taken aback by the phrase "suspended encryption" in that article. Luckily, I was able to search the actual book on Amazon, and the term the author uses is "suspended _inscription_". That makes a whole lot more sense. (I'm still grumbling about "character strokes" though.) -- Eric Christopherson From emu at e-bbes.com Wed Jul 6 17:38:38 2016 From: emu at e-bbes.com (emanuel stiebler) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 16:38:38 -0600 Subject: 'CHAS' single board computer In-Reply-To: <61549.10.10.10.2.0.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> References: <61549.10.10.10.2.0.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> Message-ID: On 1969-12-31 17:00, E. Groenenberg wrote: > Hi. > > I recently acquired a 'CHAS' single board computer containing a Motorola > 68000 processor. It contains a keyboard and 2 roms (have not powered it > up yet). > > See the picture at http://www.groenenberg.net/download/pic/CHAS.jpg nice, big board ... > I have googled for documentation or any other information, but no result. > Anybody know more about this computer? Did you see this already? http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?47357-68000-evaluation-single-board-computer-assembler-etc He had some of those, probably found out more about them ... From tothwolf at concentric.net Wed Jul 6 19:01:07 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 19:01:07 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Repairing a Supermicro P6DLF motherboard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 5 Jul 2016, Tothwolf wrote: > The electrolytic capacitors on this particular board at locations CE1 > and CE6 have Sanyo OS-CON 220uF 10V polymer parts (purple sleeve and > appear to be 10SA220M) fitted and the solder work was done by hand. The > joints were completely defluxed/cleaned, but the leads were hand sheared > down into the solder joint. All of the other electrolytic capacitors on > this board are Sanyo CG series 1000uF 16V (green) that were wave > soldered. > > I suspect two of the Sanyo CG series parts were replaced at some point > by a prior owner with the SA series polymer parts. According to the SA > series datasheet, the largest 10mm diameter part is 220uF 10V, which may > be why those were installed. I haven't used one of these boards since > the late '90s when I built a workstation with one, and I can't remember > with 100% certainty that Supermicro didn't use a few polymer parts on > these boards. I've been able to confirm that CE1 and CE6 on the P6DLH motherboard should be 1000uF 16V just like all the other Sanyo CG series capacitors on the board. I have no idea why someone replaced those two on this particular board with 220uF 10V OS-CON polymer parts (which are in parallel with other original 1000uF capacitors), but I'll install the correct value for those two capacitors when I replace the others. From tothwolf at concentric.net Wed Jul 6 19:03:00 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 19:03:00 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Repairing a Supermicro P6DLF motherboard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 6 Jul 2016, Tothwolf wrote: > On Tue, 5 Jul 2016, Tothwolf wrote: > >> The electrolytic capacitors on this particular board at locations CE1 and >> CE6 have Sanyo OS-CON 220uF 10V polymer parts (purple sleeve and appear to >> be 10SA220M) fitted and the solder work was done by hand. The joints were >> completely defluxed/cleaned, but the leads were hand sheared down into the >> solder joint. All of the other electrolytic capacitors on this board are >> Sanyo CG series 1000uF 16V (green) that were wave soldered. >> >> I suspect two of the Sanyo CG series parts were replaced at some point by a >> prior owner with the SA series polymer parts. According to the SA series >> datasheet, the largest 10mm diameter part is 220uF 10V, which may be why >> those were installed. I haven't used one of these boards since the late >> '90s when I built a workstation with one, and I can't remember with 100% >> certainty that Supermicro didn't use a few polymer parts on these boards. > > I've been able to confirm that CE1 and CE6 on the > P6DLH motherboard should be 1000uF 16V just like all the other Sanyo CG ^^^^^ P6DLF > series capacitors on the board. I have no idea why someone replaced > those two on this particular board with 220uF 10V OS-CON polymer parts > (which are in parallel with other original 1000uF capacitors), but I'll > install the correct value for those two capacitors when I replace the > others. From c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com Wed Jul 6 21:15:04 2016 From: c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com (Murray McCullough) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 22:15:04 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) Message-ID: My first word processor was from Wang called ?Word Processor? and then IBM?s ?Displaywriter?. I tried ?Wordstar? originally called ?Wordmaster? but way too complicated. When desktop publishing came along WYSIWYG printing was made possible - the writer?s true handmaiden! In the microcomputer world, classic computing, it was ?Smartwriter? on the Coleco ADAM. Those were the days! Happy computing. Murray From ed at groenenberg.net Thu Jul 7 00:20:29 2016 From: ed at groenenberg.net (E. Groenenberg) Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 05:20:29 -0000 Subject: 'CHAS' single board computer In-Reply-To: References: <61549.10.10.10.2.0.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> Message-ID: <11526.213.236.112.126.0.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> On Wed, July 6, 2016 23:38, emanuel stiebler wrote: > On 1969-12-31 17:00, E. Groenenberg wrote: >> Hi. >> >> I recently acquired a 'CHAS' single board computer containing a Motorola >> 68000 processor. It contains a keyboard and 2 roms (have not powered it >> up yet). >> >> See the picture at http://www.groenenberg.net/download/pic/CHAS.jpg > > nice, big board ... > >> I have googled for documentation or any other information, but no >> result. >> Anybody know more about this computer? > > Did you see this already? > > http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?47357-68000-evaluation-single-board-computer-assembler-etc > > He had some of those, probably found out more about them ... > > Ah, I'll try to contact him, thanks for the info. Ed -- Ik email, dus ik besta. BTC : 1J5fajt8ptyZ2V1YURj3YJZhe5j3fJVSHN LTC : LP2WuEmYPbpWUBqMFGJfdm7pdHEW7fKvDz From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 00:30:44 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 06:30:44 +0100 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/e , PDP-8/f and PDP-8/m are ex-stock Message-ID: Hi Guys +++++++++++++++++++++++ Panels stocked and ready to ship +++++++++++++++++++ I am pleased to be able to announce the following PDP-8 front panels are now ex-stock. Stock levels are 10 or less of: PDP-8/e (Type A) PDP-8/e (Type B) PDP-8/f PDP-8/m Please order now as each type takes ten days to make and the manufacturing slot for each comes round once in six weeks. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 00:37:22 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 06:37:22 +0100 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/i Help! Message-ID: <1206eb07-ffdc-0b38-59bf-c60280fecee8@btinternet.com> Hi Guys, I have a nice big batch of PDP-8/i panels in production. I really need a real original panel to check against. Can anybody lend me one? Rod (Panelman) Smallwood From tmfdmike at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 00:59:16 2016 From: tmfdmike at gmail.com (Mike Ross) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 17:59:16 +1200 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/i Help! In-Reply-To: <1206eb07-ffdc-0b38-59bf-c60280fecee8@btinternet.com> References: <1206eb07-ffdc-0b38-59bf-c60280fecee8@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Rod Smallwood wrote: > Hi Guys, > > I have a nice big batch of PDP-8/i panels in production. I > really need a real original panel to check against. > > Can anybody lend me one? > > Rod (Panelman) Smallwood Lending would be tricky since I'm in NZ but I can certainly photograph one in any detail you require. Mike http://www.corestore.org 'No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.' From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 01:03:57 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 07:03:57 +0100 Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels Message-ID: <0e281517-c98a-76d3-3252-8505f9e5d119@btinternet.com> Hi Guys We are able to-announce the successful test production of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible copy of the original. Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal stiffening brings rigidity. Painting matches the color. This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for reproduction or repair range. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 01:13:59 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 07:13:59 +0100 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/i Help! In-Reply-To: References: <1206eb07-ffdc-0b38-59bf-c60280fecee8@btinternet.com> Message-ID: <63df463a-61ba-1cd5-5f5c-103e30921ef6@btinternet.com> On 07/07/2016 06:59, Mike Ross wrote: > On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Rod Smallwood > wrote: >> Hi Guys, >> >> I have a nice big batch of PDP-8/i panels in production. I >> really need a real original panel to check against. >> >> Can anybody lend me one? >> >> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > Lending would be tricky since I'm in NZ but I can certainly photograph > one in any detail you require. > > Mike > > http://www.corestore.org > 'No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. > Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. > For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.' Thank you Mike. Photographs certainly help but round lenses bring distortion. Scanning is better but you need an A2 or A3 scanner as scanning in parts and reassembling also brings problems. Regards Rod From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 02:02:51 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:02:51 +0100 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 From: Rod Smallwood To: Paul Birkel On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: > "MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. > > Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these ending up costing? > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod Smallwood > Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > > Hi Guys > > We are able to-announce the successful test production of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. > > The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible copy of the original. > > Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal stiffening brings rigidity. > > Painting matches the color. > > This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for reproduction or repair range. > > > Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > > > Hi Paul Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like your idea better. They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I remembered that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is that it? It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy liquids. They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring pots and stirring sticks you will ever need. Cost? Well that's interesting. Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the major element. Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I should know soon. Regards Rod From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 03:47:03 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (curiousmarc3 at gmail.com) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 01:47:03 -0700 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through In-Reply-To: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> References: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <8FA30171-0835-45FC-AFE3-431711F46200@gmail.com> Wow. Talk about a historically significant computer system and program. I'd love to make a replica one day. Thanks! Marc > On Jul 5, 2016, at 7:28 AM, Dave Wade wrote: > > I guess this is on-topic. > > http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-s > ource-code/ > > From jdbryan at acm.org Thu Jul 7 10:36:21 2016 From: jdbryan at acm.org (J. David Bryan) Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 11:36:21 -0400 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator Message-ID: The second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator is now available from the Computer History Simulation Project (SIMH) site: https://github.com/simh/simh This release adds a simulation of the HP 2607, 2613, 2617, and 2618 line printers and supports the use of custom VFU tape images, as well as the built-in HP-standard VFU tape. The full set of configurable options is detailed in a new section of the HP 3000 Simulator User's Guide that is provided in Microsoft Word format in the "doc" subdirectory of the code base snapshot downloaded from the github site. A PDF version of the updated manual is also available at: http://alum.mit.edu/www/jdbryan/hp3000_doc.pdf In addition, the preconfigured MPE-V/R disc image available from Bitsavers: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/HP/HP_3000/ ...has been updated to add the following features: - The MPE cold load command files attach the line printer to the "lp.txt" output file and specify the "-n" option to clear the file before use. - Preinstalled User-Defined Commands (UDCs) provide access to the COBOL 74 compiler with the MPE-V/E :COBOLII, :COBOLIIPREP, and :COBOLIIGO commands, and to the COBOL 85 compiler with :COBOLIIX, :COBOLIIXPREP, and :COBOLIIXGO. However, note that the simulator currently does not provide the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware instructions, so programs generated by the COBOLII compiler will abort at run time with "ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION" errors, limiting the current utility of the compilers to syntax checking. Thanks once again go to Frank McConnell for providing the HP line printer subsystems manuals that facilitated development of the new simulation, and to Robert Mills for providing the COBOLII UDCs. -- Dave From leec2124 at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 11:02:07 2016 From: leec2124 at gmail.com (Lee Courtney) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 09:02:07 -0700 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Well done - congratulations! On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 8:36 AM, J. David Bryan wrote: > The second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator is now available > from the Computer History Simulation Project (SIMH) site: > > https://github.com/simh/simh > > This release adds a simulation of the HP 2607, 2613, 2617, and 2618 line > printers and supports the use of custom VFU tape images, as well as the > built-in HP-standard VFU tape. The full set of configurable options is > detailed in a new section of the HP 3000 Simulator User's Guide that is > provided in Microsoft Word format in the "doc" subdirectory of the code > base snapshot downloaded from the github site. A PDF version of the > updated manual is also available at: > > http://alum.mit.edu/www/jdbryan/hp3000_doc.pdf > > In addition, the preconfigured MPE-V/R disc image available from Bitsavers: > > http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/HP/HP_3000/ > > ...has been updated to add the following features: > > - The MPE cold load command files attach the line printer to the "lp.txt" > output file and specify the "-n" option to clear the file before use. > > - Preinstalled User-Defined Commands (UDCs) provide access to the COBOL > 74 compiler with the MPE-V/E :COBOLII, :COBOLIIPREP, and :COBOLIIGO > commands, and to the COBOL 85 compiler with :COBOLIIX, > :COBOLIIXPREP, and :COBOLIIXGO. However, note that the simulator > currently does not provide the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware > instructions, so programs generated by the COBOLII compiler will > abort at run time with "ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION" errors, limiting the > current utility of the compilers to syntax checking. > > Thanks once again go to Frank McConnell for providing the HP line printer > subsystems manuals that facilitated development of the new simulation, and > to Robert Mills for providing the COBOLII UDCs. > > -- Dave > > -- Lee Courtney +1-650-704-3934 cell From johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com Thu Jul 7 13:11:02 2016 From: johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com (John H. Reinhardt) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 14:11:02 -0400 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> On 7/7/2016 3:02 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: > > > > -------- Forwarded Message -------- > Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 > From: Rod Smallwood > To: Paul Birkel > > > > On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: >> "MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. >> >> Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these ending up costing? >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod Smallwood >> Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels >> >> Hi Guys >> >> We are able to-announce the successful test production of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. >> >> The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible copy of the original. >> >> Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal stiffening brings rigidity. >> >> Painting matches the color. >> >> This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for reproduction or repair range. >> >> >> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood >> >> >> > Hi Paul > Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like > your idea better. > > They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I remembered > that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is > that it? > > It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy liquids. > They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring pots and > stirring sticks you will ever need. > > Cost? Well that's interesting. > Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the > major element. > Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I > should know soon. > > Regards Rod > > I would stick with the "ElevenHeaven" since that indicates a PDP-11. The Sixteen refers to the bits, I know, but there were a lot of 16-bit-ers out there and only one Eleven! BTW, I'm looking forward to your getting to the PDP-11 series, especially an 11/70 panel and bezel. Regards, John H. Reinhardt From ian.finder at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 12:40:06 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 10:40:06 -0700 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/e , PDP-8/f and PDP-8/m are ex-stock In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Rod sent me an extra 8/e panel due to a shipping mistake, the one with the less than 180 degree lines on the rotator switch. It is located in Seattle, WA. If you pay Rod for the panel, and me to ship it to you, you'll get it a lot quicker. On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 10:30 PM, Rod Smallwood < rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote: > Hi Guys > > +++++++++++++++++++++++ Panels stocked and ready to ship > +++++++++++++++++++ > > I am pleased to be able to announce the following PDP-8 front panels are > now ex-stock. > > Stock levels are 10 or less of: > > PDP-8/e (Type A) > > PDP-8/e (Type B) > > PDP-8/f > > PDP-8/m > > Please order now as each type takes ten days to make and the > manufacturing slot for each comes round once in six weeks. > > Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 7 12:57:13 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 10:57:13 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> On 07/06/2016 07:15 PM, Murray McCullough wrote: > My first word processor was from Wang called ?Word Processor? and > then IBM?s ?Displaywriter?. I tried ?Wordstar? originally called > ?Wordmaster? but way too complicated. The big oversight here is that nobody seems to collect old wapro stuff; Harris, Lanier, AES, Artec, Qyx, etc. Soon, this will be a big hole in history, I suspect. --Chuck From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 12:59:17 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 18:59:17 +0100 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/e , PDP-8/f and PDP-8/m are ex-stock In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1a283553-614b-380b-e82b-58ec5c2a1e51@btinternet.com> On 07/07/2016 18:40, Ian Finder wrote: > Rod sent me an extra 8/e panel due to a shipping mistake, the one with the > less than 180 degree lines on the rotator switch. > It is located in Seattle, WA. > > If you pay Rod for the panel, and me to ship it to you, you'll get it a lot > quicker. > > On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 10:30 PM, Rod Smallwood < > rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote: > >> Hi Guys >> >> +++++++++++++++++++++++ Panels stocked and ready to ship >> +++++++++++++++++++ >> >> I am pleased to be able to announce the following PDP-8 front panels are >> now ex-stock. >> >> Stock levels are 10 or less of: >> >> PDP-8/e (Type A) >> >> PDP-8/e (Type B) >> >> PDP-8/f >> >> PDP-8/m >> >> Please order now as each type takes ten days to make and the >> manufacturing slot for each comes round once in six weeks. >> >> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood >> > Yes thats right.. Thanks Ian Regards Rod > From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 13:31:30 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 19:31:30 +0100 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 07/07/2016 18:57, Chuck Guzis wrote: > On 07/06/2016 07:15 PM, Murray McCullough wrote: >> My first word processor was from Wang called ?Word Processor? and >> then IBM?s ?Displaywriter?. I tried ?Wordstar? originally called >> ?Wordmaster? but way too complicated. > The big oversight here is that nobody seems to collect old wapro stuff; > Harris, Lanier, AES, Artec, Qyx, etc. > > Soon, this will be a big hole in history, I suspect. > > --Chuck Wordstar of fond memory. Try highlighting a word with shift and right arrow, then ctrlC. Now move in your email and type crtlV. Yes Wordstar keyboard commands are alive and well. Mozzila Thunderbird - Yup MS Mail - Yup Notepad - Yup Libre Office Writer - Yup ... and so on. I used Wordstar as a programmers editor on a Northstar Horizon running CPM and writing commercial code in CBASIC. You could drop out of Wordstar compile or run and then go back with a couple of key strokes. ADM3A as a terminal and Diabolo Daisy as a printer. Forms on screen application and letter quality printing. Not to mention letter quality word processing single sheet feed etc. Those where the days!! Rod Smallwood From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 13:47:32 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 19:47:32 +0100 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> References: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> On 07/07/2016 19:11, John H. Reinhardt wrote: > On 7/7/2016 3:02 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: >> >> >> >> -------- Forwarded Message -------- >> Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels >> Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 >> From: Rod Smallwood >> To: Paul Birkel >> >> >> >> On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: >>> "MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. >>> >>> Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these >>> ending up costing? >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod >>> Smallwood >>> Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM >>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >>> Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels >>> >>> Hi Guys >>> >>> We are able to-announce the successful test >>> production of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. >>> >>> The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible >>> copy of the original. >>> >>> Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal >>> stiffening brings rigidity. >>> >>> Painting matches the color. >>> >>> This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for >>> reproduction or repair range. >>> >>> >>> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood >>> >>> >>> >> Hi Paul >> Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like >> your idea better. >> >> They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I >> remembered >> that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is >> that it? >> >> It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy >> liquids. >> They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring >> pots and >> stirring sticks you will ever need. >> >> Cost? Well that's interesting. >> Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the >> major element. >> Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I >> should know soon. >> >> Regards Rod >> >> > > I would stick with the "ElevenHeaven" since that indicates a PDP-11. > The Sixteen > refers to the bits, I know, but there were a lot of 16-bit-ers out > there and only > one Eleven! > > BTW, I'm looking forward to your getting to the PDP-11 series, > especially an 11/70 > panel and bezel. > > Regards, > John H. Reinhardt Ok Thanks Plan is to complete the PDP-8/i and then do the 8/L Next up will be the much requested ElevenHeaven range. As the 11/70 is the headline system we could start there. Panels first, bezel to follow. Longer term goal is a full size operating replica that is difficult (at least externally) to tell from the original. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 7 13:57:43 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 11:57:43 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> On 07/07/2016 11:31 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: > ADM3A as a terminal and Diabolo Daisy as a printer. Forms on screen > application and letter quality printing. Not to mention letter > quality word processing single sheet feed etc. The point is that word processing predates wide use of microprocessors. For a time, I ran a Diablo Hitype I OEM model connected to a 3-parallel port S100 card under WS The OEM models are essentially dumb units with spacing, carriage motion, etc. controlled by the host. Even then, word processors were old. To this day, I still use "joe" as my all-around text editor under Linux and BSD. It uses mostly WS key conventions. --Chuck From echristopherson at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 10:19:34 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 10:19:34 -0500 Subject: Megaprocessor Message-ID: This gigantic, $53,000 hobbyist-built computer is making the rounds on Facebook: http://gizmodo.com/guy-spends-four-years-50k-building-giant-computer-to-1783190283?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow A relay one from a few years ago: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/ -- Eric Christopherson From js at cimmeri.com Thu Jul 7 11:02:28 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 11:02:28 -0500 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <577E7D14.2090502@cimmeri.com> As always, amazing, Dave! - J. On 7/7/2016 10:36 AM, J. David Bryan wrote: > The second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator is now available > from the Computer History Simulation Project (SIMH) site: > > https://github.com/simh/simh > > This release adds a simulation of the HP 2607, 2613, 2617, and 2618 line > printers and supports the use of custom VFU tape images, as well as the > built-in HP-standard VFU tape. The full set of configurable options is > detailed in a new section of the HP 3000 Simulator User's Guide that is > provided in Microsoft Word format in the "doc" subdirectory of the code > base snapshot downloaded from the github site. A PDF version of the > updated manual is also available at: > > http://alum.mit.edu/www/jdbryan/hp3000_doc.pdf > > In addition, the preconfigured MPE-V/R disc image available from Bitsavers: > > http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/HP/HP_3000/ > > ...has been updated to add the following features: > > - The MPE cold load command files attach the line printer to the "lp.txt" > output file and specify the "-n" option to clear the file before use. > > - Preinstalled User-Defined Commands (UDCs) provide access to the COBOL > 74 compiler with the MPE-V/E :COBOLII, :COBOLIIPREP, and :COBOLIIGO > commands, and to the COBOL 85 compiler with :COBOLIIX, > :COBOLIIXPREP, and :COBOLIIXGO. However, note that the simulator > currently does not provide the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware > instructions, so programs generated by the COBOLII compiler will > abort at run time with "ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION" errors, limiting the > current utility of the compilers to syntax checking. > > Thanks once again go to Frank McConnell for providing the HP line printer > subsystems manuals that facilitated development of the new simulation, and > to Robert Mills for providing the COBOLII UDCs. > > -- Dave > > > From terry at webweavers.co.nz Thu Jul 7 15:53:35 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 08:53:35 +1200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> Message-ID: >To this day, I still use "joe" as my all-around text editor under Linux >and BSD. It uses mostly WS key conventions. I remember using "Runoff" (for formatting text) and "Junior" (full screen editor) on a PRIME. Then there was "Mince" which I think was a "Junior" port to the IBM-PC? Terry (Tez) From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 7 16:08:07 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 14:08:07 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577EC4B7.80407@sydex.com> On 07/07/2016 01:53 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: >> To this day, I still use "joe" as my all-around text editor under >> Linux and BSD. It uses mostly WS key conventions. > > I remember using "Runoff" (for formatting text) and "Junior" (full > screen editor) on a PRIME. Then there was "Mince" which I think was > a "Junior" port to the IBM-PC? I've used emacs on and off since the early 80s., along with some add-ons, such as "Electric C" and "mince" )= "Mince is not emacs.). I never felt comfortable with it. And I've written enough troff stuff to have forgotten most of what I learned. For document prep, does anyone still use Interleaf? --Chuck From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 16:20:01 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 15:20:01 -0600 (MDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 7 Jul 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: > To this day, I still use "joe" as my all-around text editor under Linux > and BSD. It uses mostly WS key conventions. Same here. I love Joe. I got used to WS keystrokes from Borland compiler suites. Incidentally, George R.R. Martin (author of the Song of Ice and Fire ... known to the masses as Game of Thrones) also *still* uses Wordstar 4.0 on a DOS machine. That feeds the same narrative that I'm pretty sold on, which is this (from Thulsa Doom): What is steel compared to the hand that wields it ? It's not the tool, it's the person. Better tools can (sometimes) give you better results, but usually it's just a matter of convenience. The individual doing the writing still has to want to write and be motivated to do it. The mechanics are, in general, not usually a showstopper (but please, $DEITY, don't make me use 'ed'). What is the riddle of steel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExpIKb0hY3E The effect of bloatware: http://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins I see it with guitar. I have a $150 Fender acoustic that I play (badly) most of the time. I notice complete armatures in my guitar classes that come on day one with Martin guitars clad with figured Mahogany. They can't even tune the things! I'm NOT saying I'm Jimmy Hendrix, but UGH. It's the kiss of death, too. Those people ALWAYS drop out. I noticed that everyone used to love to pirate Photoshop and Maya but then they couldn't figure out how to use it! Yet, I've seen others get amazing results with only freely available Povray and open source GIMP. I've seen how people buy $80-130k sportscars but can't drive a stick (they buy automatics) or know enough to take a high speed turn on the inside. They'd crash their bicycle if they had a chance. I've been to shoots where guys will have $8k AR15's with Nightforce optics and tricked out to the max, and I end up far outscoring them at <400yds with my cheap crappy Olympic Arms el-cheepo AR. A big wallet is no substitute for growing up redneck in Texas. Even firing a BB gun is practice putting rounds downrange. Those country club folks often have the lowest scores of anyone competing (except for the retirees who actually practice). I see it with woodworkers who buy $5k in Veritas and Lee Nielson tools and then never use them or have any work-piece they themselves have made. They have beautiful garages, though! I see it with oil paints where folks buy super-expensive paints and they don't even use them, or make modern art splat-paintings with them. Why not buy the cheap paints that cost 1/3rd as much for something so useless. The masters made their own paints out of things like egg-whites and natural pigments. Yet, their art is worth more than anything painted with Bob Ross paints (not to bust on Bob, who was very cool). There is no substitute for hard work. IMHO, that's why word processors and office suites don't much matter. Find one you like, and call it good. To misquote some Buddhist dude, "The finger that points at the moon is not the moon." -Swift From thebri at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 16:31:48 2016 From: thebri at gmail.com (Brian Walenz) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 17:31:48 -0400 Subject: multiflow trace in Austin Message-ID: It's not as old as some would like, but it's definitely unique enough. http://www.ebay.com/itm/UBER-RARE-MULTIFLOW-TRACE-14-300-COMPILER-VINTAGE-COMPUTER-processor-compiler-/112050410557?hash=item1a16b9943d:g:r2EAAOSw3YNXbtaY b From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Thu Jul 7 16:45:35 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 17:45:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> Message-ID: <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > The effect of bloatware: > http://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins "Wordstar on an 4.077 MHz 8088 could keep up with my typing; WinWord under Windoze on a 300 MHz PII can't." --Seth Breidbart You can tell how old the quote is: it cites a PII/300. > I see it with guitar. [...] > I've seen how people buy $80-130k sportscars but can't drive a stick > I've been to shoots [...] > I see it with woodworkers [...] I see it in monitors. I've been repeatedly annoyed by modern flatscreens that refuse to even try to do what CRTs from twenty years ago routinely did. "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski by someone on a mud I hang out on. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 7 17:01:56 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 15:01:56 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <577ED154.9030309@sydex.com> On 07/07/2016 02:45 PM, Mouse wrote: > "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is > its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made > by the computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski by > someone on a mud I hang out on. I heard it from an Intel guy (re: the 80386). "We work hard to design a fast CPU and you software people piss it all away.". Maybe a bit blunt, but conveys the idea. --Chuck From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 17:44:12 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 16:44:12 -0600 (MDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Thu, 7 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: > I see it in monitors. I've been repeatedly annoyed by modern > flatscreens that refuse to even try to do what CRTs from twenty years > ago routinely did. I'll pile on, too. I'm always grumbling about monitors that use some kind of super-crap algorithm to scale the bitmap (bicubic smear-a-polation). Lord have mercy, just give me the damn pixels on 1/3rd of the monitor and give me the *option* to scale it if I want. Why is it so hard to understand that nobody wants to run an LCD in it's "non-native" resolution. It always looks like crap! > "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its > continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the > computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski by someone on > a mud I hang out on. Well, there is a bright side to this, also. When you run older OSes or app software on new modern hardware, it's amazingly fast. I guess the key is to upgrade your hardware and just ignore most "advancements" in software. However, I'm sure most folks just head-nod at the normal pat-response: "But but but, you won't get security updates!" My response is that if a modern "IT guy" can't figure out how to put that system behind a firewall and properly take steps to version-lock the environment: fire him. He's a shill for the Evil Ones trying to sell us all tickets on the upgrade train with a free side of snake oil. Defense in depth means you *can* defend at multiple points, not just rely on the vendor to constantly give you blind binary patches for the OS and call that "good". Yet, when I talk about version locking as a set of procedures, people often don't even know what I'm getting at. They haven't even been introduced to the idea and only know the corporate refrain of hyper-upgrade-orthadoxy. It's a real accomplishment for the software industry, really. I can't think of any other instance where fat-cats are easily convinced to spend vulgar amounts of money on things that actually don't add squat to the bottom line. Is there that much peer pressure at the country club? Are the sales reps really *that* hot? On a related note, even though I have an Amiga 3000, I often use UAE because it's just so damn fast. It's fun, sometimes to see The Last Ninja at 1000 FPS. :-P -Swift From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 7 18:13:13 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 19:13:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) Message-ID: <20160707231313.8173A18C0D8@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Mouse > "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its > continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the > computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski There's a reason I run considerably older software (which I prefer because it's less bloated) on somewhat older hardware (which is cheap, used) - i.e. hardware that's considerably newer than the software running on it - and your quotation nails it. The response time I get with Epsilon V8.0 (circa 1996) on an Athlon XP is scintillating - my finger has barely started to come up on the key before the screen reflects the command (e.g. to switch buffers). The response time is blindingly fast. Now, admittedly, Epsilon was fast to start with (i.e. on contemporanous hardware), so perhaps it's not the best example. But the same is true for other things, albeit to a lesser degree; e.g. switching windows to different applications. Older software on newer hardware provides a sparkling user experience, in terms of responsiveness. Noel From linimon at lonesome.com Thu Jul 7 18:24:59 2016 From: linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 18:24:59 -0500 Subject: multiflow trace in Austin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160707232458.GA7839@lonesome.com> I hardly need to note that anything stored in a self-store facility in Austin for 17 years will have been subjected to very high termperatures. mcl From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 19:28:48 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 02:28:48 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 7 July 2016 at 20:31, Rod Smallwood wrote: > Try highlighting a word with shift and right arrow, then ctrlC. > Now move in your email and type crtlV. > > Yes Wordstar keyboard commands are alive and well. Nope. Sorry. Those aren't WordStar commands. They are CUA commands, adopted by more or less all GUIs. They're from the IBM CUA project, part of the SAA plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access WordStar commands for that operation would be: Mark beginning of block: ^K B Mark end of block: ^K K (WordStar did not allow block selection with the cursor keys.) Then, use the cursor keys or to your destination position. Then, to copy: ^K C Or to move: ^K V Here's a reference: http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wsemu-documentation/wsemu-commands-and-menus/1-wordstar-emulator-full-version-command-list -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 19:31:06 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 02:31:06 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 02:28, Liam Proven wrote: > Then, use the cursor keys or to your destination position. Sorry -- I meant to add in the WordStar character movement commands but I forgot 'em. It has been about 25y since I last used it! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Thu Jul 7 19:49:11 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 20:49:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577EA627.8080201@sydex.com> <201607072145.RAA04966@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <201607080049.UAA13197@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> [modern "improvements" in monitor technology] > Lord have mercy, just give me the damn pixels on 1/3rd of the monitor > and give me the *option* to scale it if I want. Why is it so hard to > understand that nobody wants to run an LCD in it's "non-native" > resolution. It always looks like crap! Most people run a monitor exactly two ways: (1) in text mode during BIOS POST and early bootup and (2) in its native resolution. There is very little business case for supporting letterboxing rather than scaling. (For the mass market. There are niches, of course.) I too find it discouraging. Tyranny of the majority at its finest. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From elson at pico-systems.com Thu Jul 7 20:48:46 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 20:48:46 -0500 Subject: multiflow trace in Austin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <577F067E.203@pico-systems.com> On 07/07/2016 04:31 PM, Brian Walenz wrote: > It's not as old as some would like, but it's definitely unique enough. > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/UBER-RARE-MULTIFLOW-TRACE-14-300-COMPILER-VINTAGE-COMPUTER-processor-compiler-/112050410557?hash=item1a16b9943d:g:r2EAAOSw3YNXbtaY > > b > We had a 7/200 at work a long time ago. A VERY neat concept, but the performance was pretty mediocre. Probably part of the problem is that is was optimized for floating point arithmetic, and most of what they were running on it was integer. Ours blew a power supply and we never fixed it. Jon From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Thu Jul 7 21:33:42 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 03:33:42 +0100 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> On 08/07/2016 01:28, Liam Proven wrote: > On 7 July 2016 at 20:31, Rod Smallwood wrote: >> Try highlighting a word with shift and right arrow, then ctrlC. >> Now move in your email and type crtlV. >> >> Yes Wordstar keyboard commands are alive and well. > Nope. Sorry. Those aren't WordStar commands. > > They are CUA commands, adopted by more or less all GUIs. They're from > the IBM CUA project, part of the SAA plan. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access > > WordStar commands for that operation would be: > > Mark beginning of block: ^K B > Mark end of block: ^K K > > (WordStar did not allow block selection with the cursor keys.) > > Then, use the cursor keys or to your destination position. > > Then, to copy: > > ^K C > > Or to move: > > ^K V > > Here's a reference: > > http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wsemu-documentation/wsemu-commands-and-menus/1-wordstar-emulator-full-version-command-list > > Ho Hum I ask understanding for seniors memory. Rod From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Thu Jul 7 23:15:51 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 21:15:51 -0700 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser Message-ID: So a friend tells me there's a maybe-abandoned HP 8510 Network Analyzer in the hallway of the engineering building of the univ. he works at. I presume it's a unit like this, as he says it's over a metre tall: http://www.ece.lsu.edu/emdl/facilities/network%20analyser.html I figure its a little too far large and too far away from my needs to take it on, but out of curiousity does anyone know offhand what processor they used in these? (I haven't looked in depth online). Cursory guess is its mid-90s technology. From pontus at Update.UU.SE Fri Jul 8 01:14:39 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 08:14:39 +0200 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> References: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> Message-ID: <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> On Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 07:47:32PM +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote: > > > On 07/07/2016 19:11, John H. Reinhardt wrote: > >On 7/7/2016 3:02 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: > >> > >> > >> > >>-------- Forwarded Message -------- > >>Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > >>Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 > >>From: Rod Smallwood > >>To: Paul Birkel > >> > >> > >> > >>On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: > >>>"MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. > >>> > >>>Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these > >>>ending up costing? > >>> > >>>-----Original Message----- > >>>From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod > >>>Smallwood > >>>Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM > >>>To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >>>Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > >>> > >>>Hi Guys > >>> > >>> We are able to-announce the successful test production > >>>of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. > >>> > >>> The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible > >>>copy of the original. > >>> > >>> Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal > >>>stiffening brings rigidity. > >>> > >>> Painting matches the color. > >>> > >>> This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for > >>>reproduction or repair range. > >>> > >>> > >>> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > >>> > >>> > >>> > >>Hi Paul > >> Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like > >>your idea better. > >> > >>They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I > >>remembered > >>that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is > >>that it? > >> > >>It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy > >>liquids. > >>They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring pots > >>and > >>stirring sticks you will ever need. > >> > >>Cost? Well that's interesting. > >>Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the > >>major element. > >>Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I > >>should know soon. > >> > >>Regards Rod > >> > >> > > > >I would stick with the "ElevenHeaven" since that indicates a PDP-11. The > >Sixteen > >refers to the bits, I know, but there were a lot of 16-bit-ers out there > >and only > >one Eleven! > > > >BTW, I'm looking forward to your getting to the PDP-11 series, especially > >an 11/70 > >panel and bezel. > > > >Regards, > > John H. Reinhardt > Ok Thanks > Plan is to complete the PDP-8/i and then do the 8/L > > Next up will be the much requested ElevenHeaven range. > As the 11/70 is the headline system we could start there. > Panels first, bezel to follow. > > Longer term goal is a full size operating replica that is difficult (at > least externally) to tell from the original. > Is there a way to tell your replicas from the originals? Given the prices of some original panels it would be nice to be able to identify a "counterfeit" one. Now, I am i no way against what you are doing I think it i great but I'm honestly conserned that these will pop up on ebay in the future as the real thing. /P From spedraja at ono.com Fri Jul 8 01:54:56 2016 From: spedraja at ono.com (SPC) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 08:54:56 +0200 Subject: Front Panels - PDP-8/e , PDP-8/f and PDP-8/m are ex-stock In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2016-07-07 7:30 GMT+02:00 Rod Smallwood : > Hi Guys > > +++++++++++++++++++++++ Panels stocked and ready to ship > +++++++++++++++++++ > > I am pleased to be able to announce the following PDP-8 front panels are > now ex-stock. > > Stock levels are 10 or less of: > > PDP-8/e (Type A) > > PDP-8/e (Type B) > > PDP-8/f > > PDP-8/m > > Please order now as each type takes ten days to make and the > manufacturing slot for each comes round once in six weeks. > > Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > > ?I must check the front panel ?of my PDP8-E/e. Perhaps I will be interested in purchase one. I'll be in touch. Kind Regards Sergio From hp-fix at xs4all.nl Fri Jul 8 02:39:45 2016 From: hp-fix at xs4all.nl (Rik Bos) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 09:39:45 +0200 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The 8510 has some versions but I know the B version uses the 69020 and also has a tape unit which is controlled by the TACO processor also used in the 9845/35 series computer. They?re nice instruments but a bit bulky. It contains a display unit and at least the analyser unit to be usefull. -Rik Van: Brent Hilpert From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 03:00:46 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 17:00:46 +0900 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have a fond memory of these. I am interested. Would they allow me to send a shipper to pick it up for crating and shipping? Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 8, 2016, at 1:15 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote: > > So a friend tells me there's a maybe-abandoned HP 8510 Network Analyzer in the hallway of the engineering building of the univ. he works at. > I presume it's a unit like this, as he says it's over a metre tall: > http://www.ece.lsu.edu/emdl/facilities/network%20analyser.html > > I figure its a little too far large and too far away from my needs to take it on, but out of curiousity does anyone know offhand what processor they used in these? > (I haven't looked in depth online). > Cursory guess is its mid-90s technology. > From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 03:17:43 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 17:17:43 +0900 Subject: Megaprocessor In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9F8E2502-ED81-44D9-82BF-86341B15D5C8@gmail.com> Blinkenlight heaven ;-) Sent from my iPad > On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:19 AM, Eric Christopherson wrote: > > This gigantic, $53,000 hobbyist-built computer is making the rounds on > Facebook: > http://gizmodo.com/guy-spends-four-years-50k-building-giant-computer-to-1783190283?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow > > A relay one from a few years ago: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/ > > -- > Eric Christopherson From spedraja at ono.com Fri Jul 8 01:57:59 2016 From: spedraja at ono.com (SPC) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 08:57:59 +0200 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2016-07-07 17:36 GMT+02:00 J. David Bryan : > The second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator is now available > from the Computer History Simulation Project (SIMH) site: > > ?[...] ? > ...has been updated to add the following features: > > - Preinstalled User-Defined Commands (UDCs) provide access to the COBOL > 74 compiler with the MPE-V/E :COBOLII, :COBOLIIPREP, and :COBOLIIGO > commands, and to the COBOL 85 compiler with :COBOLIIX, > :COBOLIIXPREP, and :COBOLIIXGO. However, note that the simulator > currently does not provide the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware > instructions, so programs generated by the COBOLII compiler will > abort at run time with "ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION" errors, limiting the > current utility of the compilers to syntax checking. > > > ?So? I assume that we can make operative programs *only* with the COBOL 74 compiler, Isn't so ? Kind Regards Sergio From kevenm at reeltapetransfer.com Fri Jul 8 06:37:34 2016 From: kevenm at reeltapetransfer.com (Keven Miller) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 05:37:34 -0600 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator References: Message-ID: You still have FORTRAN (66), RPG, SPL, and BASIC; besides the 2 COBOL compilers. Keven Miller ----- Original Message ----- From: "SPC" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Fri 08 Jul 2016 12:57 AM Subject: Re: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator 2016-07-07 17:36 GMT+02:00 J. David Bryan : > The second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator is now available > from the Computer History Simulation Project (SIMH) site: > > ?[...] > ...has been updated to add the following features: > > - Preinstalled User-Defined Commands (UDCs) provide access to the COBOL > 74 compiler with the MPE-V/E :COBOLII, :COBOLIIPREP, and :COBOLIIGO > commands, and to the COBOL 85 compiler with :COBOLIIX, > :COBOLIIXPREP, and :COBOLIIXGO. However, note that the simulator > currently does not provide the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware > instructions, so programs generated by the COBOLII compiler will > abort at run time with "ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION" errors, limiting the > current utility of the compilers to syntax checking. > > > ?So? I assume that we can make operative programs *only* with the COBOL 74 compiler, Isn't so ? Kind Regards Sergio From tingox at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 07:17:23 2016 From: tingox at gmail.com (Torfinn Ingolfsen) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 14:17:23 +0200 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> References: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:14 AM, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > > Is there a way to tell your replicas from the originals? Given the prices > of some original panels it would be nice to be able to identify a > "counterfeit" one. Hopefully he has put a "Origin:" or "Creator:" line somewhere on the backside (inside) of the panel. -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Fri Jul 8 07:18:45 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:18:45 +0100 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> References: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: <2532d8e5-7fa4-b772-8a30-4005fc29aaee@btinternet.com> On 08/07/2016 07:14, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > On Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 07:47:32PM +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote: >> >> On 07/07/2016 19:11, John H. Reinhardt wrote: >>> On 7/7/2016 3:02 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> -------- Forwarded Message -------- >>>> Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels >>>> Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 >>>> From: Rod Smallwood >>>> To: Paul Birkel >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: >>>>> "MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. >>>>> >>>>> Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these >>>>> ending up costing? >>>>> >>>>> -----Original Message----- >>>>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod >>>>> Smallwood >>>>> Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM >>>>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >>>>> Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels >>>>> >>>>> Hi Guys >>>>> >>>>> We are able to-announce the successful test production >>>>> of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. >>>>> >>>>> The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible >>>>> copy of the original. >>>>> >>>>> Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal >>>>> stiffening brings rigidity. >>>>> >>>>> Painting matches the color. >>>>> >>>>> This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for >>>>> reproduction or repair range. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>> Hi Paul >>>> Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like >>>> your idea better. >>>> >>>> They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I >>>> remembered >>>> that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is >>>> that it? >>>> >>>> It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy >>>> liquids. >>>> They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring pots >>>> and >>>> stirring sticks you will ever need. >>>> >>>> Cost? Well that's interesting. >>>> Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the >>>> major element. >>>> Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I >>>> should know soon. >>>> >>>> Regards Rod >>>> >>>> >>> I would stick with the "ElevenHeaven" since that indicates a PDP-11. The >>> Sixteen >>> refers to the bits, I know, but there were a lot of 16-bit-ers out there >>> and only >>> one Eleven! >>> >>> BTW, I'm looking forward to your getting to the PDP-11 series, especially >>> an 11/70 >>> panel and bezel. >>> >>> Regards, >>> John H. Reinhardt >> Ok Thanks >> Plan is to complete the PDP-8/i and then do the 8/L >> >> Next up will be the much requested ElevenHeaven range. >> As the 11/70 is the headline system we could start there. >> Panels first, bezel to follow. >> >> Longer term goal is a full size operating replica that is difficult (at >> least externally) to tell from the original. >> > Is there a way to tell your replicas from the originals? Given the prices > of some original panels it would be nice to be able to identify a > "counterfeit" one. > > Now, I am i no way against what you are doing I think it i great but I'm > honestly conserned that these will pop up on ebay in the future as the real > thing. > > /P Well I could say ours are better. However I'm going to get a number burned into the plexiglass. An easy way to tell is to look at the cutouts. Ours are laser cut and perfectly straight, sharp and square. The originals have tool marks and are a bit rounded in the corners by the router. Regards Rod From tingox at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 07:21:55 2016 From: tingox at gmail.com (Torfinn Ingolfsen) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 14:21:55 +0200 Subject: Megaprocessor In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote: > This gigantic, $53,000 hobbyist-built computer is making the rounds on > Facebook: > http://gizmodo.com/guy-spends-four-years-50k-building-giant-computer-to-1783190283?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow Yes, Facebook users tends to be slow. This was discussed here already last year: http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2015-June/008493.html -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 08:12:23 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 15:12:23 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 04:33, Rod Smallwood wrote: > Ho Hum I ask understanding for seniors memory. :-) WordStar commands are still used in some things, such as JOE. However, they went away before the GUI era and are mostly now forgotten. Including by you! ;-) WordPerfect replaced WordStar on DOS. It was a lot more capable and it had superb printer-driver support. Then Windows (and MacOS and GUIs in general) swept WordPerfect away. The printer drivers issue became irrelevant when the OS handled the printers and font rendering etc., and most users much preferred the GUI model of text-editing to the WordPerfect embedded-control-codes model. Interestingly, more things seem to understand the Vi keystrokes now, at least on Unix. Although I'm something of an old-timer too, dating from before the PC era and learning CP/M and VAX-VMS before I ever set hands on an IBM anything. I cordially dislike both Vi & Emacs: I grew up with keyboards with cursor and delete keys, but they didn't have META or SUPER or any of that guff. I disliked WordStar (which I found arcane and clunky even when it was still current and on retail sale), WordPerfect (all function-keys all the time, needed a keyboard template or eidetic memory). I also knew and supported MultiMate, DisplayWrite, MS Word for DOS and others. I used LocoScript at home, which replaced The Last Word on my ZX Spectrum. I admit I liked LocoScript but it had the benefit of a dedicated keyboard intended for a word-processor. MS Word was my favourite DOS wordprocessor -- even before CUA, I found its menu structure and editing keystrokes (select a block, _then_ format it) logical. And it could do WYSIWYG *bold* and _underline_ and /italic/ on screen, even on a PC text display. But when I got my hands on early Macs and Windows 2 in my first job, I discovered the CUA model, and I've liked it ever since. I still miss CUA editing on the Linux command line. There are some: http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/42908.html ... But they're all nonstandard, not widely supported or have restrictions. Anyway. the keystrokes you describe are the now-ubiquitous, on GUIs at least, CUA keystrokes -- in their later incarnation, with some cross-fertilisation from the Mac HCI guidelines. Everyone follows them and I think that's a really good thing. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 8 09:27:46 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 10:27:46 -0400 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <68EB82DD-CA4D-471A-B593-B50783BCCE12@comcast.net> > On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:15 AM, Brent Hilpert wrote: > > So a friend tells me there's a maybe-abandoned HP 8510 Network Analyzer in the hallway of the engineering building of the univ. he works at. > I presume it's a unit like this, as he says it's over a metre tall: > http://www.ece.lsu.edu/emdl/facilities/network%20analyser.html > > I figure its a little too far large and too far away from my needs to take it on, but out of curiousity does anyone know offhand what processor they used in these? > (I haven't looked in depth online). > Cursory guess is its mid-90s technology. That sounds right. I have an HP catalog from 1993, which lists very similar bits, an 8510 display unit and the 8515 and 8517 S-parameter test sets. So I'd guess this is a slightly later followup model. List price of that day, FYA, $36500 for the 8510C, and $41400 for the 8515A (slightly more for the 8517 due to the higher top frequency). Something that's going to be obvious to some but possibly not to all: "network analyzer" is short for "vector network analyzer", an electronic component measuring device. It has nothing to do with computer data networks. paul From fozztexx at fozztexx.com Fri Jul 8 09:30:34 2016 From: fozztexx at fozztexx.com (Chris Osborn) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 07:30:34 -0700 Subject: BASIC challenge on RetroBattlestations Message-ID: July is BASIC Month and there's another challenge happening on RetroBattlestations. The type-in program for this challenge borrows a little bit of code from the very first BASIC challenge that I did. I've created a little "turtle graphics" type program that uses a stack based command interpreter. Right now the commands are very simple, pen up & down, move forward and turn. There's also looping to make it easy to create that spirograph effect that everyone loves to do! This time around there's more than just the random winners for typing in the program as-is. I'll also be choosing two people who can add the most interesting features or port it to the most exotic hardware. So far there are not too many platforms that have been ported to, and the only features that anyone has added has just been random colorization. You can check it out here: https://redd.it/4qs0f3 -- Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com From anders at abc80.net Fri Jul 8 13:02:39 2016 From: anders at abc80.net (Anders Sandahl) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 20:02:39 +0200 Subject: WANTED: PDP-8 KE8E Extended arithmetic element In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <838d481d92a1567f192362583bc6e52d.squirrel@www.sadata.se> Hi, I've been looking for a KK8E for some time now. It's the set of two boards: M8340/M8341. If you have one to sell me please contact me off list. I'm also interested in hints that can lead me to one. I'll give them a good home. /Anders From jdbryan at acm.org Fri Jul 8 23:40:14 2016 From: jdbryan at acm.org (J. David Bryan) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 00:40:14 -0400 Subject: Second release of the HP 3000 Series III simulator In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: On Friday, July 8, 2016 at 8:57, SPC wrote: > So I assume that we can make operative programs *only* with the COBOL > 74 compiler, Isn't so ? The software kit contains two COBOL compilers: - a COBOL '68 compiler invoked with the :COBOL command - a COBOL '74 compiler invoked with the :COBOLII command. The second compiler has an alternate mode, invoked with the :COBOLIIX command, where it operates as a COBOL '85 compiler. This second compiler, in either '74 or '85 mode, generates programs that use the HP 32234A COBOL II firmware instructions. These instructions are not yet implemented in the simulator. Programs generated with the COBOL '68 compiler will run on the simulator. As Keven mentioned, the kit also comes with BASIC, FORTRAN '66, Pascal, RPG, and SPL compilers. Programs generated with these compilers will run on the simulator too. -- Dave From pontus at Update.UU.SE Fri Jul 8 11:11:15 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 18:11:15 +0200 Subject: Fwd: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels In-Reply-To: <2532d8e5-7fa4-b772-8a30-4005fc29aaee@btinternet.com> References: <33fd5fb6-13b6-c6f4-b954-6854bab7cd11@yahoo.com> <32cdd2a7-cbc3-609c-e6b8-0ceb7e72f745@btinternet.com> <20160708061438.GD26447@Update.UU.SE> <2532d8e5-7fa4-b772-8a30-4005fc29aaee@btinternet.com> Message-ID: <20160708161115.GE26447@Update.UU.SE> On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 01:18:45PM +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote: > > > On 08/07/2016 07:14, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > >On Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 07:47:32PM +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote: > >> > >>On 07/07/2016 19:11, John H. Reinhardt wrote: > >>>On 7/7/2016 3:02 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: > >>>> > >>>> > >>>>-------- Forwarded Message -------- > >>>>Subject: Re: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > >>>>Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 08:01:35 +0100 > >>>>From: Rod Smallwood > >>>>To: Paul Birkel > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> > >>>>On 07/07/2016 07:18, Paul Birkel wrote: > >>>>>"MakeAnEight", oh my :->. Next it will be "SweetSixteen" I imagine. > >>>>> > >>>>>Great news on the casting-in-resin prototype. How much are these > >>>>>ending up costing? > >>>>> > >>>>>-----Original Message----- > >>>>>From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rod > >>>>>Smallwood > >>>>>Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 2:04 AM > >>>>>To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >>>>>Subject: Front Panels - New development - Bezels > >>>>> > >>>>>Hi Guys > >>>>> > >>>>> We are able to-announce the successful test production > >>>>>of a PDP-8 Bezel in cast resin. > >>>>> > >>>>> The result is tough, beige colored, slightly flexible > >>>>>copy of the original. > >>>>> > >>>>> Bonding the panel to the bezel or adding internal > >>>>>stiffening brings rigidity. > >>>>> > >>>>> Painting matches the color. > >>>>> > >>>>> This will be part of our MakeAnEight parts for > >>>>>reproduction or repair range. > >>>>> > >>>>> > >>>>> Rod (Panelman) Smallwood > >>>>> > >>>>> > >>>>> > >>>>Hi Paul > >>>> Well I was going to call it ElevenHeaven but I like > >>>>your idea better. > >>>> > >>>>They got a good result first time. That seemed too easy. Then I > >>>>remembered > >>>>that when I went through the molding and casting process they said is > >>>>that it? > >>>> > >>>>It just dawned on me. Screen printing is all about handling gloopy > >>>>liquids. > >>>>They have all of the knowledge of mixing and all of the measuring pots > >>>>and > >>>>stirring sticks you will ever need. > >>>> > >>>>Cost? Well that's interesting. > >>>>Usually in a small run/custom situation its the labor cost that's the > >>>>major element. > >>>>Here it seems to be the cost of the materials to get the right result. I > >>>>should know soon. > >>>> > >>>>Regards Rod > >>>> > >>>> > >>>I would stick with the "ElevenHeaven" since that indicates a PDP-11. The > >>>Sixteen > >>>refers to the bits, I know, but there were a lot of 16-bit-ers out there > >>>and only > >>>one Eleven! > >>> > >>>BTW, I'm looking forward to your getting to the PDP-11 series, especially > >>>an 11/70 > >>>panel and bezel. > >>> > >>>Regards, > >>> John H. Reinhardt > >>Ok Thanks > >> Plan is to complete the PDP-8/i and then do the 8/L > >> > >>Next up will be the much requested ElevenHeaven range. > >>As the 11/70 is the headline system we could start there. > >>Panels first, bezel to follow. > >> > >>Longer term goal is a full size operating replica that is difficult (at > >>least externally) to tell from the original. > >> > >Is there a way to tell your replicas from the originals? Given the prices > >of some original panels it would be nice to be able to identify a > >"counterfeit" one. > > > >Now, I am i no way against what you are doing I think it i great but I'm > >honestly conserned that these will pop up on ebay in the future as the real > >thing. > > > >/P > Well I could say ours are better. However I'm going to get a number burned > into the plexiglass. > An easy way to tell is to look at the cutouts. Ours are laser cut and > perfectly straight, sharp and square. > The originals have tool marks and are a bit rounded in the corners by the > router. > > Regards Rod > > Thank you, good enough. /P From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 11:15:00 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 10:15:00 -0600 (MDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > WordStar commands are still used in some things, such as JOE. You are right and I use Joe daily, hmm, more like hourly. I'm typing this message in it, right now, in fact. It's my $EDITOR and default composition editor in Alpine, my go-to mail client. > However, they went away before the GUI era and are mostly now forgotten. > Including by you! ;-) Some of us perhaps, but after writing a few hundred thousand lines of code in Borland IDEs in the 1990s, I couldn't forget the keystrokes if I wanted to, I think. > WordPerfect replaced WordStar on DOS. It was a lot more capable and it > had superb printer-driver support. I liked both of them. The coolest thing about Wordperfect was how they actually paid attention to the fact that white text on a blue background was supposedly easier on ones eyes. I believe there was some kind of research into this, but I'm not sure if it was the by Wordperfect Corp. > Then Windows (and MacOS and GUIs in general) swept WordPerfect away. My recollection of that time was that, as soon as the unwashed masses saw that GUIs were going to be the norm on microcomputers, they were well-past-done with anything character based. I don't actually see that as 100% positive progress, though. I see it as emblematic of how "users" see computers, with both good and bad implications. Greater accessibility means more overall benefit to more people, and that's a good thing. However, too much over-simplification leads to a form of learned helplessness and a bigger chasm between the technical, and non-technical users. > The printer drivers issue became irrelevant when the OS handled the > printers and font rendering etc. ... not that M$ didn't simply co-opt the lesson from others who'd been doing it for a very long time. However, it's not such a bad thing to learn from others. They certainly "learned" plenty from MacOS. > and most users much preferred the GUI model of text-editing to the > WordPerfect embedded-control-codes model. You are right, most did prefer it. However, at the time, I remember much wailing and gnashing of teeth as people who had mastered WP screamed at Word for trying to outsmart them and they couldn't simply delete the offending control character to reverse the automagically-helpy "features" they are always trying to shovel into Word/Office. I personally still find Word to be an infuriating abomination no matter how many Paper Clips, ribbon-interfaces, or hollywood-squares-metro GUIs they put on it. A slime mold in a dress is still just a greasy disgusting fungus. Boy did Wordperfect go down in flames quick, though. I won't argue that M$ cleaned their clock in record time. It seemed like in only a couple of years they went from total-domination to being bought by... Corel (?!). > Interestingly, more things seem to understand the Vi keystrokes now, at > least on Unix. Hmm, IMHO, I'd say that it's still pretty equal and if there was any edge, it'd go to EMACS editing mode and keystrokes (especially ctrl-a and ctrl-e). It has a lot to do with what things like libreadline supports by default and what editing mode your shell defaults to. I don't personally like dealing with any kind of termdef/termcap/terminal-control and so I nearly always go looking for someone else's code who's already slogged through editing modes and UTF-8. > I cordially dislike both Vi & Emacs: I grew up with keyboards with > cursor and delete keys, but they didn't have META or SUPER or any of > that guff. Well, I do understand were this comes from. UNIX folks were dealing with a sort of multi-culturalism problem. Since it runs on so many hardware platforms and interoperates with tons of terminal types (and DOS or Windows either didn't exist yet, or didn't run on those platforms), folks are (even still) hand-wringing a lot about terminals that have different cursor key mappings et al. That's always the explanation you hear around why VI cursor movement keys aren't (just) arrow keys, and also include 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l'. So, I don't understand why, after x86 has absolutely dominated the computing scene for a few decades, that there is any excuse left for editors or terminal emulators that screw up the cursor movement keys right outta the box. It's not like there are that many types of keyboard scancodes for cursor keys on PeeCees (and heck, even non-PC UNIX hardware that uses PS/2 or USB keyboards). I don't accept the excuses about 100's of terminal types in the 1980's. That was just too long ago to still be moaning about today. Most of those terminals are in landfills, too. A few hobbyists like me might have some or play with them, but if you are pimping a UNIX variant today and you can't deal (by default out of the box) with cursor keys: your vendor or project needs a reality check. Lame excuses about old terminals making it "hard" are totally worn out and only sound laughable in 2016. However, to be fair, most of those cursor-keys-don't-work issues come from terminal mismatches as folks move between systems on a single terminal session, not ill-maintained PC keyboard + VGA console terminal code. > I disliked WordStar (which I found arcane and clunky even when it was > still current and on retail sale), WordPerfect (all function-keys all > the time, needed a keyboard template or eidetic memory). I also knew and > supported MultiMate, DisplayWrite, MS Word for DOS and others. I used > LocoScript at home, which replaced The Last Word on my ZX Spectrum. Sounds like you have a much broader experience with word processors than I do, then. I remember some of those, but I wasn't a user of any besides the first two (Wordstar and Wordperfect). -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 11:20:27 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 10:20:27 -0600 (MDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > WordStar commands for that operation would be: > Mark beginning of block: ^K B > Mark end of block: ^K K > (WordStar did not allow block selection with the cursor keys.) AFAIK, original Wordstar didn't, but the Borland IDE and Joe does. Just hold down ctrl and start hitting cursor keys to cover the text you need to select. Badabing. You've got yourself a selection. -Swift From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 11:55:34 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 18:55:34 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 18:15, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> WordStar commands are still used in some things, such as JOE. > > You are right and I use Joe daily, hmm, more like hourly. I'm typing this > message in it, right now, in fact. It's my $EDITOR and default composition > editor in Alpine, my go-to mail client. Gmail on the web, these days. Sometimes on Mac OS X, or should I now say macOS... :-( ... and sometimes on Linux. Dedicated client on Android. I keep Thunderbird around, but only for backup purposes. I don't have a favourite Linux console-mode text editor. Normally I just use vi, with a faint grimace of distaste. I only know _very_ simple commands -- insert, append, delete, save/exit or quit. I never even learned how to copy/paste in it. Something bizarre involving 'yank' is all I recall and I don't know how to do it. On my own boxes, I sometimes install Tilde, but normally use whatever the GUI's editor is -- Gedit on Unity, Leafpad on Lxde, Geany on XFCE. If I don't have a GUI, though, plain old vi. I dislike both Nano and Joe, although I'm perfectly able to use either, so there's no point installing them if they're not there. I really _really_ wish there was something like SetEdit or Tilde in the default repos for Debian/*buntu/CentOS. EFTE is sometimes there but it has issues, IIRC. >> However, they went away before the GUI era and are mostly now forgotten. >> Including by you! ;-) > > Some of us perhaps, but after writing a few hundred thousand lines of code > in Borland IDEs in the 1990s, I couldn't forget the keystrokes if I wanted > to, I think. I can remember more functionality via WordStar keystrokes than I can via vi ones! :-) > I liked both of them. The coolest thing about Wordperfect was how they > actually paid attention to the fact that white text on a blue background > was supposedly easier on ones eyes. I believe there was some kind of > research into this, but I'm not sure if it was the by Wordperfect Corp. Yes, it did look better, true. But all those arcane Ctrl-shift F5, shift-F7, alt-F11, F3, ctrl-F1 patterns -- eeuw. When WP 5.1 caught on, at least I could use drop-downs for the stuff I couldn't remember the f-key combos for. I have a download of WP 6 for DOS here, waiting for me to try in a VM. I have Word 5.5 and 6 for DOS, but they can readily and repeatably crash DOSemu. :-( > My recollection of that time was that, as soon as the unwashed masses saw > that GUIs were going to be the norm on microcomputers, they were > well-past-done with anything character based. I don't actually see that as > 100% positive progress, though. I see it as emblematic of how "users" see > computers, with both good and bad implications. Greater accessibility > means more overall benefit to more people, and that's a good thing. > However, too much over-simplification leads to a form of learned > helplessness and a bigger chasm between the technical, and non-technical > users. Definitely, on all points. Yes, GUIs swept away the console stuff, and with good reason -- there was so little standardisation among text-mode apps. I had to memorise dozens and dozens of totally different UIs, and almost all of them were nasty. But, yes, it certainly contributed to the dumbing-down of software and users both. > ... not that M$ didn't simply co-opt the lesson from others who'd been > doing it for a very long time. However, it's not such a bad thing to learn > from others. They certainly "learned" plenty from MacOS. True! But then, MacOS learned from the Lisa, and the Lisa learned from the Xerox Star. Sadly, only the surface appearance, though -- not the ubiquitous networking, not the OOPS dev tools. > You are right, most did prefer it. However, at the time, I remember much > wailing and gnashing of teeth as people who had mastered WP screamed at > Word for trying to outsmart them and they couldn't simply delete the > offending control character to reverse the automagically-helpy "features" > they are always trying to shovel into Word/Office. Yep. Me too. Both remembered, and occasionally, cursed it. I am fully aware that my feelings towards MS Word are a form of Stockholm Syndrome. I don't think it's a good app, just the one I now know best. It's for good reasons that I use the oldest versions I can. > I personally still find Word to be an infuriating abomination no matter > how many Paper Clips, ribbon-interfaces, or hollywood-squares-metro GUIs > they put on it. A slime mold in a dress is still just a greasy disgusting > fungus. It's been decaying since Office 2007 for me. I won't use Windows versions after 2003. On Windows, I use Word97 now, or LibreOffice. > Boy did Wordperfect go down in flames quick, though. I won't argue that M$ > cleaned their clock in record time. It seemed like in only a couple of > years they went from total-domination to being bought by... Corel (?!). Yes indeed! They missed the Windows boat, and it doomed them. Shame -- WP for Mac was a good app. They made it freeware and I used it occasionally. WordPerfect for Windows _today_ is a lovely app. Very fast and a nice clean UI. It'd be my Windows WP of choice _if_ I voluntarily used Windows, which I don't, and if I ran commercial paid apps, which I don't. WinWord matured into a decent app, then got bloaty and slow, then got a crappy new UI. WP4W started out bloaty and slow, and matured into a sleek, fast, efficient app. But too late. Odd how things can reverse. > Hmm, IMHO, I'd say that it's still pretty equal and if there was any edge, > it'd go to EMACS editing mode and keystrokes (especially ctrl-a and > ctrl-e). Conceded. I never mastered Emacs. All the pain of weird old pre-GUI UIs, plus all the pain of Unix terminal support etc., _and_ the pain of an app which has its own vocabulary for things which now have standard terminology. So, "buffers" and whatnot, not files and windows. And terms from a type of keyboard that hasn't been manufactured since before I grew my first pubic hairs -- "meta" and "super" and all that, when the IBM Extended layout has been the industry standard, on PC, Mac, Amiga, ST, Acorn, even DEC terminals, for 30 years. I will give Emacs a try once it is dragged kicking and screaming into 1985. Xah Lee's ErgoEmacs tried, but it's faltered and stagnated. http://ergoemacs.org/ > It has a lot to do with what things like libreadline supports by > default and what editing mode your shell defaults to. I don't personally > like dealing with any kind of termdef/termcap/terminal-control and so I > nearly always go looking for someone else's code who's already slogged > through editing modes and UTF-8. OMG yes! This is one of the weird things. I actively like Linux because it's a PC-native OS. Its commands understand PC keyboards and can display bold and underline and colours on the console. The keyboard behaves sanely -- all the keys work and do what I expect. But old Unix hands say that it feels like a lash-up and FreeBSD feels like Real Unix. Which to me means that FreeBSD can't handle PC extended screen modes -- the console always boots up in 80*25. If I want a Linux box with a text console, I can set it to 132*50 and see lots of lovely status messages. Not on FreeBSD, oh no. No VGA support here: you get MDA and like it, punk. It doesn't even understand PC partitioning. Oh no. I can't put it in a logical drive like a grown-up PC OS; oh no, it needs a primary and then in that it makes it own weird alien non-PC disk format. For me, "real Unix feel" means my keyboard doesn't behave, the utilities don't use PC features from 1981 such as bold, underline, flash, italics or colour, cursor keys may not work. The stuff that makes Real Unix People feel at home, apparently, means I feel like I'm using an alien OS from the bad old days. > Well, I do understand were this comes from. UNIX folks were dealing with a > sort of multi-culturalism problem. Since it runs on so many hardware > platforms and interoperates with tons of terminal types (and DOS or > Windows either didn't exist yet, or didn't run on those platforms), folks > are (even still) hand-wringing a lot about terminals that have different > cursor key mappings et al. That's always the explanation you hear around > why VI cursor movement keys aren't (just) arrow keys, and also include > 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l'. > > So, I don't understand why, after x86 has absolutely dominated the > computing scene for a few decades, that there is any excuse left for > editors or terminal emulators that screw up the cursor movement keys right > outta the box. It's not like there are that many types of keyboard > scancodes for cursor keys on PeeCees (and heck, even non-PC UNIX hardware > that uses PS/2 or USB keyboards). I don't accept the excuses about 100's > of terminal types in the 1980's. That was just too long ago to still be > moaning about today. Most of those terminals are in landfills, too. A few > hobbyists like me might have some or play with them, but if you are > pimping a UNIX variant today and you can't deal (by default out of the > box) with cursor keys: your vendor or project needs a reality check. Lame > excuses about old terminals making it "hard" are totally worn out and only > sound laughable in 2016. Exactly! Yes! This! Linux just shrugged and adopted native practices: it uses DOS disk partitioning, DOS keyboard layouts, DOS screen formatting, DOS screen modes, etc. *BSD flips you the finger and is extremely reluctant to use anything that didn't work on a PDP-11 before I was born. > However, to be fair, most of those cursor-keys-don't-work issues come from > terminal mismatches as folks move between systems on a single terminal > session, not ill-maintained PC keyboard + VGA console terminal code. I defer to your superiour knowledge! > Sounds like you have a much broader experience with word processors than I > do, then. I remember some of those, but I wasn't a user of any besides the > first two (Wordstar and Wordperfect). Oh, there were many more. I collected them for a while. A British PC mag ran a cover disk with a crippled copy of VolksWriter on it. They crippled it by deleting a bunch of files, so it couldn't print, do import/export, had no help, etc. Then they duplicated the disk. This meant that with a simple Norton Undelete and a table of the missing first letters of the filenames, you could restore it to full functionality. :-) So I did that and explored a new & unfamiliar WP, different from the ones my customers used: MultiMate, WordStar/NewWord/WordStar 1512/WordStar 2000 [all different, of course], WordPerfect, DisplayWrite, etc. My mind was thus opened and I went looking for others -- shareware classics which were "big in America" such as XyWrite & PC-Write; less-common commercial tools, such as Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Works, LocoScript PC, Q&A Writer. I liked outliners a lot too. So I learned about 20 DOS wordprocessors -- plus at least half a dozen classic Mac ones: MacWrite, MacAuthor, WriteNow, Nisus Writer, etc. (I've already mentioned MS Word -- the Mac versions were great pre-version-6. MacWord 5.1a was _the_ classic. And Mac WordPerfect, later freeware.) So, yes, when I say that the diversity of UIs in the DOS era was horrid, I really meant it, from extensive personal experience. *The* nastiest was Samna Executive. It was meant for bosses and was supposed to be super easy. I couldn't work it at all. Odd, really, as Samna Am? was the first serious WP for Windows 3, and it was a lovely program. Later became Lotus WordPro. Still a good app, but long dead. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 11:55:55 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 18:55:55 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 18:20, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> WordStar commands for that operation would be: >> Mark beginning of block: ^K B >> Mark end of block: ^K K >> (WordStar did not allow block selection with the cursor keys.) > > AFAIK, original Wordstar didn't, but the Borland IDE and Joe does. Just > hold down ctrl and start hitting cursor keys to cover the text you need to > select. Badabing. You've got yourself a selection. That I did not know. Interesting. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 12:08:31 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 10:08:31 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 09:20 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> WordStar commands for that operation would be: Mark beginning of >> block: ^K B Mark end of block: ^K K (WordStar did not allow block >> selection with the cursor keys.) > > AFAIK, original Wordstar didn't, but the Borland IDE and Joe does. > Just hold down ctrl and start hitting cursor keys to cover the text > you need to select. Badabing. You've got yourself a selection. Wordstar allowed for "user routines" for various keyboard and display functions. I suspect you could have made any key or combination of keys do all sorts of strange things. After WS on the PC, I moved to Wordstar 2000. A great product, but utterly incompatible with WordStar (MicroPro provided a "Star Exchange" utility with WS2K to handle conversions). Different key combinations, options, displays entirely. But it did handle prop spacing fonts quite nicely. I still have the instructions from a third-party outfit on how to make WS 3.3 handle prop spacing, but it's a real kludge. Different WP packages had their own peculiar advantages. North Star Memorite, for example, had great footnoting. --Chuck From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 12:27:00 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 19:27:00 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 19:08, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > Wordstar allowed for "user routines" for various keyboard and display > functions. I suspect you could have made any key or combination of keys > do all sorts of strange things. Ah, yes, I vaguely recall looking at that. But it was too much like hard work for me. The ultimate customisable WP was arguably Borland Sprint, I believe. It sounded great, but I only tried it very briefly and for me, it didn't offer enough to tempt me away from MS Word. MS Word 5.5 is available as freeware from Microsoft now, as a one-size-suits-all Year 2000 fix for all DOS versions of Word. I don't know why they didn't just bit the bullet and give out Word 6, which was the last ever version for DOS and is pretty much feature-equivalent and UI-equivalent to MS Word 6 for Windows 3 and classic MacOS too. > > After WS on the PC, I moved to Wordstar 2000. A great product, but > utterly incompatible with WordStar (MicroPro provided a "Star Exchange" > utility with WS2K to handle conversions). Different key combinations, > options, displays entirely. But it did handle prop spacing fonts quite > nicely. I still have the instructions from a third-party outfit on how > to make WS 3.3 handle prop spacing, but it's a real kludge. Yes, I remember it. It sorted out a lot of the idiosyncrasies of classic WordStar, but it was no easier for a WordStar user to transition to W*2K than it was to a rival WP -- such as the more widely-used, widely-supported, and on the whole more powerful WordPerfect. Always risky to try such a big transition. I presume folk here know of the excellent history of the app family? http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history There was also the now-nearly-forgotten WordStar Express, another totally new app, written I believe in Modula-2. I never heard of anyone using the normal version, but it was bundled with certain Amstrad PCs as WordStar 1512, and I saw quite a few people using that. (Mainly the Amstrad PC1512, I guess, from the name! It was the first 'Strad PC clone, and a weirdly nonstandard one at that.) Also neither file- nor keystroke-compatible, and a bit sluggish, too. Weird weird move, given WordStar's main selling points were its keyboard commands and its speed! > Different WP packages had their own peculiar advantages. North Star > Memorite, for example, had great footnoting. I never saw that one. Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It had, naturally, great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall. My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a problem. Bad old days. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 13:00:44 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 11:00:44 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It had, naturally, > great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser > printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end > of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall. > > My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as > it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it > supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular > around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive > shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a > problem. What I found surprising about the IBM Displaywriter was that much of the "smarts" of the thing resided in the printer firmware itself (e.g. underlining, bolding, etc.) and not the DW CPU unit--and, of course, the printer used EBCDIC. There were a mess of PC word processors, as well as CP/M ones. WordPerfect, PerfectWriter, PC Write, Palantir, Electric Pencil... I recall that the preferred one for the AVR Eagle systems was Spellbinder and that it had a lot of adherents--I don't know if it was ever offered for the PC platform. On occasion, I still use an editor that I wrote for CP/M and later ported to DOS. 11KB and it has lots of features that are peculiar to my preferences. I'd thought about porting it to Linux, but currently, it's still in assembly and dealing with terminfo or curses is not something that I look forward to. So I use Joe. --Chuck From echristopherson at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 13:15:24 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:15:24 -0500 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > But when I got my hands on early Macs and Windows 2 in my first job, I > discovered the CUA model, and I've liked it ever since. I still miss > CUA editing on the Linux command line. > > There are some: http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/42908.html > Thanks, Liam -- that page has finally brought back to me the name of Xwpe, an IDE/editor I played around with a little in the 90s. I never really used it for anything, but for whatever reason I've been really curious about its identity for all this time. " First, he pointed me at XWPE. It certainly looks the part, but sadly the project seems to have died. I did get it running on Fedora 20 by installing some extra libraries and symlinking them to names XWPE wanted, but it crashes very readily. http://www.identicalsoftware.com/xwpe " -- Eric Christopherson From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 13:19:05 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 20:19:05 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 20:00, Chuck Guzis wrote: > On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > > >> Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It had, naturally, >> great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser >> printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end >> of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall. >> >> My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as >> it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it >> supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular >> around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive >> shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a >> problem. > > > What I found surprising about the IBM Displaywriter was that much of the > "smarts" of the thing resided in the printer firmware itself (e.g. > underlining, bolding, etc.) and not the DW CPU unit--and, of course, the > printer used EBCDIC. Aha. I have never seen an actual DisplayWriter -- note that final "r". DisplayWrite (no "r" on the end) was a WP package for DOS. I believe it looked & worked quite like a hardware DisplayWriter, but as I said, I wouldn't know. I'm quite curious and I'm sorry I missed out on them. Oddly, at least oddly I was told, quite a few people/companies bought & used DisplayWrite even if they never had or used a hardware DisplayWriter. It wasn't very competitive but it was good enough -- the "professional" tier of early DOS wordprocessors were all expensive and rather arcane. It's also something that seemed to cause a major divide across the Atlantic, for some odd reason. Brits almost never paid for or registered shareware, I'm told, whereas many North Americans did and it could be a lucrative business. Over here in Europe it wasn't taken very seriously so none of the shareware WPs took off. The American magazines I read talked of WPs I'd never seen -- and as a professional skill I learned just about every WP program I could set hands on on DOS and Mac. Brits used ones that were obscure in N America, and vice versa. > There were a mess of PC word processors, as well as CP/M ones. > WordPerfect, PerfectWriter, PC Write, Palantir, Electric Pencil... Heard of the latter 2, never saw them. Oh, and there was LetterPerfect, too, the cheap cut-down WordPerfect. > I recall that the preferred one for the AVR Eagle systems was > Spellbinder and that it had a lot of adherents--I don't know if it was > ever offered for the PC platform. I am not sure but I think so, yes. > On occasion, I still use an editor that I wrote for CP/M and later > ported to DOS. 11KB and it has lots of features that are peculiar to my > preferences. I'd thought about porting it to Linux, but currently, it's > still in assembly and dealing with terminfo or curses is not something > that I look forward to. So I use Joe. :-) There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and was... strange. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 13:42:56 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 11:42:56 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 11:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- > apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and > was... strange. Originally, PC-DOS had only EDLIN, which, amazingly, was *less* powerful than CP/M ED. "E" in PC DOS didn't come about until version 6.3 or so. By then, MS had their EDIT editor which was intimately tied into QuickBASIC. Before that, when I typed "E" on my old PC systems, I get the Semware editor--a very nice tool. I purchased it, but rarely used it. Another good DOS editor was VEDIT, which, IIRC, was also offered for the IBM Displaywriter. I still don't like *nix vi to this very day. --Chuck From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 13:45:39 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 20:45:39 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 8 July 2016 at 20:42, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- >> apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and >> was... strange. > > Originally, PC-DOS had only EDLIN, which, amazingly, was *less* powerful > than CP/M ED. Oh my, yes. I was quite the Edlin virtuoso in the late '80s, but then, there really wasn't much to master. > "E" in PC DOS didn't come about until version 6.3 or so. By then, MS > had their EDIT editor which was intimately tied into QuickBASIC. Ah yes, true. It got separated out in the NT era. > Before that, when I typed "E" on my old PC systems, I get the Semware > editor--a very nice tool. I purchased it, but rarely used it. > > Another good DOS editor was VEDIT, which, IIRC, was also offered for the > IBM Displaywriter. Never saw them! > I still don't like *nix vi to this very day. Oh good, it's not just me. :-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From phb.hfx at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 13:46:05 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 15:46:05 -0300 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> On 2016-07-08 3:19 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 8 July 2016 at 20:00, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote: >> >> >>> Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It had, naturally, >>> great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser >>> printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end >>> of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall. >>> >>> My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as >>> it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it >>> supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular >>> around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive >>> shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a >>> problem. >> >> What I found surprising about the IBM Displaywriter was that much of the >> "smarts" of the thing resided in the printer firmware itself (e.g. >> underlining, bolding, etc.) and not the DW CPU unit--and, of course, the >> printer used EBCDIC. > Aha. I have never seen an actual DisplayWriter -- note that final "r". > > DisplayWrite (no "r" on the end) was a WP package for DOS. I believe > it looked & worked quite like a hardware DisplayWriter, but as I said, > I wouldn't know. I'm quite curious and I'm sorry I missed out on them. > > Oddly, at least oddly I was told, quite a few people/companies bought > & used DisplayWrite even if they never had or used a hardware > DisplayWriter. It wasn't very competitive but it was good enough -- > the "professional" tier of early DOS wordprocessors were all expensive > and rather arcane. > > There was also a version of displaywrite for 370, I am told that the only thing that is really similar is the name of the products. Before displaywriter the OP division of IBM produced the Office system 6 which had a really cool inkjet printer.... as long as you didn't have to fix them service reps called them "Spray and pray" They where not a thermal inkjet like most modern ones, but rather used a pressurized ink system to force the ink through nozzles on the print head, I saw one operating without the shroud around the printhead that sucked back overspray, it was really cool the print head moved along silently and the character just appeared on the page. Print quality was very good. The 6670 laser printer ( a copier 3 with a laser print head) was also originally part of that system they also produced good quality results but often had duplexing issues. later on there was the 5520 system which was really a S/34 running special software and a special version of the 5251 terminals. The first purpose built wordprocessor I ever saw was a Micom system in a government office around 1980/81. Micom first made wordprocessors based on 8080 around 1975. Paul. From phb.hfx at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 13:50:46 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 15:50:46 -0300 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FF606.5010600@gmail.com> On 2016-07-08 3:45 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 8 July 2016 at 20:42, Chuck Guzis wrote: >>> There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- >>> apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and >>> was... strange. >> Originally, PC-DOS had only EDLIN, which, amazingly, was *less* powerful >> than CP/M ED. > Oh my, yes. I was quite the Edlin virtuoso in the late '80s, but then, > there really wasn't much to master. > >> "E" in PC DOS didn't come about until version 6.3 or so. By then, MS >> had their EDIT editor which was intimately tied into QuickBASIC. > Ah yes, true. It got separated out in the NT era. > >> Before that, when I typed "E" on my old PC systems, I get the Semware >> editor--a very nice tool. I purchased it, but rarely used it. >> >> Another good DOS editor was VEDIT, which, IIRC, was also offered for the >> IBM Displaywriter. > The DOS editor I really like was originally call PE and an enhanced version "E" was shipped with later version of PC-DOS, there are also some clones of the editor floating around as well. I still use this editor regularly because of its very flexible ways of selecting and manipulating text. Paul. From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 14:13:30 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 12:13:30 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> Message-ID: <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 11:46 AM, Paul Berger wrote: > Before displaywriter the OP division of IBM produced the Office > system 6 which had a really cool inkjet printer.... as long as you > didn't have to fix them service reps called them "Spray and pray" > They where not a thermal inkjet like most modern ones, but rather > used a pressurized ink system to force the ink through nozzles on the > print head, I saw one operating without the shroud around the > printhead that sucked back overspray, it was really cool the print > head moved along silently and the character just appeared on the > page. I recall seeing the IBM inkjet printer at a late 70s NCC. IIRC it used electrostatics to deflect the ink drops to their proper position. > The first purpose built wordprocessor I ever saw was a Micom system > in a government office around 1980/81. Micom first made > wordprocessors based on 8080 around 1975. Another one that pops into my head was CPT, which used a page-edit sort of terminal. The system spewed a page's worth of text to the terminal, which was then edited on the terminal offline. The operator then hit "send" (or some such) to transmit the edited content back to the host. I still have a flipchart reference and a few 8" CPT disks. Some WPs, such as Artec, used a Diablo KSR with a one-line LCD mounted on it and a floor-standing dual 8" drive main unit. IIRC, there was a CRT option available, but it was expensive. Then there were the systems installed in newspaper bullpens--essentially smart terminals hooked to a server. I don't recall the leading brand, but I think Lanier was very big in that area. Initially, I think the biggest advantages of the early wapros was the ability to make edits to existing documents and to create multiple copies of the same document. I wonder how many of the young 'uns here have experienced the joys of carbon paper (especially when accidentally reversed) or having to re-type a whole page of text to make a few simple edits. --Chuck From chocolatejollis38 at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 14:28:09 2016 From: chocolatejollis38 at gmail.com (John Willis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:28:09 -0600 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: > > > There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- > apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and > was... strange. > > I liked EPM under OS/2, and had to get acquainted with TEDIT for disaster recovery of same. I believe "E" under OS/2 was just a stripped-down GUI editor akin to MS Notepad. From billdegnan at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 14:31:00 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 15:31:00 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> Message-ID: I used, until my Windows XP days, an editor called Qedit. Q.exe It was fast and one could edit columns as well as rows. This made it useful for pre-parsing of data files. I also used PEdit, an IBM program. I used to teach DisplayWrite 4 at the IBM Customer Center in Wilmington, Delaware. I must have a few dozen word processor programs, little ones mostly, from various systems. A lot of WordStar versions in particular for CP/M. b From phb.hfx at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 14:33:01 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 16:33:01 -0300 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: <577FFFED.4040305@gmail.com> On 2016-07-08 4:28 PM, John Willis wrote: >> >> There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- >> apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and >> was... strange. >> >> > I liked EPM under OS/2, and had to get acquainted with TEDIT for disaster > recovery of same. I believe "E" under OS/2 was just a stripped-down GUI > editor akin to MS Notepad. EPM was another derivative of the DOS editor PE. PE was one of several very nice DOS programs written by IBMers in their spare time, many of these where shared internally and PE was one of them that later became an official product. Paul. From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 8 14:33:24 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 15:33:24 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> Message-ID: <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> > On Jul 8, 2016, at 3:13 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > On 07/08/2016 11:46 AM, Paul Berger wrote: > >> Before displaywriter the OP division of IBM produced the Office >> system 6 which had a really cool inkjet printer.... as long as you >> didn't have to fix them service reps called them "Spray and pray" >> They where not a thermal inkjet like most modern ones, but rather >> used a pressurized ink system to force the ink through nozzles on the >> print head, I saw one operating without the shroud around the >> printhead that sucked back overspray, it was really cool the print >> head moved along silently and the character just appeared on the >> page. > > I recall seeing the IBM inkjet printer at a late 70s NCC. IIRC it used > electrostatics to deflect the ink drops to their proper position. I saw that technology described in a Dutch magazine ("De Ingenieur" = "the engineer") around 1972 or so. As PB mentioned, it uses a shroud or baffle, since the ink stream is always active; the control voltage steers the drops towards the paper or towards the baffle. Ink hitting the baffle was recirculated, I think. > ... > Initially, I think the biggest advantages of the early wapros was the > ability to make edits to existing documents and to create multiple > copies of the same document. I wonder how many of the young 'uns here > have experienced the joys of carbon paper (especially when accidentally > reversed) or having to re-type a whole page of text to make a few simple > edits. A bit like editing text (programs) on paper tape... I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an article about WP history). paul From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 8 14:43:41 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 12:43:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. > That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according to > Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an > article about WP history). The original post that started this thread referred to a URL http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/?platform=hootsuite It suggested that one significant contender for that author's "FIRST author to write a book on a word processor" was Len Deighton. In the late 1960s he bought one. He wrote first drafts on his typewriter, then his secretary, Ellenor Handley, retyped it into his MT/ST and edited it there. Specifically, a novel entitled "Bomber", published in 1970. If the MT/ST was released in 1964, then even with its high price, it seems odd that so many years would go by before anybody used it for a book manuscript. (I also mentioned that the pronunciation of MT/ST made me want to create a word processor to be called "FULL ST") From phb.hfx at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 14:44:21 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 16:44:21 -0300 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> Message-ID: <57800295.9030103@gmail.com> On 2016-07-08 4:33 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 8, 2016, at 3:13 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> >> On 07/08/2016 11:46 AM, Paul Berger wrote: >> >>> Before displaywriter the OP division of IBM produced the Office >>> system 6 which had a really cool inkjet printer.... as long as you >>> didn't have to fix them service reps called them "Spray and pray" >>> They where not a thermal inkjet like most modern ones, but rather >>> used a pressurized ink system to force the ink through nozzles on the >>> print head, I saw one operating without the shroud around the >>> printhead that sucked back overspray, it was really cool the print >>> head moved along silently and the character just appeared on the >>> page. >> I recall seeing the IBM inkjet printer at a late 70s NCC. IIRC it used >> electrostatics to deflect the ink drops to their proper position. > I saw that technology described in a Dutch magazine ("De Ingenieur" = "the engineer") around 1972 or so. As PB mentioned, it uses a shroud or baffle, since the ink stream is always active; the control voltage steers the drops towards the paper or towards the baffle. Ink hitting the baffle was recirculated, I think. Yes that is correct some of the droplets where purposely steered into the "gutter" and yes it was by electrostatic deflection.. IBM would used the same sort of system in the Item Numbering Feature (INF) on the 3890 cheque sorter to print a number on the back of documents on the fly. This machine could process up to 2400 cheaque sized documents a minute so they are really moving along... print quality was not quite as good. > >> ... >> Initially, I think the biggest advantages of the early wapros was the >> ability to make edits to existing documents and to create multiple >> copies of the same document. I wonder how many of the young 'uns here >> have experienced the joys of carbon paper (especially when accidentally >> reversed) or having to re-type a whole page of text to make a few simple >> edits. > A bit like editing text (programs) on paper tape... > > I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an article about WP history). I remember some of the older OP techs talking about the MT/ST, the tape reader was entirely electro-mechanical and read in stripes across the tape. This would be a precursor of the Magcard Selectric and the Memory typewriter. The later had a wide loop of tape inside an enlarged selectric case for storage. Paul. > > paul > > From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 8 15:04:55 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 16:04:55 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> Message-ID: <2C0A3073-C556-4739-A836-44F0476E625A@comcast.net> > On Jul 8, 2016, at 3:43 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > > On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: >> I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an article about WP history). > > The original post that started this thread referred to a URL > http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/?platform=hootsuite > > It suggested that one significant contender for that author's "FIRST author to write a book on a word processor" was Len Deighton. In the late 1960s he bought one. He wrote first drafts on his typewriter, then his secretary, Ellenor Handley, retyped it into his MT/ST and edited it there. > Specifically, a novel entitled "Bomber", published in 1970. > > If the MT/ST was released in 1964, then even with its high price, it seems odd that so many years would go by before anybody used it for a book manuscript. I can think of any number of reasons. $10k, in 1964? That's half a house. Its user interface may have been ill suited for the job; after all it was designed for business documents. Finally, the tape capacity was 25 kbytes, which is only a few percent of the size of a typical book. Len Deighton was a very successful writer by 1970; he may have decided to spend piles of money on a new tool because he could. But few writers strike it rich; they'd buy a good typewriter because it's a mandatory tool, but few would want to spend more than that. paul From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 15:27:29 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:27:29 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> Message-ID: <57800CB1.4030706@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 12:33 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. > That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according > to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and > references an article about WP history). That was mentioned, both in the article and by yours truly pretty early on. Another one was the IBM Mag Card typewriter. --Chuck From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 8 15:42:06 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:42:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article In-Reply-To: <2C0A3073-C556-4739-A836-44F0476E625A@comcast.net> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> <2C0A3073-C556-4739-A836-44F0476E625A@comcast.net> Message-ID: [continued discussion from the URL that Evan posted] >> If the MT/ST was released in 1964, then even with its high price, it >> seems odd that so many years would go by before anybody used it for a >> book manuscript. On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > I can think of any number of reasons. $10k, in 1964? That's half a > house. Its user interface may have been ill suited for the job; after > all it was designed for business documents. Finally, the tape capacity > was 25 kbytes, which is only a few percent of the size of a typical > book. Len Deighton was a very successful writer by 1970; he may have > decided to spend piles of money on a new tool because he could. But few > writers strike it rich; they'd buy a good typewriter because it's a > mandatory tool, but few would want to spend more than that. I agree that it was hideously expensive, and a writer would have to be wealthy to consider it. In those days, it was common practice for a writer to pay a typist to retype his typed manuscript before submitting it to a publisher. And, if submitting to more than one, MT/ST made multiple typed copies practical, whereas few publishers would bother to read carbon copies. And, as I mentioned previously, it was quite common for secretaries moonlighting as typists to bring work in and use them after-hours. (sometimes with tacit approval from the boss! My boss gave me after-hours access to use 026 punches, ('course I left them cleaner than when I started, with emptied bins, refilled card supply, jams cleared from down punches, etc.)) Admittedly, many typists with access to one would have re-typed later drafts, rather than use the editing capabilities, if there were more than a few changes per paragraph. To a real typist (>100WPM), moving a cursor to position took as long as typing the line. Drafts close to the final one, where entire paragraphs, pages, or even tapes could be left alone would be where it would finally be very worthwhile. Therefore, Deighton's sole claim to fame in this was OWNERSHIP of the MT/ST that his manuscripts were processed on. 25K per tape would mean a box of tapes, but that's not surprising nor daunting. Unlike "modern" wordprocessors which use Megabytes per page, in order to maintain capability of including dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish, that 25K was probably about a dozen pages (per tape). If one or two tapes could be used for each chapter, it would work out great. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From spc at conman.org Fri Jul 8 15:43:36 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 16:43:36 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FF606.5010600@gmail.com> References: <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> <577FF606.5010600@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20160708204336.GA16164@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Paul Berger once stated: > > > The DOS editor I really like was originally call PE and an enhanced > version "E" was shipped with later version of PC-DOS, there are also > some clones of the editor floating around as well. I still use this > editor regularly because of its very flexible ways of selecting and > manipulating text. I used PE 1.0 for *years* as my editor, and only found two issues with it: 1) it only supported lines of 255 characters or less 2) it didn't handle files where lines didn't end with CRLF That's it. I was even able to edit files that exceeded the RAM of the machine (I didn't do it often since it was sluggish but it could handle it). -spc (I just wish I could have found the source code to is, but alas ... ) From spc at conman.org Fri Jul 8 15:56:07 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 16:56:07 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> Message-ID: <20160708205607.GB16164@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated: > > On occasion, I still use an editor that I wrote for CP/M and later > ported to DOS. 11KB and it has lots of features that are peculiar to my > preferences. I'd thought about porting it to Linux, but currently, it's > still in assembly and dealing with terminfo or curses is not something > that I look forward to. So I use Joe. I've come to the conclusion [1] that terminfo and curses aren't needed any more. If you target VT100 (or Xterm or any other derivative) and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. It's a few lines of code to get the current TTY (on any modern Unix system) into raw mode in order to read characters [2]. -spc (Of course, then you have to deal with escape sequences, which can get messy ... ) [1] Bias most likely from my own usage. Mileage may vary here on this list where all sorts of odd-ball systems are still in use 8-P [2] It's six lines to get an open TTY into raw mode, one line to restore upon exit. Add in a few more lines to handle SIGWINCH (window resize). *Much* easier than dealing with curses. From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 8 15:59:23 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 13:59:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: word processor history In-Reply-To: <20160708204336.GA16164@brevard.conman.org> References: <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF430.2020009@sydex.com> <577FF606.5010600@gmail.com> <20160708204336.GA16164@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: > That's it. I was even able to edit files that exceeded the RAM of the > machine (I didn't do it often since it was sluggish but it could handle it). Many early word processing programs were limited to RAM. It was common practice to use a separate file per chapter, sometimes splitting aq chapter into two files. But, a few programs did page in from disk. 'Course with disk(s) of 100K - 250K, you still might need more than one disk for a book. From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 8 16:00:54 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 14:00:54 -0700 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <577FF4ED.4010701@gmail.com> <577FFB5A.1080004@sydex.com> <732AC92C-6DBA-49ED-B5D9-ED8728E4B6AD@comcast.net> <2C0A3073-C556-4739-A836-44F0476E625A@comcast.net> Message-ID: <57801486.20706@sydex.com> On 07/08/2016 01:42 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > And, as I mentioned previously, it was quite common for secretaries > moonlighting as typists to bring work in and use them after-hours. > (sometimes with tacit approval from the boss! My boss gave me > after-hours access to use 026 punches, ('course I left them cleaner > than when I started, with emptied bins, refilled card supply, jams > cleared from down punches, etc.)) Another thing that's forgotten is the stratification of tasks back in those days. Keypunching one's own code was frowned upon as a waste of valuable technical time; there were lower-paid keypunch operators to do that. Similarly, having a typewriter in one's office was also frowned upon, as there were secretaries to do that sort of work. I had (and still have) miserable handwriting (both script and block lettering), so I at least had a plausible excuse for doing my own key-wrangling. But I had to put up with a considerable fog of official disapproval. --Chuck From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Fri Jul 8 16:05:00 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 14:05:00 -0700 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <56DFD4B8-F3A4-4A56-936D-A07C5A5EBAD1@cs.ubc.ca> I'm 3 or more parties away from whoever would make the decision, but I've forwarded your expression of interest along through my friend. Location is Vancouver BC region if you were unaware. On 2016-Jul-08, at 1:00 AM, Curious Marc wrote: > I have a fond memory of these. I am interested. Would they allow me to send a shipper to pick it up for crating and shipping? > Marc > > Sent from my iPad > >> On Jul 8, 2016, at 1:15 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote: >> >> So a friend tells me there's a maybe-abandoned HP 8510 Network Analyzer in the hallway of the engineering building of the univ. he works at. >> I presume it's a unit like this, as he says it's over a metre tall: >> http://www.ece.lsu.edu/emdl/facilities/network%20analyser.html >> >> I figure its a little too far large and too far away from my needs to take it on, but out of curiousity does anyone know offhand what processor they used in these? >> (I haven't looked in depth online). >> Cursory guess is its mid-90s technology. >> From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 8 17:44:47 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 18:44:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <20160708205607.GB16164@brevard.conman.org> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <20160708205607.GB16164@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <201607082244.SAA03674@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > I've come to the conclusion [1] that terminfo and curses aren't > needed any more. If you target VT100 (or Xterm or any other > derivative) and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. (a) That is not my experience. (b) To the extent that it's true, it works only if you stick to a very much least-common-denominator set of sequences. VT-100s, VT-220s, VT-240s, xterms, kterms, etc, each support a slightly different set of sequences, with in some cases (eg, DCS) slightly different semantics for the same basic sequences. Assume anything more than some very minimal set and you are likely to find it breaks somewhere. > It's a few lines of code to get the current TTY (on any modern Unix > system) into raw mode in order to read characters [2]. "Raw mode" has been ill-defined since sgtty.h gave way to termios.h. Raw mode usually means something like -icanon -isig -echo -opost, and for lots of purposes you don't need to go that far; -icanon with min=1 time=0 is enough for anything that doesn't want to read usually-signal-generating characters as data. > [2] It's six lines to get an open TTY into raw mode, system("stty raw"); :-) Let's see. struct termios o, n; tcgetattr(fd,&o); n=o; cfmakeraw(&n); tcsetattr(fd,TCSANOW,&n); One line, though admittedly it's a little long. Two if you want to keep the declarations and code separate. > one line to restore upon exit. Add in a few more lines to handle > SIGWINCH (window resize). *Much* easier than dealing with curses. Depends on what you're doing. For lots of purposes, if you don't use curses or something morally equivalent, you will have to reinvent it, which carries its own prices. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From lehmann at ans-netz.de Fri Jul 8 17:49:46 2016 From: lehmann at ans-netz.de (Oliver Lehmann) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 00:49:46 +0200 Subject: Looking for old connectors Message-ID: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Hi, for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old connectors used on the original board. ###################### One is easy - J3 is a 2x10 pin 2.54mm connector which is still common today. But it is higher than the usual connectors. It has a hight of 1.5cm. If you search for the printed A-MP number (1-87456-6), you'll find the housing, but not the soldered clips used inside this housing.... http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9593 ###################### The next one is a power plug used on a CDC FINCH harddisk. The manual states, that the Connectors AMP 1-87270-1 or 3-87025-3 can be used. I guess this where connectors used with cables - but I need a connector which can be placed on a circuit board like this one: http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9587 ###################### The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP number or something: http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 Its counterpart is shown here and labled with AMP, but no number: http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_case/Disk-Tape-Component/Secrets-S8000/DSCF0366 Any info on any of this connectors would be great... Regards, Oliver From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 8 22:00:16 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 21:00:16 -0600 (MDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > I can remember more functionality via WordStar keystrokes than I can via > vi ones! :-) That's the very reason I teach Vi in classes but privately still use Joe extensively. I prefer muscle-memory-macro-keystrokes over what I'd call "conscious modes". I respect the ideas in Vi, and occasionally I dwell in it a lot and code there etc... I play some musical editor games. I even occasionally use the Motif-based "nedit" (esp on SGI boxen, it just ... feels... right). However, I feel most natural in Joe. I think it's simply just a "style" or taste issue based on past comfort with the WS and descendants. Familiarity that I'm not trying to pass off as any superiority in WS-family editors. I tell folks that Vi is still essential if you want to be a Unix bad-ass. Knowing even it's most primitive forms is helpful if you dive into ancient platforms and want to fix old code or impress girls with your regex acumen and flawless command-mode incantations. I figure if politicians can mix truth with lies, I can dabble, too. > Yes, it did look better, true. Do you happen to know that backstory about the color research? I remember that, but only vaguely. > But all those arcane Ctrl-shift F5, shift-F7, alt-F11, F3, ctrl-F1 > patterns -- eeuw. Clerks, admins, secretaries, receptionists, record hounds, and many others were freakin' ninjas with them. My mom was a Q&A Write disciple, still uses it in DOSBox, and still can do things with it I can't reproduce without coding. I know they were sorta arcane, and I won't lie and say I was a WP badass, but I witnessed some word processing badassery in conjunction with it by the aforementioned tradeswomen and men. Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where he firsts exclaims "You mean it's a MANUAL!" when he's told the computer he's attempting to voice command won't respond ? You think he's going to fumble with the keyboard then he starts typing so fast you think he's about the smoke the model M or whatever he's bangin' on at lightspeed. Some folks are like that with their word processing skills... My awesome grandma was. Maybe you are one! You definitely seem to have written extensively and from some obvious experience and authority with word processing in general. > When WP 5.1 caught on, at least I could use drop-downs for the stuff I > couldn't remember the f-key combos for. Ah yes, I remember discovering that to my delight as well. > I have a download of WP 6 for DOS here, waiting for me to try in a VM. Yeah, I have a massive DOS collection o' piracy and purchases that are slowly coalescing over the years into a few organized VMs and DOSBox instances I've been nurturing. > I have Word 5.5 and 6 for DOS, but they can readily and repeatably crash > DOSemu. :-( I'll take your *Word* for it (ugh, sorry). I do remember it had a spiffy B&W graphical splash screen with someone writing with a pen, IIRC. Maybe that was 5.5. I think I have it around somewhere too, blaspheming some bits in one of my archives. :-P > But, yes, it certainly contributed to the dumbing-down of software and > users both. Well, I think also that when commercial software puts effort into simply giving people what the want. It's like that old saying about people in democracies getting the government they deserve. In commercial software money = voting. People appear to *want* some of the garbage we have these days. Either that, or corporations are so powerful they can afford to be tone-deaf and full of hubris toward their customers. Hmm, wait I just remembered I'm a Comcast customer: my only option for fast Internet access. They rape me for vulgar sums and I just suck it up quietly; no choice. > Sadly, only the surface appearance, though -- not the ubiquitous > networking, not the OOPS dev tools. I hear ya. I've been doing a lot of fiddlin' with old 68k Macs and anything before Open Transport was, uhm, not so great. Even then, it's damn fragile and I feel like it's going to lock up at any time or this guy is going to show up and lecture me: GI: Joe PSA - "Stop all the DOWNLOADIN!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90 > I am fully aware that my feelings towards MS Word are a form of > Stockholm Syndrome. I don't think it's a good app, just the one I now > know best. Hehe, nice. At least you have a sense of humor about your heresy. :-) > It's for good reasons that I use the oldest versions I can. I can't even stand *trying* it now. 2003 is the last one I could even sit in front of. When recruiters or HR folks *DEMAND* my resume in Word, that's what I reach for. Been burned too many times by trying to export from Abiword or Libre/Open/Star Office. *claps weakly* Thanks guys, I know you tried. Most of the time they will grudgingly accept PDFs. I imagine myself smoldering and shaking with tremors the whole time spent in that shameful act of kowtowing to the man, though. :-> At least I have the decency to run it in CrossOver. That's my only defense. Long gone are the days I could send my resume over to an engineering manager as a man-page and someone would actually think it was cool. > Shame -- WP for Mac was a good app. They made it freeware and I used it > occasionally. I'll have to dig it up while I have my two 68k's out. > WP4W started out bloaty and slow, and matured into a sleek, fast, > efficient app. But too late. I've seen other with the same despairing praise. Kinda sad. > I will give Emacs a try once it is dragged kicking and screaming into > 1985. I've used it off and on over the years, but it's too heavy for me. I know what it's about, and it's cool that some folks get all zealous about it, but I never really caught the bug for it. > This is one of the weird things. I actively like Linux because it's a > PC-native OS. Its commands understand PC keyboards and can display bold > and underline and colours on the console. Actually, FreeBSD does that quite nicely for me on PCs. It's just that almost *nothing* takes advantage of it by default because UNIX coders like to target the lowest common denominator that still has screen control: vt100. Unfortunately, it's colorless. However bold underline and several other attributes are, available and somewhat underused, IMO. > The keyboard behaves sanely -- all the keys work and do what I expect. I assume you are speaking of using modern Linux with the framebuffer console. It does perform nicely and has always been a joy, I agree. However, even DOS ANSI color sequences are still a bit more visually flexible. > But old Unix hands say that it feels like a lash-up and FreeBSD feels > like Real Unix. I'd be with them on that. Experience has definitely given me that perspective. > Which to me means that FreeBSD can't handle PC extended screen modes -- > the console always boots up in 80*25. If I want a Linux box with a text > console, I can set it to 132*50 and see lots of lovely status messages. > Not on FreeBSD, oh no. No VGA support here: you get MDA and like it, > punk. Hehe. Okay, let me come to FreeBSD's defense a bit on this one. It's really really popular as a server OS in some industries. To this day, a lot of the datacenters I've worked in (and still do quite a bit) still have more available serial access (via big-az concentrators that run on Cat5-to-RS232 mostly) than they have fancy IP-KVMs or similar. Just about all serious servers have serial-rendering modes for the BIOS, the setup tools, everything... So, FreeBSD runs in these places and they keep the console at the rough level you describe because it makes it WAY more convenient to run/install FreeBSD on either these types of environments or virutalized ones that want to have a virtual serial console you can multiplex into some big management tool et al. Soooo, the point of describing that is that it might really piss some people off that FreeBSD doesn't install with graphical options (but PC-BSD does) and doesn't automatically flip into a framebuffer console when it can clearly see that you have VESA capable hardware attached. They assume you're more likely to be trying to get something done on a crappy DRAC/ILO virtual console or via serial etc... When linux flips into 1920x1080 on one of those out-of-band access devices it's a huge pain to manage the window. Not to mention that you can use the serial remote console on most HP ILOs for free, but if you want a graphical console (like Linux FBcon will require) then you pay $$$ for an "ILO Advanced" license. Lawyering bastiches. So, FreeBSD just gives friendly nods to folks buried deep in IT, too. It's not all nostalgia and curmudgeons throwing poop at new ideas. Also, NetBSD has a framebuffer console a lot like Linux's. However, it doesn't play well with 'fbset' (from Linux land) which is quite nice for folks doing things like arcade cabinet timing adjustment and the like. Nonetheless, it's quite capable, but you do need to compile it into your kernel which sets the bar a bit high for newcomers to easily use it. Most folks just dive straight to an X display manager anyhow (like KDM, GDM, or XDM). > It doesn't even understand PC partitioning. Oh no. I can't put it in a > logical drive like a grown-up PC OS; oh no, it needs a primary and then > in that it makes it own weird alien non-PC disk format. Disklabels are finally going out of fashion, even for BSD folks. We're moving to "wedges", GPT partitions, ZFS metadata labels, and all that happy stuff. Unless of course you are using DragonFly BSD and playing with HAMMER which is also quite advanced feature-wise, resembling a cross between WAFL, CXFS, and ZFS. Coming from DOS, I had some of those feelings way back when I first encountered SunOS. However, I got over it quickly when I saw the brighter spots in the OS and understood the logic once I dove into volume management schemes of the day and now. Early disk management wasn't one of BSD's strongest points. There was no GEOM, no RAIDFrame, no LVM, and for sure no ZFS. Nowadays, with GPT and ZFS you can feel super-modern, have sky-high (well, zettabyte, literally) file system limits, too. Not to mention dominating performance, and tunability to anything else I've encountered using ZFS's tunables and taking advantage of ultra-fast block devices for L2ARC and ZIL caching (much better than with BTRFS volumes or LVM2 caching I've tried). You also can flip on deduplication or multiple compression types if you get bored. With block-level encryption, at the volume management level, you can also get as paranoid as you like. Anyhow, BSD is now, IMHO, a seriously powerful storage/server OS with awesome capabilities that mostly cost big money from commercial vendors and performs with panache'. Modern FreeBSD also has great network package management and dependency solving with the newish 'pkg' tool now poised to supersede the independent binaries such as pkg_info, pkg_add etc... without harming flexibility via it's clever CLI layering. If I were going to bust on FreeBSD it wouldn't be for storage/partitioning woes (though before ZFS the diskabel interface in the installer is a bit painful) or on it's really basic defaults for video and terminal settings. If I was going to pick on FreeBSD, it'd be for it's (soon to be over in v11) lagging X11 driver efforts especially for Intel Haswell (out a long ways back in computer time fellas). > For me, "real Unix feel" means my keyboard doesn't behave, the utilities > don't use PC features from 1981 such as bold, underline, flash, italics > or colour, cursor keys may not work. Damn, man you got mauled by some UNIX boxes. They *can* do all that, but I'll admit they do manage to screw those things up a heckuva lot more than I ever remember even ANSI + DOS doing. I blame the huge diversity, too, but I don't excuse the modern instances where I too am a saying "c'mon guys, is it really that hard to let me use the !#$@ing arrow keys?" If I can find and fix those bugs with my modest skills, then let's get busy. Of course, I have had some patches accepted for such annoyances before, so at least I'm not just slingin' mud at my precious UNIX variants. :-) I'm just trying to be clear eyed. > The stuff that makes Real Unix People feel at home, apparently, means I > feel like I'm using an alien OS from the bad old days. Sadly, you aren't alone. I have some good (smart) friends who also complain that UNIX folks are mean to them in online forums and rude to the uninitiated acting as if they hold special power the rubes will never understand. I find that pretty frustrating. I want to teach people about the wonderful, beautiful, awesome parts of the blessed continuum of Unix goodness out there. I want them to behold with the same wonder my kick ass collection of gloriously Unixy things. So, I hate hearing my brothers are being rude to the noobs (as annoying as they are sometimes) who are just struggling to bring up their Ubuntu box or whatever. I guess when I've got my back up on some stuff like that it's because I feel like people won't work to learn like I did and the only way out is *through*. However, there isn't any real reason for being rude, so that's always a shame to hear. > Linux just shrugged and adopted native practices: it uses DOS disk > partitioning, DOS keyboard layouts, DOS screen formatting, DOS screen > modes, etc. BSD can use DOS disk partitions, too, but as you pointed out earlier they further complicate it with disklabels and don't give you the option to simply use the partitions "raw" without having to fiddle with a label. That's kind of the intention of "wedges" but with a lot more flexibility and less of the disklabel suck. BTRFS and ZFS go a completely different direction and suck up the whole disk making it none of your business what they are are doing with it, mostly. That has good and bad effects, but the overall feel for me has been positive. Though I still have some instances were it's easier just to deal with partitions and LVM. > *BSD flips you the finger and is extremely reluctant to use anything > that didn't work on a PDP-11 before I was born. Heh, well there is some "spunk" in the BSD spirit where folks get downright religious about leaving some things alone. I'm one of those dudes who sees BSD flip the finger, as you point out, but says "You go girl!" and applauds the raised-finger. However, I do still get off the BSD bus at the corner of Termdef Ave and Colorblind Street fairly close to your place. > So, yes, when I say that the diversity of UIs in the DOS era was > horrid, I really meant it, from extensive personal experience. I read your other posts on the topic and skimmed the blog post. You ain't kiddin'. It sounds like it was a bit more than just collecting, too. I haven't heard of about 1/3rd of the ones you mention, at a minimum. > *The* nastiest was Samna Executive. It was meant for bosses and was > supposed to be super easy. I couldn't work it at all. Hehehe. Now I have to go find it and try it! Your mini-"review" reminds me a bit of this wonderful (but terribly critical) video game review of "Big Rigs" that cracked me up: "[...] The graphical problems don't stop there, either. Big Rigs is easily one of the worst-looking PC games released in years. The truck models are amazingly terrible," http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-rigs-over-the-road-racing-review/1900-6086528/ -Swift From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 8 22:26:07 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2016 20:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: > Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where he firsts > exclaims "You mean it's a MANUAL!" when he's told the computer he's > attempting to voice command won't respond ? You think he's going to fumble > with the keyboard then he starts typing so fast you think he's about the > smoke the model M or whatever he's bangin' on at lightspeed. Some folks > are like that with their word processing skills... Not a model M. In "STIV : The Voyage Home", Scotty talks to a Macintosh Plus. When somebody hands him the mouse, he then thinks that he needs to talk into that as a microphone. Then he proceeds to do things that were not only impossible with such a machine, but would require extreme familiarity with it, which he initially seemed not to have. They save the whales, but at least it ends with the 20th century woman rejecting Kirk. Should ba a clip on YouTube. There is a wikipedia argument page about the product placement. From dave at 661.org Fri Jul 8 22:40:03 2016 From: dave at 661.org (David Griffith) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 03:40:03 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Morrow and Kaypro newsletters Message-ID: I found some BAMDUA / BAKUP newsletters (Bay Area Micro Decision Users Association and Bay Area Kaypro Users and Programmers). Does anyone know anything about these user groups? -- David Griffith dave at 661.org A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? From spc at conman.org Sat Jul 9 01:21:41 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 02:21:41 -0400 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <201607082244.SAA03674@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <20160708205607.GB16164@brevard.conman.org> <201607082244.SAA03674@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <20160709062140.GD16164@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Mouse once stated: > > I've come to the conclusion [1] that terminfo and curses aren't > > needed any more. If you target VT100 (or Xterm or any other > > derivative) and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. > > (a) That is not my experience. I did acknowledge (but it was snipped in your reply---it's the missing footnote). > (b) To the extent that it's true, it works only if you stick to a very > much least-common-denominator set of sequences. VT-100s, VT-220s, > VT-240s, xterms, kterms, etc, each support a slightly different set of > sequences, with in some cases (eg, DCS) slightly different semantics > for the same basic sequences. Assume anything more than some very > minimal set and you are likely to find it breaks somewhere. Again, it's been easily fifteen years since I last used a physical terminal, and even then, back around 2000, I only knew one other person (in person) that owned a physical terminal like I did. Today? Any terms I use (and I think the most users *NOT ON THIS LIST*) use are xterms or derivatives of xterm. I've also checked the xterm use of DCS. I *still* don't understand where you would use those particular sequences. I've also come across plenty of libraries and modules (for various langauges) that use raw ANSI sequences to color things when they "technically" should be using the Termcap Sf and Sb capabilities---those scuflaws! Touting non-portable behavior like that! > > It's a few lines of code to get the current TTY (on any modern Unix > > system) into raw mode in order to read characters [2]. > > "Raw mode" has been ill-defined since sgtty.h gave way to termios.h. > Raw mode usually means something like -icanon -isig -echo -opost, and > for lots of purposes you don't need to go that far; -icanon with min=1 > time=0 is enough for anything that doesn't want to read > usually-signal-generating characters as data. > > > [2] It's six lines to get an open TTY into raw mode, > > system("stty raw"); > > :-) > > Let's see. > > struct termios o, n; tcgetattr(fd,&o); n=o; cfmakeraw(&n); tcsetattr(fd,TCSANOW,&n); If I found that in any code I had to maintain, I'd reject that line as the unmaintainable mess that it is. Personally, I use: struct termios old; struct termios raw; int fh; fh = open("/dev/tty",O_RDWR); tcgetattr(fh,&old); raw = old; cfmakeraw(&raw); raw.c_cc[VMIN] = 1; raw.c_cc[VTIME] = 1; tcsetattr(fh,TCSANOW,&raw); (I didn't include variable declarations or obtaining the file handle to the TTY device in my initial message). -spc (Fraktur? Really? Fraktur? What company had enough blackmail material to get Fraktur part of the ECMA-48 standard?) From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Sat Jul 9 06:05:20 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 07:05:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: <20160709062140.GD16164@brevard.conman.org> References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <577FDE0F.3050608@sydex.com> <577FEA4C.8070802@sydex.com> <20160708205607.GB16164@brevard.conman.org> <201607082244.SAA03674@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160709062140.GD16164@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <201607091105.HAA10644@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >>> [...] and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. >> (a) That is not my experience. > I did acknowledge (but it was snipped in your reply---it's the > missing footnote). True enough. > I've also checked the xterm use of DCS. I *still* don't understand > where you would use those particular sequences. _I_ wouldn't, since I don't use xterm. My terminal emulator has a much richer DCS command language, allowing things like requesting window resize, or opening another window (displaying elsewhere) onto the same emulator. DCS is basically the escape hatch to device-speific functionality. > I've also come across plenty of libraries and modules (for various > langauges) that use raw ANSI sequences to color things when they > "technically" should be using the Termcap Sf and Sb > capabilities---those scuflaws! Touting non-portable behavior like > that! Well, technically, there is no such thing as ANSI colour. The colour sequences are ISO-defined extension arguments to ANSI's SGR sequence. But, yes, I've seen that too, most often with Linux. It is EXTREMELY annoying to type ls and see [0m[01;34mdir[0m file [01;36mlink[0m [01;32mpgm[0m It's even more annoying when other things - eg, vi - understand the terminal type correctly set in $TERM, but things like ls insist on assuming not only without evidence but in the presence of evidence to the contrary that the display device can handle ISO-extended X3.64 SGR. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From tothwolf at concentric.net Sat Jul 9 07:21:18 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 07:21:18 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: > Hi, > > for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old connectors used on the > original board. > ###################### > > The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP > number or something: > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 > > Its counterpart is shown here and labled with AMP, but no number: > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_case/Disk-Tape-Component/Secrets-S8000/DSCF0366 The header on the board appears to be a Molex KK 396 series header. The plug on the wiring harness is an AMP MTA-156 series IDC connector. I'm not sure why they mixed and matched connectors, but they both use the same size pins with .156" spacing. The Molex header might retain the plug better than the AMP header due to the friction lock. Molex 26-60-5100 KK 396 Header, Right-Angle with Friction Lock, 10 Circuits, Tin (Sn) Plating http://www.molex.com/molex/products/datasheet.jsp?part=active/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.xml http://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/sd/026605100_sd.pdf http://www.molex.com/webdocs/datasheets/pdf/en-us/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.pdf AMP 640389-0 MTA-156 Friction Lock Headers - Right Angle front bend, .125" solder tail http://www.te.com/usa-en/product-1-640389-0.html http://www.te.com/commerce/DocumentDelivery/DDEController?Action=showdoc&DocId=Data+Sheet%7F82056_MTA%7F0708%7Fpdf%7FEnglish%7FENG_DS_82056_MTA_0708.pdf%7F1-640389-0 From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sat Jul 9 07:27:00 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 21:27:00 +0900 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: <68EB82DD-CA4D-471A-B593-B50783BCCE12@comcast.net> References: <68EB82DD-CA4D-471A-B593-B50783BCCE12@comcast.net> Message-ID: <2680A1DC-D770-44C0-B07B-C535AA7B56FE@gmail.com> Regarding price: there was a sign on the one I used at the University, directed to students obviously: "the HP 8510 is worth more than your life". Besides HP computers, I collect HP instrumentation. Actually the latter hobby created the need for the former, since I got into vintage HP computing to control said instrumentation collection. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 8, 2016, at 11:27 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > > >> On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:15 AM, Brent Hilpert wrote: >> >> So a friend tells me there's a maybe-abandoned HP 8510 Network Analyzer in the hallway of the engineering building of the univ. he works at. >> I presume it's a unit like this, as he says it's over a metre tall: >> http://www.ece.lsu.edu/emdl/facilities/network%20analyser.html >> >> I figure its a little too far large and too far away from my needs to take it on, but out of curiousity does anyone know offhand what processor they used in these? >> (I haven't looked in depth online). >> Cursory guess is its mid-90s technology. > > That sounds right. I have an HP catalog from 1993, which lists very similar bits, an 8510 display unit and the 8515 and 8517 S-parameter test sets. So I'd guess this is a slightly later followup model. List price of that day, FYA, $36500 for the 8510C, and $41400 for the 8515A (slightly more for the 8517 due to the higher top frequency). > > Something that's going to be obvious to some but possibly not to all: "network analyzer" is short for "vector network analyzer", an electronic component measuring device. It has nothing to do with computer data networks. > > paul > From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sat Jul 9 07:28:48 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 21:28:48 +0900 Subject: HP 8510 network analyser In-Reply-To: <56DFD4B8-F3A4-4A56-936D-A07C5A5EBAD1@cs.ubc.ca> References: <56DFD4B8-F3A4-4A56-936D-A07C5A5EBAD1@cs.ubc.ca> Message-ID: <25EF9C3B-3901-4B2C-849E-04B195A07019@gmail.com> Ok, thanks. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 9, 2016, at 6:05 AM, Brent Hilpert wrote: > > I'm 3 or more parties away from whoever would make the decision, but I've forwarded your expression of interest along through my friend. > > Location is Vancouver BC region if you were unaware. From mhs.stein at gmail.com Sat Jul 9 09:02:58 2016 From: mhs.stein at gmail.com (Mike Stein) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 10:02:58 -0400 Subject: Looking for old connectors References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: The Molex version looks like it has round pins; I'd recommend rectangular pins with your matching connector, they're prone to overheat at the best of times. m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tothwolf" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2016 8:21 AM Subject: Re: Looking for old connectors > On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old connectors used on the >> original board. > >> ###################### >> >> The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP >> number or something: >> >> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 >> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 >> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 >> >> Its counterpart is shown here and labled with AMP, but no number: >> >> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_case/Disk-Tape-Component/Secrets-S8000/DSCF0366 > > The header on the board appears to be a Molex KK 396 series header. The > plug on the wiring harness is an AMP MTA-156 series IDC connector. I'm not > sure why they mixed and matched connectors, but they both use the same > size pins with .156" spacing. The Molex header might retain the plug > better than the AMP header due to the friction lock. > > Molex 26-60-5100 KK 396 Header, Right-Angle with Friction Lock, 10 > Circuits, Tin (Sn) Plating > > http://www.molex.com/molex/products/datasheet.jsp?part=active/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.xml > http://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/sd/026605100_sd.pdf > http://www.molex.com/webdocs/datasheets/pdf/en-us/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.pdf > > AMP 640389-0 MTA-156 Friction Lock Headers - Right Angle front bend, .125" > solder tail > > http://www.te.com/usa-en/product-1-640389-0.html > http://www.te.com/commerce/DocumentDelivery/DDEController?Action=showdoc&DocId=Data+Sheet%7F82056_MTA%7F0708%7Fpdf%7FEnglish%7FENG_DS_82056_MTA_0708.pdf%7F1-640389-0 From tothwolf at concentric.net Sat Jul 9 09:18:13 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 09:18:13 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Mike Stein wrote: > From: "Tothwolf" >> On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old connectors used on the >>> original board. >> >>> ###################### >>> >>> The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP >>> number or something: >>> >>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 >>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 >>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 >>> >>> Its counterpart is shown here and labled with AMP, but no number: >>> >>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_case/Disk-Tape-Component/Secrets-S8000/DSCF0366 >> >> The header on the board appears to be a Molex KK 396 series header. The >> plug on the wiring harness is an AMP MTA-156 series IDC connector. I'm not >> sure why they mixed and matched connectors, but they both use the same >> size pins with .156" spacing. The Molex header might retain the plug >> better than the AMP header due to the friction lock. >> >> Molex 26-60-5100 KK 396 Header, Right-Angle with Friction Lock, 10 >> Circuits, Tin (Sn) Plating >> >> http://www.molex.com/molex/products/datasheet.jsp?part=active/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.xml >> http://www.molex.com/pdm_docs/sd/026605100_sd.pdf >> http://www.molex.com/webdocs/datasheets/pdf/en-us/0026605100_PCB_HEADERS.pdf >> >> AMP 640389-0 MTA-156 Friction Lock Headers - Right Angle front bend, .125" >> solder tail >> >> http://www.te.com/usa-en/product-1-640389-0.html >> http://www.te.com/commerce/DocumentDelivery/DDEController?Action=showdoc&DocId=Data+Sheet%7F82056_MTA%7F0708%7Fpdf%7FEnglish%7FENG_DS_82056_MTA_0708.pdf%7F1-640389-0 > > > The Molex version looks like it has round pins; I'd recommend > rectangular pins with your matching connector, they're prone to overheat > at the best of times. Both the Molex and AMP/Tyco headers above have square pins. I use both series and have them in my inventory. Round pin .156" (3.96mm) headers have been discontinued for years due to that very issue. The flat contacts used in the connector shells don't make good contact with round pins since it offers less surface area than a square pin. As they age and oxidize, it gets even worse. I routinely replace older .156" round pin headers with modern square versions as preventative maintenance when I service/refurbish boards. From lproven at gmail.com Sat Jul 9 10:29:13 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 17:29:13 +0200 Subject: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz) In-Reply-To: References: <577E97F9.4070907@sydex.com> <76778645-be9d-cc98-f244-c7f61b7e1541@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On 9 July 2016 at 05:00, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> I can remember more functionality via WordStar keystrokes than I can via >> vi ones! :-) > > That's the very reason I teach Vi in classes but privately still use Joe > extensively. I prefer muscle-memory-macro-keystrokes over what I'd call > "conscious modes". I respect the ideas in Vi, and occasionally I dwell in > it a lot and code there etc... Well yes, OK. But whereas I remember more Word* from the '80s than I do vi, which I have used this year, I remember more CUA keystrokes now than anything else. The lovely Roger Pugh from this very list gave me a BNIB Amstrad PCW9512+ a few years back. (Thanks again, Roger!) I recall him being amazed that, with the thing sitting on my coffee table, not having touched a PCW in 25y, I could remember the key combo to reboot one. :-D > I play some musical editor games. I even > occasionally use the Motif-based "nedit" (esp on SGI boxen, it just ... > feels... right). Never used an SGI. :-( Well, apart from an x86 Visual Workstation running Windows. > However, I feel most natural in Joe. I think it's simply > just a "style" or taste issue based on past comfort with the WS and > descendants. Fair enough. For me, that feeling is a CUA editor, from Notepad to Gedit to OS X TextEdit. And that is what I miss at shell level in Linux. >> Yes, it did look better, true. > > Do you happen to know that backstory about the color research? I remember > that, but only vaguely. I'm a frayed knot. >> But all those arcane Ctrl-shift F5, shift-F7, alt-F11, F3, ctrl-F1 >> patterns -- eeuw. > > Clerks, admins, secretaries, receptionists, record hounds, and many others > were freakin' ninjas with them. My mom was a Q&A Write disciple, still > uses it in DOSBox, and still can do things with it I can't reproduce > without coding. I know they were sorta arcane, and I won't lie and say I > was a WP badass, but I witnessed some word processing badassery in > conjunction with it by the aforementioned tradeswomen and men. Oh yeah, I've seen such people. My line manager at Red Hat was like that in jEdit. I watched him do stuff I didn't know text editors could do. Note, I don't code any more. So 99% of editor advocacy is irrelevant to me -- I have zero use for syntax highlighting, colouring, formatting, autocomplete, any of it. I write English text, nothing else. This strips away a lot of the discussion, I find. But Silas was writing English text in a code editor, and flipping paragraphs around like a ninja. Astonishing. I've not seen such editor virtuosity since the DOS days of the end-'80s/start-'90s. > Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where he firsts > exclaims "You mean it's a MANUAL!" when he's told the computer he's > attempting to voice command won't respond ? You think he's going to fumble > with the keyboard then he starts typing so fast you think he's about the > smoke the model M or whatever he's bangin' on at lightspeed. Some folks > are like that with their word processing skills... My awesome grandma was. :-) Yes, I do, and no, I'm not. But I can still boggle Windows users with my ability to control it without a mouse. I learned Windows 2 in a job where we didn't own a PC mouse. We didn't need 'em -- we sold Macs. So I learned all the shortcuts. Many still work. I upgraded the seldom-used Win7 partition on my Thinkpad X200 to Win10 last month. To my surprise, I rather like it. And a lot of the shortcuts /still/ work. > Maybe you are one! You definitely seem to have written extensively and > from some obvious experience and authority with word processing in > general. I was a support guy for 15-20y, mostly on desktop stuff. I built and installed servers, but customers don't need hands-on help with servers, generally. It's with desktops and laptops. So for me to know all the apps was a professional skill. [Insert "must support all the things" meme] >> When WP 5.1 caught on, at least I could use drop-downs for the stuff I >> couldn't remember the f-key combos for. > > Ah yes, I remember discovering that to my delight as well. Clunky, but they were a huge help. Menus are /much/ more discoverable than hotkeys. >> I have a download of WP 6 for DOS here, waiting for me to try in a VM. > > Yeah, I have a massive DOS collection o' piracy and purchases that are > slowly coalescing over the years into a few organized VMs and DOSBox > instances I've been nurturing. I'm considering building and offering an assortment of DOS VMs for download, because a lot of kids are curious about this stuff but have absolutely no idea how to install and configure any of these apps. Pre-built downloadable DOS VMs with classic apps pre-installed. >> I have Word 5.5 and 6 for DOS, but they can readily and repeatably crash >> DOSemu. :-( > > I'll take your *Word* for it (ugh, sorry). :-D > I do remember it had a spiffy > B&W graphical splash screen with someone writing with a pen, IIRC. Maybe > that was 5.5. I think I have it around somewhere too, blaspheming some > bits in one of my archives. :-P Actually, I don't remember that! >> But, yes, it certainly contributed to the dumbing-down of software and >> users both. > > Well, I think also that when commercial software puts effort into simply > giving people what the want. It's like that old saying about people in > democracies getting the government they deserve. In commercial software > money = voting. People appear to *want* some of the garbage we have these > days. Either that, or corporations are so powerful they can afford to be > tone-deaf and full of hubris toward their customers. Bit of both? > Hmm, wait I just > remembered I'm a Comcast customer: my only option for fast Internet > access. They rape me for vulgar sums and I just suck it up quietly; no > choice. I know nothing of American ISPs or telcos. I didn't even know "Verizon" rhymed with "horizon" until a few years ago. Never seen an ad, never dealt with any of 'em. Europe has its own. Indeed, like for many things, there's the worldwide standard offerings, and then there are the American ones. E.g. I read some good, approachable science stuff about palaeontological climate change yesterday, but it's useless to me because it only uses Fahrenheit. I'm 50 next year. I've /never/ used Fahrenheit. It was already historical when I was at school. I am familiar with inches, feet, yards, miles, but I don't know how many yards are in a mile, and I've never understood ounces & pounds. Metric FTW. >> Sadly, only the surface appearance, though -- not the ubiquitous >> networking, not the OOPS dev tools. > > I hear ya. I've been doing a lot of fiddlin' with old 68k Macs and > anything before Open Transport was, uhm, not so great. Even then, it's > damn fragile and I feel like it's going to lock up at any time or this guy > is going to show up and lecture me: > > GI: Joe PSA - "Stop all the DOWNLOADIN!" > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90 Oh yes. I restored a Mac Classic II a few years ago, and ran MacOS 7.6.1 on it -- although this wants a minimum of 12MB and the Classic II maxes out at 10MB (RAMdoubler to the rescue) because at least with 7.6 I can use OpenTransport. >> I am fully aware that my feelings towards MS Word are a form of >> Stockholm Syndrome. I don't think it's a good app, just the one I now >> know best. > > Hehe, nice. At least you have a sense of humor about your heresy. :-) ;-) >> It's for good reasons that I use the oldest versions I can. > > I can't even stand *trying* it now. 2003 is the last one I could even sit > in front of. When recruiters or HR folks *DEMAND* my resume in Word, > that's what I reach for. Been burned too many times by trying to export > from Abiword or Libre/Open/Star Office. *claps weakly* Thanks guys, I know > you tried. Most of the time they will grudgingly accept PDFs. I imagine > myself smoldering and shaking with tremors the whole time spent in that > shameful act of kowtowing to the man, though. :-> At least I have the > decency to run it in CrossOver. That's my only defense. :-D > Long gone are the days I could send my resume over to an engineering > manager as a man-page and someone would actually think it was cool. Not seen that, but I remember the first HTML CV and the first Macromedia Flash one. >> Shame -- WP for Mac was a good app. They made it freeware and I used it >> occasionally. > > I'll have to dig it up while I have my two 68k's out. Hmmm. I think -- not sure -- that it was a PowerPC app. Brief info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Macintosh Prebuilt SheepShaver VM here: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/mac-intel.html >> WP4W started out bloaty and slow, and matured into a sleek, fast, >> efficient app. But too late. > > I've seen other with the same despairing praise. Kinda sad. It's life. Some programs went like that. Sadly the recipe for /commercial/ success is to keep adding features, relying on hardware improvements to keep performance usable, and periodically, change file formats to force customers to upgrade. We all know who has made that work for them. >> I will give Emacs a try once it is dragged kicking and screaming into >> 1985. > > I've used it off and on over the years, but it's too heavy for me. I know > what it's about, and it's cool that some folks get all zealous about it, > but I never really caught the bug for it. Its "weight" isn't a problem these days. Its bizarre 1970s UI is. >> This is one of the weird things. I actively like Linux because it's a >> PC-native OS. Its commands understand PC keyboards and can display bold >> and underline and colours on the console. > > Actually, FreeBSD does that quite nicely for me on PCs. It's just that > almost *nothing* takes advantage of it by default because UNIX coders like > to target the lowest common denominator that still has screen control: > vt100. Unfortunately, it's colorless. However bold underline and several > other attributes are, available and somewhat underused, IMO. Quite. Even on OS X, the FreeBSD-derived ``top'' command doesn't use bold and inverse like the Linux one has for 2 decades. >> The keyboard behaves sanely -- all the keys work and do what I expect. > > I assume you are speaking of using modern Linux with the framebuffer > console. And in terminal windows. > It does perform nicely and has always been a joy, I agree. > However, even DOS ANSI color sequences are still a bit more visually > flexible. > >> But old Unix hands say that it feels like a lash-up and FreeBSD feels >> like Real Unix. > > I'd be with them on that. Experience has definitely given me that > perspective. Yeah, I've heard it a lot. But I lack the Unix deep knowledge to know. All I see is the surface stuff, the appearance at boot and in a window, the setup program, the options for commands and the helpfulness of the help. Here, Linux still stomps all over FreeBSD, and AIUI FreeBSD is much more modern than the other BSDs. I think I told you that, inspired by your comments, I did get FreeBSD installed and running fine in VirtualBox. It still took literally hours of work and a fair bit of Googling. >> Which to me means that FreeBSD can't handle PC extended screen modes -- >> the console always boots up in 80*25. If I want a Linux box with a text >> console, I can set it to 132*50 and see lots of lovely status messages. >> Not on FreeBSD, oh no. No VGA support here: you get MDA and like it, >> punk. > > Hehe. Okay, let me come to FreeBSD's defense a bit on this one. It's > really really popular as a server OS in some industries. To this day, a > lot of the datacenters I've worked in (and still do quite a bit) still > have more available serial access (via big-az concentrators that run on > Cat5-to-RS232 mostly) than they have fancy IP-KVMs or similar. Just about > all serious servers have serial-rendering modes for the BIOS, the setup > tools, everything... So, FreeBSD runs in these places and they keep the > console at the rough level you describe because it makes it WAY more > convenient to run/install FreeBSD on either these types of environments or > virutalized ones that want to have a virtual serial console you can > multiplex into some big management tool et al. Ahh, OK, very good point and one I hadn't considered. But OK, while that is legit, would it hurt to have a hotkey or even a readily-accessible option to switch to higher-res text modes, at least? I never found one. > Soooo, the point of describing that is that it might really piss some > people off that FreeBSD doesn't install with graphical options (but PC-BSD > does) and doesn't automatically flip into a framebuffer console when it > can clearly see that you have VESA capable hardware attached. They assume > you're more likely to be trying to get something done on a crappy DRAC/ILO > virtual console or via serial etc... When linux flips into 1920x1080 on > one of those out-of-band access devices it's a huge pain to manage the > window. Not to mention that you can use the serial remote console on most > HP ILOs for free, but if you want a graphical console (like Linux FBcon > will require) then you pay $$$ for an "ILO Advanced" license. Lawyering > bastiches. So, FreeBSD just gives friendly nods to folks buried deep in > IT, too. It's not all nostalgia and curmudgeons throwing poop at new > ideas. Yes, understood, but I'm not even asking for graphics mode, just a hi-res text mode so I can see more of the bootup messages as they scroll past. I know what you mean, though. About 10y back I tried to built a FreeBSD webserver to host my own homepages. For nostalgic reasons, it was a newer motherboard in a cannibalised IBM PC-AT case, with an IBM MDA adaptor and a mono CRT. (I couldn't get it working well enough to use.) Trying to get Debian Linux to boot on that was "interesting". The installer runs in text mode, but during startup, the installer flips into graphics mode to display the spiral Debian logo. If you haven't _got_ graphics, it hangs. Working around _that_ took a _lot_ of work. This is a 100% text-only OS with no GUI at all. Except for the bloody logo. I'd like to slap whoever thought that was a good idea. Around 2012, I tried to put Ubuntu Server on an old Dell Poweredge server a client had given me for free. I put an old mono VGA CRT on it. 640*480 or nothing. Ubuntu Server -- again, a text-only OS -- assumed I'd have _at least_ 800*600 on a VGA console. Just like Debian, it was a real bitch to disable console mode switching. I think I had to build a custom boot CD image! So, incidentally, did Windows Server 2008. That, I got into a half-Nelson. I installed over RDP, installed native graphics chip drivers, then set the monitor type to VGa 640*480 and finally, reluctantly, Windows let me the console. > Also, NetBSD has a framebuffer console a lot like Linux's. However, it > doesn't play well with 'fbset' (from Linux land) which is quite nice for > folks doing things like arcade cabinet timing adjustment and the like. > Nonetheless, it's quite capable, but you do need to compile it into your > kernel which sets the bar a bit high for newcomers to easily use it. Most > folks just dive straight to an X display manager anyhow (like KDM, GDM, or > XDM). I should look at that, too, I guess. I tried to put NetBSD on my old SPARCstation IPX but I was not 'leet enough to get it working. >> It doesn't even understand PC partitioning. Oh no. I can't put it in a >> logical drive like a grown-up PC OS; oh no, it needs a primary and then >> in that it makes it own weird alien non-PC disk format. > > Disklabels are finally going out of fashion, even for BSD folks. We're > moving to "wedges", GPT partitions, ZFS metadata labels, and all that > happy stuff. Yes, GPT does make all this go away, but IMHO it doesn't excuse 25 years of refusing to play nice with the host machine's native formats. > Unless of course you are using DragonFly BSD and playing with > HAMMER which is also quite advanced feature-wise, resembling a cross > between WAFL, CXFS, and ZFS. (!) Never tried that, either. I confess I had the impression it was moribund. > Coming from DOS, I had some of those feelings > way back when I first encountered SunOS. However, I got over it quickly > when I saw the brighter spots in the OS and understood the logic once I > dove into volume management schemes of the day and now. Early disk > management wasn't one of BSD's strongest points. There was no GEOM, no > RAIDFrame, no LVM, and for sure no ZFS. I guess. I've never used most of them. I mostly play with desktop stuff. > Nowadays, with GPT and ZFS you can feel super-modern, have sky-high (well, > zettabyte, literally) file system limits, too. Not to mention dominating > performance, and tunability to anything else I've encountered using ZFS's > tunables and taking advantage of ultra-fast block devices for L2ARC and > ZIL caching (much better than with BTRFS volumes or LVM2 caching I've > tried). You also can flip on deduplication or multiple compression types > if you get bored. With block-level encryption, at the volume management > level, you can also get as paranoid as you like. A friend, and now listmember, had a home Linux server with ZFS for Linux. He raved about it except when he regularly spent 2-3 days hunched over the system console cursing at it when something went wrong. Which puts me /right/ off it, TBH. > Anyhow, BSD is now, IMHO, a seriously powerful storage/server OS with > awesome capabilities that mostly cost big money from commercial vendors > and performs with panache'. Modern FreeBSD also has great network package > management and dependency solving with the newish 'pkg' tool now poised to > supersede the independent binaries such as pkg_info, pkg_add etc... > without harming flexibility via it's clever CLI layering. If I were going > to bust on FreeBSD it wouldn't be for storage/partitioning woes (though > before ZFS the diskabel interface in the installer is a bit painful) or on > it's really basic defaults for video and terminal settings. If I was going > to pick on FreeBSD, it'd be for it's (soon to be over in v11) lagging X11 > driver efforts especially for Intel Haswell (out a long ways back in > computer time fellas). OK, noted. I am learning that it does get more use than I realised. >> For me, "real Unix feel" means my keyboard doesn't behave, the utilities >> don't use PC features from 1981 such as bold, underline, flash, italics >> or colour, cursor keys may not work. > > Damn, man you got mauled by some UNIX boxes. Oh gods yes. Here in Czechia, there's a strong culture of software piracy. People use low-end kit (including phones) because it's not a rich country, and a lot of people run pirated Windows because it's what they know. Trying to get people to switch from stolen commercial software ($free) to FOSS (Free free, as well as $free) is /tough./ I have a reputation as a Unix/Linux zealot, I think. I'm not. I'm a barely-competent fumbler in my own harsh self-assessment. Always have been. I was a DOS guru, sure, and pretty damned good on Netware, but since then, the tech's moved away. I stopped using Windows early this century, and am now somewhat dated on that, too. I just use Linux because I'm cheap and it's the least-bad option I have. Now I have some money, my desktop's a Mac because it was a cheap used box, with cheap used screens, classic Apple keyboard and cheap Dell 5-button mouse. The apps are all freeware or FOSS. It's just less hassle. But I'm no Unix guru, not really. I still -- heresy ahead! -- prefer MS-DOS COMMAND.COM or NT CMD.EXE to any Unix shell. Yes, really. Really truly. I don't like Unix shells. I don't grok regex or wildcard expansion, I like file extensions, I like DOS wildcards which do predictable things. Shell always feels like it's fighting back, or trying to trick me into doing something massively destructive. > They *can* do all that, but > I'll admit they do manage to screw those things up a heckuva lot more than > I ever remember even ANSI + DOS doing. I blame the huge diversity, too, > but I don't excuse the modern instances where I too am a saying "c'mon > guys, is it really that hard to let me use the !#$@ing arrow keys?" If I > can find and fix those bugs with my modest skills, then let's get busy. Of > course, I have had some patches accepted for such annoyances before, so at > least I'm not just slingin' mud at my precious UNIX variants. :-) I'm just > trying to be clear eyed. I am watching with interest to see what Linux evolves into, the further it moves from its Unix roots. I'm trying to suspend judgement, so long as it still works for me, which thus far it does. >> The stuff that makes Real Unix People feel at home, apparently, means I >> feel like I'm using an alien OS from the bad old days. > > Sadly, you aren't alone. I have some good (smart) friends who also > complain that UNIX folks are mean to them in online forums and rude to the > uninitiated acting as if they hold special power the rubes will never > understand. I find that pretty frustrating. I want to teach people about > the wonderful, beautiful, awesome parts of the blessed continuum of Unix > goodness out there. I want them to behold with the same wonder my kick ass > collection of gloriously Unixy things. So, I hate hearing my brothers are > being rude to the noobs (as annoying as they are sometimes) who are just > struggling to bring up their Ubuntu box or whatever. I guess when I've got > my back up on some stuff like that it's because I feel like people won't > work to learn like I did and the only way out is *through*. However, there > isn't any real reason for being rude, so that's always a shame to hear. Human nature. But also, well, a brief aside: I used to have a lodger in my house who was a real Unix guru. Doctorate in computational modelling of fluid dynamics on grids and clusters, maintainer of the OpenGL bindings for Perl 5. He watched me struggle with Ubuntu and often helped. But eventually, he had an epiphany. He said to me something like "you're not a programmer!" I agreed that no, I wasn't. I was once, on ZX Spectrum and Archimedes, noodling with BASIC. But not on anything modern. The fun has all gone away now. He said, "I've just realised. So much of the stuff I love about Unix and Linux is because it's an OS *by* programmers, *for* programmers. Even the shell is a programming language. It does stuff in odd ways because it makes it easier to script it. And for you, as a non-programmer, who doesn't even write simple scripts any more -- although you can, and you did once, you don't know because you don't need to. So all the stuff that I love about it makes *no sense to you* because you're not a programmer. The wonderful power and flexibility for me and people like me, to you, is just pointless and obstructive. That's why you like Windows. Windows is an OS built for system administrators. Unix is built for programmers. The stuff that is restrictive to me on Windows actually helps you. Being able to 'MOVE *.log OLDLOGS\*.*.old" is more useful to you than all the amazing stuff I can do at a shell prompt because you don't write scripts and you don't need it." It was wonderful watching the light go on over this _very VERY_ smart man's head. But after he realised it, it was like he pitied me a bit. Because I was a blind man blundering around in an art gallery full of beauty that I couldn't appreciate. I don't love Linux, and definitely not Unix. I miss classic MacOS's UI elegance, I miss BeOS's streamlined media-rich multitasking performance, I miss RISC OS's accessibility to a BASIC programmer and its raw grunt, its sheer thin-layer-over-the-metal speed. I miss EPOC's lithe battery-frugal elegance on my Psion PDAs. I miss the vision of Newton OS's amazing UI. I loved all of them. Linux, I just tolerate because it gets the job done easier than Windows and cheaper than a Mac. I don't love it and never did. I don't love Windows. I like to say I hate it, but I don't, I just miss the days when it was small and simple and clean. I didn't love MS-DOS. I made it my slave, I could make it somersault backwards through hoops while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner, but it was always a sad crippled thing. I didn't love OS/2. It was amazing and _so_ much better than Windows 3, but it was a pain in the butt. A horror to install, a nightmare to update, and never very stable or solid. I've never loved any OS on x86 except BeOS. Classic MacOS _looked_ lovely, and it was a joy to use, but like RISC OS, their multitasking and networking both sucked, and they were unstable. Unix is just the least worst option. It's still nasty. As user-friendly as a cornered rat. >> Linux just shrugged and adopted native practices: it uses DOS disk >> partitioning, DOS keyboard layouts, DOS screen formatting, DOS screen >> modes, etc. > > BSD can use DOS disk partitions, too, but as you pointed out earlier they > further complicate it with disklabels and don't give you the option to > simply use the partitions "raw" without having to fiddle with a label. Go on then. Show me FreeBSD installed with root in a DOS logical drive in an extended partition, with /home in a different logical drive and swap in a third. Go on. I dare you. It can /access/ them but you can't install into them. It tolerates them as second-class citizens for supplemental data storage, no more. > That's kind of the intention of "wedges" but with a lot more flexibility > and less of the disklabel suck. BTRFS and ZFS go a completely different > direction and suck up the whole disk making it none of your business what > they are are doing with it, mostly. That has good and bad effects, but the > overall feel for me has been positive. Though I still have some instances > were it's easier just to deal with partitions and LVM. Great on a server. Fairly useless on a desktop which may have to multi-boot 3 or 4 OSes. >> *BSD flips you the finger and is extremely reluctant to use anything >> that didn't work on a PDP-11 before I was born. > > Heh, well there is some "spunk" in the BSD spirit where folks get > downright religious about leaving some things alone. I'm one of those > dudes who sees BSD flip the finger, as you point out, but says "You go > girl!" and applauds the raised-finger. Yeah, I understand your POV, but that's where we part company. Get with the system or GTFO is more my position. > However, I do still get off the BSD bus at the corner of Termdef Ave and > Colorblind Street fairly close to your place. :-D >> So, yes, when I say that the diversity of UIs in the DOS era was >> horrid, I really meant it, from extensive personal experience. > > I read your other posts on the topic and skimmed the blog post. You ain't > kiddin'. It sounds like it was a bit more than just collecting, too. I > haven't heard of about 1/3rd of the ones you mention, at a minimum. That's the EU/US divide, I reckon. Interestingly many of the WPs popular in GB were actually written in the US and sold by American vendors. >> *The* nastiest was Samna Executive. It was meant for bosses and was >> supposed to be super easy. I couldn't work it at all. > > Hehehe. Now I have to go find it and try it! Let me know if you do! I haven't seen it since about 1992. Not that I miss it. ;-) > Your mini-"review" reminds me > a bit of this wonderful (but terribly critical) video game review of "Big > Rigs" that cracked me up: > > "[...] The graphical problems don't stop there, either. Big Rigs is easily > one of the worst-looking PC games released in years. The truck models are > amazingly terrible," > http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-rigs-over-the-road-racing-review/1900-6086528/ Heh. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From brendan at mcneill.co.nz Sat Jul 9 15:54:05 2016 From: brendan at mcneill.co.nz (Brendan McNeill) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 08:54:05 +1200 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software Message-ID: <22157FA4-684E-4011-85F7-F5212D8D9DD4@mcneill.co.nz> Greetings I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8? floppy drives but no software. I do have some blank 8? diskettes but no real means of transferring an operating system or (say) a word processing program onto them. Any assistance would be appreciated. Happy to pay for OS/Application diskettes and freight etc Many thanks Brendan --------------//---------------- brendan at mcneill.co.nz +64 21 881 883 From wh.sudbrink at verizon.net Sat Jul 9 11:52:34 2016 From: wh.sudbrink at verizon.net (Bill Sudbrink) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 12:52:34 -0400 Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: <112801d1da02$4accf1b0$e066d510$@sudbrink@verizon.net> Mike Stein wrote: > The Molex version looks like it has round pins; I'd > recommend rectangular pins with your matching connector, > they're prone to overheat at the best of times. Ya' know, I have heard that several times, but I have eight different Ohio Scientific systems and a couple of SWTPc machines (all of which make extensive use of those Connectors) and I've never seen any evidence of heating. Poor/glitchy data communication, yes. But never any heating on them. Bill S. From tothwolf at concentric.net Sat Jul 9 19:49:08 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 19:49:08 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: <5781283D.7090909@pico-systems.com> References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> <5781283D.7090909@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Jon Elson wrote: > On 07/09/2016 09:18 AM, Tothwolf wrote: >> On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Mike Stein wrote: >>> From: "Tothwolf" >>>> On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: >>>> >>>>> Hi, >>>>> >>>>> for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old connectors used on the >>>>> original board. >>>> >>>>> ###################### >>>>> >>>>> The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP >>>>> number or something: >>>>> >>>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 >>>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 >>>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 >>>>> > > These connectors are also available with gold contacts on both ends. > For long-term reliability, these are better. For lower voltage signal applications, yes. For supplying power, no. Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits. From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 9 21:30:51 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 22:30:51 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits Message-ID: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> There are 30 exhibits for Vintage Computer Festival West XI next month: http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ Exhibit registration is full. Contact me privately if you'd like to join the waiting list. From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sat Jul 9 21:51:59 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 19:51:59 -0700 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits Message-ID: <48glr9p7r47hpsb21fmwvthm.1468119079591@email.android.com> Evan, I for one am very excited. I was wondering are there any vendors or consignment items at this time? Ali -------- Original message -------- From: Evan Koblentz Date: 7/9/2016 7:30 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits There are 30 exhibits for Vintage Computer Festival West XI next month: http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ Exhibit registration is full. Contact me privately if you'd like to join the waiting list. From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 9 22:34:45 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 20:34:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Site is updated: > - Hours listed on main show page > - Main show page is linked back from each sub-page > - Consignment form is posted on consignment page :) > > http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/ Thank you! That was extremely responsive! Well done. From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 9 23:04:32 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 21:04:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> Message-ID: >> So, I guess that I can bring a few items for the consignment sales, >> (which is also "information coming soon"), but NOT a station wagon full >> of boxes of books, classic vintage computers (QX10, SMC70, early 5150, >> 8201a, etc.), hundreds of hard-sector diskettes, 3", 3.25" disks and >> alignment disks, another wooden modem, ARC serial analyzer, etc. >> (priced to meet expenses and lunch both days) >> Oh well. I would have needed to get help packing the car, etc. anyway. On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Sure you can bring a car full of stuff, as long as it's sold at consignment. > I do not know how much table space we will have for that. It is possible that > we'll ask you to bring in some at a time. At VCF6, I only brought a few things: http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/vcf6/vendor5.jpg but now I have more than ten times that, that needs to go or get DUMPSTERED. plus all that is left of http://www.xenosoft.com/FPUIB and at least 100 more boxes worth. But, my health is not good enough to even pack it all. My assistant at the last VCF died two years ago. I had been hoping to totally fill Prius station wagon, and sell enough first day to do an entire additional load the second day. But, I don't think that it is realiatic to imagine that I can manage to do that. Besides the need to channel it in small quantities through "consignment", I know that I can't manage even that level of physical exertion. So, I'll probably just fill a couple of boxes with IBM Technical References, Windows Resource kits, etc. and end up with most of the rest eventually going to paper recycling. (most of the FPUIB stuff has been in that list for 2 years, so there's obviously not a big pent-up demand) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sat Jul 9 23:05:51 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 00:05:51 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits Message-ID: <18fe6a.3cb8d17b.44b3239f@aol.com> what kind of wooden modem? In a message dated 7/9/2016 9:04:37 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, cisin at xenosoft.com writes: >> So, I guess that I can bring a few items for the consignment sales, >> (which is also "information coming soon"), but NOT a station wagon full >> of boxes of books, classic vintage computers (QX10, SMC70, early 5150, >> 8201a, etc.), hundreds of hard-sector diskettes, 3", 3.25" disks and >> alignment disks, another wooden modem, ARC serial analyzer, etc. >> (priced to meet expenses and lunch both days) >> Oh well. I would have needed to get help packing the car, etc. anyway. On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Sure you can bring a car full of stuff, as long as it's sold at consignment. > I do not know how much table space we will have for that. It is possible that > we'll ask you to bring in some at a time. At VCF6, I only brought a few things: http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/vcf6/vendor5.jpg but now I have more than ten times that, that needs to go or get DUMPSTERED. plus all that is left of http://www.xenosoft.com/FPUIB and at least 100 more boxes worth. But, my health is not good enough to even pack it all. My assistant at the last VCF died two years ago. I had been hoping to totally fill Prius station wagon, and sell enough first day to do an entire additional load the second day. But, I don't think that it is realiatic to imagine that I can manage to do that. Besides the need to channel it in small quantities through "consignment", I know that I can't manage even that level of physical exertion. So, I'll probably just fill a couple of boxes with IBM Technical References, Windows Resource kits, etc. and end up with most of the rest eventually going to paper recycling. (most of the FPUIB stuff has been in that list for 2 years, so there's obviously not a big pent-up demand) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 9 23:26:43 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 21:26:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: "Wooden modem" (Was: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <18fe6a.3cb8d17b.44b3239f@aol.com> References: <18fe6a.3cb8d17b.44b3239f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > what kind of wooden modem? Livermore Data Systems, Model B BUT, this one is labelled: General Design, Inc. and is serial #0043 I assume that this is rebadged, but it could be that another company made identical modems. It's in EXCELLENT cosmetic condition. Model number is not labelled anywhere on it, but the A model did not have a duplex switch, and the C model had originate/answer. Like: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102630200 and http://imgur.com/gallery/doVU5 (but this one is not missing screws and slightly fewer scratches) Uses old-style power cord (not included, nor known pinout) I had one a few years ago, that sold for an obscene amount ($300), in spite of having some case damage. This one looks EXCELLENT. Before I sell this, I should contact that buyer, and the others who were seriously interested. OB_Standard_Disclaimer: GUARANTEED NOT TO WORK. If it does turn out to work, you may return it for store credit of half the purchase price. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From spacewar at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 02:48:12 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 01:48:12 -0600 Subject: TI Silent 700 print mechanism mechanical issues, and Model 763/765 bubble memory notes Message-ID: I've now got a TI Silent 700 Model 763, and it is partially working. The previous owner said that the line advance wasn't working reliably, but that otherwise it was working. As I received it, the thermal print head is only darkening the top scan line of characters, and only partially. The intensity pot is already at maximum. The line advance is working, but carriage return is unreliable, which results in the carriage banging against the right side of the mechanism and getting stuck there. The horizontal carriage positioning is done by stepper motor with an encoder for feedback, so I'm surprised that it isn't smart enough to recognize that it can't home the carriage, and avoid ramming it into the right end of the mechanism. I was worried that the thermal print head might be damaged. I opened it up and found that it uses the solenoid line advance mechansim, probably the same as is documented for the early production of Model 743/745. (Later 743/745 use a stepper motor for line advance.) With power off, the carriage can be manually returned to the left side. There were two loose parts inside, a spring and a small knob. These apparently belong to the solenoid line advance mechanism, belonging on the shaft at the opposite end of the solenoid from the link to the pivot. There are screws on the left and right end of the mechanism, which when loosened, allow the printhead to be moved up and down relative to the mechanism. The Model 743/745 maintenance manual suggests adjusting that if characters aren't fully visible. I tried that, and could see a little bit more of the characters, but couldn't adjust it to get the characters entirely visible. I accidentally discovered that with a small amount of additional pressure against the carriage assembly, toward the paper path, the characters are printed fully formed, and (quite suprisingly to me) the carriage return works properly as well. If I can't get this working reliably, I may start searching for a 743 or 745 with the solenoid line advance mechanism, to try a mechanism transplant. (The mechanism with stepper motor line advance is not interchangeable, and requires a different circuit board. I'm not sure whether that mechanism was used in any model 763/765 units.) The Operating Instructions manual for the Model 763 and 765 gives information on 13 different commands which are accepted in command mode. They mention the TEST command, which performs a self-test, and the TEST INIT subcommand which resets everything to factory defaults. There's a TEST MASK subcommand not documented in the manual which allows examining or altering the bubble memory minor loop masks. When installing or replacing a bubble memory module, it may be necessary to enter this information for the new module, from the mask data printed on the label of the bubble device. Unlike the later Intel bubble memory, the TI parts (at least of the 92Kbit devices) don't have a specified dedicated "boot loop" to store the mask, nor do they have a defined synchronization pattern to provide a detectable home position, so the TMS5502/TMS9916 bubble controller chip has to ensure that the device is rotated to the home position on power down or power fail. The terminal firmware may be using a specific normal minor loop, probably the first or last loop, to store the mask and a sync pattern, but the TMS5502/TMS9916 don't provide any automation for that. The TMS5502/TMS9916 also require that the mask bits be provided in a bit-serial fashion at the precise times needed during data transfers; TI app notes show the mask stored in PROM with a counter for addressing, but the 763/765 terminal doesn't do that. I'm not sure whether they have dedicated logic for the mask, or whether it's being done by firmware. The TEST MASK subcommand is probably documented in the Maintenance Manual, which I don't have; the only reason I know about it is that a technician left a printout showing the TEST MASK output for this terminal between two pages of the Operating Instructions manual. The terminal uses a TMS9980 microprocessor, which is an 8-bit-bus version of the TMS9900, which can only address 16KB of memory. The terminal has five TMS4732 4KB ROMS, as well as some RAM, so there must be some bank-switching going on. The bubble memory modules for the terminal came in two types: 1) A large "discrete" bubble module with one 92Kbit bubble device and a whole lot of non-bubble-specific chips (presumably because the SN753xx bubble memory support chips were not yet available for production). Two large modules are fitted, to provide the terminal's basic rated storage capacity of 20K characters (actually up to 22,860 characters if 18, 36, or 72 character record lengths are used). This leaves no room for additional bubble modules. The modules show up to the TEST MASK command as modules 2 and 6. 2) A small bubble module with two 92Kbit bubble devices and the SN753xx bubble memory support chips. A single module provides the 20K (22860 character) basic rated storage. Up to four of these modules can be fitted, for up to 80K (91,440) characters. My terminal had two large bubble modules installed. A friend gave me three more large modules, which have been treated roughly, so they have bent pins and possibly damaged components. I have one small module that came from eBay some years ago. I haven't tried any of them yet. From lehmann at ans-netz.de Sun Jul 10 03:12:38 2016 From: lehmann at ans-netz.de (Oliver Lehmann) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 10:12:38 +0200 Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: <20160710101238.Horde._eeSPBcAepKZvlB18Ooe3Wc@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Thanks for your help so far - I was able to find them at mouser: > One is easy - J3 is a 2x10 pin 2.54mm connector which is still common today. > But it is higher than the usual connectors. It has a hight of 1.5cm. If you > search for the printed A-MP number (1-87456-6), you'll find the housing, > but not the soldered clips used inside this housing.... > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9593 found: Connectors: http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=87523-6 Housing: http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=1-87456-6 > The next one is a power plug used on a CDC FINCH harddisk. The manual > states, that the Connectors AMP 1-87270-1 or 3-87025-3 can be used. > I guess this where connectors used with cables - but I need a connector > which can be placed on a circuit board like this one: > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9587 found: http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=26-60-5100 > The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea about its AMP > number or something: > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 > > Its counterpart is shown here and labled with AMP, but no number: > > http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_case/Disk-Tape-Component/Secrets-S8000/DSCF0366 Found too without keying pin but this is not important as I don't need one. The thing is - the connectors in my housing on the board are kinda simpl. The ones at mouser seem to be kinda complex with some sort of locking mechanism - I'm not sure I need those, but I'm not able to find simpler ones. Maybe the locking spring can be removed by me before installing them in the housing? I need to be sure that I can remove the board from the harddisk without such a locking mechanism preventing me from doing so.... Connectors: http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=5-87278-1 Housing: http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=1-87270-5 From elson at pico-systems.com Sat Jul 9 11:37:17 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 11:37:17 -0500 Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: References: <20160709004946.Horde.jyFBEUJPRsuZY9WhLgnr1vS@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: <5781283D.7090909@pico-systems.com> On 07/09/2016 09:18 AM, Tothwolf wrote: > On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Mike Stein wrote: >> From: "Tothwolf" >>> On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> for rebuilding a circuit, I'm in need of 3 old >>>> connectors used on the >>>> original board. >>> >>>> ###################### >>>> >>>> The next one is also a power plug - but I have no idea >>>> about its AMP >>>> number or something: >>>> >>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9588 >>>> >>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9589 >>>> >>>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9584 >>>> >>>> These connectors are also available with gold contacts on both ends. For long-term reliability, these are better. Jon From spectre at floodgap.com Sat Jul 9 21:51:54 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 19:51:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> from Evan Koblentz at "Jul 9, 16 10:30:51 pm" Message-ID: <201607100251.u6A2ptEI50726546@floodgap.com> > There are 30 exhibits for Vintage Computer Festival West XI next month: > http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ I'm looking forward to being there. Now, how about that consignment form? :P -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular. ------------------ From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 9 21:59:26 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 22:59:26 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <201607100251.u6A2ptEI50726546@floodgap.com> References: <201607100251.u6A2ptEI50726546@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <5781BA0E.2070305@snarc.net> Cameron wrote... >> how about that consignment form? :P Ali wrote... >> I was wondering are there any vendors or consignment items at this time? Working on the consignment form, stay tuned.... There aren't vendors this time. Going to be a LOT more to the show in 2017. This year's show is kind of back-to-basics. From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 9 22:02:48 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 20:02:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > There are 30 exhibits for Vintage Computer Festival West XI next month: > http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ > Exhibit registration is full. Contact me privately if you'd like to join the > waiting list. Suggestion: Put the hours, as well as the dates of the event on the website. Clearly and prominently on every page of it, not several levels deep. Vendor information is still "coming soon". BUT, it does clearly state that there is NO intent for flea market/swap meet. So, I guess that I can bring a few items for the consignment sales, (which is also "information coming soon"), but NOT a station wagon full of boxes of books, classic vintage computers (QX10, SMC70, early 5150, 8201a, etc.), hundreds of hard-sector diskettes, 3", 3.25" disks and alignment disks, another wooden modem, ARC serial analyzer, etc. (priced to meet expenses and lunch both days) Oh well. I would have needed to get help packing the car, etc. anyway. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 9 22:10:09 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 23:10:09 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> Message-ID: <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> > So, I guess that I can bring a few items for the consignment sales, > (which is also "information coming soon"), but NOT a station wagon full > of boxes of books, classic vintage computers (QX10, SMC70, early 5150, > 8201a, etc.), hundreds of hard-sector diskettes, 3", 3.25" disks and > alignment disks, another wooden modem, ARC serial analyzer, etc. > (priced to meet expenses and lunch both days) Sure you can bring a car full of stuff, as long as it's sold at consignment. I do not know how much table space we will have for that. It is possible that we'll ask you to bring in some at a time. From jonelson126 at gmail.com Sat Jul 9 22:27:09 2016 From: jonelson126 at gmail.com (Jon Elson) Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2016 22:27:09 -0500 Subject: offering part of uVax/VaxStation 3100 In-Reply-To: <5781B2DE.3020904@pico-systems.com> References: <5781B2DE.3020904@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <5781C08D.40705@pico-systems.com> On 07/09/2016 09:28 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > I have the bottom part of a DV-31ETA-A-A01 VaxStation > 3100. It has the bottom of the case, the main CPU board > and the power supply. I think additional memory and the > graphics/SCSI adaptor were mezzanine boards, and are NOT > present in this. It was quite dirty when I found it, and > I have not tried to fire it up. Anybody have an interest > in this? > > Jon From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 9 22:30:38 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2016 23:30:38 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> Message-ID: <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> Site is updated: - Hours listed on main show page - Main show page is linked back from each sub-page - Consignment form is posted on consignment page :) http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/ From pbirkel at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 03:14:07 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 04:14:07 -0400 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? Message-ID: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. How does that situation jibe with the SIMM issue/experience? ----- paul From tothwolf at concentric.net Sun Jul 10 08:07:39 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 08:07:39 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Paul Birkel wrote: > Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: > >> "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide will >> form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major headache. >> This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium PCs with 30 and >> 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." > > Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses > tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. I'm not familiar with them used in DEC systems in that way, but the problems with mixing tin and gold plated connectors is well documented. Even the connector manufacturers warn against mixing different platings. Another problem that can occur is because a gold surface is softer than tin oxide, if the header pin is tarnished, mating the gold plated contact with the header will not break the surface of the tin oxide. Tin oxide is not a good conductor. > How does that situation jibe with the SIMM issue/experience? Somewhere around here I still have some 4MB 30 pin SIMMs with gold plated contacts that were used in tin plated sockets for several years. The damage/contamination of the gold plated SIMM contacts is significant. From pbirkel at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 08:21:11 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:21:11 -0400 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) Message-ID: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy Sotomayor Jr Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 4:04 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs? What you can do (and I?ve seen it done) is define verilog modules that provide the functions of the IC and use that in their designs. I?ve seen at least two interesting classic computer recreations using this approach (re-implemenation of the CADR lisp machine in verilog and an IBM 360/30 in verilog). ROMs are easy (just instantiate a lookup table). PLCs are just combinatorial equations which are relatively easy with the verilog ?assign? statement. TTFN - Guy ====****==== Do you have a pointer to that "IBM 360/30 in Verilog", Guy? ----- paul From ljw-cctech at ljw.me.uk Sun Jul 10 08:23:57 2016 From: ljw-cctech at ljw.me.uk (Lawrence Wilkinson) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 15:23:57 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> That'll be me, I guess, It's in VHDL. URL in sig. On 10/07/16 15:21, Paul Birkel wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy Sotomayor Jr > Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 4:04 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs? > > What you can do (and I?ve seen it done) is define verilog modules that provide the functions of the IC and use that in their designs. I?ve seen at least two interesting classic computer recreations using this approach (re-implemenation of the CADR lisp machine in verilog and an IBM 360/30 in verilog). > > ROMs are easy (just instantiate a lookup table). PLCs are just combinatorial equations which are relatively easy with the verilog ?assign? statement. > > TTFN - Guy > > ====****==== > > Do you have a pointer to that "IBM 360/30 in Verilog", Guy? > > ----- > paul > -- Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360 From stefan.skoglund at agj.net Sun Jul 10 10:44:42 2016 From: stefan.skoglund at agj.net (Stefan Skoglund (lokal =?ISO-8859-1?Q?anv=E4ndare=29?=) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 17:44:42 +0200 Subject: server maintenance In-Reply-To: <20A54D18-23CD-4D37-8FA4-7052860FFAD0@doughq.com> References: <000001d1d960$00146740$003d35c0$@classiccmp.org> <9937D29B-92E9-451F-9DF8-96E595CE10DE@shiresoft.com> <314974b8-2eee-f633-76fd-9f68f7a5c1b2@jbrain.com> <3d4c3e09-c2ae-72d1-35a0-a6117eab45a1@hack.net> <20A54D18-23CD-4D37-8FA4-7052860FFAD0@doughq.com> Message-ID: <1468165482.3564.16.camel@agj.net> l?r 2016-07-09 klockan 13:04 +1000 skrev Doug Jackson: > Ummmmmm > > Weren't our computers designed before quality change control existed... > > (Duck) > > Doug Umm, im reading James W Cortada's book Before The Computer. The E Remington company got from 1865 far less custom from it's largest customer,and so had to look after a new product. E Remington company got access to a new product namely C Sholes's typewriter and they definitely had the problems of manufacturing a lot of tiny metallic parts (and some which was a bit larger) under control including the necessary quality control. They didn't know how to market the new thing so they took in the services of a external partner. After that they had the 3 of 4 requirements for a successful product: knowing how to produce it knowing how to sale it the unique product They didn't have the captured market. Of the early entrants (Cortada) into an market/industry the early ones who meet the first 3 req usually ended up dominating the industry. Unfortunately they gave up to early and sold the business to the inventor. 2 years later 1874 or the sales started to explode. So YES quality control is old hens toth except occasionaly someone influential don't want it or don't understand why it is rather important. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 10 11:09:48 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:09:48 -0700 Subject: ISO HP 2392 terminal and VT100 keytops Message-ID: <21c487d2-eb87-a472-70b2-c85fa6485f6b@bitsavers.org> Well, I accidentally ordered two VT100 tubes, so this weekend I tried to restore the one I have, only to discover the keyboard is missing 3 keytops (" References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 10, 2016, at 9:07 AM, Tothwolf wrote: > > On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Paul Birkel wrote: >> Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: >> >>> "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." >> >> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. > > I'm not familiar with them used in DEC systems in that way, but the problems with mixing tin and gold plated connectors is well documented. Even the connector manufacturers warn against mixing different platings. While "don't mix contact surfaces" is sufficient, it isn't necessary. What matters is the "anodic index" of the metal, or rather, the difference between those two values for the two metals in contact. If that difference is large, you have a problem; if it's small enough, you do not. "Small enough" depends on the environment; aboard an oceangoing ship the number has to be smaller than in an office setting. I remember looking into this topic for an investigation of what types of contact platings are acceptable for lithium coin cell battery holders in IT equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion has some information. paul From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 10 13:58:54 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 11:58:54 -0700 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <9e955f6d-21d2-5e09-5e69-662c40b0c02b@bitsavers.org> On 7/10/16 1:14 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses > tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. > I'm not near one right now, but there should be gold plating on the finger in the DEC connector block at the point of contact with the pcb edge connector. It's easier to see on the VAX era blocks. From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sun Jul 10 13:58:45 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 11:58:45 -0700 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> Message-ID: <010501d1dadd$168e7f00$43ab7d00$@net> > > Thank you! > That was extremely responsive! > > Well done. > WHOA! Fred isn't grumpy! :D *ducking for cover* -Ali From tothwolf at concentric.net Sun Jul 10 08:46:35 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 08:46:35 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: <20160710101238.Horde._eeSPBcAepKZvlB18Ooe3Wc@avocado.salatschuessel.net> References: <20160710101238.Horde._eeSPBcAepKZvlB18Ooe3Wc@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: >> One is easy - J3 is a 2x10 pin 2.54mm connector which is still common >> today. >> But it is higher than the usual connectors. It has a hight of 1.5cm. If you >> search for the printed A-MP number (1-87456-6), you'll find the housing, >> but not the soldered clips used inside this housing.... >> >> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9593 > > found: > Connectors: > http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=87523-6 > > Housing: > http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=1-87456-6 AMP used to make a lot more contact variations including solder tail and wire wrap versions. When Tyco bought AMP, they began rapidly discontinuing large numbers of products as part of their LEAN initiative. It could be the contacts that were originally used were some of those which were discontinued. You could probably crimp the contacts onto #24 or #22 busbar wire (tinned solid copper) which would allow you to solder them to the board. The proper crimper for these type of contacts is essential and an older model AMP crimp tool is not terribly expensive second hand/surplus if you have time to wait for one to turn up. From elson at pico-systems.com Sun Jul 10 13:07:36 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 13:07:36 -0500 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <57828EE8.8080500@pico-systems.com> On 07/10/2016 12:07 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 10, 2016, at 9:07 AM, Tothwolf wrote: >> >> On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Paul Birkel wrote: >>> Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: >>> >>>> "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." >>> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >>> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >> I'm not familiar with them used in DEC systems in that way, but the problems with mixing tin and gold plated connectors is well documented. Even the connector manufacturers warn against mixing different platings. > While "don't mix contact surfaces" is sufficient, it isn't necessary. What matters is the "anodic index" of the metal, or rather, the difference between those two values for the two metals in contact. If that difference is large, you have a problem; if it's small enough, you do not. "Small enough" depends on the environment; aboard an oceangoing ship the number has to be smaller than in an office setting. I remember looking into this topic for an investigation of what types of contact platings are acceptable for lithium coin cell battery holders in IT equipment. > > This applies to bolted contact for structural things. Gold connectors usually have light contact pressure to preserve the soft gold plating. Tin contacts usually have higher contact force to scrape the oxide off the tin surface. When they are mixed, the tin can wipe onto the gold and then allow oxides to form due to the lower contact force. Tin contacts are supposed to provide enough pressure to form gas-tight contact areas. And, of course, when exposed to salty air, then everything goes downhill REAL fast, corrosion galore. In a salt environment, I'd use semi-hermetically sealed connectors, and still expect lots of problems. The Navy probably knows a LOT about these things. Jon From lehmann at ans-netz.de Sun Jul 10 13:54:50 2016 From: lehmann at ans-netz.de (Oliver Lehmann) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 20:54:50 +0200 Subject: Looking for old connectors In-Reply-To: References: <20160710101238.Horde._eeSPBcAepKZvlB18Ooe3Wc@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Message-ID: <20160710205450.Horde.id_uyId7xIUOZiFUMODx_Gg@avocado.salatschuessel.net> Tothwolf wrote: > On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Oliver Lehmann wrote: > >>> One is easy - J3 is a 2x10 pin 2.54mm connector which is still >>> common today. >>> But it is higher than the usual connectors. It has a hight of 1.5cm. If you >>> search for the printed A-MP number (1-87456-6), you'll find the housing, >>> but not the soldered clips used inside this housing.... >>> >>> http://pics.pofo.de/gallery3/index.php/S8000/S8000_boards/FINCH-Adapter-Board/IMGP9593 >> >> found: >> Connectors: >> http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=87523-6 >> >> Housing: >> http://www.mouser.de/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=1-87456-6 > > AMP used to make a lot more contact variations including solder tail > and wire wrap versions. When Tyco bought AMP, they began rapidly > discontinuing large numbers of products as part of their LEAN > initiative. It could be the contacts that were originally used were > some of those which were discontinued. > > You could probably crimp the contacts onto #24 or #22 busbar wire > (tinned solid copper) which would allow you to solder them to the > board. The proper crimper for these type of contacts is essential > and an older model AMP crimp tool is not terribly expensive second > hand/surplus if you have time to wait for one to turn up. I planned to use rigid wire. It Zilog used them too when they made the circuit. You can see how they cut it on the bottom of the PCB. I plan to just solder the wires on the connectors. Once they're placed on the PCB they won't be moved so the soldering joint on the connectors should not break over time. Crimping should not be needed I'd say.... From jbdigriz at dragonsweb.org Sun Jul 10 14:15:02 2016 From: jbdigriz at dragonsweb.org (James B DiGriz) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 15:15:02 -0400 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through In-Reply-To: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> References: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20160710151502.238b9476@verticle> On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 15:28:02 +0100 "Dave Wade" wrote: > I guess this is on-topic. > > http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-s > ource-code/ More Apollo source code now on GitHub: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/162241/assembly-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon-now-published-on-github?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 From cisin at xenosoft.com Sun Jul 10 14:18:26 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 12:18:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <010501d1dadd$168e7f00$43ab7d00$@net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> <010501d1dadd$168e7f00$43ab7d00$@net> Message-ID: >> Thank you! >> That was extremely responsive! >> Well done. On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Ali wrote: > WHOA! Fred isn't grumpy! :D *ducking for cover* Well, it was pretty quick turnaround for a perfect response to a gripe/suggestion. Besides, it I don't acknowledge the good stuff, then people won't take me seriously when I have something to say. In other posts, I might have revealed some causal aspects of grumpiness, including too much stuff, and no longer able to manage it. My own fault for inadequate planning for sudden reality events. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From tothwolf at concentric.net Sun Jul 10 14:29:52 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 14:29:52 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: <57828EE8.8080500@pico-systems.com> References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> <57828EE8.8080500@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Jon Elson wrote: > On 07/10/2016 12:07 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 10, 2016, at 9:07 AM, Tothwolf wrote: >>> On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Paul Birkel wrote: >>>> Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: >>>> >>>>> "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide >>>>> will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major >>>>> headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium >>>>> PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." >>>> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >>>> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >>> I'm not familiar with them used in DEC systems in that way, but the >>> problems with mixing tin and gold plated connectors is well >>> documented. Even the connector manufacturers warn against mixing >>> different platings. >> While "don't mix contact surfaces" is sufficient, it isn't necessary. >> What matters is the "anodic index" of the metal, or rather, the >> difference between those two values for the two metals in contact. If >> that difference is large, you have a problem; if it's small enough, you >> do not. "Small enough" depends on the environment; aboard an >> oceangoing ship the number has to be smaller than in an office setting. >> I remember looking into this topic for an investigation of what types >> of contact platings are acceptable for lithium coin cell battery >> holders in IT equipment. > > This applies to bolted contact for structural things. Gold connectors > usually have light contact pressure to preserve the soft gold plating. > Tin contacts usually have higher contact force to scrape the oxide off > the tin surface. When they are mixed, the tin can wipe onto the gold > and then allow oxides to form due to the lower contact force. Tin > contacts are supposed to provide enough pressure to form gas-tight > contact areas. Another thing to keep in mind here is that electrical current is being passed through the junction. Mixed metals greatly increases the potential for electromigration. > And, of course, when exposed to salty air, then everything goes downhill > REAL fast, corrosion galore. In a salt environment, I'd use > semi-hermetically sealed connectors, and still expect lots of problems. > The Navy probably knows a LOT about these things. Even in a reasonably good atmospheric environment weird issues can crop up. I once evaluated an air handler controller which had worked perfectly in product testing, but once field deployed, had a very high failure rate. It was made up of two pc boards with a pair of .100" pin and socket board to board interconnects. The two boards were physically held together with 4 nylon snap-in standoffs. The lower board contained terminal blocks, modular connectors, and the power supply circuitry and the upper board contained the microcontroller, network circuitry, etc. The cause of the failures turned out to be fretting corrosion of the board to board connectors caused by vibration. Another contributing factor was that many installers were not installing all 4 mounting screws when mounting the controller inside the unit (these were field retrofitted controllers) but were instead only installing 2 screws in opposite corners. The fix was to replace all of the existing board to board interconnects, both the header and socket with parts that had 30 microinches of hard gold over nickel (the original parts had 15 microinches of gold) and to use a contact lubricant during assembly. Repaired boards were also to be installed using all 4 mounting screws. The vendor later redesigned the controller so it was all on a single board (while still admitting no fault, of course). From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 10 14:40:05 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 15:40:05 -0400 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? Message-ID: actually some DEC backplane had gold dos inside on finders of backplane and in one instance we had a 8i that has all gold plated everything on the backplance and heavy gold too. back in the days - - Ed Sharpe retired CEO Computer Exchange Inc Phx In a message dated 7/10/2016 12:30:30 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, tothwolf at concentric.net writes: On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Jon Elson wrote: > On 07/10/2016 12:07 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 10, 2016, at 9:07 AM, Tothwolf wrote: >>> On Sun, 10 Jul 2016, Paul Birkel wrote: >>>> Stated Tothwolf tothwolf at concentric.net: >>>> >>>>> "Both contact surfaces must also be the same material or tin oxide >>>>> will form on the surface of the gold plating and cause a major >>>>> headache. This was a serious problem with 486 and earlier Pentium >>>>> PCs with 30 and 72 pin SIMMs and it led to a number of lawsuits." >>>> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >>>> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >>> I'm not familiar with them used in DEC systems in that way, but the >>> problems with mixing tin and gold plated connectors is well >>> documented. Even the connector manufacturers warn against mixing >>> different platings. >> While "don't mix contact surfaces" is sufficient, it isn't necessary. >> What matters is the "anodic index" of the metal, or rather, the >> difference between those two values for the two metals in contact. If >> that difference is large, you have a problem; if it's small enough, you >> do not. "Small enough" depends on the environment; aboard an >> oceangoing ship the number has to be smaller than in an office setting. >> I remember looking into this topic for an investigation of what types >> of contact platings are acceptable for lithium coin cell battery >> holders in IT equipment. > > This applies to bolted contact for structural things. Gold connectors > usually have light contact pressure to preserve the soft gold plating. > Tin contacts usually have higher contact force to scrape the oxide off > the tin surface. When they are mixed, the tin can wipe onto the gold > and then allow oxides to form due to the lower contact force. Tin > contacts are supposed to provide enough pressure to form gas-tight > contact areas. Another thing to keep in mind here is that electrical current is being passed through the junction. Mixed metals greatly increases the potential for electromigration. > And, of course, when exposed to salty air, then everything goes downhill > REAL fast, corrosion galore. In a salt environment, I'd use > semi-hermetically sealed connectors, and still expect lots of problems. > The Navy probably knows a LOT about these things. Even in a reasonably good atmospheric environment weird issues can crop up. I once evaluated an air handler controller which had worked perfectly in product testing, but once field deployed, had a very high failure rate. It was made up of two pc boards with a pair of .100" pin and socket board to board interconnects. The two boards were physically held together with 4 nylon snap-in standoffs. The lower board contained terminal blocks, modular connectors, and the power supply circuitry and the upper board contained the microcontroller, network circuitry, etc. The cause of the failures turned out to be fretting corrosion of the board to board connectors caused by vibration. Another contributing factor was that many installers were not installing all 4 mounting screws when mounting the controller inside the unit (these were field retrofitted controllers) but were instead only installing 2 screws in opposite corners. The fix was to replace all of the existing board to board interconnects, both the header and socket with parts that had 30 microinches of hard gold over nickel (the original parts had 15 microinches of gold) and to use a contact lubricant during assembly. Repaired boards were also to be installed using all 4 mounting screws. The vendor later redesigned the controller so it was all on a single board (while still admitting no fault, of course). From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sun Jul 10 14:59:18 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 12:59:18 -0700 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> <5781BC91.6080106@snarc.net> <5781C15E.30800@snarc.net> <010501d1dadd$168e7f00$43ab7d00$@net> Message-ID: <010a01d1dae5$8bd7b2b0$a3871810$@net> > Besides, it I don't acknowledge the good stuff, then people won't take > me seriously when I have something to say. > > > In other posts, I might have revealed some causal aspects of > grumpiness, including too much stuff, and no longer able to manage it. > My own fault for inadequate planning for sudden reality events. Fred, Can't argue with that - just was out of character! I contacted you in regards to "too much stuff" via the other email account - hopefully it got through. I find that the 1and1 servers are occasionally blocked by other ISPs every once in a while with no indication on my end.... -Ali From tdk.knight at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 15:57:49 2016 From: tdk.knight at gmail.com (Adrian Stoness) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 15:57:49 -0500 Subject: Lunar Module Code Walk Through In-Reply-To: <20160710151502.238b9476@verticle> References: <000901d1d6c9$7031fdb0$5095f910$@gmail.com> <20160710151502.238b9476@verticle> Message-ID: thats making the rounds on my local hackerspace mailing list they're all mining it now :P On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 2:15 PM, James B DiGriz wrote: > On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 15:28:02 +0100 > "Dave Wade" wrote: > > > I guess this is on-topic. > > > > > http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-s > > ource-code/ > > > More Apollo source code now on GitHub: > > > > https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/162241/assembly-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon-now-published-on-github?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 > > > From fjkraan at xs4all.nl Sun Jul 10 16:13:46 2016 From: fjkraan at xs4all.nl (Fred Jan Kraan) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 23:13:46 +0200 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> On 2016-07-10 07:00 PM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > > Greetings > > I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8? floppy drives but no software. I do have some blank 8? diskettes but no real means of transferring an operating system or (say) a word processing program onto them. > > Any assistance would be appreciated. Happy to pay for OS/Application diskettes and freight etc The PDT-150 was also sold with a VT-105 as the MiniMINC and can run some versions of RT-11 (at least V3b). On my site there are images of disks, but it requires a PC capable of writing single density format to an 8" disk. IMD is not the most common format in DEC circles, but it is in PC land. http://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/miniminc/floppyImages/ > > Many thanks > Brendan Greetings & success, Fred Jan Kraan From vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net Sun Jul 10 16:56:56 2016 From: vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net (Brad H) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 14:56:56 -0700 Subject: TV Typewriter reproduction Message-ID: <0c9f01d1daf5$fa420b50$eec621f0$@bettercomputing.net> Hey guys, Getting closer to the 'construction' phase of my TVT replica. I already built a mockup the case and reconfigured and painted the MDS keyboard I found to match the prototypes. I also got some 'natural' colored PCB stock and etched some boards. Pretty happy with the results. Hard to tell if I got the right color or not.. I notice in photos my boards look closer to the color of the original than they appear to me 'in person'. Anyway, I remember Nick Allen was kind enough to post that photo of his TVT unit - I meant to ask at the time, are there any more pictures of it, especially from underneath? Or is there anyone else out there with photos of original TVTs (not to be confused with the later CT1024)? I'm finding the few pictures I can find of assembled TVTs very valuable in answering assembly and part questions. The blog of my progress on my TVT is here for those interested: http://bradhodge.ca/blog/?cat=11 Thanks again! Brad From fred at MISER.MISERNET.NET Sun Jul 10 20:41:13 2016 From: fred at MISER.MISERNET.NET (Fred) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 20:41:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: cctalk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 9 Jul 2016 cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: [talk about word processors, specifically WordPerfect] I would LOVE to find a (hobbyist) copy of WordPerfect for OpenVMS some day. Back in the day I could fly through those key combos on WP 5.1 ... Fred From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 19:44:13 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 09:44:13 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> Message-ID: And Carl Claunch has an IBM 1130 in VHDL. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 10, 2016, at 10:23 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson wrote: > > That'll be me, I guess, It's in VHDL. URL in sig. > >> On 10/07/16 15:21, Paul Birkel wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy Sotomayor Jr >> Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 4:04 PM >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> Subject: Re: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs? >> >> What you can do (and I?ve seen it done) is define verilog modules that provide the functions of the IC and use that in their designs. I?ve seen at least two interesting classic computer recreations using this approach (re-implemenation of the CADR lisp machine in verilog and an IBM 360/30 in verilog). >> >> ROMs are easy (just instantiate a lookup table). PLCs are just combinatorial equations which are relatively easy with the verilog ?assign? statement. >> >> TTFN - Guy >> >> ====****==== >> >> Do you have a pointer to that "IBM 360/30 in Verilog", Guy? >> >> ----- >> paul > > -- > Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk > The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360 > > From elson at pico-systems.com Sun Jul 10 20:46:23 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 20:46:23 -0500 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: <9e955f6d-21d2-5e09-5e69-662c40b0c02b@bitsavers.org> References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> <9e955f6d-21d2-5e09-5e69-662c40b0c02b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <5782FA6F.10507@pico-systems.com> On 07/10/2016 01:58 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > > On 7/10/16 1:14 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > >> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >> > I'm not near one right now, but there should be gold plating on the finger in the DEC > connector block at the point of contact with the pcb edge connector. It's easier to > see on the VAX era blocks. > > Absolutely. The WW pins were tinned, but there was selective gold plating on the card edge contact fingers. It would take a strong light and magnifier to see it down inside the connector, but you can rest assured the contact was gold-gold. Jon From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 10 20:50:32 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 21:50:32 -0400 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? Message-ID: <353c3f.6170aeb2.44b45568@aol.com> right on! In a message dated 7/10/2016 6:46:28 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, elson at pico-systems.com writes: On 07/10/2016 01:58 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > > On 7/10/16 1:14 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > >> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >> > I'm not near one right now, but there should be gold plating on the finger in the DEC > connector block at the point of contact with the pcb edge connector. It's easier to > see on the VAX era blocks. > > Absolutely. The WW pins were tinned, but there was selective gold plating on the card edge contact fingers. It would take a strong light and magnifier to see it down inside the connector, but you can rest assured the contact was gold-gold. Jon From spacewar at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 21:38:15 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 20:38:15 -0600 Subject: TI Silent 700 print mechanism mechanical issues, and Model 763/765 bubble memory notes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On further study, I find that I misunderstood the nature of the print mechanism in the TI Silent 700 model 763. What I thought was the line advance solenoid is actually a head lift solenoid. It fooled me because it is actuated every time the line is advanced, but the actual line advance is performed by a stepper motor, like the newer variant of models 743 and 745, rather than by a solenoid as in the older variant of models 743/745. The missing spring and knob prevent the head from being held in close enough proximity to the thermal paper. I'll have to figure out how to secure the parts in place in order to make it work reliably. From spacewar at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 22:01:21 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 21:01:21 -0600 Subject: TI Silent 700 print mechanism mechanical issues, and Model 763/765 bubble memory notes In-Reply-To: <2D8CC47C-E954-4B2A-8926-4C28E5E94552@pobox.com> References: <2D8CC47C-E954-4B2A-8926-4C28E5E94552@pobox.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Chris Elmquist wrote: > I've restored a couple Silent 700 and found that the grease in the head lift solenoid had become very sticky (ie, no longer grease) and after completely cleaning and applying new (white lithium grease) the solenoid works much better. I also had one of the knobs you mention split but was able to repair with super glue. Thanks for the info. Now that I have a better understanding of what's wrong with it, maybe I've got a decent chance of fixing it. > Love these Silent 700s, so keep 'em running! I'm keeping my out for more of them. :-) My main interest in this one was as a representative use of TI bubble memory devices. I don't think TI was terribly successful at getting bubble memory design wins; the only non-TI product I've heard of that used TI bubble memory was a Multibus board, and I've never actually seen it. Intel seemed to get a lot more design wins, though they didn't get into the market until just before TI decided to call it quits. From pbirkel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 02:19:21 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 03:19:21 -0400 Subject: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? In-Reply-To: <5782FA6F.10507@pico-systems.com> References: <0add01d1da83$08442670$18cc7350$@gmail.com> <9e955f6d-21d2-5e09-5e69-662c40b0c02b@bitsavers.org> <5782FA6F.10507@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <0bdb01d1db44$8b9434e0$a2bc9ea0$@gmail.com> -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jon Elson Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2016 9:46 PM To: General at classiccmp.org; Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Connectors: Both contact surfaces must also be the same material? On 07/10/2016 01:58 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > > On 7/10/16 1:14 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > >> Almost every DEC System Unit ("backplane") that I've ever seen uses >> tinned-contacts, yet the Modules all use gold-plated fingers. >> > I'm not near one right now, but there should be gold plating on the > finger in the DEC connector block at the point of contact with the pcb > edge connector. It's easier to see on the VAX era blocks. > > Absolutely. The WW pins were tinned, but there was selective gold plating on the card edge contact fingers. It would take a strong light and magnifier to see it down inside the connector, but you can rest assured the contact was gold-gold. Jon ----- Evidently a strong light *and* a strong magnifier (at least for me!). Off to find one ... well, two. paul ----- From iamcamiel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 03:31:04 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:31:04 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> Message-ID: And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. Op 11 jul. 2016 2:44 a.m. schreef "Curious Marc" : > And Carl Claunch has an IBM 1130 in VHDL. > Marc > > Sent from my iPad > > > On Jul 10, 2016, at 10:23 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson > wrote: > > > > That'll be me, I guess, It's in VHDL. URL in sig. > > > >> On 10/07/16 15:21, Paul Birkel wrote: > >> -----Original Message----- > >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy > Sotomayor Jr > >> Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 4:04 PM > >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >> Subject: Re: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs? > >> > >> What you can do (and I?ve seen it done) is define verilog modules that > provide the functions of the IC and use that in their designs. I?ve seen > at least two interesting classic computer recreations using this approach > (re-implemenation of the CADR lisp machine in verilog and an IBM 360/30 in > verilog). > >> > >> ROMs are easy (just instantiate a lookup table). PLCs are just > combinatorial equations which are relatively easy with the verilog ?assign? > statement. > >> > >> TTFN - Guy > >> > >> ====****==== > >> > >> Do you have a pointer to that "IBM 360/30 in Verilog", Guy? > >> > >> ----- > >> paul > > > > -- > > Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk > > The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360 > > > > > From pbirkel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 05:53:54 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 06:53:54 -0400 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> Message-ID: <0c7f01d1db62$84fee3f0$8efcabd0$@gmail.com> -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Camiel Vanderhoeven Sent: Monday, July 11, 2016 4:31 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. ----- Sweet :->. What FPGA platform are you using? Lawrence used a Spartan 3. Don't know how close to "full" he pushed it. paul From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 06:40:30 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:40:30 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> Message-ID: <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> No kidding! That's a massive effort. How close is that to a 360/50? I have a front panel that needs a brain, could sure use that! Marc Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 11, 2016, at 5:31 PM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > > And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. > Op 11 jul. 2016 2:44 a.m. schreef "Curious Marc" : > >> And Carl Claunch has an IBM 1130 in VHDL. >> Marc >> >> Sent from my iPad >> >>>> On Jul 10, 2016, at 10:23 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson >>> wrote: >>> >>> That'll be me, I guess, It's in VHDL. URL in sig. >>> >>>> On 10/07/16 15:21, Paul Birkel wrote: >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Guy >> Sotomayor Jr >>>> Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 4:04 PM >>>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >>>> Subject: Re: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs? >>>> >>>> What you can do (and I?ve seen it done) is define verilog modules that >> provide the functions of the IC and use that in their designs. I?ve seen >> at least two interesting classic computer recreations using this approach >> (re-implemenation of the CADR lisp machine in verilog and an IBM 360/30 in >> verilog). >>>> >>>> ROMs are easy (just instantiate a lookup table). PLCs are just >> combinatorial equations which are relatively easy with the verilog ?assign? >> statement. >>>> >>>> TTFN - Guy >>>> >>>> ====****==== >>>> >>>> Do you have a pointer to that "IBM 360/30 in Verilog", Guy? >>>> >>>> ----- >>>> paul >>> >>> -- >>> Lawrence Wilkinson lawrence at ljw.me.uk >>> The IBM 360/30 page http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360 >> From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 09:42:40 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 16:42:40 +0200 Subject: Successor models that never were Message-ID: Unfinished or never launched follow-ons to classic 1980s home micros... http://uk.pcmag.com/desktop-reviews/82794/gallery/7-classic-home-pc-follow-ups-that-were-never-released -- Sent from my phone - please pardon brevity & typos. From iamcamiel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 10:10:41 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:10:41 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: <0c7f01d1db62$84fee3f0$8efcabd0$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <0c7f01d1db62$84fee3f0$8efcabd0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: > And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. > ----- > > Sweet :->. What FPGA platform are you using? Lawrence used a Spartan 3. Don't know how close to "full" he pushed it. I'm using the XUPV5 PCIE board (Xilinx Virtex-5 XC5VLX110T); currently about 60% occupied, but the design needs lots of debugging. I'm only implementing the CPU on the FPGA, transcribing from the IBM ALDs. I/O channels will be provided by the Hercules emulator (with its cpu ripped out) on the system the PCIe card is plugged into. From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 11 10:44:36 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 08:44:36 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> Message-ID: <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> On 7/11/16 1:31 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. > Op 11 jul. 2016 2:44 a.m. schreef "Curious Marc" : > Was the microcode derived from the engineering drawings? >From memory, the 65 is the bigger brother to the 50 with a wider memory bus. It was also the base machine for their first machine with paging, the model 67. From elson at pico-systems.com Mon Jul 11 11:11:38 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 11:11:38 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> On 07/11/2016 06:40 AM, Curious Marc wrote: > No kidding! That's a massive effort. How close is that to a 360/50? I have a front panel that needs a brain, could sure use that! > 360/50 is a 32-bit machine, the real thing has a core memory "local store" and (3, IIRC) built-in channels. it does not allow memory interleaving. The 360/65 has a 64-bit path to memory, and does permit interleaving. it also allows two /65s to be put together in a multiprocessor system. There are a few additional instructions to communicate between CPUs. The 65 has solid state local store, and a 56-bit ALU, so it can do double-precision floating-point arithmetic without having to double up the cycles, as the /50 does. The /65 has no built-in channels. Jon From elson at pico-systems.com Mon Jul 11 11:14:01 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 11:14:01 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> On 07/11/2016 10:44 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > On 7/11/16 1:31 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: >> And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. >> Op 11 jul. 2016 2:44 a.m. schreef "Curious Marc" : >> > Was the microcode derived from the engineering drawings? > > The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. These machines didn't have a huge amount of microcode, about 2000 words if no emulation options. Jon From iamcamiel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 11:34:43 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 18:34:43 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog (was: How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?) In-Reply-To: <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: > > And I'm very close to having a 360/65 in VHDL. > > Was the microcode derived from the engineering drawings? Yes, from hand-corrected OCR scans. To be precise, the ALDs and microcode I'm using are not for a plain 2065, but for a 7201-02, the variant that was used in the 9020 complex. I'm making modifications that I hope make it work like a 2065 again. > From memory, the 65 is the bigger brother to the 50 with a wider memory bus. And a bigger ALU, so the microcode for floating point operations is very different I believe. Camiel From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 11 12:00:38 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:00:38 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. > 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 12:12:27 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 13:12:27 -0400 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software In-Reply-To: <22157FA4-684E-4011-85F7-F5212D8D9DD4@mcneill.co.nz> References: <22157FA4-684E-4011-85F7-F5212D8D9DD4@mcneill.co.nz> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Brendan McNeill wrote: > Greetings > > I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8? floppy drives but no software. I do have some blank 8? diskettes but no real means of transferring an operating system or (say) a word processing program onto them. This reminds me to ask, since I also have a PDT-150... there's vtserver for larger machines (ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/PDP-11/Vtserver/vtreadme.html - 192K of RAM required) that can be used to image 8" floppies on a bare machine. Every few years, I keep tossing around the idea to bang out a less-feature-rich vtserver client with only one device driver loaded and target a machine with 56Kbytes (or 60Kbytes - PDT-150) but I've never sat down to check the level of effort, or if it's just worth starting from scratch with an RX (or RL or RK) target and make a new app and client. The advantage of reusing the vtserver server part is that it's been in use for long enough to find the obvious bugs, and the limitation of 16-bit block counts (32MB) isn't an issue for most 1970s media, even up to RK07s. Once you have a working RT-11 system, things like Kermit are handy enough for moving files, but I think we are still lacking in the "bootstrapping a small machine" department. For me, since I have alternatives, the "simpler" option is to turn a MicroPDP-11 (w/256Kbytes or more) into an RX01/RX02/RL01/RL02 imaging machine and just use vtserver. I still dream of a bare-metal solution for 64KB machines, since that _is_ viable for a small RT-11 rig. -ethan From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 12:34:06 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 13:34:06 -0400 Subject: cctalk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 9:41 PM, Fred wrote: > On Sat, 9 Jul 2016 cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > > [talk about word processors, specifically WordPerfect] > > I would LOVE to find a (hobbyist) copy of WordPerfect for OpenVMS some > day. Back in the day I could fly through those key combos on WP 5.1 ... I used to work for a guy who resold WordPerfect for VMS, but I haven't seen that in the wild since 1988 (he showed me a box with a media kit and a 50-seat license, I forget the exact amount but I think it was around $30,000). So I've seen it, but I never used it myself. Other places I worked, we used MASS-11. _That_ I have. -ethan From iamcamiel at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 12:46:26 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 19:46:26 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: Hi Al, I have a 7201-2 set that I scanned. They're ~64 MB TIF files per sheet, about ~150GB in total. I can upload those where ever you want. Op 11 jul. 2016 6:58 p.m. schreef "Al Kossow" : On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. > 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. From classiccmp at crash.com Mon Jul 11 12:46:39 2016 From: classiccmp at crash.com (Steven M Jones) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:46:39 -0700 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software In-Reply-To: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> References: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: <78796137-6024-4998-139a-8887489ce749@crash.com> On 07/10/2016 14:13, Fred Jan Kraan wrote: > > On 2016-07-10 07:00 PM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: >> >> I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8? floppy >> drives but no software. [...] >> >> Any assistance would be appreciated. Happy to pay for OS/Application >> diskettes and freight etc > > The PDT-150 was also sold with a VT-105 as the MiniMINC and can run some > versions of RT-11 (at least V3b). Back in the later 80s I picked up an ex-Digit's PDT-11/150, which was sold to her with a VT52. It came with RT-11 v4 and random bits and bobs, all of which is lost in storage somewhere at the moment. Just wanted to point out that the PDT will happily run RT-11 v4, and I'm not sure what the last version would be. I see a reference to using VTCOM with the PDT-11/150 in the RT-11 v5.1 release notes, so... --S. From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 11 13:19:52 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 11:19:52 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: On 7/11/16 10:46 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > Hi Al, > > I have a 7201-2 set that I scanned. They're ~64 MB TIF files per sheet, > about ~150GB in total. I'll have to wait until Jay increases the amount of disk space available to bitsavers. From jwest at classiccmp.org Mon Jul 11 13:24:47 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 13:24:47 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <005601d1dba1$813225e0$839671a0$@classiccmp.org> That should be "very soon", as that was part of the reason for the server maintenance last week to lay some groundwork. Stay tuned.... From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 13:42:09 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 14:42:09 -0400 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software In-Reply-To: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> References: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Fred Jan Kraan wrote: > On 2016-07-10 07:00 PM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: >> Greetings >> >> I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8" floppy drives... > > The PDT-150 was also sold with a VT-105 as the MiniMINC and can run some > versions of RT-11 (at least V3b). I happen to have a VT-105, but I don't recall much in the way of non-lab apps that ever used the graphing capability of the VT-105 (or any of the other semi-graphical DEC terminals). > On my site there are images of disks, but > it requires a PC capable of writing single density format to an 8" disk. IMD > is not the most common format in DEC circles, but it is in PC land. > > http://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/miniminc/floppyImages/ IMD is good. John Wilson's putr is good. Plenty of ways to write an RX01 with a PC that can write the format and has an 8" drive on it. I'm working on that myself (John recently sent me a 24V boost PSU, so I'm going to try to hang a Tandon TM-848 off a DOS/Win3.11 PC, but I'm also likely to grab an RXV21 and stuff it into a MicroPDP-11 and use vtserver with an enclosed RX02 from a MINC-11 - after I run it through a refurb to clean out dust and hardened positioner grease). -ethan From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 13:44:36 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 14:44:36 -0400 Subject: DEC PDT-150 software In-Reply-To: <78796137-6024-4998-139a-8887489ce749@crash.com> References: <5782BA8A.80708@xs4all.nl> <78796137-6024-4998-139a-8887489ce749@crash.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Steven M Jones wrote: > Just wanted to point out that the PDT will happily run RT-11 v4, and I'm > not sure what the last version would be. I see a reference to using > VTCOM with the PDT-11/150 in the RT-11 v5.1 release notes, so... As long as you have a suitable PD driver, any version ought to work... http://www.pdp-11.nl/pdt11-150/pdt11-150-info.html -ethan From steven at malikoff.com Mon Jul 11 17:36:16 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 08:36:16 +1000 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Al said: > On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: >> The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. > > 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. > If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. Indeed they must be. I've been looking for /40 ALDs for some time but haven't struck any. I wonder if they're scarce becase the 40 was a AFAIK a british-developed 360. My dad was posted to Hursley to learn the /40 in 64-65. The only Model 40 docs I have left are less than a dozen pages of 'IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 40 DEVELOPMENT MANUAL' from March 1965 from 'IBM BRITISH LABORATORIES'. Why do I have these? Dad used to bring home Model 40 binders in the late 60s so my brother and I had a good supply of paper to scribble and paint on as kids. All the pages I have left have drawings on the blank side and that was why my parents kept them :) Steve. From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 18:46:00 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 01:46:00 +0200 Subject: cctalk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 11 July 2016 at 03:41, Fred wrote: > On Sat, 9 Jul 2016 cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > > [talk about word processors, specifically WordPerfect] > > I would LOVE to find a (hobbyist) copy of WordPerfect for OpenVMS some > day. Back in the day I could fly through those key combos on WP 5.1 ... Ahh, yes. I did install one instance of MS Word 5 on SCO Xenix/386. That was... interesting. The client had 2 printers, a high-speed dot-matrix and a slower, higher-quality one. Getting the font support for Word working with both was a significant exercise. I think I wrote more and longer shell scripts for that single job than all the rest of my entire career (& hobbyist use) put together. Word worked surprisingly well. A 9600bps Wyse-60 struggled to keep up with Word's inverse-video highlighting, but if you were patient, or used block select rather than character-by-character (Ctrl+Shift+cursors instead of Shift+cursors) it could keep up. A _lot_ of work to get it all working, and honestly, while it did work, it didn't work particularly well. I think the client replaced terminals with PCs + a terminal emulator for people who needed WP functionality. They could print to the Xenix printer spools and that worked fairly well. Some clever PC terminal emulator from James River... [*Googles*] Ah, yes, ICE.TEN I think it was: http://www.icetcp.com/ I can't remember if I ever saw or used WordPerfect on Xenix. Maybe. I did want to see if I could find an old copy of Word for Xenix and run it under Xenix compatibility on a modern Linux, but I never could find it, and I think Linux's Xenix-compatibility functionality was quietly deprecated and dropped decades ago... -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 19:28:14 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 09:28:14 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <3ECA863F-E6D1-4AEB-8298-1B4329A162A3@gmail.com> I haven't looked yet, but are the 360/50 ALDs available anywhere? Marc > On Jul 12, 2016, at 2:00 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > >> On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: >> >> The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. > > 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. > If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. > > > From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 19:35:29 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 09:35:29 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> Thanks for the detailed answer. I see the front panels look remarkably similar though. Short of redoing a 360/50 on an FPGA (I'd need to retire to have enough time for this one!), could I use the /50 panel with the /65 emulator? Marc > On Jul 12, 2016, at 1:11 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > >> On 07/11/2016 06:40 AM, Curious Marc wrote: >> No kidding! That's a massive effort. How close is that to a 360/50? I have a front panel that needs a brain, could sure use that! > 360/50 is a 32-bit machine, the real thing has a core memory "local store" and (3, IIRC) built-in channels. it does not allow memory interleaving. > > The 360/65 has a 64-bit path to memory, and does permit interleaving. it also allows two /65s to be put together in a multiprocessor system. There are a few additional instructions to communicate between CPUs. The 65 has solid state local store, and a 56-bit ALU, so it can do double-precision floating-point arithmetic without having to double up the cycles, as the /50 does. The /65 has no built-in channels. > > Jon From tmfdmike at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 20:15:31 2016 From: tmfdmike at gmail.com (Mike Ross) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:15:31 +1200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 10:36 AM, wrote: > Al said: >> On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: >>> The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. >> >> 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. >> If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. > > Indeed they must be. I've been looking for /40 ALDs for some time but haven't struck any. I wonder if they're > scarce becase the 40 was a AFAIK a british-developed 360. My dad was posted to Hursley to learn the /40 in 64-65. > > The only Model 40 docs I have left are less than a dozen pages of 'IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 40 DEVELOPMENT MANUAL' > from March 1965 from 'IBM BRITISH LABORATORIES'. > Why do I have these? Dad used to bring home Model 40 binders in the late 60s so my brother and I had a good > supply of paper to scribble and paint on as kids. All the pages I have left have drawings on the blank side > and that was why my parents kept them :) > > Steve. I have some 360 ALDs - and I think they may include 40. About to go on holiday with kids; ping me from time to time and I'll check! Mike http://www.corestore.org 'No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.' From iamvirtual at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 20:31:31 2016 From: iamvirtual at gmail.com (B M) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 19:31:31 -0600 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: I have 3 stands, but I only need 1 for my VT-50. I am taking offers on the other 2 :-) I believe these stands to be authentic DEC VT5X stands. Is there any way of telling for sure? There are no markings on the stands. Here is a picture of the stand: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzqkBl9PETyQek51bFlXTU53a1E The tray dimensions (all inside dimensions) are as follows: width: 16-13/16" length: 22-7/8" height (floor to base of tray including casters): 25" The lip of the stand is approx 7/16" The metal is approx 1/16" thick. --barrym On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 12:55 AM, Fritz Mueller wrote: > On 06/27/2016 10:06 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > >> ...could you measure, and/or photograph the part that the VT52 sits on? >> > > Yes please, pictures appreciated, thanks! > > --FritzM. > > From iamvirtual at gmail.com Mon Jul 11 21:00:41 2016 From: iamvirtual at gmail.com (B M) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:00:41 -0600 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: Sorry. I forgot to mention that I live near Calgary Alberta Canada. --barrym On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 7:31 PM, B M wrote: > I have 3 stands, but I only need 1 for my VT-50. I am taking offers on > the other 2 :-) > > I believe these stands to be authentic DEC VT5X stands. Is there any way > of telling for sure? There are no markings on the stands. > > Here is a picture of the stand: > https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzqkBl9PETyQek51bFlXTU53a1E > > The tray dimensions (all inside dimensions) are as follows: > > width: 16-13/16" > length: 22-7/8" > height (floor to base of tray including casters): 25" > > The lip of the stand is approx 7/16" > The metal is approx 1/16" thick. > > --barrym > > On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 12:55 AM, Fritz Mueller wrote: > >> On 06/27/2016 10:06 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: >> >>> ...could you measure, and/or photograph the part that the VT52 sits on? >>> >> >> Yes please, pictures appreciated, thanks! >> >> --FritzM. >> >> > From steven at malikoff.com Mon Jul 11 21:10:41 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:10:41 +1000 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Mike said: > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 10:36 AM, wrote: >> Al said: >>> On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: >>>> The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. >>> >>> 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. >>> If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. >> >> Indeed they must be. I've been looking for /40 ALDs for some time but haven't struck any. I wonder if they're >> scarce becase the 40 was a AFAIK a british-developed 360. My dad was posted to Hursley to learn the /40 in 64-65. >> >> The only Model 40 docs I have left are less than a dozen pages of 'IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 40 DEVELOPMENT MANUAL' >> from March 1965 from 'IBM BRITISH LABORATORIES'. >> Why do I have these? Dad used to bring home Model 40 binders in the late 60s so my brother and I had a good >> supply of paper to scribble and paint on as kids. All the pages I have left have drawings on the blank side >> and that was why my parents kept them :) >> >> Steve. > > I have some 360 ALDs - and I think they may include 40. About to go on > holiday with kids; ping me from time to time and I'll check! That would be great thanks Mike. In the meantime if anyone's interested I can scan those few 'ModForty' (as my Dad always used to refer to it as) pages. The original side, not the drawn-on side.. Steve From elson at pico-systems.com Mon Jul 11 21:24:07 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 21:24:07 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> On 07/11/2016 05:36 PM, steven at malikoff.com wrote: > > Indeed they must be. I've been looking for /40 ALDs for some time but haven't struck any. I wonder if they're > scarce becase the 40 was a AFAIK a british-developed 360. My dad was posted to Hursley to learn the /40 in 64-65. LOTS of model /40s were sold in the US. EVERY one had its own set of ALDs, with the serial number of the CPU on them. They not only recorded the general info for the model, but they had specific changes to reflect the exact configuration of THAT machine. Jon From elson at pico-systems.com Mon Jul 11 21:31:42 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 21:31:42 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> On 07/11/2016 07:35 PM, Curious Marc wrote: > Thanks for the detailed answer. I see the front panels look remarkably similar though. Short of redoing a 360/50 on an FPGA (I'd need to retire to have enough time for this one!), could I use the /50 panel with the /65 emulator? > Not really! The 360/50 had 4 "rollers" for 4 rows of lights, and one row of data switches, and 2 rows of dedicated lights. The 360/65 had 6 rollers with 6 rows of lights, plus TWO rows of data switches, and pretty much no dedicated lights other than associated with the rollers. Both had a row of address switches under the data switches. So, yes, in GENERAL, they had a similar look and layout, but in detail, there was a lot different, some of it specifically related to the memory word width. The only machine that looked really different was the 360/30, that had a panel more reminiscent of the 1401. And, of course, the 360/85, which was really a prototype of the 370/165. As far as software was concerned, it was just a really fast 360, but the hardware was MUCH more advanced. Jon From steven at malikoff.com Mon Jul 11 22:43:38 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:43:38 +1000 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: Jon said: > LOTS of model /40s were sold in the US. EVERY one had its > own set of ALDs, with the serial number of the CPU on them. > They not only recorded the general info for the model, but > they had specific changes to reflect the exact configuration > of THAT machine. I didn't know that every machine came with a set of ALDs but you are right that a lot of /40's were sold stateside. My dad was re-posted directly from Hursley to Poughkeepsie in '65 which I was where some (or all?) the /40s were assembled. One of the IBM Journals (75 years?) has a large colour photo of a row of 40s on the final assembly floor at Poughkeepsie, everyone in it striking that characteristic 60s/70s IBM-photo-pose, eg. someone leaning over a table, another reaching for a console knob, one changing a tape and at least two people earnestly discussing a printout. Steve. From spacewar at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 00:09:10 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 23:09:10 -0600 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: I've been trying to find vendors who sell the parts to build stands like that. Ideally I'd like the column height to be adjustable, but I obviously can't come up with the right words for a search because I can't find them even in fixed height. I'd like to build one specifically for a DEC GT40 terminal, with a keyboard tray. Someone I know has a stand that is almost perfect for the GT40, but there's no identifying information on it, so I can't easily search for a matching stand. From iamcamiel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 00:34:34 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 07:34:34 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: Op 12 jul. 2016 5:50 a.m. schreef : > > Jon said: > > LOTS of model /40s were sold in the US. EVERY one had its > > own set of ALDs, with the serial number of the CPU on them. > > They not only recorded the general info for the model, but > > they had specific changes to reflect the exact configuration > > of THAT machine. > > I didn't know that every machine came with a set of ALDs but you are > right that a lot of /40's were sold stateside. My dad was re-posted > directly from Hursley to Poughkeepsie in '65 which I was where some (or > all?) the /40s were assembled. > One of the IBM Journals (75 years?) has a large colour photo of a row > of 40s on the final assembly floor at Poughkeepsie, everyone in it > striking that characteristic 60s/70s IBM-photo-pose, eg. someone leaning > over a table, another reaching for a console knob, one changing a tape and > at least two people earnestly discussing a printout. Most weren't sold, but leased. The ALDs would be used by the IBM CE, not the customers themselves. I don't know if machines that were sold rather than leased came with ALDs or if IBM kept these, I suspect the latter to be the case. From iamcamiel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 00:41:31 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 07:41:31 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: Op 12 jul. 2016 4:10 a.m. schreef : > > Mike said: > > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 10:36 AM, wrote: > >> Al said: > >>> On 7/11/16 9:14 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > >>>> The microcode was in the ALD drawings, and might even be in bitsavers archive, if they have the right manual. > >>> > >>> 360 CPU ALDs are extremely difficult to find. > >>> If the 65 set could be scanned, I'd be happy to upload them to bitsavers. > >> > >> Indeed they must be. I've been looking for /40 ALDs for some time but haven't struck any. I wonder if they're > >> scarce becase the 40 was a AFAIK a british-developed 360. My dad was posted to Hursley to learn the /40 in 64-65. IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley was a software facility, the model 40 was developed in Poughkeepsie, like the others. Secondary production sites were in Mainz, Germany, and Japan. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 01:25:02 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 02:25:02 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:31 PM, B M wrote: > I have 3 stands, but I only need 1 for my VT-50. I am taking offers on the > other 2 :-) I would love one, but I am afraid of the shipping costs to Ohio. I've had small packages shipped from Toronto and it seems to run over $10/lb. > I believe these stands to be authentic DEC VT5X stands. Is there any way > of telling for sure? There are no markings on the stands. I can't be certain, but the height and the appearance suggest to me that they are. > Here is a picture of the stand: > https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzqkBl9PETyQek51bFlXTU53a1E Superb! > The tray dimensions (all inside dimensions) are as follows: > > width: 16-13/16" > length: 22-7/8" > height (floor to base of tray including casters): 25" > > The lip of the stand is approx 7/16" > The metal is approx 1/16" thick. Thanks for the info! I can check the bottom of a VT52 to see what's there at those dimensions - feet or any corner/edge features. Anyone have a photo handy of the bottom of a VT52? With a scale ruler? I can take one but it'll be a week or two until I'm in the right place. -ethan From fritzm at fritzm.org Tue Jul 12 02:08:25 2016 From: fritzm at fritzm.org (Fritz Mueller) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 00:08:25 -0700 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> > Thanks for the info! I can check the bottom of a VT52 to see what's > there at those dimensions - feet or any corner/edge features. Anyone > have a photo handy of the bottom of a VT52? With a scale ruler? I > can take one but it'll be a week or two until I'm in the right place. Pic of bottom of VT52 w/ ruler: https://drive.google.com/a/fritzm.org/file/d/0Bx_zOIQ4Z79ZbVBHa1dYSTlmQzA/view?usp=sharing Thanks, Ethan and Barry! ?FritzM. From pbirkel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 02:22:48 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 03:22:48 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> Message-ID: <00b901d1dc0e$31ae3b90$950ab2b0$@gmail.com> -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ethan Dicks Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 2:25 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:31 PM, B M wrote: > I have 3 stands, but I only need 1 for my VT-50. I am taking offers > on the other 2 :-) ... > The tray dimensions (all inside dimensions) are as follows: > > width: 16-13/16" > length: 22-7/8" > height (floor to base of tray including casters): 25" > > The lip of the stand is approx 7/16" > The metal is approx 1/16" thick. Thanks for the info! I can check the bottom of a VT52 to see what's there at those dimensions - feet or any corner/edge features. Anyone have a photo handy of the bottom of a VT52? With a scale ruler? I can take one but it'll be a week or two until I'm in the right place. -ethan ----- My VT52 would require a pan 17 3/4" wide to properly fit its feet ... maybe yours is a "slimline" :->. paul ----- From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 02:58:08 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 16:58:08 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is if we can find 360/50 ALDs... Marc > On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:31 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > >> On 07/11/2016 07:35 PM, Curious Marc wrote: >> Thanks for the detailed answer. I see the front panels look remarkably similar though. Short of redoing a 360/50 on an FPGA (I'd need to retire to have enough time for this one!), could I use the /50 panel with the /65 emulator? > Not really! The 360/50 had 4 "rollers" for 4 rows of lights, and one row of data switches, and 2 rows of dedicated lights. > > The 360/65 had 6 rollers with 6 rows of lights, plus TWO rows of data switches, and pretty much no dedicated lights other than associated with the rollers. > > Both had a row of address switches under the data switches. > > So, yes, in GENERAL, they had a similar look and layout, but in detail, there was a lot different, some of it specifically related to the memory word width. > > The only machine that looked really different was the 360/30, that had a panel more reminiscent of the 1401. > And, of course, the 360/85, which was really a prototype of the 370/165. As far as software was concerned, it was just a really fast 360, but the hardware was MUCH more advanced. > > Jon From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 03:14:20 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 09:14:20 +0100 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> Message-ID: <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious > Marc > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is if we can > find 360/50 ALDs... > Marc > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA using the POP rather than individual ALU's. Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. > > On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:31 AM, Jon Elson wrote: > > > >> On 07/11/2016 07:35 PM, Curious Marc wrote: > >> Thanks for the detailed answer. I see the front panels look remarkably > similar though. Short of redoing a 360/50 on an FPGA (I'd need to retire to > have enough time for this one!), could I use the /50 panel with the /65 > emulator? > > Not really! The 360/50 had 4 "rollers" for 4 rows of lights, and one row of > data switches, and 2 rows of dedicated lights. > > > > The 360/65 had 6 rollers with 6 rows of lights, plus TWO rows of data > switches, and pretty much no dedicated lights other than associated with the > rollers. > > > > Both had a row of address switches under the data switches. > > > > So, yes, in GENERAL, they had a similar look and layout, but in detail, there > was a lot different, some of it specifically related to the memory word width. > > > > The only machine that looked really different was the 360/30, that had a > panel more reminiscent of the 1401. > > And, of course, the 360/85, which was really a prototype of the 370/165. > As far as software was concerned, it was just a really fast 360, but the > hardware was MUCH more advanced. > > > > Jon From iamcamiel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 03:55:56 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:55:56 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: Op 12 jul. 2016 10:14 a.m. schreef "Dave Wade" : > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious > > Marc > > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > > > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is if we > can > > find 360/50 ALDs... > > Marc > > > > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA using > the POP rather than individual ALU's. > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to start > on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) > Of course it wouldn't be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be > important. Sure, a generic one would be simpler, but the point of doing an accurate one of a specific model (65 in my case) is to accurately drive the panel that shows the internal registers and opening of gates. From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 04:00:30 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 18:00:30 +0900 Subject: Y Combinator is restoring one of Alan Kay's Xerox Alto machines In-Reply-To: References: <116225ef-4848-540b-f734-4670a0471790@bitsavers.org> <297f0d2c-ed44-e9f6-3521-963b2851f740@bitsavers.org> <002901d1cc4b$3e223de0$ba66b9a0$@gmail.com> <198FBBD6-796A-4C88-B9CE-C7BD13AA5723@gmail.com> <1219DEB2-6144-44EF-9AC1-3054AD0D52FD@gmail.com> Message-ID: <25A4E234-D4BF-4E5D-BD0B-6AD2F08E0596@gmail.com> Ken's in-depth blog post to go with the previous video http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day_11.html > On Jul 5, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Curious Marc wrote: > > Video from yesterday?s work on the Diablo cartridge disc: > https://youtu.be/PR5LkQugBE0 > Should be up in a few minutes. > We were tickled pink to have official representation from PARC (former Xerox Parc) at the session. > Marc > > Ken?s new post on the monitor repair to go with my previous video. > http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day.html > Al Kossow got us a new CRT tube, so we are probably going to try that this week-end. > Marc > > > Latest entry from Ken Shirriff, trying out BCPL (ancestor of C). On the emulator, not yet on the real machine: > http://www.righto.com/2016/06/hello-world-in-bcpl-language-on-xerox.html > > Marc > > There are only two entries right now: > http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.html > http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day.html > Marc > > From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 04:04:05 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 18:04:05 +0900 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very specific to the CPU detailed innards. Marc > On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA using > the POP rather than individual ALU's. > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to start > on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) > Of course it wouldn't be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be > important. From pbirkel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 05:00:20 2016 From: pbirkel at gmail.com (Paul Birkel) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 06:00:20 -0400 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00e701d1dc24$333e4f70$99baee50$@gmail.com> Principles of Operation, I believe. Example: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0 _360PrincOps.pdf -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious Marc Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 5:04 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very specific to the CPU detailed innards. Marc > On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA > using the POP rather than individual ALU's. > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to > start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be > cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 06:08:19 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:08:19 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes Message-ID: Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties. http://lowendmac.com/2016/nutek-mac-clones/ -- Sent from my phone - please pardon brevity & typos. From steven at malikoff.com Tue Jul 12 06:24:14 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 21:24:14 +1000 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: <7c885477e3e679376da031173fc16e37.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Camiel said: > IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley was a software facility, the model 40 was > developed in Poughkeepsie, like the others. Secondary production sites were > in Mainz, Germany, and Japan. Yes, the wiki does say that, but I am sure Hursley was involved in designing hardware as well, for instance TROS. This PDF by Pugh states that a team at Hursley were designing the Model 40: http://ed-thelen.org/Pugh-Technology_Transfer.pdf As a CE, my dad was there to study the hardware only. From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 06:42:13 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:42:13 +0100 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <039401d1dc32$6f6a0670$4e3e1350$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Camiel > Vanderhoeven > Sent: 12 July 2016 06:35 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > Op 12 jul. 2016 5:50 a.m. schreef : > > > > Jon said: > > > LOTS of model /40s were sold in the US. EVERY one had its own set > > > of ALDs, with the serial number of the CPU on them. > > > They not only recorded the general info for the model, but they had > > > specific changes to reflect the exact configuration of THAT machine. > > > > I didn't know that every machine came with a set of ALDs but you are > > right that a lot of /40's were sold stateside. My dad was re-posted > > directly from Hursley to Poughkeepsie in '65 which I was where some > > (or > > all?) the /40s were assembled. > > One of the IBM Journals (75 years?) has a large colour photo of a row > > of 40s on the final assembly floor at Poughkeepsie, everyone in it > > striking that characteristic 60s/70s IBM-photo-pose, eg. someone > > leaning over a table, another reaching for a console knob, one > > changing a tape and at least two people earnestly discussing a printout. > > Most weren't sold, but leased. The ALDs would be used by the IBM CE, not > the customers themselves. I don't know if machines that were sold rather > than leased came with ALDs or if IBM kept these, I suspect the latter to be > the case. I would actually expect IBM to supply the ALD's with a machine when bought. Under anti-trust legislation they had to supply enough information for a third party to maintain the machine. I am pretty sure the ALD's for the 7090 formerly at GCHQ (UK Snooping agency) latterly at Manchester University Medical School went to the National Museum of Computing when Dr. Clarke died.. http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/linux-newsletter/linux at uk12/dclark.shtml this machine was maintained by Ferranti so I assume they had the ALD's.. Dave From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 07:07:55 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:07:55 +0100 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <039a01d1dc36$063fe350$12bfa9f0$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Camiel > Vanderhoeven > Sent: 12 July 2016 09:56 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: RE: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > Op 12 jul. 2016 10:14 a.m. schreef "Dave Wade" : > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of > > > Curious Marc > > > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 > > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > > > > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > > > > > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is > > > if > we > > can > > > find 360/50 ALDs... > > > Marc > > > > > > > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA > > using the POP rather than individual ALU's. > > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to > > start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be > > cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. > > Sure, a generic one would be simpler, but the point of doing an accurate one > of a specific model (65 in my case) is to accurately drive the panel that shows > the internal registers and opening of gates. I think you are correct. I had assumed that the panel only displayed the normal 360 registers, in which case the VHDL could easily route these to a panel, but on reading the 360/65 Functional Characteristics http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/funcChar/A22-6884-3_360-65_funcChar.pdf I can see several registers are displayed that are not mentioned or defined elsewhere so you would need a Set of ALDs for the 65 (or possibly a 67 as that?s basically the same machine) to get a full panel display. It would Also be nice to see what is on the roller selector switchs as that page in the manual has not scanned very well.. Dave From iamcamiel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 08:01:44 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 15:01:44 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <7c885477e3e679376da031173fc16e37.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <7c885477e3e679376da031173fc16e37.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 1:24 PM, wrote: > Camiel said: >> IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley was a software facility, the model 40 was >> developed in Poughkeepsie, like the others. Secondary production sites were >> in Mainz, Germany, and Japan. > > Yes, the wiki does say that, but I am sure Hursley was involved in designing > hardware as well, for instance TROS. This PDF by Pugh states that a team at Hursley > were designing the Model 40: http://ed-thelen.org/Pugh-Technology_Transfer.pdf > As a CE, my dad was there to study the hardware only. You're quite right, I was wrong. Both hardware and software development took place at Hursley. According to Pugh, Johnson, and Palmer's "IBM's 360 and early 370 systems", the /30 (then called NPL 101) was developed at Endicott, the /40 (NPL 250) at Hursley, and the larger models at Poughkeepsie. From pete at petelancashire.com Tue Jul 12 08:05:33 2016 From: pete at petelancashire.com (Pete Lancashire) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 06:05:33 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: Time to dust of the 50 panel hidden in the basement. -pete On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 1:55 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > Op 12 jul. 2016 10:14 a.m. schreef "Dave Wade" : >> >> > -----Original Message----- >> > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious >> > Marc >> > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 >> > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> > >> > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog >> > >> > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is if > we >> can >> > find 360/50 ALDs... >> > Marc >> > >> >> It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA using >> the POP rather than individual ALU's. >> Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to start >> on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) >> Of course it wouldn't be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be >> important. > > Sure, a generic one would be simpler, but the point of doing an accurate > one of a specific model (65 in my case) is to accurately drive the panel > that shows the internal registers and opening of gates. > From iamcamiel at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 08:05:54 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 15:05:54 +0200 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <039a01d1dc36$063fe350$12bfa9f0$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> <039a01d1dc36$063fe350$12bfa9f0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Camiel >> Vanderhoeven >> Sent: 12 July 2016 09:56 >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> >> Subject: RE: IBM 360/30 in verilog >> >> Op 12 jul. 2016 10:14 a.m. schreef "Dave Wade" : >> > >> > > -----Original Message----- >> > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of >> > > Curious Marc >> > > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 >> > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> > > >> > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog >> > > >> > > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that is >> > > if >> we >> > can >> > > find 360/50 ALDs... >> > > Marc >> > > >> > >> > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA >> > using the POP rather than individual ALU's. >> > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to >> > start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be >> > cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. >> >> Sure, a generic one would be simpler, but the point of doing an accurate one >> of a specific model (65 in my case) is to accurately drive the panel that shows >> the internal registers and opening of gates. > > I think you are correct. I had assumed that the panel only displayed the normal 360 registers, in which case > the VHDL could easily route these to a panel, but on reading the 360/65 Functional Characteristics > > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/funcChar/A22-6884-3_360-65_funcChar.pdf > > I can see several registers are displayed that are not mentioned or defined elsewhere so you would need a > Set of ALDs for the 65 (or possibly a 67 as that?s basically the same machine) to get a full panel display. It would > Also be nice to see what is on the roller selector switchs as that page in the manual has not scanned very well.. I have a pdf file I created that shows the layout of the roller bars; I don't think the link can take attachments, but if you want I could email you a copy directly. Camiel. From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 12 09:18:01 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:18:01 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> Message-ID: > On Jul 12, 2016, at 3:08 AM, Fritz Mueller wrote: > > >> Thanks for the info! I can check the bottom of a VT52 to see what's >> there at those dimensions - feet or any corner/edge features. Anyone >> have a photo handy of the bottom of a VT52? With a scale ruler? I >> can take one but it'll be a week or two until I'm in the right place. > > Pic of bottom of VT52 w/ ruler: > > https://drive.google.com/a/fritzm.org/file/d/0Bx_zOIQ4Z79ZbVBHa1dYSTlmQzA/view?usp=sharing As I recall, the VT52 stand is smaller than you'd expect because the pan holds only the main body of the display: the four feet (two at the back and two near the back edge of that mesh panel) drop into the pan at its four corners. The keyboard section of the VT5x simply extends forward from the stand pan. On the other hand, a VT100 needs a large pan because the keyboard is a separate part, and it too sits on the stand. So I suspect the stand shown by BM is a VT100 stand, not a VT52 stand. paul From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 12 09:30:05 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:30:05 -0400 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: <00e701d1dc24$333e4f70$99baee50$@gmail.com> References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> <00e701d1dc24$333e4f70$99baee50$@gmail.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 12, 2016, at 6:00 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > > Principles of Operation, I believe. Example: > > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0 > _360PrincOps.pdf > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious > Marc > Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 5:04 AM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light > and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very > specific to the CPU detailed innards. > Marc > >> On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade wrote: >> >> It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA >> using the POP rather than individual ALU's. >> Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to >> start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be >> cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. It depends on what you're trying to emulate. If you want an instruction level simulator, sort of a SIMH in silicon, then going from the POP or analogous documents (processor reference manuals, computer family architecture manuals such as DEC published for the PDP-11 and VAX) will do nicely. Such an approach is not going to show you the peculiarities of a particular implementation, details too deep for the sort of documentation you're using, let alone implementation bugs. By way of analogy, if you build a CDC 6000 emulation using that approach, it won't do the "zero written to memory at PC at deadstart time" property, because that is nowhere documented or explained in any printed document I have ever seen. But it's part of the unwritten lore of that machine. If you build a gate level model from the engineering drawings, you can see it clearly (and you can readily discover its cause). Building an accurate model from a POP requires a great deal of intellectual effort, to understand all the critical details sufficiently to model them in behavioral models. You can perhaps lift them from existing software emulators (SIMH, Hercules) and get "close enough". Debugging would be hard, especially if the documentation isn't quite accurate enough to allow all the diagnostics to pass. A gate level model constructed from the engineering drawings is more cumbersome in certain ways, almost certainly less efficient in FPGA resources -- but it's much more a mechanical process. If the drawings are accurate (that's an "if" indeed), then the model will be accurate. The diagnostics should pass without major effort, serving more as confirmation tools than as debugging aids. paul From isking at uw.edu Tue Jul 12 09:54:15 2016 From: isking at uw.edu (Ian S. King) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 07:54:15 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> <00e701d1dc24$333e4f70$99baee50$@gmail.com> Message-ID: It is my understanding - from conversations with numerous IBM engineers and retirees - that ALDs are 'as-built' documents related to a particular machine and were indeed kept with the machine at the customer site. Otherwise, the poor CE would have to haul around a rack of ALDs for each machine being serviced! It's easy to underestimate the physical bulk of these documents when printed and in binders. -- Ian On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 7:30 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > > On Jul 12, 2016, at 6:00 AM, Paul Birkel wrote: > > > > Principles of Operation, I believe. Example: > > > > > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0 > > _360PrincOps.pdf > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious > > Marc > > Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 5:04 AM > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > > > What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light > > and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very > > specific to the CPU detailed innards. > > Marc > > > >> On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > >> > >> It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA > >> using the POP rather than individual ALU's. > >> Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to > >> start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be > >> cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. > > It depends on what you're trying to emulate. If you want an instruction > level simulator, sort of a SIMH in silicon, then going from the POP or > analogous documents (processor reference manuals, computer family > architecture manuals such as DEC published for the PDP-11 and VAX) will do > nicely. Such an approach is not going to show you the peculiarities of a > particular implementation, details too deep for the sort of documentation > you're using, let alone implementation bugs. > > By way of analogy, if you build a CDC 6000 emulation using that approach, > it won't do the "zero written to memory at PC at deadstart time" property, > because that is nowhere documented or explained in any printed document I > have ever seen. But it's part of the unwritten lore of that machine. If > you build a gate level model from the engineering drawings, you can see it > clearly (and you can readily discover its cause). > > Building an accurate model from a POP requires a great deal of > intellectual effort, to understand all the critical details sufficiently to > model them in behavioral models. You can perhaps lift them from existing > software emulators (SIMH, Hercules) and get "close enough". Debugging > would be hard, especially if the documentation isn't quite accurate enough > to allow all the diagnostics to pass. > > A gate level model constructed from the engineering drawings is more > cumbersome in certain ways, almost certainly less efficient in FPGA > resources -- but it's much more a mechanical process. If the drawings are > accurate (that's an "if" indeed), then the model will be accurate. The > diagnostics should pass without major effort, serving more as confirmation > tools than as debugging aids. > > paul > > > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 10:05:57 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:05:57 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 12, 2016, at 3:08 AM, Fritz Mueller wrote: >>> Thanks for the info! I can check the bottom of a VT52 to see what's >>> there at those dimensions - feet or any corner/edge features. Anyone >>> have a photo handy of the bottom of a VT52? With a scale ruler? I >>> can take one but it'll be a week or two until I'm in the right place. >> >> Pic of bottom of VT52 w/ ruler: >> >> https://drive.google.com/a/fritzm.org/file/d/0Bx_zOIQ4Z79ZbVBHa1dYSTlmQzA/view?usp=sharing > > As I recall, the VT52 stand is smaller than you'd expect because the pan holds only the main body of the display: the four feet (two at the back and two near the back edge of that mesh panel) drop into the pan at its four corners. The keyboard section of the VT5x simply extends forward from the stand pan. That makes sense. I was looking at the pan size and it was several inches longer than the footprint of the 4 feet on the bottom of the terminal (13 3/4" for the VT52 and 22 7/8" for the pan) , and then there was Paul Birkel's comment that the footprint of his VT52 was wider than that pan. Checking the external dimensions of a VT100, the terminal is 18" wide by ~14" deep, and the keyboard is 18" wide and 8" deep. Adjusting for a small setback for the feet, a 17"x22" pan seems like it would have no problems accepting a VT100 and keyboard with not much margin. > On the other hand, a VT100 needs a large pan because the keyboard is a separate part, and it too sits on the stand. So I suspect the stand shown by BM is a VT100 stand, not a VT52 stand. I have seen neither so I can't provide any historical experience to tell them apart, but the dimensions seem to bear that out. A nice stand, and if I found one close, I'd use it, but not specifically a VT52 stand. -ethan From henk.gooijen at hotmail.com Tue Jul 12 10:21:02 2016 From: henk.gooijen at hotmail.com (Henk Gooijen) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 17:21:02 +0200 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand Message-ID: >> I believe these stands to be authentic DEC VT5X stands.? Is there any way >> of telling for sure?? There are no markings on the stands. > >I can't be certain, but the height and the appearance suggest to me >that they are. > >> Here is a picture of the stand: >> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzqkBl9PETyQek51bFlXTU53a1E The 5-leg stand seems correct to me, the vertical standing pipe (painted black) seems also OK to me. However, the tray is a different story. But I have to admit, that my reference is only the VT55-FB on a roll-around stand. If the stand for the VT55-FB is identical to the one for the VT52, then the tray is not the original one. It is not a tray, but just a plate and significantly smaller, but not flat. I can take pictures on Saturday of my VT55-FB with original stand. Let me know, because I'd have to remove the VT (6 bolts, IIRC). - Henk From ggs at shiresoft.com Tue Jul 12 10:33:19 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 08:33:19 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <504098C3-01C4-4891-B566-A67CE49AE505@shiresoft.com> POP = Principles of Operations. It is the 360/370 *bible*. It describes (in detail) how the architecture works (including all instructions). It specifies what are ?architectural? (ie can be counted on by all models) and what are ?implementation? specific. Changes to the POP were *very* restricted?that is, the architecture committee needed a long and detailed justification for any change to the POP and most didn?t make it in. TTFN - Guy > On Jul 12, 2016, at 2:04 AM, Curious Marc wrote: > > What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very specific to the CPU detailed innards. > Marc > >> On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade wrote: >> >> It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA using >> the POP rather than individual ALU's. >> Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to start >> on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) >> Of course it wouldn't be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be >> important. From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 10:58:53 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 16:58:53 +0100 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <283E8013-BC0C-47DC-A874-2B6672EFBF0C@gmail.com> <5783C53A.9070708@pico-systems.com> <20441DA3-1ABA-472B-8384-79F630E8B05C@gmail.com> <5784568E.60903@pico-systems.com> <7CAD9669-F00D-409D-9961-982470B098BC@gmail.com> <020101d1dc15$64a78860$2df69920$@gmail.com> <039a01d1dc36$063fe350$12bfa9f0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <019501d1dc56$4acd4600$e067d200$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Camiel > Vanderhoeven > Sent: 12 July 2016 14:06 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Dave Wade > wrote: > > > >> -----Original Message----- > >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of > >> Camiel Vanderhoeven > >> Sent: 12 July 2016 09:56 > >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >> > >> Subject: RE: IBM 360/30 in verilog > >> > >> Op 12 jul. 2016 10:14 a.m. schreef "Dave Wade" > : > >> > > >> > > -----Original Message----- > >> > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of > >> > > Curious Marc > >> > > Sent: 12 July 2016 08:58 > >> > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >> > > > >> > > Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog > >> > > > >> > > Darn. My hopes are shattered. Lots of Verilog in my future, that > >> > > is if > >> we > >> > can > >> > > find 360/50 ALDs... > >> > > Marc > >> > > > >> > > >> > It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in > >> > FPGA using the POP rather than individual ALU's. > >> > Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning > >> > to start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't > >> > be cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important. > >> > >> Sure, a generic one would be simpler, but the point of doing an > >> accurate one of a specific model (65 in my case) is to accurately > >> drive the panel that shows the internal registers and opening of gates. > > > > I think you are correct. I had assumed that the panel only displayed > > the normal 360 registers, in which case the VHDL could easily route > > these to a panel, but on reading the 360/65 Functional Characteristics > > > > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/funcChar/A22- > > 6884-3_360-65_funcChar.pdf > > > > I can see several registers are displayed that are not mentioned or > > defined elsewhere so you would need a Set of ALDs for the 65 (or > > possibly a 67 as that?s basically the same machine) to get a full panel > display. It would Also be nice to see what is on the roller selector switchs as > that page in the manual has not scanned very well.. > > I have a pdf file I created that shows the layout of the roller bars; I don't > think the link can take attachments, but if you want I could email you a copy > directly. > > Camiel. A direct reply would be very nice. Dave From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:02:08 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:02:08 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Reproduction micros Message-ID: I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 project nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA hardware emulation it's probably not as hard as it once was. Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. Project BreadBox (dead) http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in FPGA, but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I think it really rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 The Firebee ST clone project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project The C64 Joystick clone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones dead link: http://www.commodore.net The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the system. It comes with a case et al. http://www.altair680kit.com/ A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with many prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They never seem to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort toward a complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise they made seems to be in 2007. http://www.natami.net/ For consoles there are plenty of clones: http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 Then there is the Cray1 remake http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ -Swift From isking at uw.edu Tue Jul 12 11:08:49 2016 From: isking at uw.edu (Ian S. King) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 09:08:49 -0700 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <3cc85436ffe6ecf7fce44fa34d7bd327.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <7c885477e3e679376da031173fc16e37.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: ...and the /20 was developed at Sindelfingen, which was one reason it was the redheaded stepchild (but very popular nonetheless, due to its lower cost). On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 1:24 PM, wrote: > > Camiel said: > >> IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley was a software facility, the model 40 was > >> developed in Poughkeepsie, like the others. Secondary production sites > were > >> in Mainz, Germany, and Japan. > > > > Yes, the wiki does say that, but I am sure Hursley was involved in > designing > > hardware as well, for instance TROS. This PDF by Pugh states that a team > at Hursley > > were designing the Model 40: > http://ed-thelen.org/Pugh-Technology_Transfer.pdf > > As a CE, my dad was there to study the hardware only. > > You're quite right, I was wrong. Both hardware and software > development took place at Hursley. According to Pugh, Johnson, and > Palmer's "IBM's 360 and early 370 systems", the /30 (then called NPL > 101) was developed at Endicott, the /40 (NPL 250) at Hursley, and the > larger models at Poughkeepsie. > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From steveb at quickweb.co.uk Tue Jul 12 11:10:43 2016 From: steveb at quickweb.co.uk (Steve Browne) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 17:10:43 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The ZX Spectrum Next is going to be interesting.... http://www.specnext.com/ Look at that industrial design! Designed by Rick Dickinson who was behind the ZX80,ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Spectrum Plus and QL Steve On 12 July 2016 at 17:02, Swift Griggs wrote: > > I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business > ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? > I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 > project nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA > hardware emulation it's probably not as hard as it once was. > > Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > > Project BreadBox (dead) > > http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b > > The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in > FPGA, but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I > think it really rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. > http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 > > The Firebee ST clone project > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project > > The C64 Joystick clone > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV > > Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones > dead link: http://www.commodore.net > > The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One > > The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the > system. It comes with a case et al. > http://www.altair680kit.com/ > > A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness > http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html > > These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. > Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with > many prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They > never seem to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort > toward a complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise > they made seems to be in 2007. > http://www.natami.net/ > > For consoles there are plenty of clones: > http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones > > https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 > > Then there is the Cray1 remake > http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > > -Swift > From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:10:28 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:10:28 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a > Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties. Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly baby, but I wanted to see it anyway). Hehe, I like the summary on everymac.com: " If anything, NuTek proved that uncontrolled 'cloning' of the Macintosh would result in the same type of compatibility problems familiar to the Wintel world. " No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. Ask the ReactOS team, the WINE & CrossOver guys, or the half dozen MS Exchange clones that try to keep up with MAPI. The put a lot of honest effort into it, and the results are still... meh. -Swift From echristopherson at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:12:53 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:12:53 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: MEGA65 FPGA-based Commodore 65 remake: http://mega65.org/ On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:02 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business > ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? > I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 > project nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA > hardware emulation it's probably not as hard as it once was. > > Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > > Project BreadBox (dead) > > http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b > > The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in > FPGA, but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I > think it really rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. > http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 > > The Firebee ST clone project > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project > > The C64 Joystick clone > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV > > Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones > dead link: http://www.commodore.net > > The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One > > The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the > system. It comes with a case et al. > http://www.altair680kit.com/ > > A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness > http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html > > These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. > Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with > many prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They > never seem to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort > toward a complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise > they made seems to be in 2007. > http://www.natami.net/ > > For consoles there are plenty of clones: > http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones > > https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 > > Then there is the Cray1 remake > http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > > -Swift > -- Eric Christopherson From echristopherson at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:13:27 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:13:27 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:12 AM, Eric Christopherson < echristopherson at gmail.com> wrote: > MEGA65 FPGA-based Commodore 65 remake: http://mega65.org/ > Oops; sorry for top-posting. > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:02 AM, Swift Griggs > wrote: > >> >> I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business >> ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? >> I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 >> project nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA >> hardware emulation it's probably not as hard as it once was. >> >> Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > > -- Eric Christopherson From elson at pico-systems.com Tue Jul 12 11:16:33 2016 From: elson at pico-systems.com (Jon Elson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:16:33 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <578517E1.1030401@pico-systems.com> On 07/12/2016 12:34 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > Most weren't sold, but leased. The ALDs would be used by > the IBM CE, not the customers themselves. I don't know if > machines that were sold rather than leased came with ALDs > or if IBM kept these, I suspect the latter to be the case. Absolutely, the ALDs went with the machines, whether sold or leased. The ALDs contained machine specific info for the emulators loaded into it, as well as all ECOs applied at the factory and in the field. So, you could have 2 identical models at an installation, and there would be TWO ALD carts, with serial numbers on them, so they knew which one applied to which box. Jon From spectre at floodgap.com Tue Jul 12 11:25:00 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 09:25:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: from Swift Griggs at "Jul 12, 16 10:10:28 am" Message-ID: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> > > Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a > > Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties. > > Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew > that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted > to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly > baby, but I wanted to see it anyway). It seems like it limited itself largely to System 6 apps, which if MultiFinder weren't running, *could* (I say *could*) provide a passable approximation of the GUI for well-behaved apps. I'm really interested to see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under these circumstances, but no one seems to know if any actually got sold. Did they? -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Please dispose of this message in the usual manner. -- Mission: Impossible - From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Tue Jul 12 11:35:37 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 17:35:37 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <77F998DA-6181-4EB8-BF4A-F92166B2C204@btinternet.com> Well I could do front and back panels. In fact anything that needs silk screening. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood Sent from my iPad > On 12 Jul 2016, at 17:02, Swift Griggs wrote: > > > I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business > ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? > I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 > project nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA > hardware emulation it's probably not as hard as it once was. > > Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > > Project BreadBox (dead) > http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b > > The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in > FPGA, but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I > think it really rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. > http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 > > The Firebee ST clone project > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project > > The C64 Joystick clone > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV > > Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones > dead link: http://www.commodore.net > > The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One > > The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the > system. It comes with a case et al. > http://www.altair680kit.com/ > > A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness > http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html > > These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. > Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with > many prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They > never seem to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort > toward a complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise > they made seems to be in 2007. > http://www.natami.net/ > > For consoles there are plenty of clones: > http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones > https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 > > Then there is the Cray1 remake > http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > > -Swift From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:41:22 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 17:41:22 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html Spectrum III http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an-fpga/comment-page- 1/ but lots more about Dave > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Swift > Griggs > Sent: 12 July 2016 17:02 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Reproduction micros > > > I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business > ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? > I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 project > nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA hardware emulation > it's probably not as hard as it once was. > > Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > > Project BreadBox (dead) > http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d > 800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b > > The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in FPGA, > but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I think it really > rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. > http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 > > The Firebee ST clone project > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project > > The C64 Joystick clone > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV > > Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones dead > link: http://www.commodore.net > > The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One > > The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the > system. It comes with a case et al. > http://www.altair680kit.com/ > > A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness > http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html > > These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. > Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with many > prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They never seem > to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort toward a > complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise they made > seems to be in 2007. > http://www.natami.net/ > > For consoles there are plenty of clones: > http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones > https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo- > Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 > > Then there is the Cray1 remake > http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > > -Swift From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 11:51:21 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 18:51:21 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12 July 2016 at 18:10, Swift Griggs wrote: > Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew > that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted > to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly > baby, but I wanted to see it anyway). I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like. Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple of LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a GNUstep-based Linux distro. > Hehe, I like the summary on everymac.com: > > " If anything, NuTek proved that uncontrolled 'cloning' of the Macintosh > would result in the same type of compatibility problems familiar to the > Wintel world. " > > No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. Ask the ReactOS > team, the WINE & CrossOver guys, or the half dozen MS Exchange clones that > try to keep up with MAPI. The put a lot of honest effort into it, and the > results are still... meh. I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving nothing but a smoking stain on the ground. Saying that, I'm amazed at how well WINE works these days. On the machine I'm typing on (an elderly Thinkpad X200 running 64-bit Ubuntu), MS Word 97 is my go-to wordprocessor. It's considerably faster than the latest LibreOffice running natively, and it has never ever crashed on me on this machine. I've been occasionally using this combo for years and it wasn't this stable before. Genuinely impressive. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 12 11:55:06 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:55:06 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:21 AM, Henk Gooijen wrote: > > >>> I believe these stands to be authentic DEC VT5X stands. Is there any way >>> of telling for sure? There are no markings on the stands. >> >> I can't be certain, but the height and the appearance suggest to me >> that they are. >> >>> Here is a picture of the stand: >>> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzqkBl9PETyQek51bFlXTU53a1E > > The 5-leg stand seems correct to me, the vertical standing pipe > (painted black) seems also OK to me. However, the tray is a different > story. But I have to admit, that my reference is only the VT55-FB on a > roll-around stand. If the stand for the VT55-FB is identical to the > one for the VT52, then the tray is not the original one. > It is not a tray, but just a plate and significantly smaller, but not flat. Yes, that sounds familiar now. The feed stick through holes in the tray/plate, so no rim is needed to position the terminal correctly. The bolts are for security, in case you lean too hard on the keyboard. The terminal is well enough balanced it will sit on the stand without them. Cool, that means duplicating it would be fairly easy, because the stand top can just be a flat top (metal or plywood) with holes drilled in it for the terminal feet. I would expect the VT55 and VT52 (and several others) to share a stand model since they all have the same case. paul From glen.slick at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 12:02:41 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:02:41 -0700 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: You could go with the modern times and get at VT220 cart / table www.ebay.com/itm/262486498646 From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 12:04:27 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:04:27 -0400 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Glen Slick wrote: > You could go with the modern times and get at VT220 cart / table > > www.ebay.com/itm/262486498646 The ET stand! I think my VT52 would fall off though. -ethan From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Tue Jul 12 13:01:13 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 18:01:13 +0000 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: > You could go with the modern times and get at VT220 cart / table > > www.ebay.com/itm/262486498646 I have (most of?) one of those in bits. Actually with the top platform to take a VR241 colour monitor and a 'cage' to hang on the back to take a Rainbow or Pro (it's adjustable) CPU box. When I have the space I will put it together. Be warned that this thing exists in 115V and 230V versions. There is a motor and leadscrew mechanism to lift/lower the top platform operated by a couple of pedals. -tony From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 13:06:05 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 12:06:05 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like > Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus > were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like. That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1 on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-) > Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and > almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple of > LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a > GNUstep-based Linux distro. IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while. I never could get that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for sale recently: http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is. However, like most hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the day". In the 90's I was a student, mostly. There was no-freakin-way I was going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs. Plus, back in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. It's a bit like BMW owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot. GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally. It's interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and backing-ideas. I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy on my part), honestly. Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods in the early days). Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how low we have to set the bar to snag them. Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows, Ubuntu is trying. Who knows, maybe Android will become that. I'll catch the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soooooo many of the apps are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus" free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or "malware" as it suits them (ie.. corporate sponsors say it's safe? Oh, ohhhhhkay then, we don't mind if you steal an address book, log keystrokes, or secretly GPS track folks - just don't replicate). The countermeasures for these issues seem to me to be weak and ineffective, so far. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to trust commercial OS's or software at this point, no matter how much bling they cop. I still carry my Philips Xenium phone running Symbian (and lasting about 20 days before needing a charge). Tastes great, and less filling. I'd love to see a commercial phone OS project start with the mentality of the OpenBSD project. I'd be willing to try something like that! Features like totally secure defaults, zero trust for basically anyone or anything, secure OS protections that are difficult to override by silly apps, etc.. would be welcome. > I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded > and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows > apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving > nothing but a smoking stain on the ground. I have absolutely zero doubt that you are quite correct. If it took .000001% bit of market share away from them, they'd have a nuclear freak-out and figure out a way to hybridize ninjas with their corporate lawyers and send them out riding elephant sharks for vengeance. What would be hilarious (but again fantasy) is if ReactOS had a breakthrough in terms of functionality that got them very close (say 99% or better compat). Then if they sat on it for a while, getting it right before subsequently release it the genie would be out of the bottle. If it worked compatibility-wise even as well as XP or Win7, it'd be a hit and crimp the snot out of M$. Of course, they'd probably find some way to DCMA it out of existence. It just depends on how widespread the release got and how illegal it was to own it. > Saying that, I'm amazed at how well WINE works these days. It's impressive when it works. There are still a large number of applications that don't work, too. Even bread-and-butter apps like the latest Firefox often crash and burn. I have seen a few that are rock solid, Office 97, Winamp, and a few other "gold" (winehq) or better certified applications. I run RegexBuddy sometimes in Wine and as you say, no problems. That's not to say the WINE team isn't amazing. They are. It's just a tough slog. -Swift From kurtk7 at centurylink.net Tue Jul 12 13:09:46 2016 From: kurtk7 at centurylink.net (Kurt K) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:09:46 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5E66E9D6-82D0-443B-AE7C-A85EC27448E1@centurylink.net> I haven't heard of these projects. Do you have a larger list of projects that exist? > On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:41 AM, "Dave Wade" wrote: > > There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. > > http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html > > Spectrum III > > http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an-fpga/comment-page- > 1/ > > but lots more about > > Dave > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Swift >> Griggs >> Sent: 12 July 2016 17:02 >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >> >> Subject: Reproduction micros >> >> >> I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business >> ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? >> I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 > project >> nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA hardware > emulation >> it's probably not as hard as it once was. >> >> Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. >> >> Project BreadBox (dead) >> http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d >> 800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b >> >> The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in > FPGA, >> but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I think it > really >> rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. >> http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 >> >> The Firebee ST clone project >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project >> >> The C64 Joystick clone >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV >> >> Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones dead >> link: http://www.commodore.net >> >> The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One >> >> The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the >> system. It comes with a case et al. >> http://www.altair680kit.com/ >> >> A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness >> http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html >> >> These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. >> Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with > many >> prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They never > seem >> to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort toward a >> complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise they made >> seems to be in 2007. >> http://www.natami.net/ >> >> For consoles there are plenty of clones: >> http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones >> https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo- >> Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 >> >> Then there is the Cray1 remake >> http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ >> >> -Swift > From kurtk7 at centurylink.net Tue Jul 12 13:16:26 2016 From: kurtk7 at centurylink.net (Kurt K) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:16:26 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <5E66E9D6-82D0-443B-AE7C-A85EC27448E1@centurylink.net> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <5E66E9D6-82D0-443B-AE7C-A85EC27448E1@centurylink.net> Message-ID: <7403C527-8B94-4E52-AC2F-F95D31C9ED7A@centurylink.net> I guess if I checked the email chain, I'd get my answer. Pity no way to get ahold of a C-One, sold out. I'd love to get one. > On Jul 12, 2016, at 1:09 PM, Kurt K wrote: > > I haven't heard of these projects. Do you have a larger list of projects that exist? > >> On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:41 AM, "Dave Wade" wrote: >> >> There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. >> >> http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html >> >> Spectrum III >> >> http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an-fpga/comment-page- >> 1/ >> >> but lots more about >> >> Dave >> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Swift >>> Griggs >>> Sent: 12 July 2016 17:02 >>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts >>> >>> Subject: Reproduction micros >>> >>> >>> I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business >>> ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? >>> I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the Altair 680 >> project >>> nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA hardware >> emulation >>> it's probably not as hard as it once was. >>> >>> Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. >>> >>> Project BreadBox (dead) >>> http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d >>> 800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b >>> >>> The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented in >> FPGA, >>> but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I think it >> really >>> rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. >>> http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 >>> >>> The Firebee ST clone project >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project >>> >>> The C64 Joystick clone >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV >>> >>> Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones dead >>> link: http://www.commodore.net >>> >>> The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One >>> >>> The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone of the >>> system. It comes with a case et al. >>> http://www.altair680kit.com/ >>> >>> A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness >>> http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html >>> >>> These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. >>> Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along with >> many >>> prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They never >> seem >>> to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort toward a >>> complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise they made >>> seems to be in 2007. >>> http://www.natami.net/ >>> >>> For consoles there are plenty of clones: >>> http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones >>> https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo- >>> Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 >>> >>> Then there is the Cray1 remake >>> http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ >>> >>> -Swift >> From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 13:24:22 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 19:24:22 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <5E66E9D6-82D0-443B-AE7C-A85EC27448E1@centurylink.net> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <5E66E9D6-82D0-443B-AE7C-A85EC27448E1@centurylink.net> Message-ID: <006c01d1dc6a$9d37f7f0$d7a7e7d0$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Kurt K > Sent: 12 July 2016 19:10 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: Reproduction micros > > I haven't heard of these projects. Do you have a larger list of projects that > exist? I found a list on the MIST site https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki/FPGA-Projects https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki/TheBoard which is a project to let you run multiple emulations on a single board... There is also another IBM1130 emulation which is functional rather than cycle accurate... http://ibm1130.org/party/v06 Dave > > > On Jul 12, 2016, at 11:41 AM, "Dave Wade" > wrote: > > > > There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. > > > > http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html > > > > Spectrum III > > > > http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an- > fpga/comment > > -page- > > 1/ > > > > but lots more about > > > > Dave > > > >> -----Original Message----- > >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of > >> Swift Griggs > >> Sent: 12 July 2016 17:02 > >> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > >> > >> Subject: Reproduction micros > >> > >> > >> I'm probably dreaming, but is anyone aware of DIY efforts or business > >> ventures aiming to reproduce a classic micro or "next-gen" classic micro? > >> I have seen a lot of efforts, but only one quite like that (the > >> Altair 680 > > project > >> nails it). I'm just thinking that with 3D printers and FPGA hardware > > emulation > >> it's probably not as hard as it once was. > >> > >> Here are some similar efforts I'm already aware of. > >> > >> Project BreadBox (dead) > >> > http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47834&sid=ae3e721d8d > >> 800cbe5d6b003afe70d79b > >> > >> The truly kick ass MIST. A nice clone of several systems implemented > >> in > > FPGA, > >> but design wise, it's a shabby little metal box. I have one and I > >> think it > > really > >> rocks. I just wish there were more cases and accessories. > >> http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96 > >> > >> The Firebee ST clone project > >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Coldfire_Project > >> > >> The C64 Joystick clone > >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV > >> > >> Commodore.net used to sell PeeCee C64 and Amiga look-a-like clones > >> dead > >> link: http://www.commodore.net > >> > >> The C-One. A FPGA board to emulate the C64, again no case. > >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-One > >> > >> The awesome Altair 680 kit that appears to be a very complete clone > >> of the system. It comes with a case et al. > >> http://www.altair680kit.com/ > >> > >> A bunch of PDP-X replicas in FPGAs with various degrees of usefulness > >> http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html > >> > >> These guys are trying to build a NEW Amiga with backward compatibility. > >> Sounds like a wonderful project. They seem to be pretty far along > >> with > > many > >> prototype boards built. FPGA guts with a real 060' for CPU! They > >> never > > seem > >> to have made boards for sale, though, and there was no effort toward > >> a complete system design (case, keyboards, etc...). The last noise > >> they made seems to be in 2007. > >> http://www.natami.net/ > >> > >> For consoles there are plenty of clones: > >> http://segaretro.org/Unlicensed_Mega_Drive_clones > >> https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Retron-System-GENESIS-Nintendo- > >> Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2 > >> > >> Then there is the Cray1 remake > >> http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > >> > >> -Swift > > From echristopherson at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 13:45:46 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:45:46 -0500 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and > almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple > of LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a > GNUstep-based Linux distro. > I assume you mean a distro that has GNUstep as its default UI the way Unity, GNOME, KDE, MINT, Cinammon, etc. do in various distros. Actually, in the early 2000s there were at least two embryonic distros I knew of: LinuxSTEP and Simply GNUstep. I followed LS a little closely for a while, but I don't remember much about the approach it took. I'm not sure it ever got so far as to really include GUI apps. I seem to remember that it took a less FHS-centric approach to directory layout, but it was probably less radical than things like the Bogolinux layout and more like the NeXT one. I definitely remember though that they didn't want to just through a GNUstep skin on the day's equivalent of Ubuntu (IIRC the distro was rolled independently of any other distro, except maybe Linux From Scratch, if that counts). Simply GNUstep I really don't know anything about. There just have never been very many GUI apps using GNUstep. In my experience, too, the actual experience of using them has been quite buggy, except for a few smaller apps (smaller = fewer features; I guess that means less to get wrong). Plus the interaction of GNUstep's GUI framework itself was, at least at the time, very dependent on the WindowMaker window manager, which was pretty much a separate product with its own set of problems (e.g. it's written in plain C using libraries that sort of mimicked the NeXT look and feel much the way GNUstep's own AppKit does, but with *no code shared* between the two). I just recently switched backed to WindowMaker and a mix & match of xterm, Firefox, Chrome, and the occasional Gtk+/GNOME or Qt/KDE app. I'd like something "pure" like an all-GNUstep system, but it's just not happening. -- Eric Christopherson From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 15:00:40 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:00:40 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > I'm really interested to see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under > these circumstances, [...] That was the ROM code, right? I'm curious about that, myself. I guess that it can all be software emulated. I suppose they could have created some kind of software mechanism to capture those calls and redirect them to a library which re-implemented them. I'm guessing the same would be needed for Quickdraw calls, but perhaps those weren't around in the 6.x days? I dunno. > but no one seems to know if any actually got sold. Did they? I've never seen one in the wild. The picture looks like an early NEC workstation to me. It's sad that they never made it work to any major degree. The more the merrier, I say. -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 15:09:36 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:09:36 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote: > MEGA65 FPGA-based Commodore 65 remake: http://mega65.org/ That project looks amazing! Does anyone know how far along they are? The web page is dated 2015, but that probably doesn't mean much. However, it's clear they aren't shipping, yet. One thing that I notice right away about that picture is how bright white that case is! Even with retr0brite, that's hard to do... helps that it's brand-new, though. -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 15:41:41 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:41:41 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Steve Browne wrote: > The ZX Spectrum Next is going to be interesting.... http://www.specnext.com/ Wow! I hope that takes off. It's beautiful. Plus, in other news, they will ship schematics! Wow. > Look at that industrial design! Designed by Rick Dickinson who was > behind the ZX80,ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Spectrum Plus and QL That's pretty impressive. It'd be like Jay Miner (RIP) returning to re-create an Amiga 5000. Thanks for pointing that one out. It's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Now, if they'll only ship... -Swift From steveb at quickweb.co.uk Tue Jul 12 15:44:54 2016 From: steveb at quickweb.co.uk (Steve Browne) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 21:44:54 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12 July 2016 at 21:41, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Steve Browne wrote: > > The ZX Spectrum Next is going to be interesting.... > http://www.specnext.com/ > > Wow! I hope that takes off. It's beautiful. Plus, in other news, they will > ship schematics! Wow. > > > Look at that industrial design! Designed by Rick Dickinson who was > > behind the ZX80,ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Spectrum Plus and QL > > That's pretty impressive. It'd be like Jay Miner (RIP) returning to > re-create an Amiga 5000. > > Thanks for pointing that one out. It's exactly the kind of thing I was > looking for. Now, if they'll only ship... > > -Swift > Well I'm hoping so. There was an update a couple of days ago on the Facebook page, where they said: "This resulted in the current price of the Spectrum Next to be around ?160 including the accelerator board" "The original plan of starting the campaign on Kickstarter in June is now pushed back around a couple of months" So keep alert! Steve From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 15:49:34 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:49:34 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Screen Printing (was Re: Reproduction micros) In-Reply-To: <77F998DA-6181-4EB8-BF4A-F92166B2C204@btinternet.com> References: <77F998DA-6181-4EB8-BF4A-F92166B2C204@btinternet.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Rod Smallwood wrote: > Well I could do front and back panels. In fact anything that needs silk > screening. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood As a hobbyist I've made a few tee-shirts, bags, and other items using a real silk screen, transparencies, photo resist emulsion, PVC inks, and a heat gun. I've done primitive "trap color" using registration marks, but never "process color" (too hard without a 4 screens and better gear). Is the process you use similar? I'm only asking because I'm curious. Also, just out of curiosity, what kind of color process can you do on a circuit board or side panel ? The most complicated thing I've seen is CMYK process-color done with water based inks and fancy super-tight registration. The results (not by me) were really awesome, but I'm guessing that kind of thing isn't done the same way on non-fabric materials (perhaps PVC inks work, though). -Swift From sub at hoffart.de Tue Jul 12 15:54:57 2016 From: sub at hoffart.de (sub at hoffart.de) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 22:54:57 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Swift Griggs : > > On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a >> Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties. > > Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew > that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted > to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly > baby, but I wanted to see it anyway). > [?] > No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. Executor is no emulator, and it does not seem that NuTek was/had one, too. It is just a (more or less) compatible clone of APIs. In principle as System 7 was one of System 6 - also not fully compatible. > Ask the ReactOS > team, Yes, that?s a similar effort ? And I disagree ? it *can* be done: rewriting an OS from scratch, implementing a given set of APIs, and have some success. It?s been done several times e.g. with compatible UNIX implementations. One of it is close to total domination of the UNIX market, although it is not a certified UNIX and came laaaate to the UNIX market: Linux. Or MagiC from Andreas Kromke et al.: a full replacement for Atari TOS (BIOS; XBIOS, GEMDOS, VDI, AES). It?s been quite popular on the Atari ST in Germany. Regards G?tz -- http://www.3rz.org From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 12 16:26:53 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 15:26:53 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, sub at hoffart.de wrote: > > No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. > Executor is no emulator, and it does not seem that NuTek was/had one, > too. It is just a (more or less) compatible clone of APIs. In principle > as System 7 was one of System 6 - also not fully compatible. Quite right. I should have been more clear about both rather than use the term "emulator" which I already knew was pretty loaded with expectations. However, my point was only that if Executor could do it, so could someone like Nutek. However, from reading about the hardware, it sounds like it had an actual '030 in there. > > Ask the ReactOS team, > Yes, that?s a similar effort ? Well, WINE is probably a closer analog to Executor than ReactOS. However, again the point wasn't to define "emulation" but to say that re-implementing an OS isn't easy and has a spotty history of results. That's all. I agree with you that it's not impossible to do right. Just hard. > And I disagree ? it *can* be done: rewriting an OS from scratch, > implementing a given set of APIs, and have some success. It?s been done > several times e.g. with compatible UNIX implementations. I understand. I've used many such API-rigs myself under both NetBSD and Linux. > One of it is close to total domination of the UNIX market, although it > is not a certified UNIX and came laaaate to the UNIX market: Linux. I'm not sure what you're referring to here: binary emulation, POSIX compliance, Single UNIX Specification, iBCS emulation, etc... Personally, I've seen NetBSD "emulate" (for lack of a better term) a lot more commercial UNIX systems than Linux ever has. I've also had a lot more luck cross-compiling to other OSs which has some overlap with the whole API-emulation topic. However, in some of those cases you need to fetch libraries from the original dist to make it work right and that's probably "cheating" to most people who want to get froggy about the "emulation" term. > Or MagiC from Andreas Kromke et al.: a full replacement for Atari TOS > (BIOS; XBIOS, GEMDOS, VDI, AES). It?s been quite popular on the Atari ST > in Germany. It sounds interesting. I'm familiar with Firebee and MiNT, though this sounds a tad different. I'm not expert on STs, but I think they are neat. I'll have to check it out. -Swift From wrm at dW.co.za Wed Jul 13 03:09:10 2016 From: wrm at dW.co.za (Wouter de Waal) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 10:09:10 +0200 Subject: bode.ee.ualberta.ca Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20160713100756.15bf1100@mort.dw.co.za> Hi all Does anyone have a mirror of bode.ee.ualberta.ca or know where I can find one? Sheesh the internet's supposed to be a repository but stuff is disappearing off of it like there's a black hole somewhere. W From terry at webweavers.co.nz Wed Jul 13 00:02:00 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 17:02:00 +1200 Subject: Youtube show and tell of that Bondi Blue iMac I posted a while back Message-ID: In case anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/JrBqqL6VS6M Terry (Tez) From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Wed Jul 13 00:36:11 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 22:36:11 -0700 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <0190DB88-2A31-43CE-A93D-88C87017849B@eschatologist.net> On Jul 12, 2016, at 9:25 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > > I'm really interested to > see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under these circumstances, There?s nothing particularly special about the Mac Toolbox and Operating System per se. Pretty much anyone could have attempted to develop a clean-room workalike using the ?Inside Macintosh? books: - Implement each API described in the book to have the behavior described in the books, - Dispatching each one using the A-trap and taking parameters in the registers described in the books, - And affecting the globals as described in the books. Through System 6 there were only a few hundred and they were very well-understood, and even things like trap patching were (relatively) well managed by developers of large scale commercial apps because they had to work on everything from a Mac 512Ke to a Mac IIfx with tons of RAM and disk and multiple displays under MultiFinder or A/UX. Many companies actually developed portable workalikes to the System 6 APIs in order to port their applications from one platform to another. QuarkXPress even used to provide a Toolbox-workalike API as part of their Windows plug-in SDK. The real killer was System 7, which doubled or tripled the number of available APIs via the system, and did so with thorough integration and compatibility. Then there was the PowerPC transition and System 7.1.2. And then the API set grew enormously again with System 7.5? There was no way someone like NuTek could have kept up. There were companies that developed later Mac API compatibility suites. One of them was Altura, the same people who provided the Quick Help application that all of the MacOS programming docs switched to (in lieu of Symantec?s THINK Reference); they provided an API suite that you could use to port to Windows or UNIX and they had at least a minimally working version for OPENSTEP after Apple bought NeXT and before Apple announced Carbon. And of course Apple itself had a Mac API compatibility suite that was part of QuickTime for Windows. I know of companies that used it to actually port Mac applications to Windows, because it was fairly complete and licensing QuickTime for Windows for a commercial product wasn?t a hassle. -- Chris From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Wed Jul 13 00:39:51 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 22:39:51 -0700 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> On Jul 12, 2016, at 1:00 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > That was the ROM code, right? I'm curious about that, myself. I guess that > it can all be software emulated. ROM is software. > I suppose they could have created some > kind of software mechanism to capture those calls and redirect them to a > library which re-implemented them. You mean like using a dispatching system based on some sort of trap mechanism to call into the OS? (How do you think it was possible for there to be multiple OS releases for the Mac after the first Mac 128 shipped? They didn?t tell people to crack open their systems and install new ROMs?) > I'm guessing the same would be needed > for Quickdraw calls, but perhaps those weren't around in the 6.x days? I > dunno. Huh? QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it switched to 68K. -- Chris From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Wed Jul 13 01:17:59 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 02:17:59 -0400 Subject: Youtube show and tell of that Bondi Blue iMac I posted a while back Message-ID: <4e1208.71522474.44b73717@aol.com> Well Done a nice tour! Terry! Ed# In a message dated 7/12/2016 10:02:09 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, terry at webweavers.co.nz writes: In case anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/JrBqqL6VS6M Terry (Tez) From useddec at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 04:17:00 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 04:17:00 -0500 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest Message-ID: I have a big load of DEC items coming in within the next month or two, probably a 24 foot truck packed, and an even larger one one possible this fall. I already have a 25 foot storage unit costing me a small fortune, and will probably need another. I need to sell off as many boxes, boards and terminals, and printers. This includes numerous most Q bus boxes, all vaxes, and a few 8-E boxes without covers and maybe slides. I am trying to keep the weeks before and after VCF free of medical appointments. I should be able to drop off items there, ship most, including overseas. You are always welcome to stop by as long as its pre scheduled, and too many people at once could complicate things.I think the members who have stopped here in the past have had a good time picking and chatting. Please send me any requests off list. Thanks, Paul From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Wed Jul 13 07:36:00 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 08:36:00 -0400 Subject: DEC Permission to Copy Out-Of-Print Message-ID: <578635B0.70004@compsys.to> I need to obtain a link to the DEC Permission to Copy Out-Of-Print manuals. Might it still be at an HP site? Specifically, while just the actual permission itself will be helpful, more important is to be able to show that it still comes from an official source. I saw the Permission Notice in the past a few times, but I never bothered to keep a copy. Did anyone at least keep a copy? I would imagine that bitsavers might have a copy, so that would at least be helpful. Jerome Fine From echristopherson at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 09:29:28 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 09:29:28 -0500 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Chris Hanson wrote: > QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it > switched to 68K. > Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development? -- Eric Christopherson From spc at conman.org Wed Jul 13 10:33:15 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 11:33:15 -0400 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: <20160713153315.GA19851@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Eric Christopherson once stated: > On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Chris Hanson > wrote: > > > QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it > > switched to 68K. > > > > Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development? Yes. The project was originally managed by Jef Raskin and he started it iwth the 6809. Once Jobs took the project over, it switched to the 68000. -spc From dpi at dustyoldcomputers.com Wed Jul 13 10:44:13 2016 From: dpi at dustyoldcomputers.com (Doug Ingraham) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 09:44:13 -0600 Subject: WANTED: PDP-8 KE8E Extended arithmetic element In-Reply-To: <838d481d92a1567f192362583bc6e52d.squirrel@www.sadata.se> References: <838d481d92a1567f192362583bc6e52d.squirrel@www.sadata.se> Message-ID: You used to be able to find a set with connector blocks for $200 to $300 range on EBay. But I haven't seen any pop up for a couple of years now. Keep an eye on machines. These options were found in the variants of E's (F and M) and some A's. You might have to buy another machine in order to get this option. Remember that you are looking for what I would classify as a fairly rare option on machines that are becoming rare now. There are not a lot of these machines in service anymore. Good Luck! On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Anders Sandahl wrote: > Hi, > > I've been looking for a KK8E for some time now. It's the set of two > boards: M8340/M8341. If you have one to sell me please contact me off > list. > > I'm also interested in hints that can lead me to one. > > I'll give them a good home. > > /Anders > > -- Doug Ingraham PDP-8 SN 1175 From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Wed Jul 13 13:49:00 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 12:49:00 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 7/12/2016 10:41 AM, Dave Wade wrote: > There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. > > http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html > > Spectrum III > > http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an-fpga/comment-page- > 1/ > > but lots more about > > Dave Strange ... how all the computers that hit the dumpsters many moons ago are coming back again. Ben. From useddec at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 15:42:33 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:42:33 -0500 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Sorry, Champaign, IL area. A few hours south of Chicago. On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 4:17 AM, Paul Anderson wrote: > I have a big load of DEC items coming in within the next month or two, > probably a 24 foot truck packed, and an even larger one one possible this > fall. > > I already have a 25 foot storage unit costing me a small fortune, and will > probably need another. > > I need to sell off as many boxes, boards and terminals, and printers. This > includes numerous most Q bus boxes, all vaxes, and a few 8-E boxes without > covers and maybe slides. > > I am trying to keep the weeks before and after VCF free of medical > appointments. I should be able to drop off items there, ship most, > including overseas. You are always welcome to stop by as long as its pre > scheduled, and too many people at once could complicate things.I think the > members who have stopped here in the past have had a good time picking and > chatting. > > Please send me any requests off list. > > Thanks, Paul > From jwest at classiccmp.org Wed Jul 13 18:55:28 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 18:55:28 -0500 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000201d1dd62$087ba730$1972f590$@classiccmp.org> Greg wrote... ------- It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you with a list of what they would be interested in on the chance that you might have something they want. ------- 1) I'd usually prefer what Paul is doing, rather than vendors posting a weekly inventory list to the list. 2) If a vendor has 10,000 parts, you can't expect them to list it all. And for those with larger collections... I'd much rather someone tell me a few things they are looking for and then I'll go look to see what I have. Good way to start a trading session :) J From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 17:37:21 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 23:37:21 +0100 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00d401d1dd57$1ef91a70$5ceb4f50$@gmail.com> M8061 is RL01/RL02 and I would like if you could ship to UK. > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jules > Richardson > Sent: 13 July 2016 22:56 > To: Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: DEC boards at recycler > > > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. > They're scheduled for preprocessing this evening (e.g. ceramic ICs pulled and > diverted into different pile due to higher gold content), but I may be able to > get them a stay of execution (as of now I've got about 2 hours in which to let > him know before I'm awol for a family event). > > Anything below strike anyone as being worth saving (vs. common as dirt > serial interfaces etc.)? I'm not sure at the moment if I can rescue the lot... > > M7957 > M8189 > M8192 > M8061 x 2 > M8044 x 2 > M8190 > M8043 x 2 > M7961 > M8067 x 2 > M7856 > > In addition to those, a board branded Dilog CQ1610, another marked PXX-2 > with four SC44077P ics in the center, and a memory board marked 980110014 > containing 128 mmc3764 RAM ics. Also several Emulex boards which didn't > contain anything that was obviously a part number (from memory a couple > that were "full width" and three that were "half width") - I'm guessing > they're probably tape controllers, but they might be hard disk. > > Working status unknown, but cosmetically they looked good. It sounds like > the previous owner had complete machines which he split and scrapped at > some point in the past, and this box of boards had sat around in his garage > since. > > cheers > > Jules From johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com Wed Jul 13 17:41:11 2016 From: johnhreinhardt at yahoo.com (John H. Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 18:41:11 -0400 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 7/13/2016 5:56 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. > They're scheduled for preprocessing this evening (e.g. ceramic ICs > pulled and diverted into different pile due to higher gold content), > but I may be able to get them a stay of execution (as of now I've got > about 2 hours in which to let him know before I'm awol for a family > event). > > Anything below strike anyone as being worth saving (vs. common as > dirt serial interfaces etc.)? I'm not sure at the moment if I can > rescue the lot... > M7957 <-- DZV11, 4 LINE ASYNC MUX M8189 <-- PDP-11/23 CPU - Probably someone would want M8192 <-- PDP-11/73 CPU - Probably someone would want M8061 x 2 <-- RLV12 RL02 Interface M8044 x 2 <-- 4K/32K MOS RAM M8190 <-- PDP-11/83 CPU - Probably someone would want M8043 x 2 <-- DLV11-J - 4 lines serial M7961 <-- ???? M8067 x 2 <-- 128k/512k MOS Memory M7856 <-- DL11-W RS-232 SLU & realtime clock option > > In addition to those, a board branded Dilog CQ1610, another marked > PXX-2 with four SC44077P ics in the center, and a memory board marked > 980110014 containing 128 mmc3764 RAM ics. Also several Emulex boards > which didn't contain anything that was obviously a part number (from > memory a couple that were "full width" and three that were "half > width") - I'm guessing they're probably tape controllers, but they > might be hard disk. > > Working status unknown, but cosmetically they looked good. It sounds > like the previous owner had complete machines which he split and > scrapped at some point in the past, and this box of boards had sat > around in his garage since. > > cheers > > Jules > Dilog CQ1610 is a 16-linse serial card (I think) Anything Emulex with a 50-pin connector on the top is probably a SCSI card. Worth saving. I don't know where you are, but most of it is probably worth saving, someone, somewhere is probably looking for that stuff. If it's working, that is. Maybe even for repair parts. John H. Reinhardt From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 18:29:33 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:29:33 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> Message-ID: <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of ben > Sent: 14 July 2016 00:24 > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Reproduction micros > > On 7/13/2016 3:53 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > > > > > The modern replacements have the advantage they can use a "modern" > VGA > > display, SD-Card for data not slow cassette tape. > > So you ARE THE EVIL ONE! I had to pick up a "MODERN" VGA and can not do > any thing with the *#%&!@* wide screen. Even GOOD TV like STAR TREK or I > LOVE LUCY is 4:3 ratio. > I was being sarcastic. VGA is now becoming obsolete, modern screens are starting to drop it for DVI/HDMI .... ... I keep some "legacy" 3:3 flat panel LCD displays for the same reason... > I thought that would be floppy drive of some kind. > > > Dave > > > Dave From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Wed Jul 13 18:47:48 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 17:47:48 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 7/13/2016 5:29 PM, Dave Wade wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of ben >> Sent: 14 July 2016 00:24 >> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org >> Subject: Re: Reproduction micros >> >> On 7/13/2016 3:53 PM, Dave Wade wrote: >> >>> >>> The modern replacements have the advantage they can use a "modern" >> VGA >>> display, SD-Card for data not slow cassette tape. >> >> So you ARE THE EVIL ONE! I had to pick up a "MODERN" VGA and can not do >> any thing with the *#%&!@* wide screen. Even GOOD TV like STAR TREK or I >> LOVE LUCY is 4:3 ratio. >> > > I was being sarcastic. VGA is now becoming obsolete, modern screens are > starting to drop it for DVI/HDMI .... > KEEP THE VGA'S, PS/2 MICE AND KEYBOARDS! All the latest FPGA projects use them and *STANDARD* SD cards. Ben. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Wed Jul 13 19:39:26 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:39:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest Message-ID: <20160714003926.7D4BE18C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Greg Stark > It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you > with a list of what they would be interested in It might seem more reasonable if you'd seen his basement... :-) Noel From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Wed Jul 13 19:49:29 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:49:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: DEC boards at recycler Message-ID: <20160714004929.6E68818C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Jules Richardson > I just told the guy to hold off on execution and I'm going back in next > week with a view to just buying everything Good call. Most of those cards are worth something to someone. (E.g. I'd be interested in the CPU's, the RLV12s, the DLV11-Js, and the M8067s - which are MSV11-Ps. But I'll let others grab them all first, they'd only be extra spares, for me.) They usually sell for $30-$100+ (for the rarer ones, like the M8190 - that's the KDJ11-B, used in both the 11/83 and 11/84). If either the M8190 or the M8192 has the optional FPU chip, the FPJ11, that is worth big dineros. The only exception is the M8044 - those are pretty low-value (I use them only as test boards for working on broken systems), since they are Q18 _only_, and can't be mixed with Q22 boards. So maybe $10 each, for those. Noel From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 16:53:25 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 22:53:25 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of ben > Sent: 13 July 2016 19:49 > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Reproduction micros > > On 7/12/2016 10:41 AM, Dave Wade wrote: > > There is an on-going CoCo 3 in FPGA. > > > > http://www.brianholman.com/retrocompute/files/coco3fpga.html > > > > Spectrum III > > > > http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an- > fpga/comment > > -page- > > 1/ > > > > but lots more about > > > > Dave > > Strange ... how all the computers that hit the dumpsters many moons ago > are coming back again. Ben. > > But that's true of much vintage computing. Original CoCo III and even Speccy's sell well on E-Bay. The modern replacements have the advantage they can use a "modern" VGA display, SD-Card for data not slow cassette tape. Dave From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 16:56:16 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 16:56:16 -0500 Subject: DEC boards at recycler Message-ID: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. They're scheduled for preprocessing this evening (e.g. ceramic ICs pulled and diverted into different pile due to higher gold content), but I may be able to get them a stay of execution (as of now I've got about 2 hours in which to let him know before I'm awol for a family event). Anything below strike anyone as being worth saving (vs. common as dirt serial interfaces etc.)? I'm not sure at the moment if I can rescue the lot... M7957 M8189 M8192 M8061 x 2 M8044 x 2 M8190 M8043 x 2 M7961 M8067 x 2 M7856 In addition to those, a board branded Dilog CQ1610, another marked PXX-2 with four SC44077P ics in the center, and a memory board marked 980110014 containing 128 mmc3764 RAM ics. Also several Emulex boards which didn't contain anything that was obviously a part number (from memory a couple that were "full width" and three that were "half width") - I'm guessing they're probably tape controllers, but they might be hard disk. Working status unknown, but cosmetically they looked good. It sounds like the previous owner had complete machines which he split and scrapped at some point in the past, and this box of boards had sat around in his garage since. cheers Jules From billdegnan at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 17:07:16 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 18:07:16 -0400 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Jules Richardson < jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: > > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. > They're scheduled for preprocessing this evening (e.g. ceramic ICs pulled > and diverted into different pile due to higher gold content), but I may be > able to get them a stay of execution (as of now I've got about 2 hours in > which to let him know before I'm awol for a family event). > > Anything below strike anyone as being worth saving (vs. common as dirt > serial interfaces etc.)? I'm not sure at the moment if I can rescue the > lot... > > > M7856 > always useful to have a serial card, the UNIBUS standard is the M7856, often 9600 b From kirkbdavis at me.com Wed Jul 13 17:07:59 2016 From: kirkbdavis at me.com (Kirk Davis) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:07:59 -0700 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: <06C2F41D-E4BA-4BC6-AB74-B1AAF8327688@me.com> The M8190 is likely to be of interest to someone since it?s likely to be a 11/84. Personally I?m interested in one or both of the M8061?s which are Qbus RL02 controllers and would cough up some bucks to buy off the recycler. Kirk > On Jul 13, 2016, at 2:56 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > > > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. They're scheduled for preprocessing this evening (e.g. ceramic ICs pulled and diverted into different pile due to higher gold content), but I may be able to get them a stay of execution (as of now I've got about 2 hours in which to let him know before I'm awol for a family event). > > Anything below strike anyone as being worth saving (vs. common as dirt serial interfaces etc.)? I'm not sure at the moment if I can rescue the lot... > > M7957 > M8189 > M8192 > M8061 x 2 > M8044 x 2 > M8190 > M8043 x 2 > M7961 > M8067 x 2 > M7856 > > In addition to those, a board branded Dilog CQ1610, another marked PXX-2 with four SC44077P ics in the center, and a memory board marked 980110014 containing 128 mmc3764 RAM ics. Also several Emulex boards which didn't contain anything that was obviously a part number (from memory a couple that were "full width" and three that were "half width") - I'm guessing they're probably tape controllers, but they might be hard disk. > > Working status unknown, but cosmetically they looked good. It sounds like the previous owner had complete machines which he split and scrapped at some point in the past, and this box of boards had sat around in his garage since. > > cheers > > Jules From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 18:12:02 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 18:12:02 -0500 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5786CAC2.3050601@gmail.com> On 07/13/2016 05:41 PM, John H. Reinhardt wrote: > M7961 <-- ???? Yeah, I started throwing numbers into Google after I posted, and I think that one came up empty. Maybe I wrote it down wrong. > Anything Emulex with a 50-pin connector on the top is probably a SCSI card. > Worth saving. Hmm, that sounds useful. Makes me wonder how far things are from being able to make a functional system, assuming a backplane and suitable PSU... > I don't know where you are, but most of it is probably worth saving, > someone, somewhere is probably looking for that stuff. If it's working, > that is. Maybe even for repair parts. I'm up in northern MN. First time I've seen any DEC stuff in the ~12 years I've been around here. Anyway, I just told the guy to hold off on execution and I'm going back in next week with a view to just buying everything, then I'll figure it out later. My wife just gave me a look ;) J. From stark at mit.edu Wed Jul 13 18:20:00 2016 From: stark at mit.edu (Greg Stark) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:20:00 +0100 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm new here so maybe I'm wrong but isn't the norm that sellers offer items for sale and buyers makee offers for those items? It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you with a list of what they would be interested in on the chance that you might have something they want. -- Greg From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Wed Jul 13 18:24:19 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 17:24:19 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> On 7/13/2016 3:53 PM, Dave Wade wrote: > > The modern replacements have the advantage they can use a "modern" VGA > display, SD-Card for data not slow cassette tape. So you ARE THE EVIL ONE! I had to pick up a "MODERN" VGA and can not do any thing with the *#%&!@* wide screen. Even GOOD TV like STAR TREK or I LOVE LUCY is 4:3 ratio. I thought that would be floppy drive of some kind. > Dave From imp at bsdimp.com Wed Jul 13 18:27:48 2016 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 17:27:48 -0600 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 5:20 PM, Greg Stark wrote: > I'm new here so maybe I'm wrong but isn't the norm that sellers offer items > for sale and buyers makee offers for those items? > > It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you with > a list of what they would be interested in on the chance that you might > have something they want. It's a bit of the norm in the collecting world. My dad was an avid stamp collector and he had a list of the stamps from different countries that he wanted to purchase. He'd send this list to a number of different dealers who would then make him an offer to sell him some of the stamps on his list. He'd pick and chose which of the offers he accepted based on funds on hand, and how much of the goal it would accomplish (he had favorite countries and less favorite ones). It seems to me that folks with ancient DEC computers know what they want and likely have the list on-hand.... So it isn't too crazy.... Warner From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Wed Jul 13 19:58:03 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:58:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: FTGH: DEC 54-17507 backplane; Sun type-4 keyboards Message-ID: <201607140058.UAA22040@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> I've finally started digging through all my stuff in storage, at least in a small way. Two (or three) things I've found so far might be of interest here. (There will likely be more eventually, but it's anybody's guess when I'll find the round tuits to do more digging.) - One DEC 54-17507. Google makes me think this is the Qbus backplane from a BA123. It appears to be in good shape; while I am not set up to test it, it looks pretty much "too simple to break". It consists of the PCB, the Qbus connectors on one side, two 18-pin power connectors and one ten-pin connector with blue plastic shroud on the other side, and a piece of heavy sheet steel all this is bolted to. (And the bolts, of course. :-) Oh, all four resistor packs are installed. - Two Sun type-4 keyboards. (Whether the list is two or three things depends on whether you count these as one thing or two.) They are somewhat age-yellowed, and one of them has some stain spots. All the keys appear to work mechanically. I have a machine I can test these with, but I will have to first dig out a suitable cable; whether they are available now or later depends on whether you want to wait for me to find a cable to test them. These are in Ottawa (Canada's national capital, for those who don't know the name or who want disambiguation) and are anyone's for the claiming. In theory I can ship, but in practice I find I totally suck at getting stuff shipped (I have two things pending shipping right now, pending for long times), so you are much more likely to get something soon if you can pick it up or give me a local(ish) place I can drop it off, and if someone wants something shipped and someone else is prepared to pick it up, I'm taking the easy-for-me option. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Wed Jul 13 19:59:20 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 01:59:20 +0100 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: <000201d1dd62$087ba730$1972f590$@classiccmp.org> References: <000201d1dd62$087ba730$1972f590$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <247749F7-74A4-41FB-8A35-E1F91AF541B0@btinternet.com> Whilst our list is not a marketplace and often sees a lot of altruistic acts in the cause keeping going or restoring systems. There is a need to be able to post wanted/offered small ads. Rod Sent from my iPad > On 14 Jul 2016, at 00:55, Jay West wrote: > > Greg wrote... > ------- > It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you with a list of what they would be interested in on the chance that you might have something they want. > ------- > > 1) I'd usually prefer what Paul is doing, rather than vendors posting a weekly inventory list to the list. > 2) If a vendor has 10,000 parts, you can't expect them to list it all. And for those with larger collections... I'd much rather someone tell me a few things they are looking for and then I'll go look to see what I have. Good way to start a trading session :) > > J > > From jwest at classiccmp.org Wed Jul 13 20:35:01 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:35:01 -0500 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: <247749F7-74A4-41FB-8A35-E1F91AF541B0@btinternet.com> References: <000201d1dd62$087ba730$1972f590$@classiccmp.org> <247749F7-74A4-41FB-8A35-E1F91AF541B0@btinternet.com> Message-ID: <000001d1dd6f$f08a0320$d19e0960$@classiccmp.org> Rod wrote.... There is a need to be able to post wanted/offered small ads. Absolutely. And it happens a lot... thank $diety J From cctalk at snarc.net Wed Jul 13 20:50:45 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 21:50:45 -0400 Subject: VCF West has 30 exhibits In-Reply-To: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> References: <5781B35B.9070204@snarc.net> Message-ID: <5786EFF5.2060901@snarc.net> > There are 30 exhibits for Vintage Computer Festival West XI next month: > http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-exhibits/ VCF West now has * 31 * exhibits. :) From vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net Wed Jul 13 21:22:35 2016 From: vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net (Brad H) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 19:22:35 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> It's pretty cool seeing what people are doing out there. I like when people replicate things that are super rare -- like the Mark-8, SCELBI, etc. And it's definitely cool to see projects like the Altair clone, with its big empty case, all the hardware being emulated by a tiny little replacement inside. I think the Amiga project is neat, although personally I'm not sure I'd find a need for one. The thing about the Amiga was its wow factor -- I remember walking into Compucentre (Canadian chain) in the mid-80s.. and there's all the computers from 8 bit heaven and their 16 color graphics (if you were lucky).. and then there's this one computer on a pedestal featuring a totally real jungle cat prowling onscreen. It just blew the doors off everything else there, and I would go wanting for one for 20 years afterward (now I have 5 :)). Not sure a replica can revive *that*. From vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net Wed Jul 13 21:24:32 2016 From: vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net (Brad H) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 19:24:32 -0700 Subject: Mall directory computers Message-ID: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood memories. When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville Mall getting one of those very early mall directory computers. This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what I remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet 'keyboard' you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they just PCs, most likely? Or some kind of custom job? From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Wed Jul 13 21:28:06 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 22:28:06 -0400 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <20160714004929.6E68818C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160714004929.6E68818C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: I would be extremely interested in the cpu boards. Pick them up please. I have a spare unibus chasis and am have been looking for a cpu card for a while. The memory boards M8067, real time clock M7856, and serial card M8043 are of interest. The cpu boards are of the highest interest to me. If you can pick them up , plase contact me off list. I likely do not need all the cpu boards, the board to an 11/23 or 11/73 are of the highest interest. --Devin On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Jules Richardson > > > I just told the guy to hold off on execution and I'm going back in > next > > week with a view to just buying everything > > Good call. Most of those cards are worth something to someone. (E.g. I'd be > interested in the CPU's, the RLV12s, the DLV11-Js, and the M8067s - which > are > MSV11-Ps. But I'll let others grab them all first, they'd only be extra > spares, for me.) > > They usually sell for $30-$100+ (for the rarer ones, like the M8190 - > that's > the KDJ11-B, used in both the 11/83 and 11/84). If either the M8190 or the > M8192 has the optional FPU chip, the FPJ11, that is worth big dineros. > > The only exception is the M8044 - those are pretty low-value (I use them > only > as test boards for working on broken systems), since they are Q18 _only_, > and > can't be mixed with Q22 boards. So maybe $10 each, for those. > > Noel > From cctalk at snarc.net Wed Jul 13 21:44:36 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 22:44:36 -0400 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... Message-ID: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF West. That's all I can say for now. :) From linimon at lonesome.com Wed Jul 13 22:28:04 2016 From: linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 22:28:04 -0500 Subject: IBM 360/30 in verilog In-Reply-To: References: <0b0f01d1daad$ed728dc0$c857a940$@gmail.com> <57824C6D.8080406@ljw.me.uk> <99bf1f6c-c064-3eda-e4c7-feb3a9e562b6@bitsavers.org> <5783C5C9.7050207@pico-systems.com> <8a629987-1bcb-1bca-5691-fd1d0cc4158b@bitsavers.org> <6a18f88826e0113e1e35d3840d023f50.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578454C7.2070009@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <20160714032804.GC25819@lonesome.com> On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 01:43:38PM +1000, steven at malikoff.com wrote: > everyone in it striking that characteristic 60s/70s IBM-photo-pose, eg. > someone leaning over a table, another reaching for a console knob, one > changing a tape and at least two people earnestly discussing a printout. Although not at IBM, in the late 70s/early 80s I was the "model" for a photo that went into an annual report. The photographers are the ones that insist on the pose. They insisted that I be "doing something" even though that "something" was to act like I was pressing a button on a machine that was not complete yet, and which if pressed would have done nothing whatsoever. This, despite my insistence that this pose was clearly nonsense. mcl From cisin at xenosoft.com Wed Jul 13 23:25:56 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 21:25:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob Zeidman > said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF West. > That's all I can say for now. :) THAT might be CP/M code in MS-DOS. As to your subject line of "DOS code in CP/M", although a lot of the data structures, commands, and API are suspiciously similar ("we did that for software portability"), I doubt that any amount of studying of the code of CP/M will ever show that Gary Kildall copied anything from MS-DOS to write CP/M! (although it is suspiciously similar to CMD.EXE in Windows) There was never any question about MS-DOS being a copy of CP/M in how it looked and worked. THAT was never disputed. It started as a work-similar PLACEHOLDER for SCP to use while waiting for DRI to release CP/M-86. BUT, in those days, work-alike was NOT considered to be infringing. (AND, Gary Kildall was not a very litigious person) In those days, before "look and smell", it was generally considered perfectly acceptable to make an identical looking and behaving program, so long as none of the actual CODE was copied. Perfectly acceptable to have all menus the same, and to make a RAC-MAN program. ("Puckman" was one of the pre-release names of "Pacman" (character resembles a hockey puck), but somebody realized how easy it would be to change a 'P' into an 'F' on the face of the arcade machine.) Adam Osborne when he started Paperback Software was going to get rich selling identical looking and behaving duplicates of popular software. LOTUS changed the interpretations of copyright law. If Adam were to have been just a touch quicker about going out and buying any of the debris failed companies from VisiCalc (several of which had IP rights to VisiCalc), then he could have filed a counter-suit against LOTUS and fought them off. and When Novell bought the remains of DRI, all that they really wanted was IP rights to CP/M, in case Microsoft ever sued them over copyright. and If Delrina were to have cut a deal with Jefferson Airplane to buy the rights to the album cover of Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, Berkeley Systems would have lost their case ("stealing the idea of toasters with wings") (Am I the only one who considered the Opus and Bill screensaver to have been a Fair-Use parody?) and, . . . just like the DOS code in CP/M, . . . "The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous Galactic Copyright Laws. Its interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws." From computerdoc at sc.rr.com Wed Jul 13 23:32:36 2016 From: computerdoc at sc.rr.com (Kip Koon) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:32:36 -0400 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> Message-ID: <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Hi Guys, I have been suspicious of Microsoft pirating CP/M for decades! Back in my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the college library where I attended thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like MS-DOS!" So I went on a reading spree and found out that CP/M was written by Gary Kildall well before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long history that I obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much about it on the Internet. I think that was why Bill Gates was so adamant about forcing licensing of his software upon everyone though-out his ownership of Microsoft. Just because memory is so big now and so cheap compared to the '70s and '80s doesn't mean Microsoft should stop optimizing software. A 3GB Installation DVD for an Operating System has got to be way too unoptimized! I don't even want to get started on how many bugs there are in new releases of Microsoft's software. I believe that the family of Gary Kildall finally won that war if memory serves. Microsoft ought to pay his family's linage royalties forever in my opinion. I wonder how many people Microsoft stepped on to get where they are. I'd love to know the inside scoop on that one, but I'm sure that those in the know had to have been forced to sign nondisclosure agreements or be sued. That seems to be Microsoft's MO. There was a movie about a very similar scenario called Antitrust released in 2001 that was about a software giant's operating system called NURV if memory serves that starred Tim Robbins who was the owner/chairman of the company and Ryan Phillippe as a young software programmer. Through-out the movie I kept wondering how much of this related to and was like Microsoft! I immediately thought of Microsoft within the first few minutes of the movie once I began to realize what was going on! Please forgive me. I normally don't like to rant and rave online or in emails as I like to keep things positive since there is so much not right in this world, but this really struck a chord! I really wish I could attend VCF West, but unfortunately I have no access to the needed funds so I was wondering will Bob Zeidman's talk be video recorded? If so, where is the video repository for past VCF seminars? If not, I hope someone will step up and do so. In any event, I hope you all have fun at VCF West! I will be thinking of you guys. I think I was born and raised on the wrong side of the country. I was born, raised and still live in SC, but sometimes I wished I had grown up on the west coast somewhere near Silicon Valley where all the surplus computer electronics was always appearing. I have been known to work endless hours on end programming and building microprocessor based computers. I used to dream about working with DEC PDP-8s and PDP-11s years ago in high school and college. I poured over whatever computer related magazines I could find back then in the late '70s and early '80s. If I had it all to do over again knowing what I know now, where would I have gone and what would I have done... :) Take care my friends. Kip Koon computerdoc at sc.rr.com http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz > Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:45 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... > > Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to > disclose at VCF West. > > That's all I can say for now. :) From computerdoc at sc.rr.com Wed Jul 13 23:43:18 2016 From: computerdoc at sc.rr.com (Kip Koon) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:43:18 -0400 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> Message-ID: <000d01d1dd8a$3ec63ee0$bc52bca0$@sc.rr.com> Hi Guys, I have to laugh at myself. I just realized that when I read the title of the email, I thought it had said CP/M code in DOS? Revisited..." Sometimes I really think I'm dyslexic. Maybe. In love with computers, definitely. I think I was born with food in one hand and computers in the other with Star Trek and Star Wars somewhere in the vicinity. :) Take care my friends. Kip Koon computerdoc at sc.rr.com http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz > Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:45 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... > > Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob > Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF > West. > > That's all I can say for now. :) From brendan at mcneill.co.nz Thu Jul 14 00:15:39 2016 From: brendan at mcneill.co.nz (Brendan McNeill) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:15:39 +1200 Subject: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy Message-ID: <37CC4933-E0AF-4FB5-9F26-05EB95FCD3BA@mcneill.co.nz> Greetings The DEC RRD40 CD-ROM drive requires a DEC caddy to insert and remove CD?s from the drive. Does anyone have a spare caddy they could sell/post to me? Details of caddy in this document link below, however if you don?t know what it is you are probably unlikely to have one. http://www.carelife.com/manuals/RDD40_Optical_Drive_Owner_Manual.PDF Many thanks Brendan --------------//---------------- brendan at mcneill.co.nz +64 21 881 883 From spacewar at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 00:28:07 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 23:28:07 -0600 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Kip Koon wrote: > Back in my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the college library where I attended > thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like MS-DOS!" And if you'd read about DEC operating systems, you'd have thought that CP/M looks like TOPS-10, OS-8, and RT-11, though not quite as "EXACTLY" as MS-DOS looks like CP/M. "Bad artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso From barythrin at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 00:44:19 2016 From: barythrin at gmail.com (Sam O'nella) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:44:19 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros Message-ID: I haven't built or marketed anything myself but i believe if i understood ?correctly from several folks who have that vga was a cheaper choice due to licensing costs for dvi or hdmi at the time.? Not sure if vga is past that point or open but when keeping home brew kits cheap for us hobbyists every dollar counts. It would be interesting maybe as a Wikipedia page (thought there was one) to show which projects were out there and preferably which are still active. ?A shrinking but understandable issue when buying ?im batches with personal money in hopes that theyll sell eventually. From computerdoc at sc.rr.com Thu Jul 14 00:53:25 2016 From: computerdoc at sc.rr.com (Kip Koon) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 01:53:25 -0400 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <000001d1dd94$09ba5600$1d2f0200$@sc.rr.com> Hi Eric, Hum, I wonder where Gary got his ideas? Didn't he use a DEC PDP-nn for his initial PL/M compiler to get the first CP/M built in the first place? I'd like to find out more about TOPS-10, OS-8 and RT-11. Very interesting indeed! Kip Koon computerdoc at sc.rr.com http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Eric Smith > Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 1:28 AM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... > > On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Kip Koon wrote: > > Back in my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the college library where I attended > thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like > MS-DOS!" > > And if you'd read about DEC operating systems, you'd have thought that CP/M looks like TOPS-10, OS-8, and RT-11, though not quite > as "EXACTLY" as MS-DOS looks like CP/M. > > "Bad artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso From barythrin at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 00:54:33 2016 From: barythrin at gmail.com (Sam O'nella) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:54:33 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros Message-ID: <0tbfkbeel1ghfngrx12e803x.1468475673977@email.android.com> -------- Original message -------- The thing about the Amiga was its wow factor -- I remember walking into Compucentre (Canadian chain) in the mid-80s.. and there's all the computers from 8 bit heaven and their 16 color graphics (if you were lucky).. and then there's this one computer on a pedestal featuring a totally real jungle cat prowling onscreen. It just blew the doors off everything else there, and I would go wanting for one for 20 years afterward (now I have 5 :)). Not sure a replica can revive *that*. Thats an awesome story and experience that unfortunately i agree is hard to relay to people these days. To see how great lots of classics were during their heyday in comparison to what was out is what made so many historic memories. I think its unfortunately harder for younger generation sometimes to put away their cinematic quality vr and experience vintage gaming for what it was. Graphics drawn by programming, music while gaming, going for blocks and blips to fully animated sprites and tracked music playing all while fitting on a floppy disk. Or even the wealth and size of the virtual text world at a terminal or personal computer. Preaching to the choir here but when i did finally get around to showing selections of systems at our past vcf it was a blast and i enjoyed showing some of the comparison of commodore to some pc ascii games but also being fair and switching out to some of my favorite dos games too as well as pointing out the crispness of the pc display for text making it a probable better system out of the box for staring at text all day. I miss closer vcfs :-( From barythrin at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 01:01:23 2016 From: barythrin at gmail.com (Sam O'nella) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 01:01:23 -0500 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... Message-ID: I thought it had said CP/M code in DOS? Revisited..." Sometimes I really think I'm dyslexic. > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz > Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:45 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... > > Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? > Get ready for mind blown moment. ... ;-) you were right both times! {Insert dramatic ground hog clip} From pontus at Update.UU.SE Thu Jul 14 01:42:43 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:42:43 +0200 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: <20160714003926.7D4BE18C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160714003926.7D4BE18C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20160714064243.GC32757@Update.UU.SE> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 08:39:26PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Greg Stark > > > It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide you > > with a list of what they would be interested in > > It might seem more reasonable if you'd seen his basement... :-) > > Noel While I haven't seen the basement in question I know Paul has lots and lots of gear, as well as limited time and resources to do inventory. So while a list with pictures would be nice, I think the alternative would be that we wouldn't see any of it. What would be good is a brief description of what vintage and type of gear there is.. although Paul probably has "one of each" :) /P From dave.g4ugm at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 02:34:03 2016 From: dave.g4ugm at gmail.com (Dave Wade) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:34:03 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <014a01d1dda2$18d90010$4a8b0030$@gmail.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Sam > O'nella > Sent: 14 July 2016 06:44 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: RE: Reproduction micros > > I haven't built or marketed anything myself but i believe if i > understood correctly from several folks who have that vga was a cheaper > choice due to licensing costs for dvi or hdmi at the time. I didn't think there were licencing costs for DVI but apparently I am wrong. The connector is absolutely horrid. > > Not sure if vga is past that point or open but when keeping home brew kits > cheap for us hobbyists every dollar counts. > As far as I know VGA has always been open. I can't see anything patentable in the spec, its really just RGB with higher sync rates. > It would be interesting maybe as a Wikipedia page (thought there was one) > to show which projects were out there and preferably which are still > active. A shrinking but understandable issue when buying im batches with > personal money in hopes that theyll sell eventually. That would take some updating... Dave From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 14 07:05:22 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:05:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: DEC boards at recycler Message-ID: <20160714120522.A2CFE18C0C7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Devin Davison > I have a spare unibus chasis and am have been looking for a cpu card > for a while. Umm, those CPUs are all QBUS CPUs, not UNIBUS. Was your "unibus" a typo for 'QBUS'? If not, all those CPU boards are, alas, of no use to you. > The memory boards M8067, real time clock M7856, and serial card M8043 > are of interest. Likewise most of these boards are QBUS, the M7856 being the only UNIBUS one. Noel From abuse at cabal.org.uk Thu Jul 14 08:24:53 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:24:53 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160714132453.GA4227@mooli.org.uk> On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 12:44:19AM -0500, Sam O'nella wrote: > I haven't built or marketed anything myself but i believe if i understood > ?correctly from several folks who have that vga was a cheaper choice due to > licensing costs for dvi or hdmi at the time.? Parts of DVI are patented, but there are royalty-free licences available. It's also fairly like that the patents have all bit expired, or are invalid. HDMI can be treated as DVI with a different plug. I doubt supporting either interface would be a problem on licensing grounds. If nothing else, these things aren't made in high enough volume to attract the attention of the attack lawyers. > Not sure if vga is past that point or open but when keeping home brew kits > cheap for us hobbyists every dollar counts. This is the more likely reason: DVI and related standards use TMDS signalling which requires a reasonably complex logic block running at a minimum of 250MHz to scramble and multiplex the 24 bit RGB into the four output signals. This is not impossible on low-end FPGAs, but it does eat enough LEs that the designer may decide to just support VGA rather than cut back functionality elsewhere or require a more expensive FPGA. From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 09:50:02 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:50:02 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Brad H wrote: > I think the Amiga project is neat, although personally I'm not sure I'd > find a need for one. I have an Amiga 3000 (my personal favorite), but I have limited space so I can only have about two "classic" systems set up at once (and those are usually SGI machines in the retro-spots-of-active-honor). I'm not one of those types who has a personal warehouse with loads of old gear stacked on huge shelves. So, I find that I spend a lot more time with a MIST FPGA Amiga than my real 3000. The main reason being that since it can use VGA + USB, it's small, and it's super easy to put on a KVM make it attractive in my case. Plus it can emulate so many micros, I get more time with them. > The thing about the Amiga was its wow factor I totally agree. I'm not a huge fan of Workbench, but the Amiga hardware and the way folks exploited it in games, demos, and applications was the thing that impressed me. All those custom chips doing interesting things (music and graphics - there was no bean-counting-co-processor thankfully) while at the time my impression of PeeCees was that they just bottleneck'd everything through one pathetically slow CPU with brain-damaged memory management and then wanted to brag in a dull magazine about mind-numbing things like how fast you could get a spreadsheet done or reconcile accounts payable for your boss... ie, reeeeal inspiring stuff to a 14 year old (*yawn*). I see things a bit differently, now, (I actually think DOS and x86 is cooler now than I did back in the day) but that's how I felt as a teen. Of course the x86 today just feels like it's so complex that the actual microcode you "get" to access & play with isn't really reflecting what's going on inside. It's just some shared fiction while the CPU really does super-complex optimizations way beyond what any one person can really understand anymore. It's also why I haven't curiously disassembled any C code in probably a decade. I realized the compiler could always do a better job and use instructions or features I didn't even know existed. Perhaps, I think that way because I'm not a specialized EE staring at chip lithography all day. However, others have made the point more elegantly before on the list. > I remember walking into Compucentre (Canadian chain) in the mid-80s.. > and there's all the computers from 8 bit heaven and their 16 color > graphics (if you were lucky).. and then there's this one computer on a > pedestal featuring a totally real jungle cat prowling onscreen. It just > blew the doors off everything else there [...] I had nearly the same experience at a chain here in the states called "Electronics Boutique". They'd have a couple of PeeCees running demos and facing out the storefront. Your eyes would always been drawn to the Amiga running a Dragon's Lair or Space Ace demo (or something else awesome). I remember being in the store talking to the staff and people walking in to get a PeeCee and walking out with an Amiga because the kids were so impressed with the games and graphics etc... Also, I've heard versions of this same story from at least three other people. It seems to be a very common experience. It definitely whet my appetite for Amigas, too. However, at the time $$$ was a big problem for me and my family. So, it really wasn't until they were started to become quite obsolete that I finally got to own one. By that time, I was into UNIX and so it was already just a "retro curiosity" but one I still enjoy. I do wish I'd got the chance to use Amigas to do something "real" when they were state of the art. That or I wish I'd had an A500 the day they hit the shelves and had all the cool games. I'm sure that would have been a lot of fun. -Swift From cctalk at snarc.net Thu Jul 14 09:51:05 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:51:05 -0400 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <5787A6D9.2060904@snarc.net> > will Bob Zeidman's talk be video recorded? Yes. We're also thinking about a live stream. TBD. > If so, where is the video repository for past VCF seminars? Most of the talks from VCF East are here: https://www.youtube.com/c/VintageComputerFederation501c3 We have the raw footage from past VCF West shows + we need to get it online. From cctalk at snarc.net Thu Jul 14 09:53:15 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:53:15 -0400 Subject: Doh! Oopsie in the subject line / was Re: CP/M code in DOS? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <000d01d1dd8a$3ec63ee0$bc52bca0$@sc.rr.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000d01d1dd8a$3ec63ee0$bc52bca0$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <5787A75B.30108@snarc.net> > I have to laugh at myself. I just realized that when I read the title of the email, I thought it had said CP/M code in DOS? Revisited..." Sometimes I really think I'm dyslexic. Maybe. In love with computers, definitely. I think I was born with food in one hand and computers in the other with Star Trek and Star Wars somewhere in the vicinity. :) Take care my friends. Wow, I really (bleeped) that one! Subject line indeed should have been "CP/M code in DOS" not the opposite. Sorry. :) From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 09:58:27 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 07:58:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Doh! Oopsie in the subject line / was Re: CP/M code in DOS? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5787A75B.30108@snarc.net> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000d01d1dd8a$3ec63ee0$bc52bca0$@sc.rr.com> <5787A75B.30108@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Wow, I really (bleeped) that one! Subject line indeed should have been "CP/M > code in DOS" not the opposite. Sorry. :) Then my entire time travel hypothesis is for naught. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 10:19:08 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:19:08 -0400 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > I found various DEC (Qbus?) boards at my local tame recycler earlier. Neat! I used to have a friendly scrapper for a friend - got a BA23 from him, and some VAXBI boards (because was quite happy to pay him well over the gold value) - but that was coming up on 20 years ago. > Also several Emulex boards which didn't > contain anything that was obviously a part number (from memory a couple that > were "full width" and three that were "half width") - I'm guessing they're > probably tape controllers, but they might be hard disk. Emulex made a lot of disk and tape and serial comms interfaces. If they are dual-width, they are Qbus for sure. If they are quad-width, they could be Qbus or Unibus, though in my experience, Unibus Emulex cards are hex-width, taking advantage of the board space to load up features/port count. Thinking back to the Emulex CS/21 16-port serial card, it has a pair of 50-pin connectors, but the array of 40-pin DIP UARTs and the cluster of EIA line drivers by the connectors means it's fairly easy to see it's a serial card. I don't know if Emulex ever did Qbus serial cards, so a dual or quad-height card with one or two 50-pin connectors is more likely to be SCSI, disk or tape or both, than serial, so all I'd advise there is looking for tell-tale signs of an actual board name/number or the characteristic parts associated with SCSI vs EIA serial. They also made ESDI and SMD interfaces, but the pin count there is a dead giveaway. -ethan From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 10:28:13 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:28:13 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On 13 July 2016 at 07:39, Chris Hanson wrote: > (How do you think it was possible for there to be multiple OS releases for the Mac after the first Mac 128 shipped? They didn?t tell people to crack open their systems and install new ROMs?) Apple didn't, no. But Commodore, Atari and Acorn did. :-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 10:44:28 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:44:28 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12 July 2016 at 20:06, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like >> Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus >> were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like. > > That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1 > on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-) That was one of the things people didn't talk about in the classic days. I supported classic MacOS Macs up until the early noughties. They were horribly unstable. I embraced OS X early on, but some people hung on as long as possible, and others disliked OS X so much they switched to Windows. All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly unstable: Windows 3.x, and indeed 9x; Amiga OS; ST GEM; Acorn RISC OS. None had proper memory protection, few had preemptive multitasking or didn't do it well. It's why I switched to Windows NT 3.1 back in '93 and liked it. I did actually used to like Windows, an NT was a proper, solid, grown -up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2. > IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while. Exactly. > I never could get > that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo > kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for > sale recently: > > http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html > > I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is. Wow! That's great value! If only I were on the same continent! > However, like most > hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the > day". True. > In the 90's I was a student, mostly. 1980s for me. The expensive kit I couldn't afford were things like the Apple ][ and BBC Micro, or even a fully-tricked-out C64. Later the Amiga, ST and Mac. By the time I had some money, 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes were available for There was no-freakin-way I was > going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at > least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs. Yes they were. Part of a non-compete agreement between Steve Jobs & Apple Computer, you see. > Plus, back > in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were > *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. Well, they had reason. In their time they were /incredibly/ radical computers. > It's a bit like BMW > owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their > sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car > leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA > meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot. Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 with a sidecar for many years. > GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish > them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally. Interesting. I think it's a hugely big deal, but it's too late, sadly. > It's > interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX > heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's > still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms > of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and > backing-ideas. It's a million-to-one shot, I reckon. And similar comments to those re ReactOS and MS lawyers apply. > I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy > on my part), honestly. Me too! > Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated > hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute > working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never > liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods > in the early days). GNOME 2 was all right. Best desktop of its time. GNOME 3's main role seems to be inspiring replacements for itself and providing some foundations for them. ;-) > Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world > domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how > low we have to set the bar to snag them. I think it's arguably happened, actually, in the form of your next paragraph. > Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize > Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer > even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is > normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows, > Ubuntu is trying. Well quite. > Who knows, maybe Android will become that. Nah, not with Chrome OS etc. around. > I'll catch > the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soooooo many of the apps > are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the > scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus" > free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or "malware" as it suits > them (ie.. corporate sponsors say it's safe? Oh, ohhhhhkay then, we don't > mind if you steal an address book, log keystrokes, or secretly GPS track > folks - just don't replicate). The countermeasures for these issues seem > to me to be weak and ineffective, so far. A fair point. > I'm not sure I'll ever be able to trust commercial OS's or software at > this point, no matter how much bling they cop. I still carry my Philips > Xenium phone running Symbian (and lasting about 20 days before needing a > charge). Tastes great, and less filling. I loved my Blackberry Passport -- its OS really is a better Android than Android. However, it just doesn't have the apps. > I'd love to see a commercial phone OS project start with the mentality of > the OpenBSD project. I'd be willing to try something like that! Features > like totally secure defaults, zero trust for basically anyone or anything, > secure OS protections that are difficult to override by silly apps, etc.. > would be welcome. BB10 is close, but proprietary. Perhaps Jolla comes closer? > I have absolutely zero doubt that you are quite correct. If it took > .000001% bit of market share away from them, they'd have a nuclear > freak-out and figure out a way to hybridize ninjas with their corporate > lawyers and send them out riding elephant sharks for vengeance. :-D Yep! > What would > be hilarious (but again fantasy) is if ReactOS had a breakthrough in terms > of functionality that got them very close (say 99% or better compat). Then > if they sat on it for a while, getting it right before subsequently > release it the genie would be out of the bottle. If it worked > compatibility-wise even as well as XP or Win7, it'd be a hit and crimp the > snot out of M$. I reckon a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, with support for the newer APIs -- to hell with Metro etc., just classic Win32, no DOS, no 16-bit, no 32-bit, pure legacy-free 64-bit with none of the accessories, UI changes etc. No "Active Desktop", no IE, just the Explorer and enough compatibility to add 3rd party replacements for everything from Notepad to Paint to Media Player. No sidebar, desktop gadgets, Start screen, Modern apps, nothing. There's a lot of free-to-download Windows components, from Media Player to IE. It just needs to be good enough to run them, it doesn't need to replicate them. Even so, I don't think it will ever happen. > Of course, they'd probably find some way to DCMA it out of > existence. It just depends on how widespread the release got and how > illegal it was to own it. Exactly. > It's impressive when it works. There are still a large number of > applications that don't work, too. Even bread-and-butter apps like the > latest Firefox often crash and burn. Anything that runs WINE has native Firefox, surely, plus other browsers? > I have seen a few that are rock > solid, Office 97, Winamp, and a few other "gold" (winehq) or better > certified applications. I run RegexBuddy sometimes in Wine and as you say, > no problems. > > That's not to say the WINE team isn't amazing. They are. It's just a tough > slog. Absolutely. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From kirkbdavis at me.com Thu Jul 14 11:39:10 2016 From: kirkbdavis at me.com (Kirk Davis) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 09:39:10 -0700 Subject: DEC boards at recycler In-Reply-To: <20160714120522.A2CFE18C0C7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160714120522.A2CFE18C0C7@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <4E3912D2-2898-477F-AE31-E43CAE15EDB0@me.com> I have several extra if you are looking for Qbus cpus for the cost of shipping. Contract me off list. Kirk > On Jul 14, 2016, at 5:05 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> From: Devin Davison > >> I have a spare unibus chasis and am have been looking for a cpu card >> for a while. > > Umm, those CPUs are all QBUS CPUs, not UNIBUS. Was your "unibus" a typo for > 'QBUS'? If not, all those CPU boards are, alas, of no use to you. > >> The memory boards M8067, real time clock M7856, and serial card M8043 >> are of interest. > > Likewise most of these boards are QBUS, the M7856 being the only UNIBUS one. > > Noel From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 11:46:34 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 09:46:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Kip Koon wrote: > Hi Guys, > I have been suspicious of Microsoft pirating CP/M for decades! Back in > my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the college library where I > attended thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like MS-DOS!" So I went on > a reading spree and found out that CP/M was written by Gary Kildall well > before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long history that I > obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much about it on > the Internet. No, but you should learn it. LOTS more details are readily available about every portion of this over-simplified shortened history. The major aspects are undisputed, but there are opinions about minor details. (such as various versions of the culture clash) "Gary HAD TO blow off the IBM meeting, because there was a binder of documentation that had to be delivered to Bill Godbout, and it was not POSSIBLE to find ANYBODY else to carry it to Oakland (airport). Why would he have to be there for IBM to apply for a license?" OF COURSE MS-DOS looks exactly like CP/M! THAT was the intent! It would have been unusable as a placeholder if it didn't. NO, Bill Gates did NOT write MS-DOS. Gary Kildall wrote CP/M. It was very well established as the defacto standard. DRI "Digital Research Incorporated" (formerly "Intergalactic Digital Research") began working on CP/M-86, a version of CP/M for 8086 based machines. Seattle Computer Products (SCP) was building an 8086 based machine. Hardware was beginning to work, but CP/M-86 wasn't available yet. Tim Paterson (of SCP) started working on system software. At NCC ("National Computer Conference") 1979, SCP shared a booth with Microsoft and Lifeboat (big distributor for CP/M and Microsoft products). Tim Paterson was intrigued by Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC (BASIC with enough of an OS built in to support disk files - best known, although without the name, is RS Coco). SCP started shipping some 8086 based CPUs with "Stand-Alone BASIC-86". There was an assumption that CP/M would ultimately be the OS, but CP/M-86 wasn't available yet. Paterson started to write a "placeholder" - a crude substitute for an OS that could be used instead of the OS for testing and completing the hardware design. He studied what CP/M did, and wrote a crude imitation of it as a placeholder. Although he studied it in order to make his behave the same, he denies [moderately credibly] ever having access to the source code of CP/M, nor copying code directly, merely writing simple obvious code to behave exactly the same. He called that temporary OS, "QDOS" ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") http://www.patersontech.com/dos/softalk.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems Instead of CP/M's disk formats and directory structure, he made his like the file system of Stand-Alone-BASIC. For marketing purposes, it was sold as "86-DOS". Apparently "quick and dirty" didn't seem marketable! When IBM decided to take over the personal computer market, they didn't do their homework very well. Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit, instead of building a true 8 bit machine. One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80 co-processor plus CP/M for Apple][). IBM went to Microsoft for "BASIC and CP/M". Microsoft sent them to DRI for CP/M. There was an EXTREME culture clash between IBM and DRI, that included Gary blowing off the meeting, since IBM could simply fill out the forms "like any other customer" and leave them with Gary's wife. IBM did not want to do business with "hippies". (4 years ago, I visited the DRI house (801 Lighthouse,Pacific Grove), to see for myself the view from the upstairs window ("OMG, are those guys coming to the door, DEA?"). IBM went back to Microsoft, where Bill Gates made his people suit up, and IBM made the BASIC deal contingent on an OS. Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated a deal to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client. Microsoft hired Paterson, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed to IBM. Paterson worked to finish the OS, and start the next major revision. Gary Kildall got tired of people telling him that he had made the biggest screwup in history. Towards the end of his life, he was drinking heavily. Since MS-DOS was an imitation of CP/M, rumors that it stole code from CP/M have always existed. Some code WILL match - if you are doing the exact same thing, will you, in places, write the exact same code? How much match does it take to assume copying, instead of similar coding? Having explicitly decided to use identical data structures, what are the chances of coincidentally choosing the exact same algorithm for a given portion of a task? If you both use DAA for printing a number in decimal, will that code match? Periodically, there will be urban legends of hidden DRI copyright messages in MS-DOS, or easter eggs. Easter eggs, in this context, are hidden content that can be accessed through non-obvious ways. For example, in TRS-DOS V2, typing BOOT.SYS.RV36, and holding down J and N pops up a full page message saying COPYRIGHT RANDY COOK. (RV36 (a password) and J,N might not be accurate). "Nobody" knew about it. When Apparat (APR-DOS, later NEWDOS) imitated TRSDOS, they claimed to be non-infringing, until Randy Cook's lawyer popped up that easter egg in NEWDEOS. APPARAT admitted infringement, and agreed to rewrite from scratch (NEWDOS-80). Radio Shack changed "RANDY COOK" to "TANDY CORP". Nobody knows where any such easter eggs are in MS-DOS, in spite of extensive searching, although Jerry Pournelle once claimed to have been shown one, BY GARY KILDALL, in MS-DOS 1.00. If Zeidman has found such a "smoking gun", then it is still big news. Interpretation of software copyright has changed. In those days, identical appearance and behavior was not considered infringement unless actual code was copied. NOW, identical appearance and behavior WOULD be considered infringing, so it is no longer legal to do, even "clean-room", what Paterson did. Because of that, Novell bought the ruins of DRI. If Microsoft were to accuse Novell of writing something that looked too much like some part of MS-DOS, Novell would be able to trot out their ownership of CP/M copyrights. A copyright infringement trump-card. "Ah, so you want to sue us for copying your program, which was copied from another program that we now own? Are you sure?" CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From ggs at shiresoft.com Thu Jul 14 12:03:26 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:03:26 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> > On Jul 14, 2016, at 9:46 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: > > > When IBM decided to take over the personal computer market, they didn't do their homework very well. > Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit, instead of building a true 8 bit machine. > One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80 co-processor plus CP/M for Apple][). > IBM chose the 8088 because the bus was close enough to the 8085 that the peripherals from the S/23 could be re-used with minor tweaks (in many cases just a re-layout). They wanted something that would allow > 64KB of RAM without having to go through the pains of what was done on S/23 (it was an 8085 system that has 192KB of ROM and upto 128KB of RAM) and none of the 8-bit micros could do that. IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was actually TJ Watson Jr that instructed that a ?skunk? team be formed to see how quickly a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of Apple making inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that. It was never envisioned to be a huge market for these things?it was viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take away business from IBM?s traditional machines. TTFN - Guy From vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net Thu Jul 14 10:56:08 2016 From: vintagecomputer at bettercomputing.net (Brad H) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:56:08 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> Message-ID: <0ff101d1dde8$3cfdeb40$b6f9c1c0$@bettercomputing.net> I have kind of a counter around my 'office' and I've laid out stuff on top of and under it (and even stuff on top of the stuff). I have one 'work' desk where I set up a machine or two and play. My Digital Group Z80 has been occupying that spot for months -- just too much fun to play with. But my Amiga 2000 is right next to it. I remember after seeing that Amiga 2000 at the store trying desperately to convince my Dad to buy one. I don't remember what the exact price point was but it was up there, and his concern was compatibility with work. An IBM loyalist, he went from PCjr to PC to AT to PS/2. I do remember knowing that they had the XT emulation board available for the Amiga and trying that angle with him to no avail. Later on as a consolation he acquiesced to putting in a (then) very expensive 2400 baud modem into our PS/2 so I could BBS. My question about the FPGA Amigas is can you not just emulate pretty much anything on a PC these days? I never tried Amiga emulation (if I have the real thing I always go to that). Not sure how much the emulators can handle. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Swift Griggs Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 7:50 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: RE: Reproduction micros On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Brad H wrote: > I think the Amiga project is neat, although personally I'm not sure > I'd find a need for one. I have an Amiga 3000 (my personal favorite), but I have limited space so I can only have about two "classic" systems set up at once (and those are usually SGI machines in the retro-spots-of-active-honor). I'm not one of those types who has a personal warehouse with loads of old gear stacked on huge shelves. So, I find that I spend a lot more time with a MIST FPGA Amiga than my real 3000. The main reason being that since it can use VGA + USB, it's small, and it's super easy to put on a KVM make it attractive in my case. Plus it can emulate so many micros, I get more time with them. > The thing about the Amiga was its wow factor I totally agree. I'm not a huge fan of Workbench, but the Amiga hardware and the way folks exploited it in games, demos, and applications was the thing that impressed me. All those custom chips doing interesting things (music and graphics - there was no bean-counting-co-processor thankfully) while at the time my impression of PeeCees was that they just bottleneck'd everything through one pathetically slow CPU with brain-damaged memory management and then wanted to brag in a dull magazine about mind-numbing things like how fast you could get a spreadsheet done or reconcile accounts payable for your boss... ie, reeeeal inspiring stuff to a 14 year old (*yawn*). I see things a bit differently, now, (I actually think DOS and x86 is cooler now than I did back in the day) but that's how I felt as a teen. Of course the x86 today just feels like it's so complex that the actual microcode you "get" to access & play with isn't really reflecting what's going on inside. It's just some shared fiction while the CPU really does super-complex optimizations way beyond what any one person can really understand anymore. It's also why I haven't curiously disassembled any C code in probably a decade. I realized the compiler could always do a better job and use instructions or features I didn't even know existed. Perhaps, I think that way because I'm not a specialized EE staring at chip lithography all day. However, others have made the point more elegantly before on the list. > I remember walking into Compucentre (Canadian chain) in the mid-80s.. > and there's all the computers from 8 bit heaven and their 16 color > graphics (if you were lucky).. and then there's this one computer on a > pedestal featuring a totally real jungle cat prowling onscreen. It > just blew the doors off everything else there [...] I had nearly the same experience at a chain here in the states called "Electronics Boutique". They'd have a couple of PeeCees running demos and facing out the storefront. Your eyes would always been drawn to the Amiga running a Dragon's Lair or Space Ace demo (or something else awesome). I remember being in the store talking to the staff and people walking in to get a PeeCee and walking out with an Amiga because the kids were so impressed with the games and graphics etc... Also, I've heard versions of this same story from at least three other people. It seems to be a very common experience. It definitely whet my appetite for Amigas, too. However, at the time $$$ was a big problem for me and my family. So, it really wasn't until they were started to become quite obsolete that I finally got to own one. By that time, I was into UNIX and so it was already just a "retro curiosity" but one I still enjoy. I do wish I'd got the chance to use Amigas to do something "real" when they were state of the art. That or I wish I'd had an A500 the day they hit the shelves and had all the cool games. I'm sure that would have been a lot of fun. -Swift From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 12:16:54 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 19:16:54 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <0ff101d1dde8$3cfdeb40$b6f9c1c0$@bettercomputing.net> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <0ff101d1dde8$3cfdeb40$b6f9c1c0$@bettercomputing.net> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 17:56, Brad H wrote: > My question about the FPGA Amigas is can you not just emulate pretty much > anything on a PC these days? I never tried Amiga emulation (if I have the > real thing I always go to that). Not sure how much the emulators can > handle. Yes you can, and sometimes with better fidelity, but it doesn't _transform_ your generic C21 computer into a retro machine. You're running a program under your normal OS. It doesn't look or feel the same. But running vintage kit takes effort, knowledge, possibly troubleshooting & repair skills, and you need to own it or know where to get it. Whereas you can buy a new FPGA-based recreation, usually for not much, and whereas it's not the same, it is a computer. It boots and runs the same OS as the old machine. No emulation, it's real hardware, and probably better than the original. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 12:19:43 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 19:19:43 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12 July 2016 at 18:10, Steve Browne wrote: > The ZX Spectrum Next is going to be interesting.... http://www.specnext.com/ > > Look at that industrial design! Designed by Rick Dickinson who was behind > the ZX80,ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Spectrum Plus and QL It's pretty but they're only renders so far. There's no hardware yet. It will, in theory, be a redesigned TBBlue in a retro-ish case. If you want an off-the-shelf FPGA enhanced Spectrum, it already exists: http://zxuno.speccy.org/index_e.shtml Availability is limited and erratic, though. Like a Mac mini, it's BYODKM. And it doesn't have a Spectrum expansion connector, because it's a 3.3V device and the Speccy was 5V -- but they're working on it. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 12:21:28 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:21:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: >> When IBM decided to take over the personal computer market, they didn't do their homework very well. >> Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit, instead of building a true 8 bit machine. >> One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80 co-processor plus CP/M for Apple][). On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > IBM chose the 8088 because the bus was close enough to the 8085 that the > peripherals from the S/23 could be re-used with minor tweaks (in many > cases just a re-layout). > They wanted something that would allow > 64KB of RAM without having to > go through the pains of what was done on S/23 (it was an 8085 system > that has 192KB of ROM and upto 128KB of RAM) and none of the 8-bit > micros could do that. It makes sense to me. Hardware would be same as for an ordinary 8 bit machine, but lots more (1MB!!) memory map. Since nobody could possibly need more than 10 times the current RAM, big chunks of space could be used for memory mapped I/O, such as both a text display AND an amazing 640x200 graphics display. > IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was actually TJ Watson > Jr that instructed that a ?skunk? team be formed to see how quickly > a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of Apple making > inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that. > It was never envisioned to be a huge market for these things?it was > viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take away > business from IBM?s traditional machines. They assumed [correctly] that they could, with trivial ease, simply step in and dominate that "home computer" market. Particularly useful if anybody was crazy enough to take in a home computer to work and use it for some minor office tasks. I'm glad that Apple survived IBM's entry and presence in that market. From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 12:34:36 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:34:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot. > Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 > with a sidecar for many years. I like BMW bikes, and even the imitations (Ural, Dnepr). I love the Isetta, but somehow none of their cars since then appeal to me. I played with a NeXT briefly, before release, trying to get a printer to connect. I'm not sure if I've even seen one since then. > Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize > Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer > even resembling UNIX, much. How many even know of a connection? > Who knows, maybe Android will become that. as phone/PDA software, it does OK. Giving iPhone competition. Trying to use it as a computer platform seems far-fetched. From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 12:42:30 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:42:30 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > That was one of the things people didn't talk about in the classic days. > I supported classic MacOS Macs up until the early noughties. They were > horribly unstable. I had forgot myself until I recently started messing with OS8.1 again. Anecdotally, lately I've felt that 7.6 + Open Transport was a bit more stable than 8.1. However, neither approaches "stable" by my definition. Some of the bugs I've seen have also been really nasty. For example I was playing with Aldus Pagemaker from way-back-when and I noticed that after you saved over the same file N number of times it'd become corrupt and unusable. The hardware is solid, though. When I fire up NetBSD on the machine it's pretty much just as stable as it is on the x86 side, just slower. I also notice that A/UX seems to be much more stable than OS8.1. For example, when I fire up "fetch" (an FTP client) that often crashes and locks up my 8.1 setup on A/UX 3.1, it still crashes a lot but A/UX doesn't lock up. It just kills the client process. Of course, on A/UX, I usually just use the CLI for such things anyhow. It was an enlightening experiment, though. > I embraced OS X early on, but some people hung on as long as possible, > and others disliked OS X so much they switched to Windows. Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool, myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time) and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut. :-) For some reason, I don't have the same hangups on non-UNIX OSs. It's because my biases are weaker outside of UNIX boxen. > All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly unstable: > Windows 3.x, and indeed 9x; Amiga OS; ST GEM; Acorn RISC OS. None had > proper memory protection, few had preemptive multitasking or didn't do > it well. Yep. Don't forget my old friend DOS, either. Ctrl-alt-delete keys got quite a workout on those boxes, too. However, it's travails were *nothing* compared to say Win98ME, which crashed 3-4 times a day for me on ALL machines I tried it on. That was bottom-barrel Windows, IMHO. > -up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2. I've spent all of about five minutes with OS/2. After working for IBM for years, and watching that drama just soured me on touching it. I might have liked it, though. Who knows? It just didn't have hardly any software I cared about and I had 100% certainty that IBM would screw it up. > 1980s for me. The expensive kit I couldn't afford were things like the > Apple ][ and BBC Micro, or even a fully-tricked-out C64. Glad it wasn't just me. :-) > > Plus, back in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, > > and they were *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. > Well, they had reason. In their time they were /incredibly/ radical > computers. It's a fair point, but something that gets my back up faster than just about anything computing-related is unvarnished elitism by spoiled rich kids. Ie.. people who think it's not what you know or what you can do with what you have - it's only what you own. Ugh. > Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 > with a sidecar for many years. That actually sounds pretty fun and much harder to visualize that at a PTA meeting. :-) > GNOME 2 was all right. Best desktop of its time. XFCE was a close second for a while and is still going pretty strong. If I wanted an "integrated desktop environment" these days (which I don't) I'd probably reach for that. > GNOME 3's main role seems to be inspiring replacements for itself and > providing some foundations for them. ;-) Ha! I would agree wholeheartedly. > I think it's arguably happened, actually, in the form of your next > paragraph. It has. I agree. The numbers of Android devices are mind-boggling. These wasteoids running into water fountains while texting *are* Linux users, but I'm not sure they really represent anything but consumers and the full implications of that are yet to be seen. Woman falls into fountain while texting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66L1o-uES0 People here spend *insane* amounts of time on them. In my eyes, Smartphones are the new TV. Another opiate of the masses. http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/informate-report-social-media-smartphone-use/ > > Who knows, maybe Android will become that. > Nah, not with Chrome OS etc. around. Didn't Sergei Brin say they'd probably get merged? I seem to remember that, but who knows. I don't think I've even seen ChromeOS. The idea of a "cloud OS" is utterly repugnant to me on being-pwned-by-big-brother basis. I won't touch that crap. That's one of many reasons why I actually do *use* these old OSes and marginal desktops like BSD boxes. Fewer attackers are looking to target them. I actually think that it might be fairly difficult or impossible today to create a commercial desktop OS that wouldn't be full of corporate spyware, NSA backdoors, and other unacceptable "features". Business weasels of today just can't resist the sirens call of stolen metadata and tracking/ad dollars. However, back in the 80s-90s the vendors knew that they had to at least give the impression they were competing via making a great OS for the consumer. Nowadays, they've nearly dropped the facade and cynically decided corporate feudalism trumps consumer empathy every time: witness the "subscription model". > I loved my Blackberry Passport -- its OS really is a better Android than > Android. However, it just doesn't have the apps. I almost got one of those simply on the basis that: 1. It's QNX (neat!) 2. It's not iOS or Android. 3. It still does a lot of "smartphone" things. Ultimately I didn't do it because I figure it's still "too smart" for me to be comfortable, and the battery life can't hold a candle to my current dumb phone. > BB10 is close, but proprietary. Perhaps Jolla comes closer? The stuff that appeals to me is more along the lines of: Punkt MP01 https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp01-mobile-phone/ Johns Phone http://www.johnsphones.com/store/item9 ... or the one I use that I imported from some Russian-a-stan: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Original-Unlocked-Philips-Xenium-E311-Dual-Sim-Cell-Phone-/261919525832 > I reckon a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, with support for the newer > APIs -- to hell with Metro etc., just classic Win32, no DOS, no 16-bit, > [...] I'd love that. I'd use it for VMs I have to create to access a zillion different client VPNs I have to use. Nowadays I use WinXP, or if I must, Win7. > Anything that runs WINE has native Firefox, surely, plus other browsers? Yes, true. I mainly use WINE under NetBSD, which does have Firefox, but not Chrome (yet). Since I mostly turn off Javascript and Flash, using simple browsers like Dillo are often fine, too. Websites these days are basically a huge hairball of code they assume I will run, when all I care about is markup and content. I get why it's done, but they can't force me to participate. So, browser choices usually aren't the issue. It's usually some game or media program from Windows that blows up spectacularly in Wine. As an aside, I love running suspicious programs that end up having viruses or whatever in WINE then when I see them trying to pivot, simply killing processes and wiping out the whole damn WINE container. However, with online file scanners like virustotal being free, I rarely take even that small risk anymore. -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 12:50:48 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:50:48 -0600 (MDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: > CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera. I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste. You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of DOS... but it could just be the drugs. -Swift From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Thu Jul 14 12:57:14 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:57:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly >> unstable: [...] Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as a counterexample. Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to learn from it. (Not that I think it's perfect, of course. But I do think it did some things better than most of what I see today.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org Thu Jul 14 12:57:55 2016 From: RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:57:55 +0000 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <539CFBE84C931A4E8516F3BBEA36C7AA01AED47F58@505MBX2.corp.vnw.com> From: Fred Cisin Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 9:47 AM > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Kip Koon wrote: >> So I went on a reading spree and found out that CP/M was written by Gary >> Kildall well before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long >> history that I obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much >> about it on the Internet. > No, but you should learn it. > LOTS more details are readily available about every portion of this > over-simplified shortened history. [snip] > Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated a deal > to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client. Not Bill Gates, Paul Allen, as detailed in his autobiography _Idea Man_. Just for the record. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/ From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 13:13:52 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:13:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <539CFBE84C931A4E8516F3BBEA36C7AA01AED47F58@505MBX2.corp.vnw.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <539CFBE84C931A4E8516F3BBEA36C7AA01AED47F58@505MBX2.corp.vnw.com> Message-ID: >> Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated a deal >> to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client. On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Rich Alderson wrote: > Not Bill Gates, Paul Allen, as detailed in his autobiography _Idea Man_. > Just for the record. Thanks! I appreciate corrections to get it right on such details. Someday, perhaps there should be a detailed version of this part of the history. (if only to answer some of the really absurd ridiculous ones, such as "Pirates Of The Valley" (Bill Gates cold-calling IBM to sell them on the idea of having an OS??, and then telling us that we should learn their version!)) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Thu Jul 14 13:47:53 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:47:53 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> On Jul 14, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > > IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was actually TJ Watson Jr that instructed that a ?skunk? team > be formed to see how quickly a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of Apple making > inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that. It was never envisioned to be a huge market > for these things?it was viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take away business from > IBM?s traditional machines. And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs? which these days use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed! -- Chris From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 14 13:50:26 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:50:26 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: <5787DEF2.7080901@sydex.com> I don't get the significance of any of this. CP/M-80 is what, less than 16K of code (not counting the very few utilities that come bundled with it)? It's not rocket science and pales in comparison with the mainframe and mini OSes that were around at the time--and indeed, some of the more advanced OSes for microcomputers. It's ridiculously simple to reverse-engineer (I know, I've done it), given nothing more than the published documentation and a running system. Everyone seems to forget about the work-alikes, such as TPM for the Epson QX-80. GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS functionality for the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS. A tempest in a teapot. At least from where I sit, Chuck From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Thu Jul 14 14:03:31 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:03:31 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> Message-ID: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> On 7/14/2016 8:50 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > I do wish I'd got the chance to use Amigas to do something "real" when > they were state of the art. That or I wish I'd had an A500 the day they > hit the shelves and had all the cool games. I'm sure that would have been > a lot of fun. I had hopes on the Amiga until they came out with the 2000*. > -Swift > Ben. * Lets add a brain dead cpu and run DOS. From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 14:14:24 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 12:14:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5787DEF2.7080901@sydex.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <5787DEF2.7080901@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: > GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS functionality for > the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any > accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS. Ah, but what a funny lawsuit!! > A tempest in a teapot. > At least from where I sit, To most people, assembly language and operating systems are "complex and mysterious" Many don't grasp the concept of reverse engineering, and assume piracy. I think that Paterson was well able to write work-alike code. From goetz at hoffart.de Thu Jul 14 14:35:21 2016 From: goetz at hoffart.de (=?utf-8?Q?G=C3=B6tz_Hoffart?=) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 21:35:21 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: <201607121625.u6CGP0ug16646438@floodgap.com> <4535C928-83ED-4C55-B422-B5C63FBBDEC7@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: <24BDB653-B5F6-4A8C-8D9C-455A26F49444@hoffart.de> > Am 13.07.2016 um 16:29 schrieb Eric Christopherson : > >> QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it >> switched to 68K. >> > > Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development? Yes, 6809: http://www.folklore.org -> search for 6809. Regards G?tz From spc at conman.org Thu Jul 14 15:15:45 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:15:45 -0400 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Mouse once stated: > >> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly > >> unstable: [...] > > Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as > a counterexample. Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to > learn from it. (Not that I think it's perfect, of course. But I do > think it did some things better than most of what I see today.) What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the water). -spc From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Thu Jul 14 15:43:23 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:43:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> [...] VMS [...] > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was > incredible. For its time, certainly. Even today, there are a few things a DECnet stack does better than an IP stack. > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > water). I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what is _much_ better is the documentation it contains. DEC documentation of the VMS era was _awesome_. Even today I rarely see it equaled, never mind bettered, in many ways. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 15:50:12 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:50:12 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot. I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot more about it than I ever thought to learn. I respect the OS a lot and I agree with Mouse about parts of it still being object lessons to other OSes. I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big bruhaha back in the 1990s. HOWEVER... Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack. When using TCP/IP related tools they all seem like basic-functionality ports from the Unix side (but stable and usable nonetheless). Plus, IIRC, some of the code came right outta Tru64 / OSF1 in the 90's. That's what some of the VMS guys told me, anyhow. > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > water). The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis shell scripting and that's also accurate. As far as the help system goes, it's got that regularity I mentioned. It's very predictable to get help for a given switch or command argument. However, versus a modern FreeBSD box? The man pages are MUCH better in my opinion that DCL help. They are more detailed with sections of help that's usually not even available in the DCL help. As a UNIX guy who doesn't hate VMS at all (I think it's cool) my basic impression is this: Strengths versus Unix: * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too. * Great hardware error logging that generally tells you exactly what's wrong (even if you have to run a turd like WSEA to get it out of a binary error log - same as Tru64 though). * Lots of performance metrics and instrumentation of the OS's features * Very solid clustering. (no, it's not incredible and unsurpassed like some people still say - other OSes have similar features now, but it took a very long time to catch up to VMS.) * Some fairly nice backup features (but not as advanced as, say, whats in LVM2 or ZFS in some ways). * Regularity. It's hard to articulate but VMS is very very "regular" and predictable in how it does things. * Crazy stable. Downsides versus Unix: * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too. Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box. Maybe VSI will fix this, and maybe they are so politically screwed up they will never get it off the ground. We'll see. I have an open mind. * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I dearly miss. * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be fair). If you are a VMS bigot and you take offense at any of this, please go easy on me. I'm just giving my impressions, not stating any of this as absolute truth or law. I'm certainly not trying to bust on VMS. I think VMS is neat. -Swift From other at oryx.us Thu Jul 14 15:51:33 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:51:33 -0500 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> On 07/14/16 12:42 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who > wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool, > myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets > sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time) > and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing > break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut. > :-) > I'm missing something here. Although most did/are using the Apple supplied GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement. I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although mostly for fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for OS X/PPC. Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can pretty much do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix. What OS X didn't ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own. >> -up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2. > > I've spent all of about five minutes with OS/2. After working for IBM for > years, and watching that drama just soured me on touching it. I might have > liked it, though. Who knows? It just didn't have hardly any software I > cared about and I had 100% certainty that IBM would screw it up. > In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3. I was taking a lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language specifically, I found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my work. OS/2 truly provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up a DOS session with my Assembly code and go right on working. Applications are/were a long story on OS/2, that I could write volumes on, but in short, if you wanted to play games, DOS and later, Windows was the place to be. Or the more 2000+ updated answer, on a game console. OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does one need per OS? From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back in the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS (Work Place Shell). OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 volumes. In summary, back in the early 1990's, I moved to OS/2. I didn't do it to get some application I needed, I moved for stability in the Wintel world. And for me, it did a great job. Jerry From cctalk at beyondthepale.ie Thu Jul 14 16:24:44 2016 From: cctalk at beyondthepale.ie (Peter Coghlan) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:24:44 +0100 (WET-DST) Subject: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy In-Reply-To: "Your message dated Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:15:39 +1200" <37CC4933-E0AF-4FB5-9F26-05EB95FCD3BA@mcneill.co.nz> Message-ID: <01Q2JU03N4YS00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> > > Greetings > > The DEC RRD40 CD-ROM drive requires a DEC caddy to insert and remove CD's from > the drive. Does anyone have a spare caddy they could sell/post to me? > Hi Brendan, I have a few but where I am is just about the furthest anyone can get from New Zealand without leaving the planet. Let me know if you don't find any closer to you. Regards, Peter Coghlan. From guy at cuillin.org.uk Thu Jul 14 16:51:05 2016 From: guy at cuillin.org.uk (Guy Dawson) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:51:05 +0100 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: I was running a 3 node VAXcluster in the late 1980s. We had two 8550s and an 8820 connected via a CI star coupler to two HSC70 storage controllers and 24 RA81 drives; two upright tape (TU78s?) drives too. The drives were connected to both HSC70s in RAID 1 pairs. We had 11 pairs, a spare and a quorum disk for the VAXcluster. The environment was rock solid and ran for many years. We could do rolling VMS and application upgrades on the three nodes. A great production system. We even had an X25 based DECnet connection between Australia where the system was installed and the UK where our software company was based. On 14 July 2016 at 21:50, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: > > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. > > Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot. > > I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot > more about it than I ever thought to learn. I respect the OS a lot and I > agree with Mouse about parts of it still being object lessons to other > OSes. I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big > bruhaha back in the 1990s. > > HOWEVER... > > Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I > wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you > are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's > very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are > radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and > others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack. > > When using TCP/IP related tools they all seem like basic-functionality > ports from the Unix side (but stable and usable nonetheless). Plus, IIRC, > some of the code came right outta Tru64 / OSF1 in the 90's. That's what > some of the VMS guys told me, anyhow. > > > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > > water). > > The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about > how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence > of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis > shell scripting and that's also accurate. > > As far as the help system goes, it's got that regularity I mentioned. It's > very predictable to get help for a given switch or command argument. > However, versus a modern FreeBSD box? The man pages are MUCH better in my > opinion that DCL help. They are more detailed with sections of help that's > usually not even available in the DCL help. > > As a UNIX guy who doesn't hate VMS at all (I think it's cool) my basic > impression is this: > > Strengths versus Unix: > * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very > early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too. > * Great hardware error logging that generally tells you exactly what's > wrong (even if you have to run a turd like WSEA to get it out of a > binary error log - same as Tru64 though). > * Lots of performance metrics and instrumentation of the OS's features > * Very solid clustering. (no, it's not incredible and unsurpassed like > some people still say - other OSes have similar features now, but it > took a very long time to catch up to VMS.) > * Some fairly nice backup features (but not as advanced as, say, > whats in LVM2 or ZFS in some ways). > * Regularity. It's hard to articulate but VMS is very very "regular" and > predictable in how it does things. > * Crazy stable. > > Downsides versus Unix: > > * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too. > Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers > * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box. > Maybe VSI will fix this, and maybe they are so politically screwed up > they will never get it off the ground. We'll see. I have an open mind. > * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from > UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as > saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I > dearly miss. > * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and > dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be > fair). > > If you are a VMS bigot and you take offense at any of this, please go easy > on me. I'm just giving my impressions, not stating any of this as absolute > truth or law. I'm certainly not trying to bust on VMS. I think VMS is > neat. > > -Swift > > -- 4.4 > 5.4 From ian.finder at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 16:52:36 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:52:36 -0700 Subject: Looking for the numpad "/" key for an apple extended keyboard II Message-ID: If you have one, please ping me. mine met a work accident today. -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 16:53:52 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:53:52 -0600 (MDT) Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Jerry Kemp wrote: > I'm missing something here. Although most did/are using the Apple > supplied GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement. Perhaps there is a way to run an X11 server without Aqua, but I don't know of it. However, I'm far from an OSX expert. > I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although > mostly for fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for > OS X/PPC. Cool. That sounds interesting. > Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can > pretty much do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix. > What OS X didn't ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own. Hmm, not in my experience. IMHO, there is a metric ton of stuff missing from OSX. They overload their command line tools to do too much, again, IMO. Apple also gives you just about squat in the way of filesystem and volume management features that are standard on freely available UNIX variants like BSD and Linux. I could go on for a while about what's missing, but it's a style-argument only. I don't hate OSX, but I'm definitely not ready to view it as UNIX-with-benefits and have some very long and specific reasons for that. It's not just a gut impression. > In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3. I was taking > a lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language > specifically, I found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my > work. OS/2 truly provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up > a DOS session with my Assembly code and go right on working. I had similar experiences with DOS and something called DESQview/X. I think it was made by Quarterdeck Systems. I didn't know squat about UNIX or XDMCP at the time, but it was still beyond awesome to me to be able to run a DOS window and do something uber-stupid in Lattice-C or Borland and watch it gracefully recover. So, I can emphatically understand what you mean. > OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does > one need per OS? Fair point, but choice is good, too. > From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back > in the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS > (Work Place Shell). That's inside baseball to me. I'll take your word for it. > OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 > volumes. You probably already know, but it seems there is another one now, too, based on ECS: https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-lion-go/ Also FYI, just to be super-clear, I didn't mean to bash or attack OS/2. I was just saying I'm too ignorant about it to make a judgment and IBM burned me too much to care. However, for all I know it's super-awesome. -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 16:59:25 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:59:25 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Looking for the numpad "/" key for an apple extended keyboard II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Ian Finder wrote: > If you have one, please ping me. mine met a work accident today. Do you happen to know if the key/keycap from an Apple Adjustable Keyboard number pad would work? I bought a Quadra 660AV and Quadra 700 in the last few months and the 660AV came with an AAKB but the keyboard is kind of shot (several keys are a bit sticky and work half-assed). If you want it, it's yours. I'll throw it in a box and ship it (the whole AAKB) to you just to keep it out of the trash one day. It's bright white at least (very little yellowing esp on the keypad). If you don't want it and someone else does, let me know. -Swift From spc at conman.org Thu Jul 14 17:28:12 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 18:28:12 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <20160714222812.GC29935@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated: > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: > > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. > > Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot. > > I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot > more about it than I ever thought to learn. I respect the OS a lot and I > agree with Mouse about parts of it still being object lessons to other > OSes. I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big > bruhaha back in the 1990s. > > HOWEVER... > > Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I > wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you > are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's > very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are > radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and > others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack. I never did much with the networking on VMS (being a student, all I really did with the account was a few Pascal programs for Programming 101 and printing really large text files since I didn't want to waste the my printer paper). All I really have to go on is what I've read about it, and it was probably DECnet stuff (clustering, etc) that made the network invisible. Yes, there are other systems out that that may have similar functionality (QNX is one I did work with, and loved it). > > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > > water). > > The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about > how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence > of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis > shell scripting and that's also accurate. My complaint was that for simple things (like changing a directory) it was very verbose compared to Unix (or even MS-DOS). But I absolutely *love* the assembly language of the VAX. It's a wonderful instruction set. -spc (Not that I did much VAX assembly ... ) From other at oryx.us Thu Jul 14 17:39:23 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:39:23 -0500 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> Message-ID: <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> Thanks for the comments, it's always educational to get the viewpoints and experiences from others, on items that are "shared ground". I didn't mean to come off like an OS/2 fanatic. I started using OS/2 around 1990, early 1991 at the latest, and short of Unix (I wasn't a Unix fanatic at the time, although I was coming up to speed), I still judge OS/2 to be one of the better x86 options for the early and mid 1990's. Its a given here that you looked at the software you wanted to run, then purchased the appropriate hardware accordingly. Thanks for the reminder on the Arca Noae, I'm sure I had read that previously, then just selectively chose to drop it from memory. I haven't used OS/2, or its derivatives, exclusively on a day-to-day basis since probably 1997 or 1998 at the latest. On 07/14/16 04:53 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > >> In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3. I was taking >> a lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language >> specifically, I found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my >> work. OS/2 truly provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up >> a DOS session with my Assembly code and go right on working. > > I had similar experiences with DOS and something called DESQview/X. I > think it was made by Quarterdeck Systems. I didn't know squat about UNIX > or XDMCP at the time, but it was still beyond awesome to me to be able to > run a DOS window and do something uber-stupid in Lattice-C or Borland and > watch it gracefully recover. So, I can emphatically understand what you > mean. > >> OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does >> one need per OS? > > Fair point, but choice is good, too. > >> From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back >> in the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS >> (Work Place Shell). > > That's inside baseball to me. I'll take your word for it. > >> OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 >> volumes. > > You probably already know, but it seems there is another one now, too, > based on ECS: > > https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-lion-go/ > > Also FYI, just to be super-clear, I didn't mean to bash or attack OS/2. I > was just saying I'm too ignorant about it to make a judgment and IBM > burned me too much to care. However, for all I know it's super-awesome. > > -Swift > From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 14 17:55:48 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:55:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: >> CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera. On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: > I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at > least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and > the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste. > You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you Not very. Just current events during my time. I was never an important participant. But, I was there. > happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the > name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be > wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before > FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of > DOS... Yes. Novell acquired the remains of DRI in 1991? They sold DR-DOS as "Novell DOS" Caldera was formed a few years later by some Novell people. (The Caldera V Microsoft lawsuit was not about copyright; it was complaining about dirty dealings by Microsoft, such as putting unnecessary code into Windoze 3.1 to make it refuse to run under DR-DOS. There was a settlement in 2000? that was believed to be about $250M) Caldera begat Lineo, Lineo begat DRDOS, Inc. DRDOS, Inc. is apparently for sale for $25K. If you have any expectations of being sued by Microsoft for writing anything that resembles any of their stuff, it could be cheap legal insurance. (Adam Osborne was too slow about buying Visicalc debris) When a company folds, the IP rights may end up with multiple people, either in dispute, or simply non-exclusively owned by more then one. Hence, Novell could spin off CP/M, without giving up their joint ownership of IP rights as protection against Microsoft. > but it could just be the drugs. Could be. From cctalk at beyondthepale.ie Thu Jul 14 16:51:40 2016 From: cctalk at beyondthepale.ie (Peter Coghlan) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:51:40 +0100 (WET-DST) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: "Your message dated Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:43:23 -0400 (EDT)" <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> > > > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > > water). > > I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so did > Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line? I used it a lot and I had some issues here and there but I found it to be streets ahead of any other command line system I came across on anything else anywhere. (Not that I think we should doing os-wars re-enactments here. Too many glass houses to start a stone throwing competition.) Regards, Peter Coghlan. From useddec at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 17:57:37 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:57:37 -0500 Subject: DEC items to either pick up, ship or drop off at VCF midwest In-Reply-To: <20160714064243.GC32757@Update.UU.SE> References: <20160714003926.7D4BE18C0E5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20160714064243.GC32757@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: I think a few list members who have seen the basement have taken a few pictures. I have no problem if they want to post them to the list. Some things change often depending on how I feel and if I have help. I someone wants, I can try to take a few pics with my I phone and text them to them so they can post them here. I don't even know if the basement is half of the total. Paul On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 1:42 AM, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 08:39:26PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > From: Greg Stark > > > > > It doesn't seem reasonable to me for you to request buyers provide > you > > > with a list of what they would be interested in > > > > It might seem more reasonable if you'd seen his basement... :-) > > > > Noel > > While I haven't seen the basement in question I know Paul has lots > and lots of gear, as well as limited time and resources to do > inventory. > > So while a list with pictures would be nice, I think the alternative > would be that we wouldn't see any of it. > > What would be good is a brief description of what vintage and type of > gear there is.. although Paul probably has "one of each" :) > > /P > From echristopherson at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 20:38:45 2016 From: echristopherson at gmail.com (Eric Christopherson) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 20:38:45 -0500 Subject: How to execute arbitrary code on a Nintendo Message-ID: <20160715013845.GA41000@gmail.com> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/07/how-to-beat-super-mario-bros-3-in-less-than-a-second/ -- Eric Christopherson From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Thu Jul 14 21:26:19 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:26:19 -0400 Subject: Seeking RL02 cable transition connector Message-ID: Asking for a friend... ;-) An old buddy of mine picked up a PDP-11/73 at auction and we just went over it tonight - cleaned out some spilled toner from some careless stacking in a warehouse, and looked over the RL02 on top and it all seems complete and good to go, except... the connector on the I/O bulkhead was broken off (the ears and screws remain) and the BC06R 40-pin cable is sticking out. The drive-to-drive cable is there and looks intact, but there's nothing at the CPU end to clamp it to. These get brought up from time to time as people refurb 1980s PDP-11s and such - The easiest place to get these from is dead RL02 drives, since there are two off them on the back of each drive. Does anyone have a loose one to sell? Also as mentioned from time to time, the part number seems to be obscure and buried, but it's a component in a C-AD-7012415-0-0 "transition bracket assembly", which appears to be this 40-pin ZIF connector attacked to a rack-mountable metal bracket. All he needs is the plastic bit, but if it comes attached to a bracket, then that's OK too. Yes, I know we can get him operational with a long 40-pin cable. I'd just like to replace the one missing bit. Thanks! -ethan From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Thu Jul 14 23:03:50 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:03:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, > I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah, probably. But there's a lot more to networking than just IP. Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From rlloken at telus.net Thu Jul 14 23:41:38 2016 From: rlloken at telus.net (Richard Loken) Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:41:38 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: >> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, >> I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. > > If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah, > probably. But there's a lot more to networking than just IP. > Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and > integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact. And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix. The candidate for lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from BSD4.X. I think I recall credit given to Berkeley and bsd it the readable UCX files in VAX/VMS Version 5 but all I have is an Alpha running OpenVMS 8.2 and those file don't contain any copyright or credit notices at all. They start off with stuff like this: /****************************************************************************** *************************************************/ /* Created: 18-NOV-1997 11:24:36 by OpenVMS SDL EV1-50 */ /* Source: 22-OCT-1996 00:33:26 DISK$UCX_BUILD2:[UCX.X42.BL21.SRC.NET]INET_USE */ /****************************************************************************** *************************************************/ -- Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS : "...underneath those Athabasca University : tuques we wear, our Athabasca, Alberta Canada : heads are naked!" ** rlloken at telus.net ** : - Arthur Black From steven at malikoff.com Fri Jul 15 00:24:28 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 15:24:28 +1000 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <1a95bd6b7bbe754133201a66b9194928.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Swift said: > I think VMS is neat. As a comp sci student I loved using VMS on our 11/780s at Uni, from first year through final year where we also had the use of a Gould PN6080 UNIX mini. (Aside - the Gould had one good drive, one flaky. The OS and staff accounts were on one, student accounts and /tmp on the other. Guess which :) On the teaching VAX, I vaguely recall one time just after the computing department had a new version of the OS installed, I logged in and I typed '&' (or something) on a line by itself and the DCL shell crashed and went back to login. That got patched pretty quick. Another humorous thing was certain faculties such as Statistics or Economics would hand out (apart from an account for each student) a common account that was locked into a DCL menu of for instance stats applications, that had a minimal quota and priveleges and anyone in the course could use to check terminal availability and print or submit job completions and that sort of thing. With these accounts it was possible to break out of the menu to the DCL shell, and as it was an anonymous account do (from hazy memory) something along the lines of EDIT/NOJOURNAL [SYS$SYSTEM]password.dat or something similar, and presto although you couldn't edit it or even see it, it would be held open and any attempt for anyone to log in anywhere would get some message that the password file was locked by another user. I er saw it done by a friend :) Apart from that, students would write crazy long DCL scripts that would find out whether their friends were logged in somewhere on campus, and that sort of thing. No matter that it took ages to execute and used up our meagre student account CPU-seconds quota and log us out! So we just logged in again and got another few CPU seconds. The messaging command (can't recall what it was - phone?) was great and lots of fun to use. Of course geek guys would use it to send messages to girls they could see at other terminals, offering to help! I recall using EDIT/EDT and really loved it, none of our student terminals (Telerays?, Hazeltines, LSI, Wyse, any other cheap beaten-up terminals the Uni owned) ever had the mysterious GOLD key though, and it wasn't till decades later I saw a real DEC keyboard with that key. I felt disappointed because it was actually just yellow and not really gold at all, not even painted. Other times I used to edit my comp sci and stats assignments in line mode on the DECwriter IIIs and Teletype 43s which most students avoided like the plague, preferring to use EDT in full-screen mode on a glass terminal. Being comfortable with line mode editing was very convenient for me if I happened to arrive late to a terminal room when assignments were nearly due. And now I have one of those cute little baby VAXen, the smallest VAX ever made, a 4000 VLC from an eBay impulse purchase. I have not powered it up yet but someday I will and am hoping it works and has VMS on it. It might even jog a few more fond memories (^_^) Steve. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 00:37:11 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 01:37:11 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot. > > I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot > more about it than I ever thought to learn.... > ... I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big > bruhaha back in the 1990s. It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s. I was on both sides, so mostly, I watched. I got my start with VMS a few months before I touched UNIX - same hardware - VAX-11/750. I've written device drivers, system utilities, and application code for both. VMS was very good to me from 1984-1994, and I did a bit more with it from 1997-2003, then nothing commercially since then. UNIX (and by extension Linux) has been good to me the entire time since 1985. If I have choice, I'll grab something UNIXy to do my work on - I'm not particular as to flavor. > HOWEVER... > > Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I > wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you > are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's > very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are > radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and > others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack. I think TCP networking on VMS is a bit of a bodge, but back when I used it every day in the 1980s, we didn't _have_ any Ethernet interfaces in the entire company - *everything* we did was via sync and async serial. How well do you think it would go if all you had was SLIP and PPP? We did a lot. Yes, other people had high-speed networking and VAX clusters, etc. We did not. Not even our VAXen running UNIX. All serial, all day. We still got a lot done. >> But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except >> for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the >> water). I found certain aspects of DCL to be quirky, even if I did learn it before I touched a UNIX shell. That said, it was easier (to me) to write full-on apps and utilities in DCL than sh or csh. It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it). I even completely automated our build process (formerly a full-time engineer's job, but as the company shrank, we couldn't afford to have someone who was, essentially just a build master)... source code control, pulling code based on which product it was for, compiling it (without "make"), linking it locally, sending the objects over to a machine running another version of VMS, linking it there, pulling all the text objects and executables into two tape-build repositories and cutting magtape for distribution - all in DCL. I literally turned a fulltime job into a script. All you had to type was "$ RELEASE " and it would pull everything, auto-increment the version number, inject it into the code, build everything and tell you it was time to make tapes (8 hours later!) I'm sure it's possible to do all of that in csh, but even now, I wouldn't want to be the one to build that. > The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about > how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence > of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis > shell scripting and that's also accurate. The regularity and predictability of args and options is definitely a strength in DCL. Args are entire words, not letters which change from app to app. Here's a trivia question: which letters are _not_ valid arguments to 'ls'? I know one off the top of my head but not the others. Next thing - how about those args to 'dd'? Crazy. Now how about 'tar'... etc., etc. I use this stuff every day, but I have internalized a massive amount of UNIX trivia to be able to do so. VMS requires far less random factoid knowledge to get stuff done on the command line. There's a system command line parser, and it helps with the consistency. VMS HELP is also awesome. I use man pages - they are good if you already know how things work and are just trying to remember is it '-p' here, or '-a' or what? > Strengths versus Unix: > * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very > early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too. Much stronger. There are dozens of privileges you can grant so someone can do their job and not overstep things. UNIX says, "all or nothing. Don't screw up." [ other strengths deleted for brevity ] > Downsides versus Unix: > > * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too. > Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers There was DECUS back in the day - a very strong source of sharable software going back well over a decade before there was any VMS. Consequently, there was less freeware available via Usenet. OTOH, I learned a *lot* porting utilities and games from comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games to VMS. Some things were a lot harder than others. > * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box. Meh. > * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from > UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as > saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I > dearly miss. There are looping directives, but they are not as C-like as sh/bash/csh/ksh... > * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and > dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be > fair). Very true, but back in the day, you had to pay ~$30,000 to get the UNIX source. I have the papers to prove it (Software Results had a System III and System V source license, which I ended up with when the company folded). You could also pay DEC for VMS source. No idea how much that was (not cheap). For some perspective, you were running these OSes on machines that cost $300,000 in 1977 (11/780), $120,000 in 1980 (11/750), $40,000 in 1982 (11/730), $10,000 in 1985 (MicroVAX)... (newer, smaller and slower, at least the models we could afford). > If you are a VMS bigot and you take offense at any of this, please go easy > on me. I'm just giving my impressions, not stating any of this as absolute > truth or law. I'm certainly not trying to bust on VMS. I think VMS is > neat. No offense taken, but I'm just sharing my own experiences as someone who used both, heavily, every day for most of 1984-1994 on 80s hardware, and still use UNIX and UNIX-y things all day every day. In the end, it did thrive where VMS was something of a dead-end. Fun ride while it lasted, though. -ethan (Some prices from memory, some checked against resources like http://www.jcmit.com/cpu-performance.htm ) ~ From huw.davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Fri Jul 15 02:12:18 2016 From: huw.davies at kerberos.davies.net.au (Huw Davies) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:12:18 +1000 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <84A34582-3435-45CE-AAB1-641A216203B6@kerberos.davies.net.au> > On 15 Jul 2016, at 14:41, Richard Loken wrote: > > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: > >>> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, >>> I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. >> >> If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah, >> probably. But there's a lot more to networking than just IP. >> Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and >> integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact. > > And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 > since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the > Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix. The candidate > for lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from > BSD4.X. Let?s say UCX had some deficiencies (being polite) and was replaced with TCPIP Services for OpenVMS. This TCP/IP stack was based on the code from Tru64 Unix (aka Digital Unix aka OSF/1) and used what was known as the basket to map the OpenVMS API to Tru64 and vice versa. Disclaimer: I used to work for HP and was an OpenVMS Ambassador so might be slightly biased Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green" From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:00:57 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:00:57 -0400 Subject: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy In-Reply-To: <01Q2JU03N4YS00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <37CC4933-E0AF-4FB5-9F26-05EB95FCD3BA@mcneill.co.nz> <01Q2JU03N4YS00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: Are the caddys specific to that drive or pretty standard? I picked up a stack of caddys recently, if you can get me a reference picture i can see if any of them are the same. --Devin On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: > > > > Greetings > > > > The DEC RRD40 CD-ROM drive requires a DEC caddy to insert and remove > CD's from > > the drive. Does anyone have a spare caddy they could sell/post to me? > > > > Hi Brendan, > > I have a few but where I am is just about the furthest anyone can get from > New > Zealand without leaving the planet. Let me know if you don't find any > closer > to you. > > Regards, > Peter Coghlan. > From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 08:49:01 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 07:49:01 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Richard Loken wrote: > And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 > since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the > Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix. The candidate for > lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from > BSD4.X. It was second hand and unverified information, as I said. Perhaps I even misheard them and they did, in fact, say Ultrix. Let me backpedal and say "I heard one or more of the VMS TCP/IP stacks came from a UNIX variant". I don't know much about VMS, as I said. I wasn't trying to be an expert or ruffle anyone's feathers, that's why I added the qualifiers. > I think I recall credit given to Berkeley and bsd it the readable UCX > files in VAX/VMS Version 5 but all I have is an Alpha running OpenVMS > 8.2 and those file don't contain any copyright or credit notices at all. Well, for all I know, they wrote it from scratch. All I'm saying is that the presence of multiple IP stacks looks to me to be unwieldy, organic, and incremental. DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also proprietary, seldom used, and seems to mean different things to different people since it was developed in "phases" which bear only loose resemblance to each other in form & function. -Swift From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 15 09:08:40 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:08:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also > proprietary, seldom used, I think it is only semi-proprietary. I've seen open documentation that at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet and for serial lines. However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of hosts it supports. I don't remember exactly what the limit is; different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large corporation. (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host number within each area? I'm sure someone here knows.) Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might have been a contender. For all I know maybe they've even done that, but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony. But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the ground-up integration into the OS. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 09:27:38 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:27:38 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <919E4223-90D3-4268-9AA3-BCF3471FD7D6@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:08 AM, Mouse wrote: > >> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also >> proprietary, seldom used, > > I think it is only semi-proprietary. I've seen open documentation that > at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was > sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet > and for serial lines. DECnet is open in the sense that anyone can see or reprint the specs, and implement the protocols. Arguably it is pretty similar to the BSD license (the "with attribution" variant). And the specs were written with sufficient care that following them is, in general, sufficient to create an interoperable implementation. For example, I implemented DDCMP for RSTS from the DDCMP spec, and "it just worked". This, by the way, is quite rare in protocol specs; it certainly is not true for many RFCs, and for one I know of it wasn't even considered a worthwhile goal by the document editor! The only ways in which DECnet is proprietary is that the development work was done by Digital and not others. And the name (DECnet) was a trademark. (Then again, so is "Linux".) Actually, the "done by Digital" is true only through Phase III. In Phase IV, you get Ethernet (developed by Digital, Intel, and Xerox), HDLC (developed by various telcos based on earlier work by IBM), and perhaps other bits. And of course, in Phase V, a whole lot of the machinery is from OSI, though that was very much a two-way street (IS-IS came from Digital's work on Phase V routing, as did OSPF). Finally, even when one organization did the detail work in a particular area, various algorithms and inspiration came from other sources. Dijkstra's algorithm is a good example, of course, but there are plenty of others. (The softlink loop detection algorithm in DECdns is another example of a decades old algorithm put to good work in DECnet.) paul From imp at bsdimp.com Fri Jul 15 09:28:16 2016 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 08:28:16 -0600 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 7:49 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Richard Loken wrote: >> And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 >> since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the >> Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix. The candidate for >> lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from >> BSD4.X. > > It was second hand and unverified information, as I said. Perhaps I even > misheard them and they did, in fact, say Ultrix. Let me backpedal and say > "I heard one or more of the VMS TCP/IP stacks came from a UNIX variant". I > don't know much about VMS, as I said. I wasn't trying to be an expert or > ruffle anyone's feathers, that's why I added the qualifiers. Ah Eunice. There was a project to run Unix binaries on VMS. From that project at least two TCP/IP stacks were born: Wollongong TCP/IP and Multinet TCP/IP. Wollongong basically bought the rights to Eunice and made it into basically a TCP/IP product as well. The guys that did Eunice originally went back and created Multinet which is a radically cleaned up version with many thing rewritten for speed. Eunice started out life from 4.1BSD and was later based on 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD. Ultrix was also based on 4.2BSD. UCX was a different beast... As was the package from CMU... Warner From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 09:31:30 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:31:30 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <2D1A3CD1-DFA0-4BE4-83C2-6FEC0E735999@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:08 AM, Mouse wrote: > >> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also >> proprietary, seldom used, > > ... > However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of > hosts it supports. I don't remember exactly what the limit is; > different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address > size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large > corporation. (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host > number within each area? I'm sure someone here knows.) Correct. 16 bits total in Phase IV (up from 8 bits in Phase II and III). Then again, with NAT ("hidden areas") that worked acceptably well even for the largest DECNet (the one at Digital). Keep in mind that DECnet was designed as a network for an organization, not as an internet. > Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the > IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might > have been a contender. For all I know maybe they've even done that, > but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony. DECnet did increase the address space, with Phase V where the address is variable length up to 20 bytes. The difficulty is that it was all based on OSI, with all the international standards bureaucracy that implied. And by that time, TCP/IP had become a viable competitor, which was "good enough" (32 bit addresses) and sufficiently much simpler and more nimble that it came out the winner. > But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the > ground-up integration into the OS. Well said. paul From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 09:44:52 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 08:44:52 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote: > It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s. I was on both > sides, so mostly, I watched. This thread has definitely been the most civil discussion and set of anecdotes I've seen when folks discuss VMS and Unix in the same thread. I usually don't bring up VMS because I'm not that well versed in it, and when I make one mistake in the nomenclature or some other triviality, someone usually gets butthurt and tries to make a fool out of me or just scream bloody murder. However, folks have been nice this time, for which I breathe a sigh of relief. Of course there is still time for someone to troll... :-) > I've written device drivers, system utilities, and application code for > both. >From your experience and depth on both platforms, it sounds like you have a well rounded perspective. I have merely hours of experience in VMS but years in UNIX. I've never written any device drivers outside of stubs or proof of concept stuff I've done in tutorials. However, I've written a lot of C utilities and app code and most of that was on UNIX platforms, but a little in DOS or on the Amiga. > If I have choice, I'll grab something UNIXy to do my work on - I'm not > particular as to flavor. I'll reach for NetBSD first, FreeBSD second, and then it's just "whatever will work" if those are off the table. For play, I love to work with obscure, obsolete, specialized, or otherwise interesting UNIX variants. > How well do you think it would go if all you had was SLIP and PPP? Do you mean versus some other point-to-point protocol or versus just using serial terminal emulation? If it's versus DECnet, I'd say that it'd go quite well. I've used both SLIP and PPP (and loads of others) to build networks with Unix boxes and/or Cisco routers. When I worked for Cisco I implemented a LOT of PPP links. They work great. They create a nice interface for you to apply ACLs, routing rules, etc.. I have zero problem with either. In fact, there are extensions to PPP such as multi-link and VJ compression that make it rock even harder. Personally, I've had super-wonderful experiences with the protocol. My only doubt is that if it was used on very old equipment it might have been too CPU or memory intensive versus something much more simplistic or efficient. > All serial, all day. We still got a lot done. There isn't anything wrong with serial, as far as I'm concerned. It's got it's place and it did a great job for folks. It still does in many cases. > That said, it was easier (to me) to write full-on apps and utilities in > DCL than sh or csh. Well, I'm a C programmer, as I mentioned, as well as a UNIX zealot and I am pretty allergic to csh. Again, it's just a style issue, but I wish that Bill Joy didn't name it "csh" because it's not something I'm happy to see associated with C coders (folks automatically assume you want csh if you're a c-coder sometimes). I'll definitely take any form of Bourne shell (sh ksh zsh bash) before I resort to csh. Fortunately, most folks seem to agree and csh is pretty niche these days. That's not to say there aren't very enthusiastic users of csh, too. As far as DCL goes, I'll just say this, without 'while' and 'for' I'm sorry, it's a PITA. As a programmer, I find shell scripting to be much more flexible due to more language features and sugar. Sure, you can use 'if'-statements to cobble together a replacement for most situations, but it's clumsy & ugly from what I've seen. > It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL > (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it). Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in a comparison involving functionality. It's not a fair fight or apples to apples in my mind at all. Plus, Perl isn't a CLI interpreter (though I suppose you could try it that way). DCL is. Hence, I'd compare it to shell script. However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise in DCL (joke!). :-) > The regularity and predictability of args and options is definitely a > strength in DCL. Args are entire words, not letters which change from > app to app. That is the big thing that DCL has going for it, if you ask me. > Next thing - how about those args to 'dd'? Crazy. Now how about > 'tar'... etc., etc. I use this stuff every day, but I have internalized > a massive amount of UNIX trivia to be able to do so. This is always the criticism of UNIX environments versus VMS & DCL. It's valid, I think. I agree with you about the whacky args to 'dd', 'tar', and others (SysV vs BSD 'ps', I could go on and on). > VMS requires far less random factoid knowledge to get stuff done on the > command line. There's a system command line parser, and it helps with > the consistency. I've also been told that the way the help is put together in VMS tends to make the CLI args and switches more consistently well-documented. That's a lesson for some clever UNIX variant to learn, or perhaps it's the "wild west" nature of UNIX that actually attracts some people. It's the whole "less regulation" idea, maybe. I don't know. However, I would like to see some improvements here and there. UNIX isn't perfect. There are plenty of dingy spots. However, to me it's like democracy - it's the best of a bunch of bad systems. > Much stronger. There are dozens of privileges you can grant so someone > can do their job and not overstep things. UNIX says, "all or nothing. > Don't screw up." Well, while I agree VMS is much stronger when we talk about it in the context of the 1990s. However, it's certainly not "all or nothing" even in older UNIX variants. There *are* 'group' and 'other' permissions, not just 'owner'. The problem for that model is when you need an exception. Ie.. someone wants to write to a file that they don't own, aren't in the proper group for, and you can't add them to the group for some reason, PLUS you can't open up the file permissions. That's the the most common situation that serves as an argument for POSIX ACLs. It's the "textbook example". Having said that, let's talk real for just a sec. The current crop of Unix variants often have equal or better authentication/authorization systems. Take a look at SElinux, Cgroups, Capabilities, and POSIX ACLs. Put those all together and you can do everything that VMS can plus a ton more. The modern discussion also mirrors the storage capabilities of VMS. It has has shadow-sets (essentially RAID1) for a long time and they nailed that functionality very early on as well as made the ODS file system aware of it. However, post LVM2, ZFS, BTRFS, DRBD / HAST, and/or compared to modern VxVM & VxFS, VMS is lacking a very long list of valuable and important features that are freely available now in many UNIX variants. > OTOH, I learned a *lot* porting utilities and games from > comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games to VMS. Some things were a lot > harder than others. I think the biggest stumbling block is the lack of fork() in VMS. They have threads and some hacks like LIB$SPAWN, instead. However, in most cases, I'll take a fork() model over threads any day. Concurrency and marshalling threads has always been a PITA, IMHO. It's not that fork() gets out of it, it just forces a more simple structure/design (again, just my opinion based on experience). -Swift From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:07:44 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:07:44 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote: >> It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s. I was on both >> sides, so mostly, I watched. > > This thread has definitely been the most civil discussion and set of > anecdotes I've seen when folks discuss VMS and Unix in the same thread. I > usually don't bring up VMS because I'm not that well versed in it, and > when I make one mistake in the nomenclature or some other triviality, > someone usually gets butthurt and tries to make a fool out of me or just > scream bloody murder. However, folks have been nice this time, for which I > breathe a sigh of relief. Indeed. As you've seen, I use both. No need to be all "Commodore vs Atari" about it. ;-) >> How well do you think it would go if all you had was SLIP and PPP? > > Do you mean versus some other point-to-point protocol or versus just using > serial terminal emulation? I mean vs ethernet-type networking. The physical layer stuff has fewer variants to worry about with Ethernet vs serial (3mbps vs 10mbps vs 100mbps, and 10Base5 vs 10Base2 vs 10BaseT vs flavors of fiber as opposed to all the parameters one has to match up to get any two machines talking over a serial link). Where this matters is that all our modern gear was developed in an environment where nearly everything being transported across it is TCP/IP. Try pushing DDCMP over the wire. ISTR there's now some TCP wrappers to get gear to be willing to handle these packets, but that just adds to the complexity and frustration. With serial DDCMP, we just hooked up two sync serial ports up with a modem eliminator (which provides the baud-rate clocking for both hosts) and it "just works" (since there are few options to configure at that point). All the configuration is a layer or two up as you set up the logical nodes in your network. Entirely unlike TCP/IP and Unix networking in terms of workflow and type/quantity. This is not a "A is better than B" argument - it's just some descriptions of the elements of the process and how they are different. >> It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL >> (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it). > > Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in > a comparison involving functionality. Sure. Absolutely no argument. Just pointing out that comparing DCL to shell isn't exactly apples-to-apples either. If anything, measured in arbitrary units, DCL is a half-step over shell scripting and a half-step below Perl (etc.) scripting. > However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise > in DCL (joke!). :-) Have you ever seen a string of ''' used to dereference DCL args? Definitely the hardest thing about getting a working complex DCL script. >> Much stronger. There are dozens of privileges you can grant so someone >> can do their job and not overstep things. UNIX says, "all or nothing. >> Don't screw up." > > Well, while I agree VMS is much stronger when we talk about it in the > context of the 1990s. However, it's certainly not "all or nothing" even in > older UNIX variants. There *are* 'group' and 'other' permissions, not just > 'owner'. I don't mean file permissions, I mean system privileges. Some UNIX filesystems have ACLs (VMS has _very_ well developed ACLs, but that's not what I mean). I mean "I am root" or "I am not root" in UNIX land becomes, "what system object/resource do you wish to access? Read or write? Do you have one of the following privileges: NETMBX, TMPMBX, GROUP, GRPPRV, ACNT, ALLSPOOL, BUGCHK, EXQUOTA, GRPNAM, PRMCEB, PRMGBL, PRMMBX, SHMEM,ALTPRI, AUDIT, OPER, PSWAPM, SECURITY, SYSLCK, WORLD,DIAGNOSE, IMPORT, MOUNT, SYSGBL, VOLPRO, READALL,BYPASS, CMEXEC, CMKRNL, DETACH, DOWNGRADE, LOG_IO, PFNMAP, PHY_IO, READALL, SETPRV, SHARE, SYSNAM, SYSPRV, UPGRADE? Want to mount a disk? In Unix, a user is told "must be root". In VMS, you need MOUNT. You can give someone MOUNT and none of the other privs, meaning this user can mount disks or tapes but not necessarily read physical memory or bypass file permissions or write to device registers or any of the other privileged tasks. It's not all-or-nothing; you grant the level of access required and no more. (http://www.mi.infn.it/~calcolo/OpenVMS/ssb71/6015/6017p014.htm#vms_privileges_tab) >> OTOH, I learned a *lot* porting utilities and games from >> comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games to VMS. Some things were a lot >> harder than others. > > I think the biggest stumbling block is the lack of fork() in VMS. Yes. That was one I just dodged. If stuff I was porting did a fork(), I just found something else to port instead. The workarounds, as you point out, are non-trivial and don't map 1:1 to what fork() does. -ethan From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:35:01 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 09:35:01 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote: > Indeed. As you've seen, I use both. No need to be all "Commodore vs > Atari" about it. ;-) Hehe, I forgot about that. Here I am liking both of those, now too. I think I was playing with Hatari yesterday and eUAE last week ! > I mean vs ethernet-type networking. The physical layer stuff has fewer > variants to worry about with Ethernet vs serial (3mbps vs 10mbps vs > 100mbps, and 10Base5 vs 10Base2 vs 10BaseT vs flavors of fiber as > opposed to all the parameters one has to match up to get any two > machines talking over a serial link). OH oh oh. Then, sure! I see your points. I remember the days before CAT5 ruled everything and you had "hubs" that didn't do autosensing very well etc... Yes, as you say, serial is much more simple. It also sounds like it's advantaged because of how closely tied to the OS that particular type of networking is. Ie.. what Mouse already said with more elegance. > Sure. Absolutely no argument. Just pointing out that comparing DCL to > shell isn't exactly apples-to-apples either. If anything, measured in > arbitrary units, DCL is a half-step over shell scripting and a half-step > below Perl (etc.) scripting. Heh, okay, I see what you mean, then. Since I don't even know DCL that well, I'm totally going to take your word for it. > Have you ever seen a string of ''' used to dereference DCL args? > Definitely the hardest thing about getting a working complex DCL script. Yes! I have seen that. That's one thing that jumped out at me, too. > I don't mean file permissions, I mean system privileges. Some UNIX > filesystems have ACLs (VMS has _very_ well developed ACLs, but that's > not what I mean). Ah, okay, you were talking about what I'd call "capabilities" (in Linux parlance) and the whole VMS kit and kaboodle. I was thinking just permissions. > Want to mount a disk? In Unix, a user is told "must be root". In VMS, > you need MOUNT. Yes, and I do wish this was the default mentality in UNIX, too. I think it makes more sense and gives an admin more flexibility. It's flat-out better in most cases. As I said, capabilities are fairly similar, but they didn't come along until WAY after most UNIX variants were set in their ways. -Swift From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:40:27 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:40:27 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 23:51, Peter Coghlan wrote: > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line? I used it a lot and I > had some issues here and there but I found it to be streets ahead of any other > command line system I came across on anything else anywhere. > > (Not that I think we should doing os-wars re-enactments here. Too many glass > houses to start a stone throwing competition.) This! I learned VMS at uni in the mid-1980s. It was my first proper CLI -- before that, my computing experience consisted of ZX Spectrum, CBM PET and very briefly TI 99/4A. All of those had BASIC in ROM, so they weren't true command shells. The BBC Micro had a separate OS from its BASIC and did have a sort of CLI, later more completely separated off in RISC OS -- but I couldn't afford a BBC Micro and neither could my school. I still prefer the DOS/NT shell to Unix ones, to the horror, dismay and disgust of all my Unix-using friends. The Unix shell does all kinds of fancy stuff I never need, but it makes things I use a lot, like wildcard renames, much harder than on CMD.EXE. So, yes, I liked DCL and thought it was a pretty good -- if wordy -- shell. I don't suppose I remember much now but I preferred it to Unix from my early experiences on Xenix. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:45:37 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:45:37 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 22:51, Jerry Kemp wrote: > > I'm missing something here. Although most did/are using the Apple supplied > GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement. > > I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although mostly > for fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for OS X/PPC. > > Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can pretty > much do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix. What OS X > didn't ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own. *Blink* Really? I did not think it was possible to boot OS X in multiuser mode _without_ loading Aqua and the desktop. Am I wrong? Darwin, maybe, but AFAIK Darwin isn't maintained any more, is it? > In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3. I was taking a > lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language specifically, I > found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my work. OS/2 truly > provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up a DOS session with my > Assembly code and go right on working. Interesting. I didn't do much programming on OS/2, more on plain old DOS, but I could readily crash my OS/2 2 home PC with Fractint. Its fancy video modes could instantly cause OS/2 to throw an exception and halt. > Applications are/were a long story on OS/2, that I could write volumes on, > but in short, if you wanted to play games, DOS and later, Windows was the > place to be. Or the more 2000+ updated answer, on a game console. Hmmm. I take your point. I was never a gamer and Win3 apps ran great on OS/2 2, IME. > OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does one > need per OS? :-) Variety is the spice of life? > From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back in > the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS (Work > Place Shell). Indeed. And honestly WPS was really not all that as a shell. I place it down there with Amiga Intuition in its clunkiness. Classic MacOS, OS X and Win9x were all slicker and more capable IMHO. > OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 volumes. Indeed. I've tried it. It's just as much of a PITA to install as it was 20y ago. :-( > In summary, back in the early 1990's, I moved to OS/2. I didn't do it to > get some application I needed, I moved for stability in the Wintel world. > And for me, it did a great job. I went from OS/2 2 to the beta of Win95, and then, later, to NT 4. At work, I used NT 3 -- for me, 3.51 was a classic version. No fancy UI but solid and capable. By modern standards, fast, too. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:47:35 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:47:35 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 22:43, Mouse wrote: > As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what > is _much_ better is the documentation it contains. DEC documentation > of the VMS era was _awesome_. Even today I rarely see it equaled, > never mind bettered, in many ways. HELP WOMBAT -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:48:47 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:48:47 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 19:57, Mouse wrote: > Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as > a counterexample. Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to > learn from it. (Not that I think it's perfect, of course. But I do > think it did some things better than most of what I see today.) Well, yes, true -- but it wasn't a personal computer OS, and it wasn't a 1980s OS. It was a 1970s minicomputer OS; the fact that DEC later turned those minis into personal workstations and grafted a GUI on it doesn't change its origins. :-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From spectre at floodgap.com Fri Jul 15 10:54:44 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 08:54:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: from Swift Griggs at "Jul 15, 16 08:44:52 am" Message-ID: <201607151554.u6FFsiHX17302888@floodgap.com> > > That said, it was easier (to me) to write full-on apps and utilities in > > DCL than sh or csh. > > [...] Fortunately, most folks seem to > agree and csh is pretty niche these days. That's not to say there aren't > very enthusiastic users of csh, too. *tcsh*, yes. I now find it very difficult to use vanilla csh, even though (being a product of the University of California) that was the first shell I ever used as an undergraduate. > > It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL > > (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it). > > Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in > a comparison involving functionality. It's not a fair fight or apples to > apples in my mind at all. Plus, Perl isn't a CLI interpreter (though I > suppose you could try it that way). DCL is. Hence, I'd compare it to shell > script. However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise > in DCL (joke!). :-) TMTOWTDI. (Actually having written full apps in Perl.) ObOnTopic: I've always found DCL too damn wordy, but I appreciate its precision. I keep a VAXstation 3100 around just to remind myself "how the other half live." -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- He who Laughs, Lasts. ------------------------------------------------------ From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 10:55:18 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:55:18 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 19:34, Fred Cisin wrote: > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >>> >>> meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot. >> >> Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 >> with a sidecar for many years. > > > I like BMW bikes, and even the imitations (Ural, Dnepr). Ah yes. Now I live relatively close to Ukraine, I thought of getting one. But the company has shut down due to the war with Russia and they've gone up in price 10x over. :-( > I love the Isetta, but somehow none of their cars since then appeal to me. My mum had one. She demolished a gas station kiosk with it, then later, drove home from work, drove into the garage... right up to the back wall, trapping herself in the car as its door opened forwards and it had no reverse gear. :-D She sat there for a whole day until my dad got home from work and freed her. :-) > I played with a NeXT briefly, before release, trying to get a printer to > connect. I'm not sure if I've even seen one since then. I only had minutes on one, once, at a trade show decades back. :'( > How many even know of a connection? True, but does it matter? > > as phone/PDA software, it does OK. > Giving iPhone competition. > Trying to use it as a computer platform seems far-fetched. Oh, it's being tried: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726986/remix-os-android-desktop-ces-2016 Long term, I think Google should find some way to converge ChromeOS and Android. Having 2 different Linux-based OSes seems redundant and a waste of effort. And there's an internal-only Linux server distro too, I hear. But they can afford the duplication of effort. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 10:57:46 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:57:46 -0400 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 11:47 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > > On 14 July 2016 at 22:43, Mouse wrote: >> As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what >> is _much_ better is the documentation it contains. DEC documentation >> of the VMS era was _awesome_. Even today I rarely see it equaled, >> never mind bettered, in many ways. > > > HELP WOMBAT Not to mention "HELP ADVANCED WOMBAT". Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even than that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO. To become a PLATO programmer, all you'd need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with "sit down at a terminal and follow instructions". A logged out terminal would display "Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally everything from that point on would be described by on-line help of one kind or another. paul From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 11:17:04 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 18:17:04 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 17:57, Paul Koning wrote: > Not to mention "HELP ADVANCED WOMBAT". :-) I spent /hours/ reading that. At first I was looking around for the hidden camera because I was convinced someone was playing a very sophisticated practical joke on me at work... > Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even than that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO. To become a PLATO programmer, all you'd need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with "sit down at a terminal and follow instructions". A logged out terminal would display "Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally everything from that point on would be described by on-line help of one kind or another. Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From aek at bitsavers.org Fri Jul 15 11:35:04 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 09:35:04 -0700 Subject: ISO HP 2392 terminal and VT100 keytops In-Reply-To: <21c487d2-eb87-a472-70b2-c85fa6485f6b@bitsavers.org> References: <21c487d2-eb87-a472-70b2-c85fa6485f6b@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <998385b6-a93d-042e-557c-21a99e759a75@bitsavers.org> search over. found one on eBay after finding a seller who was selling a NOS 2392 CRT On 7/10/16 9:09 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > Also, I'd like to try to find an HP 2392 terminal From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 11:32:03 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:32:03 -0400 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 15, 2016, at 12:17 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > > On 15 July 2016 at 17:57, Paul Koning wrote: > ... >> Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even than that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO. To become a PLATO programmer, all you'd need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with "sit down at a terminal and follow instructions". A logged out terminal would display "Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally everything from that point on would be described by on-line help of one kind or another. > > Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now! You can. Check out cyber1.org -- a real PLATO system running on an emulated CDC Cyber. paul From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 15 11:50:24 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 09:50:24 -0700 Subject: PLATO PC floppy In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: <57891450.7030503@sydex.com> Anent PLATO discussions, that reminds me: I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently) PLATO client software on it probably from the mid 1980s. Is the image of this of any interest to anyone? --Chuck From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:03:18 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:03:18 -0600 (MDT) Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now! I wish they'd had a few at schools I attended. I think someone on the list mentioned that PLATO content could be viewed on Apple hardware, too. The wikipedia article on it is very detailed. I've always liked the idea of a "full educational kit" meaning that someone creates a nearly comprehensive set of documents written stepwise from absolute beginner level to help you advance to at least a journeyman's level of skill with as many other self-help/self-learning tools thrown in as could be possibly useful. From the description, PLATO seems to have embraced that idea at various points depending on who was writing content. Cool things about PLATO: * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! * It could do animations in the content * It supported speech synthesis. Blind folks want to play too! * Cool people were involved (NSF, Navy, Air Force, many scientists & engineers, Control Data, etc..) * It had a flight simulator! * It punched above it's CPU power for a i8080 * It was said to be easy to code for (TUTOR was the lang, sayeth wikipedia) * They had MUDs and other cool multi-user games, as well as "social media" (ie.. chat and multi-user applications). * Even way back when, they had touch screens! I'm sad I didn't get to learn physics 101 from one! However, my instructor for that class happened to be awesome, so maybe I should have said Linear Equations or Calc II. I had foreign unintelligible mealy-mouthed cut-rate TAs teaching those classes. Puh. I'd have taken an PLATO terminal ANY DAY over those guys since their content would have presumably been in the Queen's clear readable English. Nowadays you have Khan Academy (go Khan!) and other places that have some pretty fabulous courses and content. Not to mention big unis doing open-courses. I think both MIT and Stanford have them. I've downloaded books and materials from the MIT Open Courseware. I also like to take or at least skim courses on things I'm not familiar with aimed at kids. They make a lot fewer assumptions. Motivation I've got. 40 extra hours a week for classes at a brick and mortar school, I sadly do not have (unless I want to lose some serious sleep). So, anything that bootstraps my knowledge in an area in a complete but as-I-get-time fashion, I'm 100% on board with. I also keep old CBT CDROMs and instructional DVDs for various things. They might be old, but they often have more content or did a better job with the illustrations or animations than you get on the web. Learning is great fun to me. School, uhh, not as much. However, I know some people find the collaboration, a live instructor, and friends they make in the social atmosphere to be invaluable for their learning and enthusiasm (which is a learning amplifier, IMHO). I also have to admit that I did learn quite a bit in "labs" for classes I had, especially Astronomy classes. The labs were what kindled a sense of wonder in me. So, learning comes in a constellation of formats. I personally just like the ones that are self-driven the best at this point. I wonder what takes the place of things like PLATO nowadays. Probably a hodge-podge of PeeCee Windows apps and Adobe Flash/AIR apps, I'd guess. I'm not involved in any kind of formal education at this point, so I wouldn't know. -Swift From glen.slick at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:08:41 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:08:41 -0700 Subject: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy In-Reply-To: References: <37CC4933-E0AF-4FB5-9F26-05EB95FCD3BA@mcneill.co.nz> <01Q2JU03N4YS00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: On Jul 15, 2016 10:01 AM, "devin davison" wrote: > > Are the caddys specific to that drive or pretty standard? I picked up a > stack of caddys recently, if you can get me a reference picture i can see > if any of them are the same. > > --Devin They are specific to that drive, which is a* Laser Magnetic Storage International* (LMSI) / Philips CM201 drive. From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:12:29 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:12:29 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 21:03, ben wrote: > * Lets add a brain dead cpu and run DOS. Oh, come on, for the time, it was OK. DOS compatibility looked like it'd be a selling point, although it didn't actually prove to be a big one AIUI. The A2000 came out in '87, the same year as the 68030, so including that wasn't really viable. They probably should have used a 68020 (released 1984) but the performance and functionality gains over the 68000 were not that significant, I believe. And I think exploiting some of them would have broken binary compatibility in AmigaOS. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:15:12 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:15:12 +0200 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 00:39, Jerry Kemp wrote: > I still judge OS/2 to be one of the better x86 options for the early and mid > 1990's. Oh, definitely, yes. It truly was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows". Then MS moved the goalposts and improved Windows and leapfrogged it -- and IMHO, IBM never really caught up. Which was probably sensible as throwing tens of $millions of R&D at it would never had paid back. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 12:15:23 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:15:23 -0400 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: <9DE103AE-56F6-4D5B-B6F0-48830CED391D@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 1:03 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > ... > Cool things about PLATO: > * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! > * It could do animations in the content > * It supported speech synthesis. Blind folks want to play too! > * Cool people were involved (NSF, Navy, Air Force, many scientists & > engineers, Control Data, etc..) > * It had a flight simulator! > * It punched above it's CPU power for a i8080 There's an 8080 in the programmable terminals (though the original "Magnvox" terminal was just a pile of hardwired logic). But that didn't have to do much. The real work was in a CDC 6000 series machine. Still, those performed unusually well too; running 600 highly interactive concurrent users on a pair of CDC 6500 machines is pretty impressive. (CPU power: about 2 MIPS per CPU on a good day, two CPUs per 6500.) > * It was said to be easy to code for (TUTOR was the lang, sayeth > wikipedia) > * They had MUDs and other cool multi-user games, as well as "social > media" (ie.. chat and multi-user applications). > * Even way back when, they had touch screens! Not only that, but many of the things you mentioned were invented on PLATO: plasma panel displays, multi user games, social media, chat, bulletin boards ("group notes"), etc. paul From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:22:51 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:22:51 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 19:50, Swift Griggs wrote: > > I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at > least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and > the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste. > > You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you > happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the > name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be > wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before > FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of > DOS... but it could just be the drugs. Novell bought DR for DR-DOS, which became Novell DOS. It also sponsored development of Linux under the codename "Corsair" as a Windows-killer. When it eventually became clear that Linux wasn't ready to rival Windows on the desktop yet and wasn't going to be for quite some years to come, they spun off the Linux division as Caldera -- including the former DR, notably including the UK R&D centre that had created much of DR-DOS. Caldera was focussed on desktop Linux, though. (It's the first distro that I personally adopted, and it was a good one, too.) E.g. before WINE existed, Caldera licensed and ported Sun's WABI to Linux -- where it ran better than it did on Solaris because it was on native x86 & didn't have to do CPU emulation. Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g. many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced: DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly. Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS, took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo. Some bits had been sold off or licensed separately -- e.g. Concurrent DOS (to Concurrent Controls and IMS), & FlexOS to IBM -- so they couldn't be open sourced. Later Novell realised that the best use of Linux for them was to replace Netware as a server OS, and bought SUSE. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:24:40 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:24:40 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson wrote: > And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs? which these days use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed! The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel CPUs. But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM POWER RISC processor line. So, no, not "these days", but from 1994-2006. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:30:46 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:30:46 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5787DEF2.7080901@sydex.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <5787DEF2.7080901@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 20:50, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > Everyone seems to forget about the work-alikes, such as TPM for the > Epson QX-80. True. And there was Pro DOS for the SAM Coup?: http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/ ZCN for the Amstrad NC series: https://www.ncus.org.uk/fnov00.htm And probably others. > GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS functionality for > the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any > accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS. Not GEM as such -- it's the GUI layer. But ST GEM ran on a kernel called GEMDOS, which was a sort of hybrid of CP/M-68K and DR-DOS: a 68000 kernel but with MS-DOS like API compatibility. Written by DR and licensed from them by Atari. So, a better comparison would be DR-DOS. I think nobody ever claimed that DR stole MS-DOS source code, though. It was clean-room reverse-engineered, and had some different internal data structures, which manifested in a (very very few) compatibility problems. However, the accusation is that MS -- or SCP -- did actually use CP/M source code in creating QDOS. It's not that QDOS' design was copied from CP/M, which it was -- that's already been admitted. It's that QDOS contained appropriated CP/M source from DR. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:39:41 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:39:41 +0200 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 22:50, Swift Griggs wrote: > Strengths versus Unix: > * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very > early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too. > * Great hardware error logging that generally tells you exactly what's > wrong (even if you have to run a turd like WSEA to get it out of a > binary error log - same as Tru64 though). > * Lots of performance metrics and instrumentation of the OS's features > * Very solid clustering. (no, it's not incredible and unsurpassed like > some people still say - other OSes have similar features now, but it > took a very long time to catch up to VMS.) > * Some fairly nice backup features (but not as advanced as, say, > whats in LVM2 or ZFS in some ways). > * Regularity. It's hard to articulate but VMS is very very "regular" and > predictable in how it does things. > * Crazy stable. > > Downsides versus Unix: > > * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too. > Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers > * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box. > Maybe VSI will fix this, and maybe they are so politically screwed up > they will never get it off the ground. We'll see. I have an open mind. > * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from > UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as > saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I > dearly miss. > * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and > dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be > fair). I am no VMS expert. I used it, I liked it, I did very basic sysadmin on VAXen, but I've never brought up a machine from bare metal, for instance. (OK, once, kinda, on SIMH.) But that sounds like a very fair summary, perhaps the best I've seen. I'm hoping that VSI actually manage to rectify some of these. A modern x86-64 port, for generic hardware, with the GUI and everything all thrown in, *no* extra premium-charged anything, and perhaps an enhanced POSIX environment with some FOSS tools to facilitate porting stuff over from Linux. And it needs to be priced very very competitively, to make it cheaper than Windows Server on VMware at the very least. I'm not confident of its chances, though. Apple's OS X Server was a very solid product, keenly priced (0 cost user licences), and with excellent functionality and admin compared to Linux -- but nobody much used it and now it's almost forgotten, a sideline. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From geneb at deltasoft.com Fri Jul 15 12:38:27 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:38:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g. > many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that > couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced: > DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly. > Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of what was lost and it's a horror show. :( All the GEM stuff that could be found was released - including ViewMAX. > Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS, > took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo. > ...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS. The kernel & command.com sources were released and then it was canceled. I contacted them a number of years ago about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to basically had a melt down over it. You'd have though I was asking if it was ok if I slow-cooked one of his children. I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get all this stuff released - it was bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the project. For grins I set up a build environment today on a virtual machine - an i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes. It takes 2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :) In 1996 it took a 200Mhz Pentium 2 hours for the same task. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:39:48 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:39:48 -0600 (MDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM > POWER RISC processor line. I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with framebuffers). @#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things would have been different. Of course then something like this might have happened: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france -Swift From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:42:39 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:42:39 +0200 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <1a95bd6b7bbe754133201a66b9194928.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <1a95bd6b7bbe754133201a66b9194928.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 07:24, wrote: > As a comp sci student I loved using VMS on our 11/780s at Uni, from first > year through final year where we also had the use of a Gould PN6080 UNIX mini. > (Aside - the Gould had one good drive, one flaky. The OS and staff accounts > were on one, student accounts and /tmp on the other. Guess which :) > > On the teaching VAX, I vaguely recall one time just after the computing > department had a new version of the OS installed, I logged in and I typed > '&' (or something) on a line by itself and the DCL shell crashed and went > back to login. That got patched pretty quick. > > Another humorous thing was certain faculties such as Statistics or Economics > would hand out (apart from an account for each student) a common account that > was locked into a DCL menu of for instance stats applications, that had a > minimal quota and priveleges and anyone in the course could use to check > terminal availability and print or submit job completions and that sort of > thing. > > With these accounts it was possible to break out of the menu to the DCL shell, > and as it was an anonymous account do (from hazy memory) something along the > lines of EDIT/NOJOURNAL [SYS$SYSTEM]password.dat or something similar, > and presto although you couldn't edit it or even see it, it would be held open > and any attempt for anyone to log in anywhere would get some message that the > password file was locked by another user. I er saw it done by a friend :) > > Apart from that, students would write crazy long DCL scripts that would find > out whether their friends were logged in somewhere on campus, and that sort > of thing. No matter that it took ages to execute and used up our meagre > student account CPU-seconds quota and log us out! So we just logged in again and > got another few CPU seconds. The messaging command (can't recall what it was - > phone?) was great and lots of fun to use. Of course geek guys would use it to > send messages to girls they could see at other terminals, offering to help! > > I recall using EDIT/EDT and really loved it, none of our student terminals > (Telerays?, Hazeltines, LSI, Wyse, any other cheap beaten-up terminals the Uni > owned) ever had the mysterious GOLD key though, and it wasn't till decades later I > saw a real DEC keyboard with that key. I felt disappointed because it was actually > just yellow and not really gold at all, not even painted. > > Other times I used to edit my comp sci and stats assignments in line mode on the > DECwriter IIIs and Teletype 43s which most students avoided like the plague, > preferring to use EDT in full-screen mode on a glass terminal. Being comfortable > with line mode editing was very convenient for me if I happened to arrive late > to a terminal room when assignments were nearly due. > > And now I have one of those cute little baby VAXen, the smallest VAX ever > made, a 4000 VLC from an eBay impulse purchase. I have not powered it up yet > but someday I will and am hoping it works and has VMS on it. It might even jog a > few more fond memories (^_^) Heh. Excellent little nostalgia trip there. My student experiences were similar. :) And yes, I too now have a VAXstation 4000vlc. 3 or 4 of 'em in fact. And I've not tried powering them on yet -- I will do when I get them over here from London. I just want 1 working one to keep and I'll eBay the others. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 12:52:11 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:52:11 +0200 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 07:37, Ethan Dicks wrote: > I think TCP networking on VMS is a bit of a bodge, but back when I > used it every day in the 1980s, we didn't _have_ any Ethernet > interfaces in the entire company - *everything* we did was via sync > and async serial. How well do you think it would go if all you had > was SLIP and PPP? We did a lot. Yes, other people had high-speed > networking and VAX clusters, etc. We did not. Not even our VAXen > running UNIX. All serial, all day. We still got a lot done. Same for me when I started out on Unix with Xenix in 1988 or so. Multiport serial cards were the rule, and most of my office wasn't connected up with Ethernet yet. When I was on PC Pro magazine in London (1995-1996), there was an editorial office LAN (4th floor) and a Labs LAN (basement), but they weren't connected and neither had an Internet connection. In '96! I was the sysadmin for both. The editorial server was a PC with NT Server 3.51, serving both Macs (production team) and Windows PCs (editorial team). I put in an email server and got us all Internet email, before we had any kind of WWW connection on the desktop -- but whereas now I'd do that with Linux, back then, it seemed way too hard and we got a free eval copy of a commercial MS Mail to Internet mail connection app and ran it on the server. Looking back now, it seems ludicrous, but it wasn't then. A few years later, probably about '97 or '98, as a freelance consultant, I put in my 1st web proxy server for one of my clients, doing dial-on-demand over a 56K POTS modem on the server. That seemed very high-tech at the time! Within the next few years I put in a few of those. Indeed I was peripherally involved in the development of this: http://www.mailgate.com/ ... as tools like WinGate were so clunky. At the end of the '90s, having a DoD modem on a Windows NT4 server, a proxy server for WWW access on the workstations and simple POP3 email was sophisticated and I put in a lot of such systems. MailGate, combining POP3 email distribution and a proxy server in one, was _way_ easier than a separate proxy server and email server. It was also approximately *fifty times* cheaper than Exchange Server and Windows Proxy Server, and easier to configure. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 13:10:24 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:10:24 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb wrote: > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > >> Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g. >> many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that >> couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced: >> DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly. >> > Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive > in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of > what was lost and it's a horror show. :( Ahhhh... I would both like to see that, and not to see it, IYSWIM. > All the GEM stuff that could be found was released - including ViewMAX. Ahh yes. I remember the enhanced versions of that. If you recall, we were both on the DeltaSoft FreeGEM list, gods, nearly 2 decades ago now. (!) >> Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS, >> took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo. >> > ...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS. The kernel & command.com sources were > released and then it was canceled. I contacted them a number of years ago > about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to basically had a > melt down over it. You'd have though I was asking if it was ok if I > slow-cooked one of his children. I recall. I have one copy of the source-code CD for DR-DOS. I should put up on Bittorrent somewhere! > I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get all this stuff released - it was > bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the > project. :-( > For grins I set up a build environment today on a virtual machine - an > i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes. It takes > 2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :) In 1996 it took a 200Mhz > Pentium 2 hours for the same task. We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated. Running BeOS on a 200MHz Pentium 1 showed the potential of the hardware like nothing else I've ever seen on x86. It was as snappy and responsive as RISC OS was on the early Archimedes. This is IMHO the definitive review of them, and it is well worth a read: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimedes.pdf I vividly remember reading it as a 19YO student... "The hard disk in the A500 is most noticeable for its ferociously rapid access speed. It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye. The reason for this speed is that the disk is run with no interleaving of sectors. On an IBM XT, for example, the disk rotates about six times between each read to give the puny CPU time to digest; Archimedes eliminates this dead time as the ARM processor can suck stuff off the disk as fast as it can rotate." "It felt like the fastest computer I have ever used, by a considerable margin". ... and the amazement of being able to afford one a few years later. It's by Dick Pountain who later became a colleague and friend. Also see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/ As radical a computer as the Amiga, and far more influential -- it's the origin of the ARM chip and that is _everywhere_ now. But the OS, although not architecturally radical, was radical in other ways: live window dragging! Universal real-time font antialiasing! It felt like the fastest thing ever, as Dick said. Well, the only OS that's felt like that since, for me, was BeOS. I'd _love_ a modern BeOS on a modern multiprocessor PC. But nothing like it exists any more, and Haiku is nothing like as snappy. If I were a billionaire, I'd buy Access ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_(company) ), give the BeOS sources to the Haiku guys and sponsor them to update it. All it really needs today is a built-in hypervisor -- then you could run something bloated like Linux in a VM to get a modern browser etc. while some native ones were developed or ported. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 13:12:52 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:12:52 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 19:39, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM >> POWER RISC processor line. > > I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight > around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their > OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a > mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have > seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for > some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of > POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with > framebuffers). > > @#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in > the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of > Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things > would have been different. > > Of course then something like this might have happened: > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france Absolutely. Next did license out NextStep -- Sun licensed it and had it working on Solaris, but never sold it. I don't recall if IBM did. At least in that era, Apple and IBM missed a trick -- even if IBM was the sole licensee, then OS X Server on IBM server kit would have validated and legitimised OS X Server and might have given it a chance. There was also Novell's Portable Netware on POWER -- I even saw a demo of it running. Never released or sold. :-( -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 13:15:47 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:15:47 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb wrote: > Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of what was lost and it's a > horror show. :( While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources. DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very interesting FOSS OS. It so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy. Later, DR-DOS even got VFAT-compatible Long Filename support. That would have really helped DVX -- one of the problems with it that I read about was the need to mangle X.11 font filenames in an incompatible way, so that they'd fit into 8.3 characters. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From ggs at shiresoft.com Fri Jul 15 13:27:06 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:27:06 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: <8FBEC4BF-8E2F-4C26-93B2-FF4488614158@shiresoft.com> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM >> POWER RISC processor line. > > I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight > around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their > OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a > mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have > seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for > some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of > POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with > framebuffers). > > @#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Yep. Damned them. It?s a real pain having to figure out how to allocate development resources within a budget. That whole profit thing gets in the way of all the cool stuff! TTFN - Guy From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 15 13:30:11 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:30:11 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old > ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated. Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the mid-80s when he was working for Cray. I was grousing about the time spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those parts needing it). Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable. Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long. --Chuck From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 13:44:11 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:44:11 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 19:42, Swift Griggs wrote: > > I had forgot myself until I recently started messing with OS8.1 again. Me too, until I restored a bunch of my Macs to sell them before I left the UK. > Anecdotally, lately I've felt that 7.6 + Open Transport was a bit more > stable than 8.1. I'll take your word,. > However, neither approaches "stable" by my definition. Er, no. > Some of the bugs I've seen have also been really nasty. For example I was > playing with Aldus Pagemaker from way-back-when and I noticed that after > you saved over the same file N number of times it'd become corrupt and > unusable. Ouch! Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4 network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B&Ws to me! :-) ) OS X had both AppleTalk and SAMBA network clients, so it could attach to the NT server's shares either by afp:// or smb:// URIs *and see the same files*. But Adobe Photoshop files had resource forks. Open them via SMB and the app couldn't get at the resource fork and the file looked corrupted. Save it, and it was. You *had* to open the files from AFP drive connections -- but the app and OS had no way to enforce this, no warnings, nothing. And trying to teach non-techie graphical designers the difference and what to do was, shall we say, non-trivial. > The hardware is solid, though. When I fire up NetBSD on the machine it's > pretty much just as stable as it is on the x86 side, just slower. Never tried it. I only ever tried Linux on PowerPC once, and that was to aid in the process of installing MorphOS on a G4 mini. Dear gods that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't really worth the effort. I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one at the time. I respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC OS and that's what I miss. Actually, I just upgraded my Mac mini with a dual drive upgrade -- SSD+HD. The drives' donor is my old Toshiba desktop-replacement notebook, which mainly ran Linux. To my great surprise, the Mac could boot off the PC-formatted SSD and Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss, detected both my screens, and went straight online, no problems at all. That's my /second/ ever experience of FOSS Unix on Apple kit! > I also > notice that A/UX seems to be much more stable than OS8.1. For example, > when I fire up "fetch" (an FTP client) that often crashes and locks up my > 8.1 setup on A/UX 3.1, it still crashes a lot but A/UX doesn't lock up. It > just kills the client process. Of course, on A/UX, I usually just use the > CLI for such things anyhow. It was an enlightening experiment, though. I *must* run up A/UX some time. :-( > Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who > wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool, > myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets > sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time) > and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing > break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut. > :-) I'm the opposite. :-) > Yep. Don't forget my old friend DOS, either. Ctrl-alt-delete keys got > quite a workout on those boxes, too. True. I was a DOS master, once. Probably knew the most about it from any OS I've used! I should have considered it, but I didn't -- partly because it didn't have a native GUI. Windows became that, in time, but not 'til the '90s, really. GEM wasn't native and didn't live past the change to the '286, at least in my world -- and thanks to Apple, the PC version was crippled. I didn't consider it because I was thinking of the home-computer GUI OSes, but you're right, it deserved to be in there. > However, it's travails were *nothing* > compared to say Win98ME, which crashed 3-4 times a day for me on ALL > machines I tried it on. That was bottom-barrel Windows, IMHO. 98, 98SE or ME? 3 different things. I didn't like 98 but SE was better. Even ME became OK after it was updated. Around 2002-2003 or so, I refurbed and gave away cast-off PCs from some of my clients, giving 'em to friends and relatives who couldn't afford a PC at that time. (Linux really wasn't ready for non-techies yet). If they could, I put W2K or XP on them. But I had a couple of machines where my stock of suitable compatible RAM meant they maxed out at 80MB, 96MB or in one case 128MB. That's really not enough for Win2K, let alone XP. (I reckon 192MB was the minimum useful RAM for them.) So, reluctantly, I put ME on them, as the most modern OS they could run. And with the unofficial community "service pack", a newer browser and some FOSS apps, you know, actually, ME was not half bad. It was quick and stable enough for use on a machine with >64MB but <=128MB of RAM. I was impressed. Yes, at release, it was crap, but they did actually fix it. Put Firefox, Thunderbird, WinAmp, VLC and OpenOffice on it, plus ZoneAlarm and AVG or something, and it was perfectly usable and secure enough for a non-techie to use it day in, day out. >> -up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2. > > I've spent all of about five minutes with OS/2. After working for IBM for > years, and watching that drama just soured me on touching it. I might have > liked it, though. Who knows? It just didn't have hardly any software I > cared about and I had 100% certainty that IBM would screw it up. Not many native apps, no. But it was a better way to run DOS and Win3 ones than any MS OS of the time. I actually bought it, with my own money, and ran it on my first 2 or 3 PCs. >> 1980s for me. The expensive kit I couldn't afford were things like the >> Apple ][ and BBC Micro, or even a fully-tricked-out C64. > > Glad it wasn't just me. :-) :-/ It's why I collected so many later. All these shiny toys I couldn't afford when they were new! > It's a fair point, but something that gets my back up faster than just > about anything computing-related is unvarnished elitism by spoiled rich > kids. Ie.. people who think it's not what you know or what you can do with > what you have - it's only what you own. Ugh. I can see that. >> Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 >> with a sidecar for many years. > > That actually sounds pretty fun and much harder to visualize that at a PTA > meeting. :-) https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=345783926690&set=a.345781786690.162428.608866690&type=3&theater > XFCE was a close second for a while and is still going pretty strong. If I > wanted an "integrated desktop environment" these days (which I don't) I'd > probably reach for that. It's what I run on non-Ubuntu distros. > It has. I agree. The numbers of Android devices are mind-boggling. These > wasteoids running into water fountains while texting *are* Linux users, > but I'm not sure they really represent anything but consumers and the full > implications of that are yet to be seen. True. But I think Android is going to be what gets the other 2 billion humans online, by and large, and the implications of that will be staggering. > People here spend *insane* amounts of time on them. In my eyes, > Smartphones are the new TV. Another opiate of the masses. > http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/informate-report-social-media-smartphone-use/ Well in a way, yes. But people use them to *communicate* and that's a good thing. > Didn't Sergei Brin say they'd probably get merged? I seem to remember > that, but who knows. I don't think so. I've seen both half-hearted "yes probably" statements and also flat-out denials. Basically, I don't think they know. > I don't think I've even seen ChromeOS. No, me either, but I do kinda fancy a cheap light ChromeBook! > The idea of a > "cloud OS" is utterly repugnant to me on being-pwned-by-big-brother > basis. I won't touch that crap. That's one of many reasons why I actually > do *use* these old OSes and marginal desktops like BSD boxes. Fewer > attackers are looking to target them. Fair enough. I find it so useful, the amazing range of stuff you can do now, all for free, that I'm deeply tied into it. I could barely work without Gmail, Dropbox and so on. > I actually think that it might be fairly difficult or impossible today to > create a commercial desktop OS that wouldn't be full of corporate spyware, > NSA backdoors, and other unacceptable "features". Business weasels of > today just can't resist the sirens call of stolen metadata and tracking/ad > dollars. However, back in the 80s-90s the vendors knew that they had to at > least give the impression they were competing via making a great OS for > the consumer. Nowadays, they've nearly dropped the facade and cynically > decided corporate feudalism trumps consumer empathy every time: witness > the "subscription model". Probably. :-( Recommended reading: Cory Doctorow, /Little Brother/ Free ebook, from the author: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ You'll appreciate "Paranoid Linux". > >> I loved my Blackberry Passport -- its OS really is a better Android than >> Android. However, it just doesn't have the apps. > > I almost got one of those simply on the basis that: > > 1. It's QNX (neat!) > 2. It's not iOS or Android. > 3. It still does a lot of "smartphone" things. Buy mine? Please? :-D I'm serious, it's for sale. > Ultimately I didn't do it because I figure it's still "too smart" for me > to be comfortable, and the battery life can't hold a candle to my current > dumb phone. > >> BB10 is close, but proprietary. Perhaps Jolla comes closer? > > The stuff that appeals to me is more along the lines of: > > Punkt MP01 > https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp01-mobile-phone/ > > Johns Phone > http://www.johnsphones.com/store/item9 Oh dear gods. No no no. I use my phone for many hours a day. I reckon I use it for *phone calls* about 2-3 times a month and SMS about 2-3 times a week. That's almost a legacy feature it happens to have! > ... or the one I use that I imported from some Russian-a-stan: > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Original-Unlocked-Philips-Xenium-E311-Dual-Sim-Cell-Phone-/261919525832 Cool, but no, I use Google Translate and Google Maps and Google Calendar and things many times a day. A pocket device without them now is a paperweight to me. >> I reckon a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, with support for the newer >> APIs -- to hell with Metro etc., just classic Win32, no DOS, no 16-bit, >> [...] > > I'd love that. I'd use it for VMs I have to create to access a zillion > different client VPNs I have to use. Nowadays I use WinXP, or if I must, > Win7. > >> Anything that runs WINE has native Firefox, surely, plus other browsers? > > Yes, true. I mainly use WINE under NetBSD, which does have Firefox, but > not Chrome (yet). Since I mostly turn off Javascript and Flash, using > simple browsers like Dillo are often fine, too. Websites these days are > basically a huge hairball of code they assume I will run, when all I care > about is markup and content. I get why it's done, but they can't force me > to participate. So, browser choices usually aren't the issue. It's usually > some game or media program from Windows that blows up spectacularly in > Wine. OK, fair enough. > As an aside, I love running suspicious programs that end up having viruses > or whatever in WINE then when I see them trying to pivot, simply killing > processes and wiping out the whole damn WINE container. However, with > online file scanners like virustotal being free, I rarely take even that > small risk anymore. Nifty! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From other at oryx.us Fri Jul 15 13:48:33 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:48:33 -0500 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> Message-ID: <57893001.2040107@oryx.us> I guess I am glad that someone getting something positive from windows. I have never viewed it as any more than a virus distribution system with a poorly written GUI front end. Jerry On 07/15/16 12:15 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 15 July 2016 at 00:39, Jerry Kemp wrote: >> I still judge OS/2 to be one of the better x86 options for the early and mid >> 1990's. > > > Oh, definitely, yes. It truly was "a better DOS than DOS and a better > Windows than Windows". > > Then MS moved the goalposts and improved Windows and leapfrogged it -- > and IMHO, IBM never really caught up. > > Which was probably sensible as throwing tens of $millions of R&D at it > would never had paid back. > From ggs at shiresoft.com Fri Jul 15 13:52:58 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 11:52:58 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> Message-ID: <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 11:30 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > >> We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old >> ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated. > > Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the > mid-80s when he was working for Cray. I was grousing about the time > spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining > the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those > parts needing it). Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and > confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial > recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable. > > Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated > STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long. > When I first started working on the IBM S/23, a complete build took a week (yes, 7 days?if we were lucky). Debugging and fixing was mostly keeping a notebook of patches to applied to the previous build. ?fixes? were first developed by patch and then actual source changes were made. We usually spent a day just patching the ?fixes? when a new build was released because what we had to do in a patch vs the real change were often different. Eventually someone wrote a cross build environment for the Series/1 and the build went down to overnight (yea!). You may ask ?It was IBM why didn?t you use the S/370 mainframes??. It was accounting. We could ?buy? equipment (Series/1 and the like) and it was a capitol expense. We were billed (at a ridiculous rate as I recall) for Mainframe time out of the department expense budget. The expense budget was very closely monitored. The capitol budget not so much. Kids have it so much easier now. ;-) P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes just 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with SSDs. ;-) TTFN - Guy From austinpass at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 14:03:04 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:03:04 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from Classic CMP'ers. I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I can get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system between my current computers and the more historic versions. In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?) although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked with classic Mac OS? Also, I have an Asant? ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to be able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet. In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic Mac OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? -Austin. From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 15 14:15:58 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:15:58 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: <5789366E.9070307@sydex.com> On 07/15/2016 11:52 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > > P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot > image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes > just 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 > with SSDs. ;-) The problem is that while the PCs are getting faster, I'm slowing down. One vivid memory I have of the S/360 F-level assembler is that while the macro language was very rich, macros could take a very long time to evaluate. Some of the "system" macros were real doozies. Of course, none of that compares to the card-only systems without mass storage. --Chuck From aek at bitsavers.org Fri Jul 15 14:29:45 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:29:45 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> On 7/15/16 12:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending > to use. bad idea. Mirror door G4's were the least reliable machines we released. Too many compromises getting to a GHz, esp WRT noise and heat. I personally like Beige G3's, or mid-life G4's for differing reasons. And I use a Wallstreet daily (last portable with ADB and SCSI). From austinpass at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 14:58:42 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:58:42 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> References: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - would this be a safer bet? Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for improved reliability in the mirror door? We used the MD PowerMac as an OS X 10.3 server running Macintosh Manager catering for two suites of eMacs and iMacs running 9.2.1 "back in the day", and I don't recall it being overly unreliable. -Austin. Sent from my iPhone > On 15 Jul 2016, at 20:29, Al Kossow wrote: > > > >> On 7/15/16 12:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >> I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending >> to use. > > bad idea. > > Mirror door G4's were the least reliable machines we released. > Too many compromises getting to a GHz, esp WRT noise and heat. > > I personally like Beige G3's, or mid-life G4's for differing reasons. > > And I use a Wallstreet daily (last portable with ADB and SCSI). > From aek at bitsavers.org Fri Jul 15 15:15:51 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:15:51 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> References: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - would this be a safer bet? > Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with gigabit ethernet (2nd gen G4?) > Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for improved reliability in the mirror door? > Not without a rom change. One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr memory and there was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable. It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that wasn't so power hungry. First gen MDD was bad. I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time. From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 15:29:44 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:29:44 -0600 (MDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early > days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4 > network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B&Ws > to me! :-) ) Woot! The benefits of working with small clients over time. > Never tried it. I only ever tried Linux on PowerPC once, and that was to > aid in the process of installing MorphOS on a G4 mini. Well, if you ever put hands on another M68k, you might give it a shot. The key is to have an extra partition to setup with a BSD disklabel et al. If you have enough space (or a spare disk) it's pretty darn straightforward. It loads using a MacOS based loader program, so you don't have to ditch MacOS, either. However, the install is pretty raw (I like it, but I have a feeling you wouldn't). However, it's nowhere near as raw as, say, OpenBSD's installer. If you ever happen to install OpenBSD, Liam, please have a video camera rolling. I will be able to get all the choice British curse-phrases in one go that way. Also, just as an aside, your ex-roomy who told you that you weren't liking parts of UNIX because you weren't a dyed-in-the-wool coder (not to say you aren't smart or technical or can't do what you need to do with coding) was right. It's a programmers OS and it panders to coders and admins, others will be grousing about weird things they don't need and don't see a reason for, items being over-minimized, too spartan, or downright bizzare and not enough in the way of well-integrated features for users with other goals besides coding. Fully 100% agree with that dude, and I totally acknowledge that there is a rusty tetanus side of that double edged sword. That's why I still dabble with the darkside and play with GUI-focused OSes, too. It's a whole different feel. When I want to code, I plant myself in front of NetBSD or FreeBSD. When I want to record/compose a song, I break out an SGI, Amiga, or maybe someday a Mac (I got a fancy audio rig for my 68k Quadra recently). > Dear gods that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't > really worth the effort. Hehe, I ran MorphOS, too. It was fun for a while, but I can't really handle a proprietary OS on a such a small scale. > I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one at the time. I > respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC OS and that's what > I miss. I got one way later, too. Well past when they were new/prime. I have the exact same feeling. For me SGIs were the biggest lust-target because I actually had played with them long enough to know what I was really missing (and I was younger and all that happy stuff). > To my great surprise, the Mac could boot off the PC-formatted SSD and > Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss, detected both my screens, and went > straight online, no problems at all. In my experience using tools like "ReEFIt" make multi-booting OSX and *ix or BSD on a Macs way easy, but yeah, they don't need much to "justwork" nowadays. > I *must* run up A/UX some time. :-( My experience with it is less than 6 months old. Without Macosgarden I'd have never got the chance because finding legit disk for it is *hard* if you want 3.1. I had all manner of weird install problems because I was doing it on a SCSI2SD that isn't an Apple disk so of course Disk tools was pissed. The disk tools under A/UX would play nice, actually, but I ended up having to do all kinds of CLI jiggery pokery, manually creating file systems and what not from an emergency shell, to get A/UX to give up and install on the darn thing. It was damn weird (in a cool and unique way) once I got it working. and I dd'd off the install images and boot record off the MicroSD card once it had finished. I found that they more or less worked with Shoebill, at that point, too. > I was a DOS master, once. Probably knew the most about it from any OS > I've used! I wouldn't call myself a master, but definitely an experienced power-user. I did quite a bit of coding using 386|VMM and other such things with mostly Borland tools. The thing I miss most about DOS was it's "standalone" mentality. You want to backup your word processor ? Zip the directory. You want to backup Deluxe Paint IIe? Zip the directory. You want to backup Lotus 1-2-3? Zip the directory. Everyone took a really long drag from the dynamic library joint and passed it around in the 90's, too. I took a hit, too, and I get that there are many advantages to them, but the big DISadvantage is now many binaries become version-specific to a library that may get deprecated in subsequent releases. On DOS, that wasn't a problem. Just keep running the old one. Sure you can still compile (most) things statically or include old libraries, but it's seldom done, fiddly for users, and oft overlooked. I often lament how most apps now want "merge" with your OS not simply run on their own in a super-self-contained way DOS apps did. I also tend to hate registries (not just on Windows, I despise AIX's ODM, too). DOS had no such BS, and it's one of the things I liked about it. > 98, 98SE or ME? 3 different things. ME was the one that pissed me off the most and seemed to understand my hatred and return it in kind. That OS seemed to me to crash for the smallest and most trivial of reasons. Windows didn't seem to get stable until the 3.x branch of NT matured into W2k in my opinion. However you are WAY more well versed in the M$ black arts, so I believe you when you say you could make it behave. > It's why I collected so many later. All these shiny toys I couldn't > afford when they were new! Same here. One man's trash is another man's treasure. > https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=345783926690&set=a.345781786690.162428.608866690&type=3&theater Whoa. Czech! I love that place. I was there in my 20's for a while and I have never seen so many beautiful women in my life (and they will actually talk to you occasionally, even if you aren't Fabio). The people were super friendly and welcoming to me, too. I'll never forget it. Of course it was pre-USA-terror-freakout days when folks in Europe loved Americans. :-) Nowadays when I go to Europe I pray people will think I'm from Canada. I've had some bad experiences when they found out otherwise :-( > It's what I run on non-Ubuntu distros. XFCE is a pretty solid workhorse that doesn't do to shabby at staying thin. > True. But I think Android is going to be what gets the other 2 billion > humans online, by and large, and the implications of that will be > staggering. I'm guessing you are going to be correct, and I try to keep that in mind as I bash on it. :-) To me it's a mole/privacy-invader, to others is a stepladder out of poverty. So, they win the relative importance comparison, for sure. I just wish we could both be satisfied. > Well in a way, yes. But people use them to *communicate* and that's a > good thing. Well, riding on trains a lot and seeing people constantly on the phones, I see essentially three archetypes of glued-to-their-phones: 1. Young women (and men to a slightly lesser extent) who can't overcome their social drive and are just plain addicted to checking every possible social media channel (SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, rinse-repeat). That's pretty much all the do. I'm not sure that communication is beneficial or just plain compulsive/addictive behavior. 2. The I-have-a-million-apps-and-feel-empowered-by-technology hipster. This is the guy with not only his smartphone out. He's got the Apple Watch, two tablets, and an (unused) laptop in his bag behind him. He feels like a ninja because in his world, no matter what, "there is an app for that". He's wrong of course, and I'll eat him if we are ever stranded in the wilderness. 3. Business-weasels who are surreptitiously glancing at the other weasels to see if they have a more *expensive* phone, laptop, suit, or watch. If not, all is well. Now, he can settle in and try to figure out how to get this malware off his phone he got from surfing porn sites in Chrome from his phone. All humor and cynicism aside, I'm still on the fence when it comes to the benefit of phones in the first-world. The benefits come with some fairly heavy drawbacks, too. > > Didn't Sergei Brin say they'd probably get merged? I seem to remember > > that, but who knows. > I don't think so. No seriously, I found it. It's in the Wikipedia page for ChromeOS. He doesn't sound super-committed, though. > I've seen both half-hearted "yes probably" statements and also flat-out > denials. Basically, I don't think they know. ha! That sounds about right. > No, me either, but I do kinda fancy a cheap light ChromeBook! TBH, me too. However, the damn thing better run NetBSD. :-) Ohh, I just had an idea... I wonder if they can be hacked to run RISCOS. That would be really cool. I'll have to Google it. They are mostly ARM boxes, IIRC. > Fair enough. I find it so useful, the amazing range of stuff you can do > now, all for free, that I'm deeply tied into it. It's true. The panoply of online services offering for free things that would have cost thousands (or been impossible) 15 years ago is staggering. > Recommended reading: Cory Doctorow, /Little Brother/ > Free ebook, from the author: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ > You'll appreciate "Paranoid Linux". Ha! Yep, I've read it. Good reference: right on point. > Buy mine? Please? :-D I'm serious, it's for sale. I'd consider it if I hadn't just dropped $150 to buy a buddy's used Punkt phone. If you ain't sold it by this time next year, hit me up again ! :-) > Oh dear gods. No no no. I use my phone for many hours a day. I don't use mine for weeks at a time. When it rings it's never a good sign (it's work, someone has died, or someone is wanting something from me I'm not going to be happy about). > I reckon I use it for *phone calls* about 2-3 times a month and SMS > about 2-3 times a week. That's almost a legacy feature it happens to > have! I probably would do the same, but I've always got that little bird on my shoulder saying "They are watching you and trying to screw you." I can't feel comfortable in what I consider to be such a user-hostile environment. So, I'm that Luddite on the train where there are 90 people in the train car and nobody under 60 is doing anything but staring at their phone... but me. I'm reading a some Stevens hardcover book or a trashy fantasy or SF novel. I might be tempted to use a laptop with a wireless 4G data card in there, but it's expensive and I get plenty of time on the metal anyway. Reading when I'm on the console helps me sharpen my mind (and it always needs sharpening, hehe). > Cool, but no, I use Google Translate and Google Maps and Google Calendar > and things many times a day. A pocket device without them now is a > paperweight to me. You'd have fun ridiculing my desk, then. I still have a Rolodex (paper one), a (very) old HP calculator, an At-a-glance paper calendar, and in my car I have a small bag with 4-5 books of maps. Yes, paper maps. In my pocket are a rinky-dink phone (as discussed), a 3" folding knife with screwdriver, a Fischer Space Pen, my leather wallet, and usually 4-5 3x5 notecards in my opposite pocket. Also, I often carry an Sony NEX-7 digital camera, if I have my pack. Rarely do I carry a "real" computer et al. It's probably because I have a different kind of job and travel needs versus you. You sound like you bounce around a lot. I have a pretty static routine these days. -Swift From geneb at deltasoft.com Fri Jul 15 15:30:05 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:30:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive >> in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of >> what was lost and it's a horror show. :( > > Ahhhh... I would both like to see that, and not to see it, IYSWIM. > I don't recall seeing it since I moved house in 2006, so it may be lost. I'll try to see if I can find it. > Ahh yes. I remember the enhanced versions of that. If you recall, we > were both on the DeltaSoft FreeGEM list, gods, nearly 2 decades ago > now. (!) > Yep. That list is here: http://www.simpits.org/pipermail/gem-dev/ as well as the gem-chat list. The archive only goes back to 2003 though. > > I have one copy of the source-code CD for DR-DOS. I should put up on > Bittorrent somewhere! > Send it to the Internet Archive. :) It's nice to know that Roger sent out more than one copy. BTW, I talked to Roger a few years ago, he's into sailboats now. No where near anything even resembling IT. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 15:32:05 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:32:05 -0600 (MDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot > image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes just > 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with > SSDs. ;-) Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or embedded systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile binaries for completely alien systems is just awesome. -Swift From mtapley at swri.edu Fri Jul 15 15:33:22 2016 From: mtapley at swri.edu (Tapley, Mark) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:33:22 +0000 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4BC68441-72DE-4E66-A37E-BA8EA9777B59@swri.edu> On Jul 15, 2016, at 2:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: ?. > Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? ?. Yup: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ Have not used it, but I am up-to-date on a G3 (iMac) and a G4 (PowerBook) with TenFourFox and use them regularly. http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ Depending on your PowerPC and choice of OS, that might be attractive. Either can still run OS9 applications. - Mark From geneb at deltasoft.com Fri Jul 15 15:35:20 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:35:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb wrote: >> Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of what was lost and it's a >> horror show. :( > > > While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I > wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and > DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources. > I don't believe that for a second. I bet Some jackass manager decided it wasn't worth anything and binned it without telling anyone. > DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very interesting FOSS OS. It > so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with > built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy. > Well interesting if nothing else. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From bear at typewritten.org Fri Jul 15 15:36:25 2016 From: bear at typewritten.org (r.stricklin) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:36:25 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> Message-ID: <45D75F6B-7175-4F59-A9B8-27A0624C4931@typewritten.org> Anecdotally, this may be the case. I ran my dual 1.25 MDD for six or seven years without a single hardware failure. It's probably still fine, but I haven't tried to turn it on since I upgraded to a Mac Pro (geez, eight years ago). ok bear. -- Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 15, 2016, at 13:15, Al Kossow wrote: > > > >> On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - would this be a safer bet? > > Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with gigabit ethernet (2nd gen G4?) > >> Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for improved reliability in the mirror door? > > Not without a rom change. > One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr memory and there > was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable. > > It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that wasn't so power hungry. > First gen MDD was bad. > I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time. > > > From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 15 15:42:28 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:42:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> Message-ID: <201607152042.QAA11645@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or > embedded systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile > binaries for completely alien systems is just awesome. But it comes at a price. NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native builds. Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the cross-compiler generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle bug in the compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what. (Or at least that's what I've gathered from following port-vax at .) If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From austinpass at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 15:49:13 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 21:49:13 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> Message-ID: > On 15 Jul 2016, at 21:15, Al Kossow wrote: > > > >> On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - would this be a safer bet? > > Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with gigabit ethernet (2nd gen G4?) > >> Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for improved reliability in the mirror door? > > Not without a rom change. > One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr memory and there > was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable. > > It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that wasn't so power hungry. > First gen MDD was bad. > I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time. > > > I didn't realise the ethernet was gigabit! We had it connected to a fairly undistinguished 100Mbit switch. I have several G5's, but am at a loss as to what to do with them. If they supported classic Mac OS I'd have one up and running in a heartbeat. What was the juciest AGP graphics card for the G4? Some form of GeForce? -Austin. From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 15:54:23 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:54:23 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote: > I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although > I'm having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the > ultimate representation of the type is, so was looking for a little > input from Classic CMP'ers. I've recently been through that exercise with M68k Macs. I settled on the Quadra 700 and the Quadra/Centris 660AV. However, I think you'll hear a lot of people also recommend the Quadra 950 and Apple Workgroup Server 95. However, I realize you aren't interested and are looking at the PPC systems. > I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd > variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I > can get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system > between my current computers and the more historic versions. I've contemplated doing a PPC rig, too. For me, I don't care much about hyper-expandibilty. I like the more blingy hardware. So, for me, at the top of the pyramid stand two systems: the G4 Cube and the 20th Anniversary Mac. The Cube is now cheap on fleabay. It's prime time to grab those. If one comes up on cheap Craigslist here in Denver, I'll probably snag it and warehouse it for a while. I am just not motivated enough to pay shipping or Ebay prices, yet. IMHO, most of the tower systems were too "plasticy" and the desktop Performa-styled boxes were uglier than homemade sin. > I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get 9.2.1 on > it relatively easily. You'll want to Google MacOS PPC. Let's simply say "it's out there" and easy to get. Unless you just want the manuals an screen-printed discs, which I understand, too. > Was a gigabit ethernet card ever released with Mac OS 9 drivers? Ohhhh, yeah. Lots of them. Check out lowendmac or the like. They have lists of them. > I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I can use with it, but has > there ever been a SATA implementation that worked with classic Mac OS? Not sure about that, but I can tell you that there are ton of SCSI controllers and you can use an expensive SATA-to-SCSI bridge like the one sold by ACARD. I use several of those on various machines and they rock. > In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I > should look to get my hands on? Yes. Get the disk utilities that allow you to use non-Apple disks. The one that comes to mind the fastest is Lacie Silverlining and LIDO. > What's the state of the art in classic Mac OS browsing nowadays, Mr > Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? He will know better than me, but your best bet IMO, is either iCab or Clasilla, for sure. -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 16:13:33 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 15:13:33 -0600 (MDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <201607152042.QAA11645@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> <201607152042.QAA11645@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: > But it comes at a price. NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble > self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native > builds. Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I've only used it in the context of other platforms and variants. > Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the cross-compiler > generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle bug in the > compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what. (Or at least > that's what I've gathered from following port-vax at .) Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly motivated VAX gods. :-) > If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to > figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native. It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. You'd be a killer asset to any FOSS project, I'm sure. That goes 10x for one involving VAXes. -Swift From other at oryx.us Fri Jul 15 16:26:06 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <578954EE.5050705@oryx.us> I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back. Even kicked off a thread on a Mac email list. I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, so that didn't come into my decision making. I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory power house Mac that would run Classic. I just needed to run my Mac OS apps and games that would never be ported to x86. I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision. I can boot up into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support. This was what worked well for me. I will be interested to see what you ultimately end up choosing. Jerry On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm > having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate > representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from > Classic CMP'ers. > > I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd > variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I can > get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system between > my current computers and the more historic versions. > > In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending > to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get > 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should > be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?) > although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use > Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever > released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I > can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked > with classic Mac OS? > > Also, I have an Asant? ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to be > able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet. > > In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I > should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic Mac > OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? > > -Austin. > From jwsmail at jwsss.com Fri Jul 15 18:54:46 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:54:46 -0700 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <5789366E.9070307@sydex.com> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> <5789366E.9070307@sydex.com> Message-ID: On 7/15/2016 12:15 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > On 07/15/2016 11:52 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > > >> P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot >> image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes >> just 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 >> with SSDs. ;-) > The problem is that while the PCs are getting faster, I'm slowing down. > > One vivid memory I have of the S/360 F-level assembler is that while the > macro language was very rich, macros could take a very long time to > evaluate. Some of the "system" macros were real doozies. Hasp and I think Control program (??) on MVT were about a foot high. The system programmers for our shop at University of Missouri, Rolla, 360/50, MVT 19 thru 21 era had a hot plate, skillet, and they snacked on spam while waiting and working. Made for a unique aroma to the computer center. > Of course, none of that compares to the card-only systems without mass > storage. > > --Chuck > > From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 19:47:23 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:47:23 -0400 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 7:35 PM, Chris Hanson wrote: > > On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: >> >> * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! > > Graphics terminals were a thing that existed. It wasn?t just PLATO that used them. Graphics terminals were quite rare in the early 1970s, at least at a cost allowing them to be installed in the hundreds, and with processing requirements low enough for that. I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010. But that was far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals. paul From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 15 17:40:12 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 18:40:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <57892BB3.2010204@sydex.com> <5878CB1F-0720-40A6-BAC6-E6532EF07013@shiresoft.com> <201607152042.QAA11645@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <201607152240.SAA14386@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows >> why, because it shows up only in native builds. > Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I've only used it in the context of > other platforms and variants. I'm sure there are lots of triples it works just fine for. I just don't know why isn't one of them. As far as I know nobody else knows either. >> Nobody knows [...]. (Or at least that's what I've gathered from >> following port-vax at .) > Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly > motivated VAX gods. :-) :-) Actually, I think it probably is - just ones short on round tuits. I suspect that anyone with the necessary VAX/gcc/NetBSD chops to diagnose this problem is also kickass at a number of other things, things which (for example) pay significantly better. >> If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying >> to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native. > It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. [...] Thank you for the compliment! NetBSD apparently either disagrees or decided something else had higher priority, though. This way I have more time for doing my own thing, though, so it's not entirely without a silver lining. (Admittedly, at the moment "my own thing" is less computery, so perhaps it's not that much of a silver lining from your perspective - I don't know how much we overlap except for classiccmp.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 15 18:30:17 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:30:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: <201607152330.TAA24541@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so >> did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line? I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones. Here are the ones big enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the early-to-mid '80s): - No command-line editing. (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but only there.) - Verbosity. - Some degree of syntax straitjacket. Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather, significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time. Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too. The principal one I remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above. For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well enough for us to get useful stuff done. (The above discussion applies to DCL. I never used MCR enough to have anything useful to say, positive or negative, about it.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Fri Jul 15 18:35:50 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:35:50 -0700 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! Graphics terminals were a thing that existed. It wasn?t just PLATO that used them. -- Chris From spacewar at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 18:43:21 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:43:21 -0600 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <24DBDA65-D211-4C61-9D86-4C04A32096BC@shiresoft.com> <92F76A2A-28D7-48C7-99C3-34A42464B196@eschatologist.net> Message-ID: On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson wrote: > And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs? which these days use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed! On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel CPUs. Yes, the CPU architecture is from Intel. The hardware *system* architecture is from the IBM PC. That's the main reason why you can boot Windows on an x86 Mac. (And other PC operating systems.) From als at thangorodrim.ch Fri Jul 15 18:34:27 2016 From: als at thangorodrim.ch (Alexander Schreiber) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 01:34:27 +0200 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <20160715233427.GA32250@mordor.angband.thangorodrim.de> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:08:40AM -0400, Mouse wrote: > > DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also > > proprietary, seldom used, > > I think it is only semi-proprietary. I've seen open documentation that > at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was > sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet > and for serial lines. > > However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of > hosts it supports. I don't remember exactly what the limit is; > different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address > size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large > corporation. (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host > number within each area? I'm sure someone here knows.) *cough* 2^16 addresses for a large corp these days will just get you some howling laughter. Depending on what the company does, it might be enough for the desktops & their support environment, but not even remotely enough for the datacenters ... > Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the > IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might > have been a contender. For all I know maybe they've even done that, > but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony. IP won over OSI *hualp* and whatever else insanity was out there because it a) works, b) is reasonably simply to implement (yes, I know, a full up, modern TCP/IP stack is anything but trivial, but the basics are not that crazy) and comes with a rather low level of designed-in complexity. Just compare SMTP and the OSI equivalent, X.400 ... yikes. > But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the > ground-up integration into the OS. Which in modern UNIX systems is also there for TCP/IP. A modern UNIX type OS is pretty much unthinkable without a fully integrated TCP/IP stack. Yes, I'm aware of Coherent and their TCP/IP stack being an option, but even in the 90s I considered this to be a bad joke. Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 15 19:50:45 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:50:45 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <20160715233427.GA32250@mordor.angband.thangorodrim.de> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <201607151408.KAA29925@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160715233427.GA32250@mordor.angband.thangorodrim.de> Message-ID: > On Jul 15, 2016, at 7:34 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:08:40AM -0400, Mouse wrote: >>> ... > > IP won over OSI *hualp* and whatever else insanity was out there because > it a) works, b) is reasonably simply to implement (yes, I know, a full up, > modern TCP/IP stack is anything but trivial, but the basics are not that > crazy) and comes with a rather low level of designed-in complexity. > Just compare SMTP and the OSI equivalent, X.400 ... yikes. True, OSI application layer protocols tended to be elephants. But one should not confuse those with the lower layers. You can run X.400 on top of TCP or DECnet NSP (DEC did exactly the latter, in a commercially successful product despised by the engineers using the internal network), and similarly you can perfectly well run non-OSI applications on top of TP4. For example, it would be trivial to run http, or iscsi, over DECnet. It hasn't been done as far as I know, but technically it would be a no-brainer. In fact, a lot of application protocols (iscsi for example) are easier on DECnet because NSP (and TP4) have packet boundaries while TCP does not (though SCTP does). paul From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 15 20:08:44 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 18:08:44 -0700 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> Message-ID: <5789891C.2060804@sydex.com> On 07/15/2016 05:47 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > Graphics terminals were quite rare in the early 1970s, at least at a > cost allowing them to be installed in the hundreds, and with > processing requirements low enough for that. I remember, around the > same time, the Tektronix 4010. But that was far less flexible; it > could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals. Surely you remember CDC IGS from the 70s. I loved watching the displays being drawn on those big radar CRT displays--one color while drawing and persisting in another. They were "terminals" of a sort, no? --Chuck From kirkbdavis at me.com Fri Jul 15 21:32:10 2016 From: kirkbdavis at me.com (Kirk Davis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:32:10 -0700 Subject: 11/44 Console cable In-Reply-To: <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> References: <576D9BFF.3030200@fritzm.org> <576DBCEC.8000903@fritzm.org> <576DCCB7.3090906@fritzm.org> <57721F7C.1000204@fritzm.org> <91D7F8B4-1DE4-4591-A405-0564B625254C@fritzm.org> Message-ID: <9CB94047-88F9-4B26-872B-B6C20129EB3A@me.com> Does anyone know off hand if a 11/83 cab kit will work as a 11/44 console? Both are 20 bin ribbon cable connectors - minus the baud rate select stuff of course. I have the 44 print set kit from bitsavers but being lazy prefer not making a cable if I can avoid it. From spacewar at gmail.com Fri Jul 15 21:34:54 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:34:54 -0600 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010. But that was > far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals. The 4010 can erase just fine. The problem is that it can't do selective erase, only full-screen erase, and erasing is a slow operation. Tektronix had other models that could do both storage and refresh graphics, but they were even more expensive. The refresh capabilities tended to be fairly limited. From evan.linwood at eastek.com.au Fri Jul 15 21:55:21 2016 From: evan.linwood at eastek.com.au (Evan Linwood) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 12:55:21 +1000 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas Message-ID: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> Hi All, I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it seems they could be both significant and rare? It's been sitting on eBay but I wasn't sure if it had slipped between the cracks somehow? I've been in contact with the seller and he's said that he's still hoping to sell it, but that it has to be cleared soon (and would be scrapped). I don't live in the US, so it's not an easy one for me to work with. Is this of interest to anyone? Cheers Evan http://www.ebay.com/itm/112050410557 From jsw at ieee.org Fri Jul 15 22:04:56 2016 From: jsw at ieee.org (Jerry Weiss) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 22:04:56 -0500 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> Message-ID: <6ABAED29-3572-48D3-9ADF-392A8A1D87D0@ieee.org> On Jul 15, 2016, at 9:34 PM, Eric Smith wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010. But that was >> far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals. > > The 4010 can erase just fine. The problem is that it can't do > selective erase, only > full-screen erase, and erasing is a slow operation. > > Tektronix had other models that could do both storage and refresh > graphics, but they were even more expensive. The refresh capabilities > tended to be fairly limited. The PLATO IV terminals had a 512x512 addressable pixels, local charset memory (Font) and the ease and power of TUTOR to support them. It still amazes me how much work and fun we extracted from the limited cpu, memory, storage and communication bandwidth we had. Oh and those keyboards. Best damn ones I?ve ever used. Jerry From brain at jbrain.com Fri Jul 15 22:12:02 2016 From: brain at jbrain.com (Jim Brain) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 22:12:02 -0500 Subject: PLATO PC floppy In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <57891450.7030503@sydex.com> Message-ID: <11b5cb6c-304f-68c0-0c86-fb47aeb3eeb6@jbrain.com> On 7/15/2016 9:29 PM, Jason T wrote: > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: >> I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently) PLATO >> client software on it probably from the mid 1980s. Is the image of >> this of any interest to anyone? > I vote "yes." Will host the image, too. What platform do you think it's for? > > j I so wish I could find my copy of the PLATO client for the Commodore 64 (yep, it actually existed, I did some of my Physics 107 labs on PLATO from my room with my C64 and my 2400 bps modem (333-1000, 217 area code, to get to the terminal server(?) at the home of PLATO, UIUC. Sigh, I miss that. -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com From brain at jbrain.com Fri Jul 15 22:23:20 2016 From: brain at jbrain.com (Jim Brain) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 22:23:20 -0500 Subject: Anyone near San Marcos, CA with a Commodore drive cable? Message-ID: Evidently, there is a kind soul with a project this weekend lacking a cable (it's my fault), and I had hoped one might be available near he could borrow. Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 15 22:26:45 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 20:26:45 -0700 Subject: PLATO PC floppy In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <57891450.7030503@sydex.com> Message-ID: <5789A975.4040307@sydex.com> On 07/15/2016 07:29 PM, Jason T wrote: > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Chuck Guzis > wrote: >> I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently) >> PLATO client software on it probably from the mid 1980s. Is the >> image of this of any interest to anyone? > > I vote "yes." Will host the image, too. What platform do you think > it's for? As I said, it's probably for IBM PC/XT with CGA. Haven't checked in detail. --Chuck From n0body.h0me at inbox.com Sat Jul 16 00:05:56 2016 From: n0body.h0me at inbox.com (N0body H0me) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 21:05:56 -0800 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <578954EE.5050705@oryx.us> References: Message-ID: If I had the time and money (mostly money) to do this, I would settle for nothing less than a Quadra 840AV. Be prepared to spend $$$$, though; the 840 is quickly approaching 'investment grade'. If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the SE/30. Once again, these are kinda pricey..... > -----Original Message----- > From: other at oryx.us > Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500 > To: general at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. > > I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back. Even kicked off > a > thread on a Mac email list. > > I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, > so > that didn't come into my decision making. > > I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory > power > house Mac that would run Classic. I just needed to run my Mac OS apps > and games > that would never be ported to x86. > > I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision. I can boot > up > into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support. > > This was what worked well for me. I will be interested to see what you > ultimately end up choosing. > > Jerry > > > On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although >> I'm >> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the >> ultimate >> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from >> Classic CMP'ers. >> >> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd >> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I >> can >> get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system >> between >> my current computers and the more historic versions. >> >> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm >> intending >> to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get >> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I >> should >> be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport >> Extreme?) >> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use >> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever >> released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks >> that I >> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that >> worked >> with classic Mac OS? >> >> Also, I have an Asant? ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to >> be >> able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet. >> >> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I >> should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic >> Mac >> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? >> >> -Austin. >> ____________________________________________________________ FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium From teoz at neo.rr.com Sat Jul 16 00:33:59 2016 From: teoz at neo.rr.com (TeoZ) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 01:33:59 -0400 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: A Quadra 950 is also a decent machine if you want to fill it up with cards. Most 840av's these days have bad motherboards from leaking capacitors and the plastics break if you sneeze too hard close to them. -----Original Message----- From: N0body H0me Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2016 1:05 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. If I had the time and money (mostly money) to do this, I would settle for nothing less than a Quadra 840AV. Be prepared to spend $$$$, though; the 840 is quickly approaching 'investment grade'. If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the SE/30. Once again, these are kinda pricey..... > -----Original Message----- > From: other at oryx.us > Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500 > To: general at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. > > I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back. Even kicked off > a > thread on a Mac email list. > > I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, > so > that didn't come into my decision making. > > I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory > power > house Mac that would run Classic. I just needed to run my Mac OS apps > and games > that would never be ported to x86. > > I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision. I can boot > up > into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support. > > This was what worked well for me. I will be interested to see what you > ultimately end up choosing. > > Jerry > > > On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although >> I'm >> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the >> ultimate >> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from >> Classic CMP'ers. >> >> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd >> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I >> can >> get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system >> between >> my current computers and the more historic versions. >> >> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm >> intending >> to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get >> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I >> should >> be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport >> Extreme?) >> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use >> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever >> released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks >> that I >> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that >> worked >> with classic Mac OS? >> >> Also, I have an Asant? ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to >> be >> able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet. >> >> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I >> should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic >> Mac >> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? >> >> -Austin. >> ____________________________________________________________ FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus From aswood at t-online.de Sat Jul 16 06:24:55 2016 From: aswood at t-online.de (aswood at t-online.de) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 13:24:55 +0200 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> Message-ID: Would be quite interesting. A micro super- multiprocessor system. I do have an incomplete system, sold in Germany a GEI Trace. Mine has two Fujtsu SMD Drives. Would take the system, but wrong side of the pond. Very rare, should be saved. -- > Am 16.07.2016 um 04:55 schrieb Evan Linwood : > > Hi All, > > I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell > recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it > seems they could be both significant and rare? It's been sitting on eBay but > I wasn't sure if it had slipped between the cracks somehow? I've been in > contact with the seller and he's said that he's still hoping to sell it, but > that it has to be cleared soon (and would be scrapped). I don't live in the > US, so it's not an easy one for me to work with. Is this of interest to > anyone? Cheers Evan > > > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/112050410557 > > > From aswood at t-online.de Sat Jul 16 06:24:55 2016 From: aswood at t-online.de (aswood at t-online.de) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 13:24:55 +0200 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> Message-ID: Would be quite interesting. A micro super- multiprocessor system. I do have an incomplete system, sold in Germany a GEI Trace. Mine has two Fujtsu SMD Drives. Would take the system, but wrong side of the pond. Very rare, should be saved. -- > Am 16.07.2016 um 04:55 schrieb Evan Linwood : > > Hi All, > > I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell > recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it > seems they could be both significant and rare? It's been sitting on eBay but > I wasn't sure if it had slipped between the cracks somehow? I've been in > contact with the seller and he's said that he's still hoping to sell it, but > that it has to be cleared soon (and would be scrapped). I don't live in the > US, so it's not an easy one for me to work with. Is this of interest to > anyone? Cheers Evan > > > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/112050410557 > > > From brain at jbrain.com Sat Jul 16 01:03:09 2016 From: brain at jbrain.com (Jim Brain) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 01:03:09 -0500 Subject: PLATO PC floppy In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <57891450.7030503@sydex.com> <11b5cb6c-304f-68c0-0c86-fb47aeb3eeb6@jbrain.com> Message-ID: <10d78139-cca7-305a-9bff-2f04c502d5e8@jbrain.com> On 7/16/2016 12:54 AM, Jason T wrote: > On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:12 PM, Jim Brain wrote: >> I so wish I could find my copy of the PLATO client for the Commodore 64 >> (yep, it actually existed, I did some of my Physics 107 labs on PLATO from >> my room with my C64 and my 2400 bps modem (333-1000, 217 area code, to get >> to the terminal server(?) at the home of PLATO, UIUC. > I didn't know they had dial-in for PLATO there. Here's a 1991-era > card with two similar termserv numbers: > > http://chiclassiccomp.org/docs/content/computing/UIUC/UIUC_NewAccountCard1991.pdf > > I have somewhere the PLATO cartridge for Atari 8-bit but I've never > seen the C64 client. I'd love to try to use it with cyber1.org. It was interesting. It managed to squish the 512x512 into a 320x200 somehow. I had one of those cards as well. jlb31348 at usa.cso.uiuc.edu. 1989, I believe. It might have been 4000, 1000 might have been the UIUC general help line. It's been almost 30 years, the memory, she did not keep all of that info handy, as I never thought it would be useful. PLATO was such an interesting thing at the time at UIUC. It was considered "old" tech, and "HyperCard" for the Macs were the new way to do lessons. THose wooden cases and orange screens were an interesting sight. I always knew there was a huge community on the PLATO machines (University HIgh School in Urbana had them, as did other schools), but I never got into it. IRC and USENET demanded my time (feel free to search for jlb31348, I am sure there are plenty of horrid postings on comp.sys.cbm and sci.virtual-reality from my days there). Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com From spectre at floodgap.com Sat Jul 16 01:39:33 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 23:39:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: from Austin Pass at "Jul 15, 16 08:03:04 pm" Message-ID: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> > I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm > having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate > representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from > Classic CMP'ers. My "heavy duty" OS 9 rig is an dual 1.25GHz MDD that I upgraded to a dual Sonnet 1.8GHz, with 1.5GB RAM and OS 9.2.2. Everything flies on it. I haven't had any obvious compatibility problems. Al makes a good point though: have a spare power supply. My MDD blew through two. You didn't ask, but my preferred heavy duty 68K is the Q800. You can overclock them easily with chipclips and they are the beefiest 68K Mac that will still run A/UX. A/UX at 40MHz is a delight. > In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending > to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get > 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should > be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?) > although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use > Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever > released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I > can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked > with classic Mac OS? I've never seen a GigE card for OS 9. There is of course 100Mbit support. I would love to be proven wrong. The Sonnet SATA cards work well with OS 9 and are completely bootable. I used such a card in a 7300. > In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I > should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic Mac > OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? Sort of, as I have time. I'd like to do more with it but TenFourFox consumes much of my free hacking cycles currently. That should let up relatively soon since I've made the executive decision to fork TenFourFox at Firefox 45ESR (due to the looming spectre of Rust becoming a build-requirement, and known and expected issues with Electrolysis multi-process with the 10.4 SDK). Still, the biggest need for Classilla currently is moar crypto and that's rather hard to get right. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions. -- Henry N. Camp ------------- From spectre at floodgap.com Sat Jul 16 01:41:02 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 23:41:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> from Cameron Kaiser at "Jul 15, 16 11:39:33 pm" Message-ID: <201607160641.u6G6f21L49808202@floodgap.com> > I've never seen a GigE card for OS 9. There is of course 100Mbit support. > I would love to be proven wrong. I have been proven wrong. http://www.everymac.com/mac-answers/mac-os-9-classic-support-faq/gigabit-ethernet-for-macos-9-wireless-pc-cards-macos-9-compatible.html -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- You're only as good as the last problem someone had. -- Ballmer on security From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 02:01:12 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:01:12 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9C87682D-5CC1-4A82-BFAB-0E2D9E6ED296@gmail.com> > On 15 Jul 2016, at 21:54, Swift Griggs wrote: > >> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote: >> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although >> I'm having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the >> ultimate representation of the type is, so was looking for a little >> input from Classic CMP'ers. > > I've recently been through that exercise with M68k Macs. I settled on the > Quadra 700 and the Quadra/Centris 660AV. However, I think you'll hear a > lot of people also recommend the Quadra 950 and Apple Workgroup Server 95. > However, I realize you aren't interested and are looking at the PPC > systems. > >> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd >> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I >> can get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system >> between my current computers and the more historic versions. > > I've contemplated doing a PPC rig, too. For me, I don't care much about > hyper-expandibilty. I like the more blingy hardware. So, for me, at the > top of the pyramid stand two systems: the G4 Cube and the 20th Anniversary > Mac. The Cube is now cheap on fleabay. It's prime time to grab those. If > one comes up on cheap Craigslist here in Denver, I'll probably snag it and > warehouse it for a while. I am just not motivated enough to pay shipping > or Ebay prices, yet. > > IMHO, most of the tower systems were too "plasticy" and the desktop > Performa-styled boxes were uglier than homemade sin. > >> I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get 9.2.1 on >> it relatively easily. > > You'll want to Google MacOS PPC. Let's simply say "it's out there" and > easy to get. Unless you just want the manuals an screen-printed discs, > which I understand, too. > >> Was a gigabit ethernet card ever released with Mac OS 9 drivers? > > Ohhhh, yeah. Lots of them. Check out lowendmac or the like. They have > lists of them. > >> I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I can use with it, but has >> there ever been a SATA implementation that worked with classic Mac OS? > > Not sure about that, but I can tell you that there are ton of SCSI > controllers and you can use an expensive SATA-to-SCSI bridge like the one > sold by ACARD. I use several of those on various machines and they rock. > >> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I >> should look to get my hands on? > > Yes. Get the disk utilities that allow you to use non-Apple disks. The one > that comes to mind the fastest is Lacie Silverlining and LIDO. > >> What's the state of the art in classic Mac OS browsing nowadays, Mr >> Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? > > He will know better than me, but your best bet IMO, is either iCab or > Clasilla, for sure. > > -Swift I have a G4 Cube, complete with ADC Apple Cinema Display but it (subjectively) feels slower in normal use than the MDD, with a single 400Mhz G4 and PC100 SDRAM vs dual 1.25Ghz and PC2700 DDR RAM. I have lots of 68k Macs and love them dearly, but was looking for the biggest, best, fastest that could be used with Mac OS 9. -Austin. From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 02:05:40 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:05:40 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On 16 Jul 2016, at 06:05, N0body H0me wrote: > > If I had the time and money (mostly money) to do this, I > would settle for nothing less than a Quadra 840AV. Be > prepared to spend $$$$, though; the 840 is quickly approaching > 'investment grade'. > > If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the > SE/30. Once again, these are kinda pricey..... > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: other at oryx.us >> Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500 >> To: general at classiccmp.org >> Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. >> >> I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back. Even kicked off >> a >> thread on a Mac email list. >> >> I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, >> so >> that didn't come into my decision making. >> >> I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory >> power >> house Mac that would run Classic. I just needed to run my Mac OS apps >> and games >> that would never be ported to x86. >> >> I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision. I can boot >> up >> into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support. >> >> This was what worked well for me. I will be interested to see what you >> ultimately end up choosing. >> >> Jerry >> >> >>> On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote: >>> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although >>> I'm >>> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the >>> ultimate >>> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from >>> Classic CMP'ers. >>> >>> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd >>> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I >>> can >>> get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system >>> between >>> my current computers and the more historic versions. >>> >>> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm >>> intending >>> to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get >>> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I >>> should >>> be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport >>> Extreme?) >>> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use >>> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever >>> released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks >>> that I >>> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that >>> worked >>> with classic Mac OS? >>> >>> Also, I have an Asant? ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to >>> be >>> able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet. >>> >>> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I >>> should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic >>> Mac >>> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? >>> >>> -Austin. > > ____________________________________________________________ > FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your desktop! > Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium > > I have an SE/30. What is it about the Quadra 840 that makes it such a hot shot? I've seen a few over the last few years, but all fetch ?150+ -Austin. From austinpass at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 02:19:31 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:19:31 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> References: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <659CC2C2-A4B0-4FF9-B90C-4B6BBD442224@gmail.com> On 16 Jul 2016, at 07:39, Cameron Kaiser wrote: >> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm >> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate >> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from >> Classic CMP'ers. > > My "heavy duty" OS 9 rig is an dual 1.25GHz MDD that I upgraded to a dual > Sonnet 1.8GHz, with 1.5GB RAM and OS 9.2.2. Everything flies on it. I haven't > had any obvious compatibility problems. > > Al makes a good point though: have a spare power supply. My MDD blew > through two. > > You didn't ask, but my preferred heavy duty 68K is the Q800. You can > overclock them easily with chipclips and they are the beefiest 68K Mac > that will still run A/UX. A/UX at 40MHz is a delight. > >> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending >> to use. I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get >> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily. Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should >> be considering? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?) >> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use >> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN. Was a gigabit ethernet card ever >> released with Mac OS 9 drivers? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I >> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked >> with classic Mac OS? > > I've never seen a GigE card for OS 9. There is of course 100Mbit support. > I would love to be proven wrong. > > The Sonnet SATA cards work well with OS 9 and are completely bootable. I > used such a card in a 7300. > >> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I >> should look to get my hands on? What's the state of the art in classic Mac >> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? > > Sort of, as I have time. I'd like to do more with it but TenFourFox consumes > much of my free hacking cycles currently. That should let up relatively soon > since I've made the executive decision to fork TenFourFox at Firefox 45ESR > (due to the looming spectre of Rust becoming a build-requirement, and > known and expected issues with Electrolysis multi-process with the 10.4 SDK). > Still, the biggest need for Classilla currently is moar crypto and that's > rather hard to get right. > > -- > ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- > Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com > -- Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions. -- Henry N. Camp ------------- I think that has me decided then - I'll go with the MDD. I'll hit eBay too for some PSU replacements. I'd love one of the Sonnet upgrades but sadly Mac upgrades seem very thin on the ground this side of the pond, unless I'm looking in the wrong places. What graphics card do you use, out of interest? -Austin. From couryhouse at aol.com Sat Jul 16 03:22:39 2016 From: couryhouse at aol.com (couryhouse) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 01:22:39 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: I am following this closely ?as we were recently given?A g4 ... not the mirror frontA g4 .... mirror frontA g5 1st model drive missing nice internalsA g5 w Intel but not 3. So Cann not update to free latest ?os..is there a workaround ..internal design us not as cool as first g5 We have just what is on disc drive in them.. need to collect up a few things. Then we already had blue iMac already in boxPlus early little screen mac wife used This mac stuff is all new to me so learning curve... Ed# ?www.smecc.org Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: Cameron Kaiser Date: 7/15/16 23:39 (GMT-07:00) To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. > I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm > having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate > representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from > Classic CMP'ers. My "heavy duty" OS 9 rig is an dual 1.25GHz MDD that I upgraded to a dual Sonnet 1.8GHz, with 1.5GB RAM and OS 9.2.2. Everything flies on it. I haven't had any obvious compatibility problems. Al makes a good point though: have a spare power supply. My MDD blew through two. You didn't ask, but my preferred heavy duty 68K is the Q800. You can overclock them easily with chipclips and they are the beefiest 68K Mac that will still run A/UX. A/UX at 40MHz is a delight. > In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending > to use.? I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get > 9.2.1 on it relatively easily.? Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should > be considering?? It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?) > although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use > Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.? Was a gigabit ethernet card ever > released with Mac OS 9 drivers?? I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I > can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked > with classic Mac OS? I've never seen a GigE card for OS 9. There is of course 100Mbit support. I would love to be proven wrong. The Sonnet SATA cards work well with OS 9 and are completely bootable. I used such a card in a 7300. > In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I > should look to get my hands on?? What's the state of the art in classic Mac > OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained? Sort of, as I have time. I'd like to do more with it but TenFourFox consumes much of my free hacking cycles currently. That should let up relatively soon since I've made the executive decision to fork TenFourFox at Firefox 45ESR (due to the looming spectre of Rust becoming a build-requirement, and known and expected issues with Electrolysis multi-process with the 10.4 SDK). Still, the biggest need for Classilla currently is moar crypto and that's rather hard to get right. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- ? Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Know what I hate most?? Rhetorical questions. -- Henry N. Camp ------------- From abuse at cabal.org.uk Sat Jul 16 05:25:33 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 12:25:33 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> Message-ID: <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 01:03:31PM -0600, ben wrote: [...] > I had hopes on the Amiga until they came out with the 2000*. > * Lets add a brain dead cpu and run DOS. The A2088 was an add-in option. Back in the day, only one of my A2000-owning friends had a bridgecard. I was given a demo, and it was rather clunky. The main compelling feature of the A2000 was the built-in hard disk. Commodore UK also released the A1500 which was an A2000 without hard disk but with an extra floppy drive, i.e. the same spec as a typical A500 gaming rig. It apparently flew off the shelves, although I'm not sure why given it cost somewhat more than the A500 equivalent. From abuse at cabal.org.uk Sat Jul 16 06:12:00 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 13:12:00 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> Message-ID: <20160716111200.GB5602@mooli.org.uk> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 08:10:24PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: [...] > http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimedes.pdf > I vividly remember reading it as a 19YO student... > "The hard disk in the A500 is most noticeable for its ferociously rapid > access speed. It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time > it takes to blink an eye. The reason for this speed is that the disk is run > with no interleaving of sectors. On an IBM XT, for example, the disk rotates > about six times between each read to give the puny CPU time to digest; > Archimedes eliminates this dead time as the ARM processor can suck stuff off > the disk as fast as it can rotate." Isn't that mostly down to the difference between polled- and DMA-driven I/O? Not that IBM should be given any slack, given what a complete dog's breakfast ISA DMA is. Back in 1987, the Amiga had crap hard disk performance because while the controllers generally supported DMA, the disks still had to be formatted with that awful filesystem it inherited from Tripos. (This wasn't fixed until 1988.) I wonder how the Atari ST fared back then. Probably reasonably well given its filesystem is a FAT derivative. From jonas at otter.se Sat Jul 16 06:33:13 2016 From: jonas at otter.se (jonas at otter.se) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 13:33:13 +0200 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> > On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: >> What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was >> incredible. > > To be fair, I think you have to think about what was around when VMS was developed, and what DEC was competing with. VMS is an enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work. At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for teaching and research, not for heavy production work. In fact those early versions of Unix were completely useless for that kind of application - too limited, unstable, and no useful security features. No accounting at all, no useful batch functionality, nothing but the most basic kind of security and protection functionality etc. VMS was designed to compete with IBM mainframes and System/32-34-36 and the likes. In the early 80s I used both VMS version 4 and 5 and Unix version 7. The Unix system was used for program development, the VMS system for program development and running accounting software. The Unix system was fine for program development in a lab but far too unstable and insecure for running accounting systems in a corporate production environment. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat Jul 16 07:42:26 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:42:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 11/44 Console cable Message-ID: <20160716124226.32AD318C0E3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Kirk Davis > Does anyone know off hand if a 11/83 cab kit will work as a 11/44 > console? Both are 20 bin ribbon cable connectors Say what? The 20-pin connector on the M8190 (KDJ11-B) is configuration management, etc - the console connector is the 10-pin one (which uses the standard DEC later serial pinout, documented here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEC_asynchronous_serial_line_pinout if anyone needs it). The 11/44 console (and TU58) seem (from a quick glance at the prints) to use some odd pinout that is sui generis. Time to break out the soldering iron... Noel From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat Jul 16 07:55:30 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:55:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) Message-ID: <20160716125530.E7A1618C0E3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Jonas > At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for > teaching and research, not for heavy production work. Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of software for various Bell commercial projects. Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ article that describes it. Noel From spectre at floodgap.com Sat Jul 16 08:52:34 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 06:52:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <659CC2C2-A4B0-4FF9-B90C-4B6BBD442224@gmail.com> from Austin Pass at "Jul 16, 16 08:19:31 am" Message-ID: <201607161352.u6GDqYxX12255796@floodgap.com> > I'll hit eBay too for some PSU replacements. There are a few modified aftermarket supplies for the MDD which are also infinitely more reliable. I have an Antec one around here somewhere. The lower-watt AcBel units seem more reliable. > What graphics card do you use, out of interest? I use an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, but the GeForce 4Ti is probably the ultimate OS 9 card (it benches a bit quicker). That said, the 9000 is a very good card. I have it connected to a 1080p display which the ATI handles with absolutely no problem. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- boom boom boom Nothing outlasts the Energizer. It keeps going and going ... From jonelson126 at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 09:35:56 2016 From: jonelson126 at gmail.com (Jon Elson) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 09:35:56 -0500 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> Message-ID: <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> On 07/15/2016 09:55 PM, Evan Linwood wrote: > Hi All, > > I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell > recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it > seems they could be both significant and rare? They are VERY rare, and significant, as there were very few physical VLIW machines ever built. My guess is Trace built maybe 50 machines? Jon From aek at bitsavers.org Sat Jul 16 10:11:30 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 08:11:30 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> References: <201607160639.u6G6dXPv24577712@floodgap.com> Message-ID: On 7/15/16 11:39 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > You didn't ask, but my preferred heavy duty 68K is the Q800. Yup, I'd take it over the baroque 840AV any day. From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 22:34:22 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:34:22 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard Message-ID: Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and floppy, as well as a tiny printer. HP 362 "controller" Hp thinkjet 2225A printer Hp 9153B - HD and floppy Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im assuming is a s100 backplane. Pretty interesting. I have a couple of other Hp devices, a logic analizer, pattern generator, and volt meter, it will be interesting to see if i can get them talking with the computer. Computer works. boots into basic. Pretty complete setup for something at the scrapyard. https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/ --Devin From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Sat Jul 16 23:39:01 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 21:39:01 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2016-Jul-16, at 8:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/IMG_0148.JPG > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/IMG_0149.JPG Looks earlier than S100. I don't think I've ever seen a wirewrapped S100 backplane, they were pretty much all PCB. S100 is also a bus while this is varied wiring. I think it's more interesting. The edge connectors have a part number CDCxxxxx.... May well be from CDC. Assembly part numbers are of the form x-xxxx-xxx, somebody might confirm whether or not that's consistent with CDC numbering. From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 01:06:28 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 02:06:28 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: well come to think of it, i was at a HAM convention and i bought a bunch of wire wrap boards that were supposedly from CDC system. wire wrap boards with a card edge connector. I will have to see if they fit together. On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Brent Hilpert wrote: > On 2016-Jul-16, at 8:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > > as well as what im > > assuming is a s100 backplane. > > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/IMG_0148.JPG > > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/IMG_0149.JPG > > > Looks earlier than S100. I don't think I've ever seen a wirewrapped S100 > backplane, they were pretty much all PCB. > S100 is also a bus while this is varied wiring. > > I think it's more interesting. > The edge connectors have a part number CDCxxxxx.... > May well be from CDC. > > Assembly part numbers are of the form x-xxxx-xxx, somebody might confirm > whether or not that's consistent with CDC numbering. > > From xeon4d at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 15:09:36 2016 From: xeon4d at gmail.com (Marcos Alves) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 21:09:36 +0100 Subject: Siemens PC-MX2 Set Message-ID: Hello. I've recently acquired what came to be a Siemens PC-MX2 Set that is comprised of: * 4 Siemens Dossiers named: - Informix - BetriebeSystem SINIX Buch 1 - BetriebeSystem SINIX Buch 2 Menus - Siemens PC-MX2 Betriebsanleitung 12 Tapes: - 10 of them are of brand 3M, Model DC300XL/P and seem to be backups. - 2 of them are of brand Cadmus, Model 9000 and are named: "Munix Betriebsystem V.3/R.3-28 IS Format Anlagennummer FO/90-9754" and the other "Optionale Pakete PCS F0/89-74343 IS0055P 20-Jul-89 all files CPIO format 0. Med v.4.0 1. Munix_TCP/IP_(BSD) 7-Sep-88 2. Fortran77-32 V.4.0c" 1 Siemens branded Terminal with Serial Keyboard 1 Siemens Computer branded PC-9870 1 Siemens Dot Matrix Printer model is either PT88S-22 or -32 Is there any interest in this? I'm entertaining offers. Location is Portugal. Cumprimentos - Best Regards Marcos Alves. From classiccmp at crash.com Sat Jul 16 18:46:03 2016 From: classiccmp at crash.com (Steven M Jones) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 16:46:03 -0700 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: On 07/16/2016 15:21, steven at malikoff.com wrote: > > In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak > under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney > Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could > have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it > was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen. That's a tough example to generalize without knowing more about the workloads involved. I've certainly heard many anecdotes where a given model running VMS supported many more users than the same hardware running Ultrix/4BSD, *and* vice versa. But these examples can easily turn out to be skewed - having a ton of users running ALL-IN-1, MAIL, or NOTES-11 doesn't compare well to users compiling code, running SAS or SPSS, or doing database work. Substitute rn/trn, Mail, cc/f77, ingres, etc as needed. ;) --S. From theevilapplepie at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 20:31:59 2016 From: theevilapplepie at gmail.com (James Vess) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 20:31:59 -0500 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: Does anyone have the capacity to power the unit on in Texas? I could purchase and move, but without any ability to power it on it would just sit persistently in storage and I'm not interested in getting another minicomputer that will just sit. Let me know? On Saturday, July 16, 2016, Jon Elson wrote: > > On 07/15/2016 09:55 PM, Evan Linwood wrote: > >> Hi All, >> >> I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell >> recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it >> seems they could be both significant and rare? >> > They are VERY rare, and significant, as there were very few physical VLIW > machines ever built. My guess is Trace built maybe 50 machines? > > Jon > > From ats at offog.org Sat Jul 16 10:54:13 2016 From: ats at offog.org (Adam Sampson) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 16:54:13 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> (Peter Corlett's message of "Sat, 16 Jul 2016 12:25:33 +0200") References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: Peter Corlett writes: > Commodore UK also released the A1500 which was an A2000 without hard > disk but with an extra floppy drive, i.e. the same spec as a typical > A500 gaming rig. It apparently flew off the shelves, although I'm not > sure why given it cost somewhat more than the A500 equivalent. Looking at the prices in Amiga Shopper issue 1 (May 1991), the A1500 was a reasonable deal *if* you wanted a machine with expansion slots. Evesham Micros were selling the A1500 bundle with a 1084 monitor for ?949, when the A500 "Screen Gems" bundle with 1MB and an extra drive -- but no monitor -- was ?419. Add the ?239 for a Philips monitor and ?199 for a Checkmate A1500 expansion box (or ?350 for a Bodega Bay), and you were in nearly the same ballpark with a much less tidy system. It was definitely worth a look if what you really wanted was an A2000 with a hard disk, since you could buy a non-Commodore hard disk controller, many of which were faster and/or cheaper than the A2090. That said, though, the A1500 definitely wasn't flying off the shelves anything like as fast as the A500. I saw lots of A500s in the early 90s in Kent, but only one A1500 (with an accelerator, KCS PC emulator, and various other expansions, which eventually meant it remained in use long after the rest of us had upgraded to A1200s). Cheers, -- Adam Sampson From jsw at ieee.org Sat Jul 16 11:13:45 2016 From: jsw at ieee.org (Jerry Weiss) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 11:13:45 -0500 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <20160716125530.E7A1618C0E3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160716125530.E7A1618C0E3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <986D9503-E312-4917-BB58-7CBBC73FA9C0@ieee.org> On Jul 16, 2016, at 7:55 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> From: Jonas > >> At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for >> teaching and research, not for heavy production work. > > Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX > > was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of > software for various Bell commercial projects. > > Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it > was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ > article that describes it. I was involved in a department that had university research on one side and business on the other as well in the late 70?s and 80?s. The basic science analysis ran on PDP-11 with UNIX variants mostly Ultrix-11, Venix and some V7. Data acquisition was RT-11/TSX+ on LSI-11?s with custom hardware, handlers and interfaces. The business was PDP-11?s + RSX-11, then VAXen and VMS. Both sides did programing on Fortran and C. Separate from the license issues in that era, we generally would have not considered using the UNIX for the business side. While we had or could get the technical skills to do coding for applications, the overall support depth/response from the vendors and its operational design was not sufficient for a small operation. If the application, media or OS crashed, we needed to recover quickly and not risk permanent loss of more than a few minutes of transactions. I recall more than a few crashes on the Unix side where the file system and data recovery was not straightforward. Even on then small disk drives that used 60-250 Mbytes, fsck?ing could take over an hour. The academics could afford to put a grad student on sorting though the data loss and trying to recover missing data from multiple tapes. Software development was slower under VMS, but the overall experience was robust. We generally chose the tool that got the job done without too many culture wars. Before I let we had much of the research on NeXTSTEP or OpenStep. Steve definitely delivered a tool the academics could exploit and we did so at every layer of that product. Jerry From cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de Sat Jul 16 12:16:18 2016 From: cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de (Christian Corti) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:16:18 +0200 (CEST) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On Sat, 16 Jul 2016, Peter Corlett wrote: > main compelling feature of the A2000 was the built-in hard disk. The A2000 did *not* have a built-in hard disk, that was the A3000. The A2000 was just an "updated" A1000 in a large desktop case with Zorro slots... completely braindead. Christian From paulkoning at comcast.net Sat Jul 16 12:34:30 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 13:34:30 -0400 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <5789891C.2060804@sydex.com> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> <5789891C.2060804@sydex.com> Message-ID: <2D52F69D-AA69-4379-BC83-3C92A9F15364@comcast.net> > On Jul 15, 2016, at 9:08 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > On 07/15/2016 05:47 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > >> Graphics terminals were quite rare in the early 1970s, at least at a >> cost allowing them to be installed in the hundreds, and with >> processing requirements low enough for that. I remember, around the >> same time, the Tektronix 4010. But that was far less flexible; it >> could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals. > > Surely you remember CDC IGS from the 70s. I loved watching the displays > being drawn on those big radar CRT displays--one color while drawing and > persisting in another. > > They were "terminals" of a sort, no? IGS? Two colors? Don't recognize that. There's the 6000 console (DD60), very expensive, requiring a dedicated processor to feed it, and limited to uppercase text only plus very small amounts of graphics (a dot at a time, 3 microseconds per dot). paul From teoz at neo.rr.com Sat Jul 16 13:21:12 2016 From: teoz at neo.rr.com (TeoZ) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 14:21:12 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: A2000HD had the built in hard drive. -----Original Message----- From: Christian Corti Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2016 1:16 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Reproduction micros On Sat, 16 Jul 2016, Peter Corlett wrote: > main compelling feature of the A2000 was the built-in hard disk. The A2000 did *not* have a built-in hard disk, that was the A3000. The A2000 was just an "updated" A1000 in a large desktop case with Zorro slots... completely braindead. Christian --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 16 13:22:58 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 11:22:58 -0700 Subject: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <2D52F69D-AA69-4379-BC83-3C92A9F15364@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607142043.QAA17397@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <40CDAD33-1C4F-4E4D-83F9-7C2698ED420B@comcast.net> <6B8E7DD5-36F6-4479-AF7D-5FC79BFEC6A2@comcast.net> <5789891C.2060804@sydex.com> <2D52F69D-AA69-4379-BC83-3C92A9F15364@comcast.net> Message-ID: <578A7B82.8040800@sydex.com> On 07/16/2016 10:34 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > IGS? Two colors? Don't recognize that. There's the 6000 console > (DD60), very expensive, requiring a dedicated processor to feed it, > and limited to uppercase text only plus very small amounts of > graphics (a dot at a time, 3 microseconds per dot). IGS (Interactive Graphics System) was the generic term for the Digigraphic 200-series stuff. The consoles came in various flavors, but the best ones were the big, flat-surface jobs. The display processor with these things was pretty large; someone once told me that it resembled a 1700 more than anything. A lot of fun to fool with. --Chuck From grif615 at mindspring.com Sat Jul 16 14:36:00 2016 From: grif615 at mindspring.com (Grif) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 12:36:00 -0700 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) Message-ID: Whats this "BackInTheDay" stuff ? ;-) ?granted we upgraded to openvms at y2k, but the system ?is still in production. ? Ive been involved in this app since 93, and it was mature then. ?Just will not die :-( -------- Original message -------- From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Date: 07/16/2016 05:55 (GMT-08:00) To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Cc: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Subject: Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) ??? > From: Jonas ??? > At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for ??? > teaching and research, not for heavy production work. Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell: ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of software for various Bell commercial projects. Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ article that describes it. Noel From steven at malikoff.com Sat Jul 16 17:21:16 2016 From: steven at malikoff.com (steven at malikoff.com) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 08:21:16 +1000 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> Message-ID: <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> jonas said: > VMS is an > enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work. > At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for > teaching and research, not for heavy production work. In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen. From a.carlini at ntlworld.com Sat Jul 16 17:56:27 2016 From: a.carlini at ntlworld.com (Antonio Carlini) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:56:27 +0100 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> On 15/07/16 14:49, Swift Griggs wrote: > All I'm saying is that the presence of multiple IP stacks looks to me > to be unwieldy, organic, and incremental. VMS came with DECnet built-in (although you had to license it). If you wanted TCP/IP there was UCX, which you had to install separately. The other TCP/IP stacks came from 3rd party vendors. That's why there were multiple implementations of TCP/IP for VMS. > DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also > proprietary, The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they were free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now). There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) another for Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of their switches. > seldom used, Seldom used *now*. All the VMS systems I used commercially back then made use of DECnet. > and seems to mean different things to different people since it was > developed in "phases" which bear only loose resemblance to each other > in form & function. -Swift IPv4 and IPv6 are also only loosely related. At least the DECnet phases were sequentially numbered :-) (I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, which definitely did exist. I also assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 16 18:19:20 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 16:19:20 -0700 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: <578AC0F8.5030605@sydex.com> On 07/16/2016 03:21 PM, steven at malikoff.com wrote: > In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and > creak under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over > at Sydney Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked > Unix and could have a hundred or more students logged in on the one > machine. Whether it was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck > out of their VAXen. I recall that BSD was a great match for our 11/750. Never did succeed at getting HASP+bisync going on it though. --Chuck From glen.slick at gmail.com Sat Jul 16 21:24:17 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 19:24:17 -0700 Subject: eBay MVII BA123 $99 - Buy It Now - Richboro, Pennsylvania Message-ID: Don't see too many complete looking BA123 boxes show up on eBay and this one seems relatively cheap if you happen to be able to pick it up locally in Richboro, Pennsylvania. Plus a few boxes of VMS documentation too. http://www.ebay.com/itm/232013130536 (No personal connection to, or information about, this seller) I would grab this one myself if it was within easy driving distance. Someone should grab it. From rlloken at telus.net Sat Jul 16 23:06:01 2016 From: rlloken at telus.net (Richard Loken) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 22:06:01 -0600 (MDT) Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 17 Jul 2016, steven at malikoff.com wrote: > In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak > under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney > Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could > have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it > was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen. You certainly got more bang when your disk crashed. I ran a VAX cluster with 15 years with shadowed DSSI drives and never had a disk corruption, I replaced members of shadow sets when they died but again I never had any issues of corruption and data loss. Meanwhile I also lived with an array of Ultrix boxes and SunOS boxes where I had to clean up disk corruptions or do restores from tape onto new disks - usually in the middle of the night. Your work is always done faster if you skip steps. "System unstable, save often." -- Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS : "...underneath those Athabasca University : tuques we wear, our Athabasca, Alberta Canada : heads are naked!" ** rlloken at telus.net ** : - Arthur Black From isking at uw.edu Sat Jul 16 23:26:45 2016 From: isking at uw.edu (Ian S. King) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 21:26:45 -0700 Subject: eBay MVII BA123 $99 - Buy It Now - Richboro, Pennsylvania In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 7:24 PM, Glen Slick wrote: > Don't see too many complete looking BA123 boxes show up on eBay and > this one seems relatively cheap if you happen to be able to pick it up > locally in Richboro, Pennsylvania. Plus a few boxes of VMS > documentation too. > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/232013130536 > (No personal connection to, or information about, this seller) > > I would grab this one myself if it was within easy driving distance. > Someone should grab it. > A nice find for someone looking to 'get into' vintage computing. The disk should be easy to replace if necessary and documentation is plentiful. -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From linimon at lonesome.com Sun Jul 17 01:14:14 2016 From: linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 01:14:14 -0500 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> Message-ID: <20160717061414.GA3420@lonesome.com> On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 08:31:59PM -0500, James Vess wrote: > Does anyone have the capacity to power the unit on in Texas? Yeah but ... I wouldn't. The power supplies look too rough for me to trust the smoke-test. I can store it but I will lie if I say I can devote any time to it. mcl From robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com Sun Jul 17 01:19:17 2016 From: robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com (Rob Jarratt) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 07:19:17 +0100 Subject: eBay MVII BA123 $99 - Buy It Now - Richboro, Pennsylvania In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <019401d1dff3$25b54a20$711fde60$@ntlworld.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ian S. King > Sent: 17 July 2016 05:27 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: Re: eBay MVII BA123 $99 - Buy It Now - Richboro, Pennsylvania > > On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 7:24 PM, Glen Slick wrote: > > > Don't see too many complete looking BA123 boxes show up on eBay and > > this one seems relatively cheap if you happen to be able to pick it up > > locally in Richboro, Pennsylvania. Plus a few boxes of VMS > > documentation too. > > > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/232013130536 > > (No personal connection to, or information about, this seller) > > > > I would grab this one myself if it was within easy driving distance. > > Someone should grab it. > > > > A nice find for someone looking to 'get into' vintage computing. The disk > should be easy to replace if necessary and documentation is plentiful. > Indeed, very nicely looked after, it even has the little door at the bottom left of the front panel still intact, mine doesn't have that. Regards Rob From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 02:19:47 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 16:19:47 +0900 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: You got yourself the first consumer inkjet printer ever, from 1984: https://youtu.be/UiHNymmxKWs Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro-machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put a new one in and you should be good to go. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > > Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. > Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and > floppy, as well as a tiny printer. > > HP 362 "controller" > Hp thinkjet 2225A printer > Hp 9153B - HD and floppy > > Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. > > Pretty interesting. I have a couple of other Hp devices, a logic analizer, > pattern generator, and volt meter, it will be interesting to see if i can > get them talking with the computer. Computer works. boots into basic. > Pretty complete setup for something at the scrapyard. > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/ > > --Devin From pye at mactec.com.au Sun Jul 17 03:40:49 2016 From: pye at mactec.com.au (Chris Pye) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 18:40:49 +1000 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On 16 Jul 2016, at 3:33 pm, TeoZ wrote: > > > Most 840av's these days have bad motherboards from leaking capacitors and the plastics break if you sneeze too hard close to them. > Yes, I just gave away my 840av. It was working (and looking) fine a couple of years ago, but when I checked a few months ago the capacitors had died and the plastic bits were just falling apart. If it was just the caps I would have fixed it. Was my favourite 68K Mac, I did video editing on one back in the day. Can?t remember what video card(s) and software I used on it, but I know that the big (maybe 2GB?) SCSI drives and the max amount of RAM cost me a lot of $ back then.. Great machine but the case is horrible to work with. From mhs.stein at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 11:57:23 2016 From: mhs.stein at gmail.com (Mike Stein) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:57:23 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard References: Message-ID: <0B02097D8DA44B1CA7D30437E96D4586@310e2> >> for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Another thanks for the tip; I've got an HP2225B (HP-IL, with RS-232 converter) which presumably uses the same cartridge. Will have to check it out. m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Curious Marc" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2016 3:19 AM Subject: Re: Found some stuff at the scrapyard You got yourself the first consumer inkjet printer ever, from 1984: https://youtu.be/UiHNymmxKWs Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro-machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put a new one in and you should be good to go. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > > Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. > Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and > floppy, as well as a tiny printer. > > HP 362 "controller" > Hp thinkjet 2225A printer > Hp 9153B - HD and floppy > > Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. > > Pretty interesting. I have a couple of other Hp devices, a logic analizer, > pattern generator, and volt meter, it will be interesting to see if i can > get them talking with the computer. Computer works. boots into basic. > Pretty complete setup for something at the scrapyard. > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/ > > --Devin From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Sun Jul 17 09:03:09 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 14:03:09 +0000 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: > Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular > PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing It's mildly easier to use with a normal PC than the -B model (HPIL, battery powered). Interestingly the -A version has an HPIB-HPIL interface feeding HPIL to the main board (the interface is a modified (different firmware) version of the HP82169 IIRC. Interesting #2, the custom HP controller chip in these printers has a built-in ROM with the control firmware, but external font ROM and RAM. These communicate over what is essentially the Saturn bus, as found in the HP71, etc. > name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of I read somewhere that the official reason for 'THINKJET' was 'THermal INKJET'. I suspect that is very much a backronym. It is a thermal inkjet printer, the cartridge has little heating elements that boil the ink and cause a drop to be squirted out. > that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro- > machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time > manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, > you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put > a new one in and you should be good to go. A couple of words of warning about those cartridges. Firstly the ink, at least in older ones, is ethylene glycol based. It's toxic and attractive in taste to some animals. Keep those catridges away from cats, dogs, etc. The ink is also corrosive. It can corrode the metal faceplate on the cartridge, then drip onto the flexible PCB that connects the cartridge to the rest of the printer and corrode that too. If you ever have a Thinkjet with missing dots, that's what has happend (at least 99% of the time). The only source for replacement PCBs now is other Thinkjets. So don't leave the cartridge in the printer if you are not using it. Incidentally, if the 9153 is the drive unit I think it is, it has a very odd HP-interface hard disk in it. There is one ribbon cable (40 wires I think) carrying power, control signals and raw data. I seem to remember the head positioner is a stepper motor, but it does micro-stepping as part of the design. -tony From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 09:41:03 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 10:41:03 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> Message-ID: <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> > On Jul 16, 2016, at 6:56 PM, Antonio Carlini wrote: > > ... > The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they were free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now). I assume you had to pay for the cost of printing. They could be freely reproduced, though, it says so explicitly. > There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) another for Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of > their switches. Yes, and for that matter, there was a commercial non-DEC DECnet, by Stuart Wecker I think -- he was involved with DDCMP way back when. > ... > (I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, which definitely did exist. I also > assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!) I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. paul From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 09:47:58 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 10:47:58 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > ... > I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. By the way: starting with Phase III, DEC adopted "one phase back" compatibility. A Phase III node could talk to Phase II; a Phase IV node could talk to Phase III, all documented clearly in the specifications. (Two phases back wasn't described or aimed for, though it is not that hard; my DECnet/Python does Phase IV but talks to Phase II.) On the other hand, Phase II is not compatible with Phase I; the packet formats are significantly and it's clear that no attempt was made to deliver compatibility. I don't know why not, or why that changed later. (Before my time...) paul From lproven at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 09:48:34 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 16:48:34 +0200 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <57893001.2040107@oryx.us> References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> <57893001.2040107@oryx.us> Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 20:48, Jerry Kemp wrote: > I guess I am glad that someone getting something positive from windows. > > I have never viewed it as any more than a virus distribution system with a > poorly written GUI front end. I am ambivalent. I don't particularly like it any more, but the reasons are secondary: the poor security, the copy protection, the poor performance because of the requirement for anti-malware, etc. The core product was pretty good once. Windows 3.0 was a technical triumph, Windows for Workgroups impressive, and Win95 a tour de force. For me, Win 2K was about the peak; XP started the trend of adding bloat, although it did have worthwhile features too. Win95 was vastly easier to get installed & working than OS/2 2, it had a better shell -- sorry, but it really was -- better compatibility and better performance. No, the stability wasn't as good, but while OS/2 2 was better, NT 3.x was better than OS/2 2.x et seq. It would be technically possible to produce a streamlined, stripped-down Windows that was a bloody good OS, but MS lacks the will. Shame. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From john at forecast.name Sun Jul 17 10:06:38 2016 From: john at forecast.name (John Forecast) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 11:06:38 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > >> On Jul 16, 2016, at 6:56 PM, Antonio Carlini wrote: >> >> ... >> The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they were free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now). > > I assume you had to pay for the cost of printing. They could be freely reproduced, though, it says so explicitly. > >> There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) another for Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of >> their switches. > > Yes, and for that matter, there was a commercial non-DEC DECnet, by Stuart Wecker I think -- he was involved with DDCMP way back when. > That was Technology Concepts Inc, Sudbury MA. Sometime around 1984 I almost left DEC to join TCI but then had a change of heart. Sun?s DECnet implementation was either done by TCI or based on their code. >> ... >> (I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, which definitely did exist. I also >> assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!) > > I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. > I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 11/40?s running RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I?m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 11D in the RSX family. John. > paul > From lproven at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 10:09:21 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:09:21 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: <20160716111200.GB5602@mooli.org.uk> References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <20160716111200.GB5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 16 July 2016 at 13:12, Peter Corlett wrote: > > Isn't that mostly down to the difference between polled- and DMA-driven I/O? > Not that IBM should be given any slack, given what a complete dog's breakfast > ISA DMA is. > > Back in 1987, the Amiga had crap hard disk performance because while the > controllers generally supported DMA, the disks still had to be formatted with > that awful filesystem it inherited from Tripos. (This wasn't fixed until 1988.) > > I wonder how the Atari ST fared back then. Probably reasonably well given its > filesystem is a FAT derivative. If it's a real question, I still know some RISC OS gurus, so I can probably find out. But RISC OS was, technically, very primitive. I am not 100% sure it even did DMA. I recall around '96 or so, when busmastering DMA hard disk drivers for Windows NT 4 on the Intel 82430FX "Triton" PCI chipset and its PIIX EIDE controller appeared. They existed for Win9x too but didn't make as much difference, because the 9x kernel didn't have the internal multithreading to take advantage of it. NT did. The thing is, in a fast PC, they weren't massively quicker in terms of raw transfer speed. What they did was massively reduce the CPU load of intensive disk activity. Obviously you could only see this in Performance Monitor once the machine was booted, but it was interesting. With the ordinary default MS EIDE drivers, NT used Polled I/O. Under heavy disk load, such as loading a large modular app, the kernel CPU usage in PerfMon went very spiky. If the CPU was reasonably quick -- which around then meant a P1 at 166MHz, or maybe a Pentium 1 MMX at 200MHz, then it didn't max out the CPU, but it was working hard. With the DMA drivers, intensive disk activity barely caused a trickle of CPU activity. You could hardly see it. The difference was so dramatic, you could hear it from the changing noise of the movement of the disk heads. With PIO, it was staccato, clicky; with DMA, it became bursts of buzzing and occasional silences as the OS digested the new data it received and then requested more. Of course, if you had some expensive SCSI disk system, this wasn't anything new -- but then, with a decent SCSI host adaptor, such as an expensive Adaptec AHA2940, you never heard it in PIO mode, so the contrast wasn't there. It was harder to compare some cheap terrible SCSI adaptor with a good one -- nobody sane would put a fast hard disk on a cheapo ISA-bus AHA1510 meant for driving a scanner. Whereas with Triton drivers and a good fast EIDE HD -- the de-facto choice then was a Quantum Fireball 1.2GB -- you could install the OS, get it working, then take the floppy with the Triton drivers, install it and reboot. Presto, the machine booted faster and became significantly more responsive. Big difference. This is the most dramatic demo of DMA-driven hard disk access that I've ever personally encountered. In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305 and A310 came with ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was a series, not a model. There was, later (1990), the A540: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX. The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD: http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm ... but then it was the thick end of three thousand quid. Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506 drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS with a desktop written in BBC BASIC). So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 10:13:51 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 11:13:51 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> Message-ID: <1E895922-D146-48B9-9484-C9EA1E180EA7@comcast.net> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast wrote: > >> ... >> I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. >> > I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 11/40?s running > RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I?m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 11D in the RSX > family. I'd always heard that. But recently I found Phase I documents, which include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be. (In particular, NSP works rather differently.) And that document was for a PDP-8 OS. Possibly it was built but not shipped, or designed but not built. The document has the look of r a finished product manual, though. paul From lproven at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 10:28:38 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:28:38 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 16 July 2016 at 19:16, Christian Corti wrote: > The A2000 did *not* have a built-in hard disk, that was the A3000. The A2000 > was just an "updated" A1000 in a large desktop case with Zorro slots... > completely braindead. Again with the "braindead" jibes. You have not clarified or explained what your objection to the machine was. It seems that there were about 5 models... A1500 -- A2000, no hard disk but dual floppies. A sensible affordable model for 1987 or so. A2000 -- an expandable A1000 with slots and provision for an on-board hard disk. A2000HD -- an A2000 with a hard disk preinstalled. A2500 -- an A2000 with a CBM processor upgrade preinstalled, either a 68020 or a 68030. If you are arguing that the A2000 should have been launched with a 68020 on the motherboard, rather than a 68000, well, yes, that would have been great -- but also very expensive, and the Amiga was a low-cost machine in a very price-sensitive market. A 68020 in 1987 might have been just too much, too expensive. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From john at forecast.name Sun Jul 17 11:12:27 2016 From: john at forecast.name (John Forecast) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:12:27 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <1E895922-D146-48B9-9484-C9EA1E180EA7@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> <1E895922-D146-48B9-9484-C9EA1E180EA7@comcast.net> Message-ID: <3D4B7F01-4DA1-458E-BF8E-F65ED8DDE211@forecast.name> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > >> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast wrote: >> >>> ... >>> I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. >>> >> I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 11/40?s running >> RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I?m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 11D in the RSX >> family. > > I'd always heard that. But recently I found Phase I documents, which include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be. (In particular, NSP works rather differently.) And that document was for a PDP-8 OS. > I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 DECNET/8 SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late addition to the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill in Feb 1977 to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated Jun 1978 which seems about right. > Possibly it was built but not shipped, or designed but not built. The document has the look of r a finished product manual, though. > > paul > > From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 11:21:06 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:21:06 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Very good information to know about the printer, thanks. I am assuming that the new cartridges I get from staples should not have the toxic ink? Will it still be corrosive? There was a second printer over there, missing the plastic cover and scratched up. I think i will pick it up too for parts. As far as the disk drive goes, if it is a proprietary hard drive in there, that is a bummer. it spins up but does not sound too good. The drive in the compuer itself does not sound too good either, but it is still working and is scsi, which i have a stockpile of over here, so that is not an issue. On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 10:03 AM, tony duell wrote: > > Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular > > PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing > > It's mildly easier to use with a normal PC than the -B model (HPIL, > battery powered). Interestingly the -A version has an HPIB-HPIL > interface feeding HPIL to the main board (the interface is a > modified (different firmware) version of the HP82169 IIRC. > > Interesting #2, the custom HP controller chip in these printers > has a built-in ROM with the control firmware, but external > font ROM and RAM. These communicate over what is essentially > the Saturn bus, as found in the HP71, etc. > > > name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of > > I read somewhere that the official reason for 'THINKJET' was > 'THermal INKJET'. I suspect that is very much a backronym. It > is a thermal inkjet printer, the cartridge has little heating elements > that boil the ink and cause a drop to be squirted out. > > > that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro- > > machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time > > manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, > > you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put > > a new one in and you should be good to go. > > A couple of words of warning about those cartridges. Firstly > the ink, at least in older ones, is ethylene glycol based. It's toxic > and attractive in taste to some animals. Keep those catridges > away from cats, dogs, etc. > > The ink is also corrosive. It can corrode the metal faceplate > on the cartridge, then drip onto the flexible PCB that connects > the cartridge to the rest of the printer and corrode that too. > If you ever have a Thinkjet with missing dots, that's what has > happend (at least 99% of the time). The only source for > replacement PCBs now is other Thinkjets. So don't leave the > cartridge in the printer if you are not using it. > > Incidentally, if the 9153 is the drive unit I think it is, it has a > very odd HP-interface hard disk in it. There is one ribbon > cable (40 wires I think) carrying power, control signals and > raw data. I seem to remember the head positioner is a > stepper motor, but it does micro-stepping as part of the > design. > > -tony > From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:41:03 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:41:03 -0700 Subject: Who Loves IBM Tape? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 3480 is interesting technically because it was one of the first drives to use magneto-restrictive read heads, which are much more sensitive than inductive. The 18 track head stack will work on a conventional 1/2" tape transport, as will the 36 track heads from a 3490. This is what is in the modified STC 9914V drives shown in this paper use: http://storageconference.us/2008/presentations/3.Wednesday/5.Bordynuik.pdf About ten years ago, I bought a dozen 3480's in Chicago, and took them up to my parents farm in Wisconsin and stripped them down for the head stacks. 7340 Hypertape was developed for the Stretch project, and were mainly used by NSA. On 7/17/16 9:23 AM, Jason T wrote: > A very nice IBM 3480 brochure ended up in my hands yesterday and I had > to bump it to the top of the scan queue: > > https://archive.org/details/IBM3480MagneticTapeSubsystemBrochure > > Lots of nice shots of IBM data center tape equipment as well as a cool > "history of tape at IBM" set of pages. I've never heard of 7340 > Hypertape. > > -j > From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Sun Jul 17 11:38:53 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:38:53 -0700 Subject: Who Loves IBM Tape? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1406B9A2-8892-4D86-9CF8-CD9BF340E5D8@cs.ubc.ca> On 2016-Jul-17, at 9:23 AM, Jason T wrote: > A very nice IBM 3480 brochure ended up in my hands yesterday and I had > to bump it to the top of the scan queue: > > https://archive.org/details/IBM3480MagneticTapeSubsystemBrochure > > Lots of nice shots of IBM data center tape equipment as well as a cool > "history of tape at IBM" set of pages. I've never heard of 7340 > Hypertape. Great looking brochure. I'd have difficulty getting to it right now as most everything is packed away, but I have a mid-60s IBM brochure that presents an overview of IBM computer equipment, in the section on tape they present the hypertape cartridges as the latest development. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:43:47 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:43:47 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 7/17/16 9:21 AM, devin davison wrote: > As far as the disk drive goes, if it is a proprietary hard drive in there, > that is a bummer. They are conventional drives. The 360 or 380 are nice machines that will also run HP/UX and come in handy for recovery of HPIB disk drives. I used a 380 to read all of the HPIB disks that came from HP when they donated what was left of the Apollo and 9000 support lab to CHM. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:45:39 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:45:39 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8121aec5-2844-577c-6506-0b37fdc4efee@bitsavers.org> Memory sticks don't appear to be normal, though. I never bothered to dig into what's different about them, since they were available cheaply on eBay when i was working on the data recovery project. On 7/17/16 9:43 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > On 7/17/16 9:21 AM, devin davison wrote: > >> As far as the disk drive goes, if it is a proprietary hard drive in there, >> that is a bummer. > > They are conventional drives. The 360 or 380 are nice machines that will also run HP/UX > and come in handy for recovery of HPIB disk drives. I used a 380 to read all of the HPIB > disks that came from HP when they donated what was left of the Apollo and 9000 support > lab to CHM. > > From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 11:47:01 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:47:01 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: <8121aec5-2844-577c-6506-0b37fdc4efee@bitsavers.org> References: <8121aec5-2844-577c-6506-0b37fdc4efee@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: Yeah i saw that it was capable or running HP/UX and wanted to take a look at that. Sadly it did not come with a NIC, that would have been pretty useful for getting data into and out of the machine over the network, instead ill be limited to floppys. The basic os that came installed on it looks pretty interesting too, although i need to read up on it some. I'm going to image the drive so in the event it goes bad or i need to set things back to how i got the machine i can do so. On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > Memory sticks don't appear to be normal, though. > I never bothered to dig into what's different about them, since > they were available cheaply on eBay when i was working on the data > recovery project. > > > On 7/17/16 9:43 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > > > > On 7/17/16 9:21 AM, devin davison wrote: > > > >> As far as the disk drive goes, if it is a proprietary hard drive in > there, > >> that is a bummer. > > > > They are conventional drives. The 360 or 380 are nice machines that will > also run HP/UX > > and come in handy for recovery of HPIB disk drives. I used a 380 to read > all of the HPIB > > disks that came from HP when they donated what was left of the Apollo > and 9000 support > > lab to CHM. > > > > > > From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:51:32 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:51:32 -0700 Subject: Who Loves IBM Tape? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0a1c4edb-4b33-e347-f948-5afe70831ae4@bitsavers.org> re-reading the paper, "mechanical bit validation" was a little confusing for a while until I remembered that he also digitizes the tach signal, so he knows the absolute position of the tape. On 7/17/16 9:41 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > This is what is in the modified STC 9914V drives shown in this paper use: > > http://storageconference.us/2008/presentations/3.Wednesday/5.Bordynuik.pdf > From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:53:22 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:53:22 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: <8121aec5-2844-577c-6506-0b37fdc4efee@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <19eacfe8-0eee-9854-dc25-647df28109c7@bitsavers.org> It's "Rocky Mountain BASIC" V6.2, which you used to be able to get as floppy images from the Australian HP Museum. I think the standalone Pascal system still ran on these as well. On 7/17/16 9:47 AM, devin davison wrote: > The basic os that came installed on it looks pretty interesting too, > although i need to read up on it some. I'm going to image the drive so in > the event it goes bad or i need to set things back to how i got the machine > i can do so. > From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 11:57:08 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:57:08 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: <19eacfe8-0eee-9854-dc25-647df28109c7@bitsavers.org> References: <8121aec5-2844-577c-6506-0b37fdc4efee@bitsavers.org> <19eacfe8-0eee-9854-dc25-647df28109c7@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <220b5801-245e-8b59-6a5b-ccfc088218f0@bitsavers.org> which also ran on PCs on the 82324B Measurement Coprocessor http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=909 On 7/17/16 9:53 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > It's "Rocky Mountain BASIC" V6.2, From cisin at xenosoft.com Sun Jul 17 11:55:31 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 09:55:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: >> Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular > PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing On Sun, 17 Jul 2016, tony duell wrote: It's mildly easier to use with a normal PC than the -B model (HPIL, There were also variant models with "Centronics" interface. Those were much easier to use with a "normal PC" narrow and wide carriage. College dumpstered at least a hundred of them. At one point, they fired a tenured faculty member for dumpster diving. I didn't get caught. Same ink cartridge was also used by Kodak Diconix. It was a portable printer, that had a hollow platen holding C cells. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Sun Jul 17 12:17:36 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:17:36 +0000 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: > Very good information to know about the printer, thanks. I am assuming > that the new cartridges I get from staples should not have the toxic ink? > Will it still be corrosive? My guess is that the ink formulation has not changed. I think other things (maybe element power, timing, etc) would have to be changed too. Ethylene glycol is, of course, commonly found in car anti-freeze. The printer ink is not rediculously toxic, but some animals find it tastes sweet, they drink all they can find and it leads to kindney failure. My view (as the owner of a good few Thinkjets, and the servant of a cat) is that you don't leave the cartridges around when an animal could find them, and you wipe up any leakages. Other than that there is no real worry. And since the damage caused by the corrosive ink is a right pain to repair, I would assume all ink is corrosive and remove the cartridge from a printer that you are not using. -tony From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Sun Jul 17 12:21:42 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:21:42 +0000 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: > > As far as the disk drive goes, if it is a proprietary hard drive in there, > > that is a bummer. > > They are conventional drives. The 360 or 380 are nice machines that will also run HP/UX As far as I am aware the HP9153B is the same as an HP9154B with a floppy drive fitted. The 9154B uses an HP drive known as a 'Nighthawk' which does not have a normal interface. I've just looked at the schematics... -tony From other at oryx.us Sun Jul 17 12:33:26 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:33:26 -0500 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> <57893001.2040107@oryx.us> Message-ID: <578BC166.6000901@oryx.us> windows 95 - yea, even bill gates stated that windows 95 was the pinnacle. ease of installation - maybe due to the fact that the bulk, if not all of us here are experienced users, I've never understood the belly-aching concerning installation. Not for DOS/windows, not for OS/2, not for BSD, not for Linux, not for Solaris. Specifically when you are giving the installer the entire disk for the OS as a new system install. Just grab the disk then go. Other settings, like network, even if it is dhcp, have to be added somewhere, be it during the install or after the fact. OS/2 vs the windows GUI - sorry, but the best that anyone is going to be able to convince me on here is personal preference. Its a GUI on top of the OS where end users double click icons. Aside from the single thread input queue on early WPS, the sole advantage I ever saw that windows had over OS/2 was that early on, the *.ini files were text based on windows vs binary on OS/2. At some point, ms followed IBM and moved to binary *.ini files. I don't remember at what version. There were nice GUI based applications (3rd party) for editing OS/2 *.ini files, but it was never as nice as having actual ASCII text based files. Jerry On 07/17/16 09:48 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > I am ambivalent. I don't particularly like it any more, but the > reasons are secondary: the poor security, the copy protection, the > poor performance because of the requirement for anti-malware, etc. > > The core product was pretty good once. Windows 3.0 was a technical > triumph, Windows for Workgroups impressive, and Win95 a tour de force. > For me, Win 2K was about the peak; XP started the trend of adding > bloat, although it did have worthwhile features too. > > Win95 was vastly easier to get installed & working than OS/2 2, it had > a better shell -- sorry, but it really was -- better compatibility and > better performance. No, the stability wasn't as good, but while OS/2 2 > was better, NT 3.x was better than OS/2 2.x et seq. > > It would be technically possible to produce a streamlined, > stripped-down Windows that was a bloody good OS, but MS lacks the > will. Shame. > From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 13:39:10 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 13:39:10 -0500 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal Message-ID: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> There's a battery in my QX-10; anyone know if it's safe to remove it before it leaks (i.e. it's not responsible for storing any parameters which might be vital to system operation)? I think most of my machines which have batteries just use them for things such as TOD clock and so it's no big deal to remove them (and they'll run happily without), but I do also have various "unknowns" - of which the QX-10 is one. (I don't suppose anyone is working on a big list of machines with batteries in, which ones need consideration before removal, and which ones refuse to function without a battery present, are they?) cheers Jules From abuse at cabal.org.uk Sun Jul 17 13:54:51 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:54:51 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> On 17 Jul 2016, at 17:28, Liam Proven wrote: [...] > Again with the "braindead" jibes. You have not clarified or explained > what your objection to the machine was. We perhaps forget just how eyewateringly expensive these things were. They were "braindead" because to build them "properly" would price them out of the market. I can't quickly find 1987 pricing, but I found a plausible price list from Calco Software on page 83 of the September 1989 issue of Amiga Format. I also give an approximate RPI-adjusted price in 2016 pounds: Amiga A500: ?349 (?800). Amiga A590 20MB hard disk: ?395 (?900). Amiga B2000: ?895 (?2,000). Plus an A1084S monitor: ?1,125 (?2,500). Plus an XT bridgeboard and 5.25" drive: ?1,395 (?3,100). Plus a 30MB hard disk: ?1,595 (?3,600). A suitable floppy drive to fit the A2000: ?79 (?180). A2620 68020 accelerator card: ?1,395 (?3,100). Based on this price list, we can estimate the price of the models: > It seems that there were about 5 models... > A1500 -- A2000, no hard disk but dual floppies. A sensible affordable > model for 1987 or so. ?895 + ?79 = ?975. (ISTR them selling for a grand at launch in 1990, so at least this estimate is good.) > A2000 -- an expandable A1000 with slots and provision for an on-board hard disk. The A2000 was a ground-up redesign. It even got a new Agnus chip! ?895. > A2000HD -- an A2000 with a hard disk preinstalled. ?895 + (?1,595 - ?1,395) = ?1,095. > A2500 -- an A2000 with a CBM processor upgrade preinstalled, either a > 68020 or a 68030. ?895 + ?1,395 = ?2,290. > If you are arguing that the A2000 should have been launched with a > 68020 on the motherboard, rather than a 68000, well, yes, that would > have been great -- but also very expensive, and the Amiga was a > low-cost machine in a very price-sensitive market. A 68020 in 1987 > might have been just too much, too expensive. I think it should be quite obvious from the prices why the Amiga 2000 didn't ship with a 68020 as standard. From abs at absd.org Sun Jul 17 14:07:40 2016 From: abs at absd.org (David Brownlee) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:07:40 +0100 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <20160716111200.GB5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 17 July 2016 at 16:09, Liam Proven wrote: > In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305 and A310 came with > ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive > workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was > a series, not a model. The A500 was the development prototype which pre-dated the A310 (originally with pre-multiply ARM1 CPUs). Only a 100 or so made. I think they used pretty much the same Hitachi HD63463 as the (optional podule for the) A300 series which I think was DMA capable. > There was, later (1990), the A540: > > http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html > > This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX. > > The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD: > > http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm The A540/R260 was a completely different class of machine, with an ARM3 and the ability to take multiple memory (each with memory controller) cards. > ... but then it was the thick end of three thousand quid. > > Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506 > drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS > with a desktop written in BBC BASIC). > > So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know. Think of it as an A310 with integrated disk controller, in a big metal box with a lot more soldered wires internally :-p Acorn kept them in internal service for white a while, including for development versions of RISC OS 3 with the multitasking filer. From james at attfield.co.uk Sun Jul 17 14:29:31 2016 From: james at attfield.co.uk (James Attfield) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:29:31 +0100 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard Message-ID: <003601d1e061$8b7400e0$a25c02a0$@attfield.co.uk> > Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:34:22 -0400 > From: devin davison > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" > Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard > Message-ID: > 7+jLTP76KheCFdu31YWpowXvMsdqSVkAg at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. > Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and floppy, > as well as a tiny printer. > > HP 362 "controller" > Hp thinkjet 2225A printer > Hp 9153B - HD and floppy > > Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. I don't know what it is, but S100 it isn't. A key feature of the S100 bus is 100 pins, not 122. James From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 14:35:59 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:35:59 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: <003601d1e061$8b7400e0$a25c02a0$@attfield.co.uk> References: <003601d1e061$8b7400e0$a25c02a0$@attfield.co.uk> Message-ID: Well, i will have to see if i can find any matching wire wrap cards to plug into the backpane and i can perhaps make something of it. I did not pay much for it, its no big liss if it is useless. From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 14:26:13 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:26:13 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <3D4B7F01-4DA1-458E-BF8E-F65ED8DDE211@forecast.name> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> <1E895922-D146-48B9-9484-C9EA1E180EA7@comcast.net> <3D4B7F01-4DA1-458E-BF8E-F65ED8DDE211@forecast.name> Message-ID: <5D5E5718-E629-480B-82F9-EAC20C02A019@comcast.net> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:12 PM, John Forecast wrote: > > >> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning wrote: >> >> >>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast wrote: >>> >>>> ... >>>> I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. >>>> >>> I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 11/40?s running >>> RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I?m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 11D in the RSX >>> family. >> >> I'd always heard that. But recently I found Phase I documents, which include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be. (In particular, NSP works rather differently.) And that document was for a PDP-8 OS. >> > I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 DECNET/8 > SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late addition to > the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill in Feb 1977 > to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated Jun 1978 > which seems about right. So does that mean that RTS/8 DECnet Phase I was built but not shipped? Or shipped but not supported? The document I referred to is a full manual "RTS/8 DECNET/8 User's Guide, Order No. AA-5184A-TA". A note at the start says "converted from scanned text 1-Jun-1996" and just below that "First printing, February 1977". Chapter 6 is a fairly detained description of protocol message formats, which look vaguely like NSP as we know it but only vaguely. paul From terry at webweavers.co.nz Sun Jul 17 14:29:59 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:29:59 +1200 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Jules I found removing my QX-10's battery stopped the machines working. I tried replacing it with a lithium battery after disabling the recharging circuit but that didn't work either. The old battery doesn't show any signs of leaking so I just left it in there. I check all my machines with batteries once a year for any battery leakage so I'm comfortable with leaving it there. Terry ( Tez) On 18/07/2016 6:38 am, "Jules Richardson" wrote: > > > There's a battery in my QX-10; anyone know if it's safe to remove it before it leaks (i.e. it's not responsible for storing any parameters which might be vital to system operation)? > > I think most of my machines which have batteries just use them for things such as TOD clock and so it's no big deal to remove them (and they'll run happily without), but I do also have various "unknowns" - of which the QX-10 is one. > > (I don't suppose anyone is working on a big list of machines with batteries in, which ones need consideration before removal, and which ones refuse to function without a battery present, are they?) > > cheers > > Jules From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 14:37:46 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:37:46 -0400 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 17, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: > > Hi Jules > > I found removing my QX-10's battery stopped the machines working. I tried > replacing it with a lithium battery after disabling the recharging circuit > but that didn't work either. In the early days of amateur radio transmitters with embedded microprocessors, some idiot manufacturers put the firmware (all of it) in battery backed RAM. So if the battery went dead, you had a boat anchor, not a radio. I hope that sort of thing isn't what you're dealing with here... paul From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 17 14:39:07 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:39:07 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard Message-ID: <5f33da.5e0dc083.44bd38db@aol.com> What a flash back... (SMECC is always looking for anything related to these products) The HPIL thinkjet version was also used with the hp portable and hp portable plus laptops. we have some of them in the SMECC here... but back when I was CEO Computer Exchange inc we sold lost of these.. it was a small laptop with applications in ROM but also had a HPIL 3 1/2 disc and an HPIL Hey! Remember to the hp 45 calc.. had HPIL interface also... There was also a gaggle of cards to the PC and the HP 150 TOUCHSCREEN that would talk to HPIL and also on IBM side HPIL plus I seem to remember HPIB cards too. THANK YOU FOR THE INK WARNINGS! I did not know about the corrosive qualities of the ink and did not realize the glycerol content... I may be wrong but I remember a HPIL a HPIB a Parallel and maybe a Serial interface version of the HP Thinkjet Now there was another interface not to be confused with the HPIL it was called HP HIL HP HUMAN INTERFACE LOOP I remember? it was what the mouse used on the hp 150 etc... I may still still have my orig HP Thinkjet service training course ... we were also a service center for a bunch of the HP PC products and some manuals from classes I attended or my staff attended I saved and they are in the glassed in HP lock up area where the 2000 access and the hp micro and mini stuff lives. I have a bunch of odd VECTRA internals manuals too... Just wish I had saved more of this stuff... We also have an HP INTEGRAL (sp?) Unix all in one computer printer combo... cool concept it has THINKJET printer built in the top of it too. we never sold this product but SMECC was given a prototype many years later... REMEMBER TOO.... THINKJET printers always printed best on "special hp thinkjet paper" Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) In a message dated 7/17/2016 12:15:58 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, mhs.stein at gmail.com writes: >> for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Another thanks for the tip; I've got an HP2225B (HP-IL, with RS-232 converter) which presumably uses the same cartridge. Will have to check it out. m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Curious Marc" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2016 3:19 AM Subject: Re: Found some stuff at the scrapyard You got yourself the first consumer inkjet printer ever, from 1984: https://youtu.be/UiHNymmxKWs Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro-machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put a new one in and you should be good to go. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > > Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. > Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and > floppy, as well as a tiny printer. > > HP 362 "controller" > Hp thinkjet 2225A printer > Hp 9153B - HD and floppy > > Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. > > Pretty interesting. I have a couple of other Hp devices, a logic analizer, > pattern generator, and volt meter, it will be interesting to see if i can > get them talking with the computer. Computer works. boots into basic. > Pretty complete setup for something at the scrapyard. > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/ > > --Devin From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 17 14:39:07 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:39:07 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard Message-ID: <5f33da.5e0dc083.44bd38db@aol.com> What a flash back... (SMECC is always looking for anything related to these products) The HPIL thinkjet version was also used with the hp portable and hp portable plus laptops. we have some of them in the SMECC here... but back when I was CEO Computer Exchange inc we sold lost of these.. it was a small laptop with applications in ROM but also had a HPIL 3 1/2 disc and an HPIL Hey! Remember to the hp 45 calc.. had HPIL interface also... There was also a gaggle of cards to the PC and the HP 150 TOUCHSCREEN that would talk to HPIL and also on IBM side HPIL plus I seem to remember HPIB cards too. THANK YOU FOR THE INK WARNINGS! I did not know about the corrosive qualities of the ink and did not realize the glycerol content... I may be wrong but I remember a HPIL a HPIB a Parallel and maybe a Serial interface version of the HP Thinkjet Now there was another interface not to be confused with the HPIL it was called HP HIL HP HUMAN INTERFACE LOOP I remember? it was what the mouse used on the hp 150 etc... I may still still have my orig HP Thinkjet service training course ... we were also a service center for a bunch of the HP PC products and some manuals from classes I attended or my staff attended I saved and they are in the glassed in HP lock up area where the 2000 access and the hp micro and mini stuff lives. I have a bunch of odd VECTRA internals manuals too... Just wish I had saved more of this stuff... We also have an HP INTEGRAL (sp?) Unix all in one computer printer combo... cool concept it has THINKJET printer built in the top of it too. we never sold this product but SMECC was given a prototype many years later... REMEMBER TOO.... THINKJET printers always printed best on "special hp thinkjet paper" Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) In a message dated 7/17/2016 12:15:58 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, mhs.stein at gmail.com writes: >> for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Another thanks for the tip; I've got an HP2225B (HP-IL, with RS-232 converter) which presumably uses the same cartridge. Will have to check it out. m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Curious Marc" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2016 3:19 AM Subject: Re: Found some stuff at the scrapyard You got yourself the first consumer inkjet printer ever, from 1984: https://youtu.be/UiHNymmxKWs Original "A" version with HP-IB interface, useless for regular PCs of course. Complete with the "SomethingJet" marketing name that has been with us since then. The key innovation of that printer was the disposable cartridge with the micro-machined nozzles, which they had a horrendous time manufacturing at first. And for some incomprehensible reason, you can still order brand new cartridges from... Staples! Just put a new one in and you should be good to go. Marc Sent from my iPad > On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:34 PM, devin davison wrote: > > Actually found a pretty nice hp machine with a bunch of peripherals. > Thankfully it came with the keyboard. Also a external hard drive and > floppy, as well as a tiny printer. > > HP 362 "controller" > Hp thinkjet 2225A printer > Hp 9153B - HD and floppy > > Also a IBM wheelwriter 3 with the parallel interface, as well as what im > assuming is a s100 backplane. > > Pretty interesting. I have a couple of other Hp devices, a logic analizer, > pattern generator, and volt meter, it will be interesting to see if i can > get them talking with the computer. Computer works. boots into basic. > Pretty complete setup for something at the scrapyard. > > https://www.slashflash.info/~devin/images/scrapyard_lot/ > > --Devin From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Sun Jul 17 14:47:09 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 12:47:09 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <21d9d824-f4d3-10e8-6471-4d72b30a06ff@bitsavers.org> <76D40DC9-7555-41DB-AFA2-889FE1A2EF56@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Jul 15, 2016, at 1:49 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > I have several G5's, but am at a loss as to what to do with them. If they supported classic Mac OS I'd have one up and running in a heartbeat. You can't boot MacOS 9 on them, but you can run Classic under 10.4 on a G5 and it screams. -- Chris From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 14:47:42 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:47:42 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <578AC0F8.5030605@sydex.com> References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578AC0F8.5030605@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 7:19 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > I recall that BSD was a great match for our 11/750. Never did succeed > at getting HASP+bisync going on it though. Oh? Which method/product were you trying? I used to do that every day with our own boards. I had heard that some of our sales were due to people getting frustrated with trying other solutions and buying ours. We definitely supported Ultrix + BSD (and Sys V) from the mid-80s. I did the work to add 3780 on Unibus for Ultrix to our product line in 1989 because an existing customer needed something for that platform (we only ever sold that one, but the sale paid for the development with a little left over). Our largest Unibus machine was an 11/750 (though we had an VAX 8300 w/DWBUA, and an NMI-based VAX 8350 as our largest machine, both purchased for supporting our VAXBI product line). I kept the 8300 and the 11/750 when the company closed down. Had to leave the 8350 behind. By 1994, I was probably one of a handful of people on the planet still doing HASP or 3780 from a VAX. By early 1995, out last customer contract expired and nobody was left on support and we were 100% done. There may have been a tiny number of sites still using it, but if things broke, they never called. -ethan From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 14:52:04 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:52:04 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: References: <7c758dbd3d91260d7cd96e805aa494b1@otter.se> <946e47c7d5f56e2330ac517e6a87a45f.squirrel@webmail04.register.com> <578AC0F8.5030605@sydex.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > with a little left over). Our largest Unibus machine was an 11/750 > (though we had an VAX 8300 w/DWBUA, and an NMI-based VAX 8350 as our > largest machine, both purchased for supporting our VAXBI product > line). I kept the 8300 and the 11/750 when the company closed down. > Had to leave the 8350 behind. Transposition typos... should be... Our largest Unibus machine was an 11/750 (though we had an VAX 8300 w/DWBUA, and an NMI-based VAX 8530 as our largest machine, both purchased for supporting our VAXBI product line). I kept the 8300 and the 11/750 when the company closed down. Had to leave the 8530 behind. The 8300 is a single 42" rack with a BA32 (the size of an 11/730) and a 42" rack for disks and the Unibux BA-11. The VAX 8530 was much larger and 3-phase. -ethan From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 17 14:56:59 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:56:59 -0400 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. there is a real early one that has non intel processor then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the latest os (bummer) then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? Ed# In a message dated 7/17/2016 12:47:17 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, cmhanson at eschatologist.net writes: On Jul 15, 2016, at 1:49 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > I have several G5's, but am at a loss as to what to do with them. If they supported classic Mac OS I'd have one up and running in a heartbeat. You can't boot MacOS 9 on them, but you can run Classic under 10.4 on a G5 and it screams. -- Chris From john at forecast.name Sun Jul 17 15:15:07 2016 From: john at forecast.name (John Forecast) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 16:15:07 -0400 Subject: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <5D5E5718-E629-480B-82F9-EAC20C02A019@comcast.net> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <201607150403.AAA16188@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <578ABB9B.6060404@ntlworld.com> <3D8F12F2-6CA4-45AD-8771-2D59081491FE@comcast.net> <1E895922-D146-48B9-9484-C9EA1E180EA7@comcast.net> <3D4B7F01-4DA1-458E-BF8E-F65ED8DDE211@forecast.name> <5D5E5718-E629-480B-82F9-EAC20C02A019@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 17, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > >> >> On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:12 PM, John Forecast wrote: >> >> >>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning wrote: >>> >>> >>>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast wrote: >>>> >>>>> ... >>>>> I suppose so. Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well. Phase II was implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E. My initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III. >>>>> >>>> I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 11/40?s running >>>> RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I?m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 11D in the RSX >>>> family. >>> >>> I'd always heard that. But recently I found Phase I documents, which include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be. (In particular, NSP works rather differently.) And that document was for a PDP-8 OS. >>> >> I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 DECNET/8 >> SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late addition to >> the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill in Feb 1977 >> to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated Jun 1978 >> which seems about right. > > So does that mean that RTS/8 DECnet Phase I was built but not shipped? Or shipped but not supported? The document I referred to is a full manual "RTS/8 DECNET/8 User's Guide, Order No. AA-5184A-TA". A note at the start says "converted from scanned text 1-Jun-1996" and just below that "First printing, February 1977". Chapter 6 is a fairly detained description of protocol message formats, which look vaguely like NSP as we know it but only vaguely. > I don?t know if it ever shipped. An SPD would imply that it got pretty far along in the release process. > paul From hagstrom at bu.edu Sun Jul 17 15:18:31 2016 From: hagstrom at bu.edu (Hagstrom, Paul) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:18:31 +0000 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> Message-ID: <457050F1-6654-4552-A56E-5E979C99AABF@bu.edu> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 3:37 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > > >> On Jul 17, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: >> >> Hi Jules >> >> I found removing my QX-10's battery stopped the machines working. I tried >> replacing it with a lithium battery after disabling the recharging circuit >> but that didn't work either. > > In the early days of amateur radio transmitters with embedded microprocessors, some idiot manufacturers put the firmware (all of it) in battery backed RAM. So if the battery went dead, you had a boat anchor, not a radio. > > I hope that sort of thing isn't what you're dealing with here... > > paul > I'd also very much like to know this too. I have three of these things and would like not to lose them to a battery leak. I have done zero investigation so far apart from taking a look and not seeing a visible battery problem. But I was hoping to do a battery sweep later this summer, and these were among the ones I wanted to seriously look at de-batterying. Anyone here successfully replaced the battery? I honestly haven't checked the manuals to see if there are any notes on this, there might be. I think I have the SAMS pamphlet on the QX-10 as well, which might say. I'll look around and report back if I see anything relevant. -Paul From other at oryx.us Sun Jul 17 15:20:42 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 15:20:42 -0500 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> References: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> Message-ID: <578BE89A.9070709@oryx.us> And SheepShaver is an option to run Classic/Mac OS apps on Intel based Mac OS X boxes. Jerry On 07/17/16 02:56 PM, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. > I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. > there is a real early one that has non intel processor > then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the > latest os (bummer) > > then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. > > is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? > > Ed# > > > In a message dated 7/17/2016 12:47:17 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, > cmhanson at eschatologist.net writes: > > On Jul 15, 2016, at 1:49 PM, Austin Pass wrote: > >> I have several G5's, but am at a loss as to what to do with them. If > they supported classic Mac OS I'd have one up and running in a heartbeat. > > You can't boot MacOS 9 on them, but you can run Classic under 10.4 on a G5 > and it screams. > > -- Chris > From terry at webweavers.co.nz Sun Jul 17 15:57:18 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 08:57:18 +1200 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: <457050F1-6654-4552-A56E-5E979C99AABF@bu.edu> References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> <457050F1-6654-4552-A56E-5E979C99AABF@bu.edu> Message-ID: >Anyone here successfully replaced the battery? Hi Paul, As I mentioned, I did try a standard Lithium battery after disabling the recharging circuit. The machine just would not fire up boot. I haven't tried a NiMH or Lithium ion rechargeable though. I'd be interested to know if these work. Terry (Tez) From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 17 16:34:59 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 14:34:59 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9e2c67ab-98d9-c282-f49f-707bc64030dc@bitsavers.org> On 7/17/16 10:21 AM, tony duell wrote: > > The 9154B uses an HP drive known as > a 'Nighthawk' which does not have a normal interface. sorry, I misread the post as asking about drives inside a 360 From hagstrom at bu.edu Sun Jul 17 16:52:09 2016 From: hagstrom at bu.edu (Hagstrom, Paul) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 21:52:09 +0000 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> <457050F1-6654-4552-A56E-5E979C99AABF@bu.edu> Message-ID: <80E3E2DA-3FDF-41B9-A55C-223EB95926DF@bu.edu> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 4:57 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: > >> Anyone here successfully replaced the battery? > > Hi Paul, > > As I mentioned, I did try a standard Lithium battery after disabling the > recharging circuit. The machine just would not fire up boot. I haven't > tried a NiMH or Lithium ion rechargeable though. I'd be interested to know > if these work. > > Terry (Tez) Yes, I wasn't including that within my intended definition of "successfully." :) I didn't see much in the SAMS book or in the operations manual, except indications that the battery preserves 2K of CMOS RAM, and that you should take it to the dealer to have the battery replaced when it is getting low and losing track of the time (so they can back up the CMOS RAM for you). There did not seem to be any dire warnings about crucial parameters or firmware being lost, and there was another section that indicated that the battery should be disconnected when taking part of it apart, so it seems like it shouldn't have unrecoverable consequences. But it is distressing that you're not able to get yours to start again! I'm hoping that someone here will know a secret that we don't yet know. -Paul From cctalk at beyondthepale.ie Sun Jul 17 17:03:45 2016 From: cctalk at beyondthepale.ie (Peter Coghlan) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 23:03:45 +0100 (WET-DST) Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: "Your message dated Fri, 15 Jul 2016 19:30:17 -0400 (EDT)" <201607152330.TAA24541@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: <01Q2O3PIOU6U00EGWD@beyondthepale.ie> > > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line? > > I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones. Here are the ones big > enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the > early-to-mid '80s): > > - No command-line editing. (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but > only there.) > > - Verbosity. > I've seen a lot of complaints about this over they years but I've never really understood the problem. I think wordier commands in a command procedure (VMS speak for what others might call a shell script, batch file or an exec) are easier to understand. When they are being typed at a command prompt, they can be abbreviated somewhat to avoid redundant typing although they will never be as short as in certain other operating systems. I guess it must irritate a lot of people though because it keeps coming up. > > - Some degree of syntax straitjacket. > > Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather, > significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time. > > Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too. The principal one I > remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this > is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above. > I particularly like that items like dates/times have a standard form and they they work exactly the same with every command (unless the programmer just doesn't get the "VMS way" and works really hard to prevent it). I think that dates/times were done pretty well on VMS with the exception of a couple of blunders - not going further back than 1858 for the base date and not having the system manage time in UTC while allowing individual users to deal with time in whatever timezone they want to be in. > > For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well > enough for us to get useful stuff done. (The above > discussion applies to DCL. I never used MCR enough to have anything > useful to say, positive or negative, about it.) > While I like the way DCL processes individual commands, I think it is a bit weak when it comes to scripting command procedures and I would prefer to have something that processes commands like DCL but has facilities more like IBM's REXX for building command procedures (if that doesn't cause too much annoyance in to those on both sides of the DEC/IBM fence...) I never used MCR at all. Regards, Peter Coghlan. From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 17 19:01:53 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:01:53 -0400 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: <01Q2O3PIOU6U00EGWD@beyondthepale.ie> References: <201607141757.NAA16561@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <20160714201545.GA29935@brevard.conman.org> <01Q2JWF08XBO00817Q@beyondthepale.ie> <01Q2O3PIOU6U00EGWD@beyondthepale.ie> Message-ID: <24CF126E-0BC4-4CA4-A9E7-82BFDA587BF7@comcast.net> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 6:03 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote: > > ... > I think that dates/times were done pretty well on VMS with the exception > of a couple of blunders - not going further back than 1858 for the base > date and not having the system manage time in UTC while allowing > individual users to deal with time in whatever timezone they want to be > in. Not using UTC is indeed unfortunate in a way. Then again, using UTC internally comes with problems too, because the local time as displayed comes out wrong whenever the politicians change the rules with insufficient lead time. Some countries know to avoid this; a lot do not, as those living in Turkey or Egypt have recently discovered. As for 1858, that's not 0 but it's a lot earlier than 1969. And if you go back much further, you run into some interesting issues: Julian or Georgian calendar? Actually, that's an issue even after 1858, but only for a few countries. paul From spectre at floodgap.com Sun Jul 17 19:28:18 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:28:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <578BE89A.9070709@oryx.us> from Jerry Kemp at "Jul 17, 16 03:20:42 pm" Message-ID: <201607180028.u6I0SI0d34276428@floodgap.com> > And SheepShaver is an option to run Classic/Mac OS apps on Intel based > Mac OS X boxes. It's an option, but it's not a very good one. It has various compatibility issues with certain programs (usually the most interesting/useful ones) and it does not run anything past 9.0.4. For the programs it works with, it's a godsend, but Classic (not to mention OS 9 itself) is the best reason to keep a Power Mac around. It's a bit pokier than OS 9 due to the virtualization overhead, but it's highly compatible and infinitely better integrated with the host operating system. This is a big reason I'm "Tiger Forever" on my PowerPC gear. For that matter, you might as well run Jaguar on a G3, G4 or early G5, because Jag didn't have double-buffered Classic windows and did have better classic AppleTalk networking support. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- FORTUNE: Ten weeks from Friday you won't remember this fortune at all. ----- From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 20:03:32 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:03:32 +0900 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <55562B15-B4E7-46B7-8016-575FFA837232@gmail.com> > On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:03 PM, tony duell wrote: > > The ink is also corrosive. It can corrode the metal faceplate > on the cartridge, then drip onto the flexible PCB that connects > the cartridge to the rest of the printer and corrode that too. > If you ever have a Thinkjet with missing dots, that's what has > happend (at least 99% of the time). I do! One of them with a missing row of dots, and there was ink caked all over the contacts, and when I cleaned it, it seemed the contacts had been eaten away. That explains it! Fortunately I have a spare one for spare parts. Thanks Tony. From terry at webweavers.co.nz Sun Jul 17 20:09:14 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:09:14 +1200 Subject: Epson QX-10, battery removal In-Reply-To: <80E3E2DA-3FDF-41B9-A55C-223EB95926DF@bu.edu> References: <578BD0CE.2040500@gmail.com> <457050F1-6654-4552-A56E-5E979C99AABF@bu.edu> <80E3E2DA-3FDF-41B9-A55C-223EB95926DF@bu.edu> Message-ID: >But it is distressing that you're not able to get yours to start again! No, that's not the case fortunately. It would only not start with the new battery and the recharging circuit disabled. I soldered the old battery back in and reconfiguring the charging circuit back to what it was. It works fine now. It's just (1) the battery is old and I'm worried about it leaking at some stage and (2) I'd rather have something in there that is not rechargeable. I don't use the machine often enough for the battery to remain charged (especially a battery as old as this one) and I have to re-enter the CMOS parameters each time I drag it out. (: Cheers Terry (Tez) On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 9:52 AM, Hagstrom, Paul wrote: > > > On Jul 17, 2016, at 4:57 PM, Terry Stewart > wrote: > > > >> Anyone here successfully replaced the battery? > > > > Hi Paul, > > > > As I mentioned, I did try a standard Lithium battery after disabling the > > recharging circuit. The machine just would not fire up boot. I haven't > > tried a NiMH or Lithium ion rechargeable though. I'd be interested to > know > > if these work. > > > > Terry (Tez) > > Yes, I wasn't including that within my intended definition of > "successfully." :) I didn't see much in the SAMS book or in the > operations manual, except indications that the battery preserves 2K of CMOS > RAM, and that you should take it to the dealer to have the battery replaced > when it is getting low and losing track of the time (so they can back up > the CMOS RAM for you). There did not seem to be any dire warnings about > crucial parameters or firmware being lost, and there was another section > that indicated that the battery should be disconnected when taking part of > it apart, so it seems like it shouldn't have unrecoverable consequences. > But it is distressing that you're not able to get yours to start again! > I'm hoping that someone here will know a secret that we don't yet know. > > -Paul > > From terry at webweavers.co.nz Sun Jul 17 20:12:29 2016 From: terry at webweavers.co.nz (Terry Stewart) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:12:29 +1200 Subject: Epson QX games (with graphics) (was Epson QX-10, battery removal) Message-ID: BTW, while we discussing the QX-10 I'd love to hear from anyone that has any games which show off its nice green-screen graphics. Terry (Tez) From seefriek at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 20:36:57 2016 From: seefriek at gmail.com (Ken Seefried) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 21:36:57 -0400 Subject: cctalk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 18 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: Brent Hilpert > I don't think I've ever seen a wirewrapped S100 backplane, they were > pretty much all PCB. For what it's worth, I've seen many WW S-100 backplanes, especially from the days when it was common to assemble your own systems from parts/kits, and before S-100 was a "standard". KJ From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Sun Jul 17 20:42:43 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:42:43 -0500 Subject: Epson QX games (with graphics) (was Epson QX-10, battery removal) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <578C3413.3060008@gmail.com> On 07/17/2016 08:12 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: > BTW, while we discussing the QX-10 I'd love to hear from anyone that has > any games which show off its nice green-screen graphics. "Underground City" (I think that's what it's called, without digging it out) is the only one that I have, but there's some form of sector voodoo on the disk which prevents it from being copied/archived. :-( I suppose there's Valpaint, too :) (I *assume* it's graphical; I got a mouse with my system and I'm not aware of anything else which sounds like it might make use of it) cheers Jules From spectre at floodgap.com Sun Jul 17 21:23:04 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 19:23:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> from "COURYHOUSE@aol.com" at "Jul 17, 16 03:56:59 pm" Message-ID: <201607180223.u6I2N4Cr13369540@floodgap.com> > that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. > I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. > there is a real early one that has non intel processor > then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the > latest os (bummer) > > then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. > > is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? I'm not sure what you're referring to. If the 1.1 is clock speed, the slowest G5 is 1.6GHz. No Power Mac can run anything past 10.5.8; there is no PowerPC code left in the kernel to run. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Don't be humble ... you're not that great. -- Golda Meir ------------------- From other at oryx.us Sun Jul 17 21:57:59 2016 From: other at oryx.us (Jerry Kemp) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 21:57:59 -0500 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607180028.u6I0SI0d34276428@floodgap.com> References: <201607180028.u6I0SI0d34276428@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <578C45B7.1010006@oryx.us> I'm not disagreeing with you. I have multiple PPC Mac's and a couple of PowerBooks. I'm set. Apple systems from the past typically had 2 big advantages over windows based systems. * significantly easier to administer, and at least some level of stability over MS code * Apple systems last forever where a box was typically good for 2 to 3 years on the x86 side. I had an 8600, purchased brand new, and although it wasn't our sole system (lots of Sparc boxes at home also), we used that 8600 daily, or almost daily for 8 years. Whether the current boxes being produced today are still usable for 8 years really isn't up for debate, whether they are or not. The vast majority of Mac users don't view the technology as usable for an extended period of time. At least that is my observation. Back on topic, many Mac users today would/have stuck their nose up at PPC and 68K powered boxes, and don't even acknowledge them. If a critical piece of Mac OS code crossed their path, SheepShaver would be their only option. As for me, restating again, as I already have hardware that can run Mac OS code, SheepShaver is a novelty for me, and I have never attempted to use it for anything serious or for any significant length of time for a big project. I also agree with your comment on "Tiger forever" comment. Most people only see that we lost the Classic environment. For me, 10.5 + has been like a country music song, i.e. you know what you get if you play a country music record backwards? Answer, house, wife, job, horse, money, best friend, etc. Thanks for the reply, Jerry On 07/17/16 07:28 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: >> And SheepShaver is an option to run Classic/Mac OS apps on Intel based >> Mac OS X boxes. > > It's an option, but it's not a very good one. It has various compatibility > issues with certain programs (usually the most interesting/useful ones) > and it does not run anything past 9.0.4. For the programs it works with, it's > a godsend, but Classic (not to mention OS 9 itself) is the best reason to > keep a Power Mac around. It's a bit pokier than OS 9 due to the virtualization > overhead, but it's highly compatible and infinitely better integrated with > the host operating system. This is a big reason I'm "Tiger Forever" on my > PowerPC gear. > > For that matter, you might as well run Jaguar on a G3, G4 or early G5, > because Jag didn't have double-buffered Classic windows and did have better > classic AppleTalk networking support. > From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Sun Jul 17 22:04:00 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:04:00 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> References: <5f44c7.548fae5d.44bd3d0b@aol.com> Message-ID: <42149B32-A231-4214-BF90-C9E1697C2F04@eschatologist.net> On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:56 PM, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. This was a standard feature of Mac OS X on PowerPC hardware from the 10.0 developer builds through 10.4. > I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. > there is a real early one that has non intel processor That would be a PowerMac G5. No Power Macintosh has an Intel processor. > then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the > latest os (bummer) By "1.1" do you mean the Mac Pro? The Mac Pro has always had an Intel processor, and the model code for the first Mac Pro was MacPro1,1. > then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. This is confusing. Can you restate it or at least correct your typos before posting? There's no G3 that can run the latest macOS, since a G3 is a kind of PowerPC CPU. > is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? Not any supported way, which is the only way I'd be allowed to discuss. -- Chris From ryan at hack.net Sun Jul 17 22:15:00 2016 From: ryan at hack.net (Ryan K. Brooks) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 22:15:00 -0500 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607180223.u6I2N4Cr13369540@floodgap.com> References: <201607180223.u6I2N4Cr13369540@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <524ab68a-ac8d-dbb9-72e3-eadeb325ad6d@hack.net> On 7/17/16 9:23 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: >> that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. >> I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. >> there is a real early one that has non intel processor >> then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the >> latest os (bummer) >> >> then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. >> >> is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? > I'm not sure what you're referring to. If the 1.1 is clock speed, the > slowest G5 is 1.6GHz. No Power Mac can run anything past 10.5.8; there is > no PowerPC code left in the kernel to run. > I believe he's referring to MacPro1,1 From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Sun Jul 17 22:15:03 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 23:15:03 -0400 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: <3737ef.2251de6a.44bda3b7@aol.com> opps sorry many typos... see clarification interlaced.. In a message dated 7/17/2016 8:04:07 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, cmhanson at eschatologist.net writes: That would be a PowerMac G5. No Power Macintosh has an Intel processor yes that is first g5 has a more elegant interior design! I need a disk for this have no disc have no software but have nice system. then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the > latest os (bummer) By "1.1" do you mean the Mac Pro? The Mac Pro has always had an Intel processor, and the model code for the first Mac Pro was MacPro1,1. 1.1" do you mean the Mac Pro yea this runs nice and has 2 drive and 7 gig mem > then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run current os too. This is confusing. Can you restate it or at least correct your typos before posting? There's no G3 that can run the latest macOS, since a G3 is a kind of PowerPC CPU. G5 version 3 vrs the earlier 1.1 i > is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? Not any supported way, which is the only way I'd be allowed to discuss. From spectre at floodgap.com Sun Jul 17 22:34:14 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:34:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <578C45B7.1010006@oryx.us> from Jerry Kemp at "Jul 17, 16 09:57:59 pm" Message-ID: <201607180334.u6I3YEpG54722798@floodgap.com> > Back on topic, many Mac users today would/have stuck their nose up at PPC > and 68K powered boxes, and don't even acknowledge them. If a critical piece > of Mac OS code crossed their path, SheepShaver would be their only option. True, and that's a shame, since Classic happily runs most 68K apps too. It's a nice one-stop shop. On the other hand, Basilisk II isn't bad. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Eight out of ten voices in my head say, "don't shoot!" --------------------- From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Sun Jul 17 23:41:17 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 04:41:17 +0000 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: <5f33da.5e0dc083.44bd38db@aol.com> References: <5f33da.5e0dc083.44bd38db@aol.com> Message-ID: > The HPIL thinkjet version was also used with the hp portable and hp > portable plus laptops. > we have some of them in the SMECC here... but back when I was CEO > Computer Exchange inc we sold lost of these.. it was a small laptop > with applications in ROM but also had a HPIL 3 1/2 disc and an HPIL Yes. 80C86 (not 8088) based, there is a 16 bit data bus in there. The Portable (HP110) has built-in RAM that can't be expanded. One of the boards contains the processor and a lot of DIP-packaged 8K*8 SRAMs. The Portable Plus used surface-mount 8K*8 SRAMs and could take more on a plug-in 'RAM Drawer'. > Hey! > Remember to the hp 45 calc.. had HPIL interface also... I think you mean the HP41 (LCD alphanumeric calculator) or maybe the HP75 (handheld machine running BASIC, very similar to the HP85 in architecture). The HP45 was a simple-ish non-programmable scientific calculator with an LED display. And an undocumented stopwatch > There was also a gaggle of cards to the PC and the HP 150 TOUCHSCREEN > that would talk to HPIL and also on IBM side HPIL plus I seem to > remember HPIB cards too. The HP150 had HPIB as standard. There was an optional card that added HPIL and a Centronics port. That Centronics port was a mess. HP decided to use female DB25s for the serial ports. So to avoid confusion they used a male DB25 for the Centronics port. Only problem was the PCB was laid out for a female DB25 using IBM PC pinouts. With the result that the male version ended up effectively mirror-reversed, strobe on pin 13, etc. There were, indeed, HP ISA HPIB and HPIL cards. From memory the latter (at least) will not run in any reasonbly fast machine (8MHz CPU clock tops?) There was also an HPIL card for the Integral (portable unix machine) but I have never seen it. Was there a DIO HPIL card? [...] > I may be wrong but I remember a HPIL a HPIB a Parallel and maybe a > Serial interface version of the HP Thinkjet I have come across 6 versions : HPIB, HPIL, RS232, Centronics, Portable (battery powered Centronics) and IIRC an enhanced version of the RS232 one. > Now there was another interface not to be confused with the HPIL it was > called HP HIL HP HUMAN INTERFACE LOOP I remember? it was what the mouse > used on the hp 150 etc... Yes. They are often confused... But very different to the user and electrically. > I may still still have my orig HP Thinkjet service training course I think you can get the service manual for the Thinkjet (probably only covers the original 4 versions) from the Australian Museum. -tony From n0body.h0me at inbox.com Mon Jul 18 02:38:40 2016 From: n0body.h0me at inbox.com (N0body H0me) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 23:38:40 -0800 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >> On 16 Jul 2016, at 3:33 pm, TeoZ wrote: >> >> >> Most 840av's these days have bad motherboards from leaking capacitors >> and the plastics break if you sneeze too hard close to them. >> > > Yes, I just gave away my 840av. It was working (and looking) fine a > couple of years ago, but when I checked a few months ago the capacitors > had died and the plastic bits were just falling apart. If it was just the > caps I would have fixed it. Was my favourite 68K Mac, I did video editing > on one back in the day. Can?t remember what video card(s) and software I > used on it, but I know that the big (maybe 2GB?) SCSI drives and the max > amount of RAM cost me a lot of $ back then.. Great machine but the case > is horrible to work with. I'll agree, the 840's physicality was a total mess. But you know, I'm willing to forgive indiscretions of a mechanical nature; it doesn't affect how well the thing runs (barring cooling issues, of course). The capacitor issues are another matter; I've seen MANY products (not just computers) that suffer from this malady. It's a bit like cancer; caught early, the patient can make a complete recovery. If the affliction is too far advanced, it's likely terminal. It would seem there are two causes for this: Bad manufacturing techniques (causing the parts to overheat during assembly), and low quality parts, or parts with latent defects not detectable when the parts are new. I'd like to hear other opinions on this topic. Why the 840? To me, it represents the highest refinement of the 68k Mac, and this is very desirable to me (defective cabinetry and all). The SE/30 is my second choice; I feel it's the best 'all in one' design. Further, I'll probably start a flamewar by stating that I really don't recognise PPC Macs as 'classic', despite their age. The 88k should have been in RISC-based Mac's. But of course, the 88k's absence was not really Apple's fault, either. Just another example of 'what could have been'. Just N0bodys $0.02 ____________________________________________________________ Can't remember your password? Do you need a strong and secure password? Use Password manager! It stores your passwords & protects your account. Check it out at http://mysecurelogon.com/password-manager From cclist at sydex.com Sun Jul 17 12:29:07 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 10:29:07 -0700 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <578BC063.9010501@sydex.com> On 07/17/2016 10:17 AM, tony duell wrote: > Ethylene glycol is, of course, commonly found in car anti-freeze. > The printer ink is not rediculously toxic, but some animals find it > tastes sweet, they drink all they can find and it leads to kindney > failure. A couple of decades ago, there was a bit of a scandal with some imported Italian wines, whose producers used EG as a sweetener. --Chuck From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 09:39:34 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:39:34 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <578C45B7.1010006@oryx.us> References: <201607180028.u6I0SI0d34276428@floodgap.com> <578C45B7.1010006@oryx.us> Message-ID: <7108b80d-b0b7-6ccc-548b-6a24e54f185d@bitsavers.org> On 7/17/16 7:57 PM, Jerry Kemp wrote: > If a critical piece of Mac OS code crossed their path, SheepShaver would be their only option. > Or MAME I've been working with them a lot to correctly implement the I/O ASICs From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 09:41:10 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:41:10 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 7/18/16 12:38 AM, N0body H0me wrote: >The 88k should have > been in RISC-based Mac's. But of course, the 88k's absence was not really > Apple's fault, either. Just another example of 'what could have been'. > I worked on Apple's 88K Macs. You wouldn't have liked them. From spectre at floodgap.com Mon Jul 18 09:39:56 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:39:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: from Al Kossow at "Jul 18, 16 07:41:10 am" Message-ID: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> > > The 88k should have > > been in RISC-based Mac's. But of course, the 88k's absence was not really > > Apple's fault, either. Just another example of 'what could have been'. > > I worked on Apple's 88K Macs. You wouldn't have liked them. What were some of their issues? -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Eight out of ten voices in my head say, "don't shoot!" --------------------- From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 10:03:18 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 08:03:18 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> On 7/18/16 7:39 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > What were some of their issues? > The two big ones were a new, incompatible expansion bus interface (BLT) and that it was going to run Pink. "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural quirks are remnants of that. Going on in parallel with Hurricane (88110 desktop) was a 88100 si sized machine where the 68k emulator and nanokernel were developed. That evolved into the first generation PPC macs and (V0) software (OS 7 with enhancements) V1 was the redo of MacOS, which never happened. From spectre at floodgap.com Mon Jul 18 10:12:46 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 08:12:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> from Al Kossow at "Jul 18, 16 08:03:18 am" Message-ID: <201607181512.u6IFCkh661407944@floodgap.com> > > What were some of their issues? > > The two big ones were a new, incompatible expansion bus interface (BLT) > and that it was going to run Pink. > > "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural > quirks are remnants of that. That is extremely interesting -- was that intended as the ANS, or was that what would become the 9150? -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- MARXISTS SCHEME CLASSLESS SMALLTALK! -- Arch Robison ----------------------- From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 10:42:41 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 08:42:41 -0700 Subject: KT11-B ? Message-ID: <078bad11-c2d1-8cc8-0f18-d38a374b7700@bitsavers.org> nice system www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 I've never heard of a KT11-B hopefully whoever gets it will scan the unique parts of the documentation From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 10:53:45 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:53:45 +0200 Subject: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) In-Reply-To: <578BC166.6000901@oryx.us> References: <5787FB55.8070309@oryx.us> <5788149B.4000800@oryx.us> <57893001.2040107@oryx.us> <578BC166.6000901@oryx.us> Message-ID: On 17 July 2016 at 19:33, Jerry Kemp wrote: > windows 95 - yea, even bill gates stated that windows 95 was the pinnacle. Er, what? When? > ease of installation - maybe due to the fact that the bulk, if not all of us > here are experienced users, I've never understood the belly-aching > concerning installation. Not for DOS/windows, not for OS/2, not for BSD, > not for Linux, not for Solaris. Then I suspect that you have perhaps not experienced the variety of systems that the rest of us have. > Specifically when you are giving the > installer the entire disk for the OS as a new system install. What? Since when? I haven't done that since I first got a work PC! There's always something new to learn, and there are always more OSes to explore than space to set up multiple PCs. All my machines multi-boot. All of them. Even the Macs. > Just grab the > disk then go. There's a problem, for instance. Windows -- any version, 3, 9x, NT, whatever: [a] copy the files to an installation source folder [b] run the setup program. So, for NT4, for instance, I set up a whole client's network of CD-less machines from a Novell server. Install DOS, install the Netware client. Connect to the server, copy the files to D:\SETUP\WINNT4. Reboot with no client, but with HIMEM and SMARTDRV. CD to the folder, run WINNT.EXE. Proceed with installation. OS/2 couldn't do that. The installer only runs on OS/2. OS/2 has major problems with device drivers, which must be copied to media that the bootable installation disk can see and be corrrectly configured in the 1000+ line, unstructured, CONFIG.SYS file. You have to correctly configure drivers before you can even start the installation! BSD: it doesn't properly understand classic PC partitioning. You can't install into a logical drive in an extended partition. It can only take a primary partition and install its own weird alien partitioning system inside that, so you need 2 levels of partitioning -- one at DOS level, then inside that, one at BSD level. And so on. > Other settings, like network, even if it is dhcp, have to be > added somewhere, be it during the install or after the fact. You fail to spot the much more significant issue of finding a driver for your network card. > OS/2 vs the windows GUI - sorry, but the best that anyone is going to be > able to convince me on here is personal preference. Its a GUI on top of the > OS where end users double click icons. I could give you an illustrated hour-long presentation on the subject, but there is no point in wasting either of our times on this. > Aside from the single thread input queue on early WPS, the sole advantage I > ever saw that windows had over OS/2 was that early on, the *.ini files were > text based on windows vs binary on OS/2. At some point, ms followed IBM and > moved to binary *.ini files. I don't remember at what version. No, it didn't. Windows INI files are still text-based. However, INI files are deprecated and most config is now in the Registry, which is binary. A decent editor is provided but alas it lacks rich global search-and-replace functionality, for which I use John Rennie's excellent GREPREGISTRY tool: http://www.ratsauce.co.uk/winsrc/files.htm Note that it is a simple command-line based text S&R with no relation to GREP and its famously opaque syntax. I consider this a major advantage. Others' MMV. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Mon Jul 18 10:57:56 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 11:57:56 -0400 Subject: KT11-B ? In-Reply-To: <078bad11-c2d1-8cc8-0f18-d38a374b7700@bitsavers.org> References: <078bad11-c2d1-8cc8-0f18-d38a374b7700@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <9F597B50-3035-4D5F-BA11-E2AE4A666113@comcast.net> > On Jul 18, 2016, at 11:42 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > nice system > www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 > > I've never heard of a KT11-B I hadn't either. But I see it mentioned in the December 1975 option-module list (on Bitsavers), page 87. It's shown as "CSS" (Computer Special Systems), product status 3 ("Custom built"). paul From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 10:59:23 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:59:23 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> Message-ID: On 17 July 2016 at 20:54, Peter Corlett wrote: > I think it should be quite obvious from the prices why the Amiga 2000 didn't ship with a 68020 as standard. Exactly so. This is part of the brilliance of the Archimedes, AIUI. In detailed technical ways I confess I do not fully understand, the ARM2 and its chipset's design was optimised to work with cheap DRAM with relatively slow cycle times. The OS also ran directly from ROM. Even PCs at the time copied their BIOS ROM to RAM for faster execution. Acorn designed around this. Similarly, one of the pleasant features of the Psion 3 & 5 series PDAs was that their OS ran from ROM. Thus, although the OSes were very stable & seldom needed reboots, when they did, it was reasonably quick and the machines were highly functional with, even in the late models, as little as 8-16MB of RAM, running a rich pre-emptive multitasking GUI OS. Compare with, e.g., Android or iOS, where the OS is stored in ROM but can't execute from it. Thus, slow boot times as the entire thing must be *copied* to RAM at IPL. And of course as these run not-very-cut-down 1960s/1970s minicomputer multiuser OSes, the OSes themselves occupy many hundreds of meg, these days edging to gigabyte range. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:02:37 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:02:37 +0200 Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited... In-Reply-To: References: <5786FC94.2080205@snarc.net> <000c01d1dd88$c0bf7a80$423e6f80$@sc.rr.com> <20160716111200.GB5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 17 July 2016 at 21:07, David Brownlee wrote: > On 17 July 2016 at 16:09, Liam Proven wrote: >> In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305 and A310 came with >> ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive >> workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was >> a series, not a model. > > The A500 was the development prototype which pre-dated the A310 > (originally with pre-multiply ARM1 CPUs). Only a 100 or so made. I > think they used pretty much the same Hitachi HD63463 as the (optional > podule for the) A300 series which I think was DMA capable. > >> There was, later (1990), the A540: >> >> http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html >> >> This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX. >> >> The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD: >> >> http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm > > The A540/R260 was a completely different class of machine, with an > ARM3 and the ability to take multiple memory (each with memory > controller) cards. > >> ... but then it was the thick end of three thousand quid. >> >> Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506 >> drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS >> with a desktop written in BBC BASIC). >> >> So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know. > > Think of it as an A310 with integrated disk controller, in a big metal > box with a lot more soldered wires internally :-p > > Acorn kept them in internal service for white a while, including for > development versions of RISC OS 3 with the multitasking filer. Fascinating -- thanks for that! OK, so the HD controller chipset was DMA capable, but did Arthur take advantage of that fact? I note that the first PDF datasheet I find for that chip is on Peter Howkin's Martuan site. Pete is a friend of mine and maints RPCemu as well as the open-source version of CDE, and is a major Acorn expert. Said datasheet indicates that the HD63463 needs an accompanying HD63450 DMA controller for DMA operation. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:05:40 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:05:40 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <578954EE.5050705@oryx.us> Message-ID: On 16 July 2016 at 07:05, N0body H0me wrote: > If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the > SE/30. Once again, these are kinda pricey..... Indeed. I've seen an argument that the "ultimate" classic Mac experience -- before the colour machines and so on -- would be a maxed-out SE/30 (128MB RAM!) with internal Ethernet and greyscale monitor controllers (both is possible but tricky), with a 21" CRT attached, running A/UX. :-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:07:38 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:07:38 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 16 July 2016 at 09:05, Austin Pass wrote: > What is it about the Quadra 840 that makes it such a hot shot? I've seen a few over the last few years, but all fetch ?150+ AIUI it was the fastest ever 68K Mac (in stock form; others can be overclocked, as has been noted in this thread). However, the onboard AV circuitry mean it's incompatible with A/UX, I believe. Could be wrong. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:11:09 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:11:09 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: On 18 July 2016 at 17:03, Al Kossow wrote: > "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural > quirks are remnants of that. This is not enough for me to Google. Could you clarify, please? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From glen.slick at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:19:28 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:19:28 -0700 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 7:28 PM, Jason T wrote: > On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Glen Slick wrote: >> You could go with the modern times and get at VT220 cart / table >> >> www.ebay.com/itm/262486498646 > > This is just the sort of ridiculous DECitem I probably don't have room > for but will attempt to crowbar into my basement anyway. The price > isn't terrible but the shipping may be, and I'm not sure I want to > trust the average ebayer to pack an item like that. http://www.ebay.com/itm/262528352526?orig_cvip=true Someone bought that. Anyone here want to fess up as the buyer? If it was local and cheaper I might have grabbed it myself, even without having space to put it to use at the moment. From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 11:40:16 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:40:16 +0200 Subject: NuTek Mac comes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 15 July 2016 at 22:29, Swift Griggs wrote: > On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: >> Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early >> days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4 >> network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B&Ws >> to me! :-) ) > > Woot! The benefits of working with small clients over time. Well yes. Really, the clients of a friend of mine -- a Windows expert. He didn't do Mac stuff; I stepped in to help with that. > Well, if you ever put hands on another M68k, you might give it a shot. The > key is to have an extra partition to setup with a BSD disklabel et al. If > you have enough space (or a spare disk) it's pretty darn straightforward. > It loads using a MacOS based loader program, so you don't have to ditch > MacOS, either. However, the install is pretty raw (I like it, but I have a > feeling you wouldn't). Honestly, if I ever feel the urge to try NetBSD, it'll be on as generic a PC as I can find. > However, it's nowhere near as raw as, say, > OpenBSD's installer. If you ever happen to install OpenBSD, Liam, please > have a video camera rolling. I will be able to get all the choice British > curse-phrases in one go that way. I have done it in a VM. I was not at all impressed, but I did eventually get it working. > Also, just as an aside, your ex-roomy who told you that you weren't liking > parts of UNIX because you weren't a dyed-in-the-wool coder (not to say you > aren't smart or technical or can't do what you need to do with coding) was > right. It's a programmers OS and it panders to coders and admins, others > will be grousing about weird things they don't need and don't see a reason > for, items being over-minimized, too spartan, or downright bizzare and not > enough in the way of well-integrated features for users with other goals > besides coding. Fully 100% agree with that dude, and I totally acknowledge > that there is a rusty tetanus side of that double edged sword. That's why > I still dabble with the darkside and play with GUI-focused OSes, too. It's > a whole different feel. When I want to code, I plant myself in front of > NetBSD or FreeBSD. Indeed yes. But more than that, it's a very specific sub-family of programming -- the all-manual, all-traditional, C-family type. Contrast with Windows with rich IDEs and fancy autocompletion etc., even for C-family code. And contrast the C culture which now rules the world with the old-time non-C-family machines: Lisp Machines, Smalltalk boxes, the niche Oberon family. Step outside the C mould and you find environments which their old fans say stomped all over the C family for real productivity. > When I want to record/compose a song, I break out an > SGI, Amiga, or maybe someday a Mac (I got a fancy audio rig for my 68k > Quadra recently). Read /In The Beginning Was The Command Line/? It's out there for free. You remind me of that. >> Dear gods that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't >> really worth the effort. > > Hehe, I ran MorphOS, too. It was fun for a while, but I can't really > handle a proprietary OS on a such a small scale. It has some potential but the niche is closing. E.g. on the 1st/2nd gen Raspberry Pi, MorphOS or AROS would have been great. Single CPU core, no wireless anything, small and fast. Ideal. Linux was too big for them. The RPi 2 was quad-core. Less of a good fit. The RPi 3 is quad-core with onboard Wifi and Bluetooth. A poor fit for the Amiga OSes which don't handle such things at all yet, AFAIK. >> I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one at the time. I >> respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC OS and that's what >> I miss. > > I got one way later, too. Well past when they were new/prime. I have the > exact same feeling. For me SGIs were the biggest lust-target because I > actually had played with them long enough to know what I was really > missing (and I was younger and all that happy stuff). I understood the lust back in the day, for the awesome graphics power. But everything has that now, and anyway, I never understood 3D and OpenGL -- the maths is too much for me. >> To my great surprise, the Mac could boot off the PC-formatted SSD and >> Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss, detected both my screens, and went >> straight online, no problems at all. > > In my experience using tools like "ReEFIt" make multi-booting OSX and *ix > or BSD on a Macs way easy, but yeah, they don't need much to "justwork" > nowadays. I've put rEFInd on it now and it starts to boot again, but fails. I will investigate. > My experience with it is less than 6 months old. Without Macosgarden I'd > have never got the chance because finding legit disk for it is *hard* if > you want 3.1. I had all manner of weird install problems because I was > doing it on a SCSI2SD that isn't an Apple disk so of course Disk tools was > pissed. The disk tools under A/UX would play nice, actually, but I ended > up having to do all kinds of CLI jiggery pokery, manually creating file > systems and what not from an emergency shell, to get A/UX to give up and > install on the darn thing. It was damn weird (in a cool and unique way) > once I got it working. and I dd'd off the install images and boot record > off the MicroSD card once it had finished. I found that they more or less > worked with Shoebill, at that point, too. Hmmm. Sadly I think I no longer have any suitable hardware. Unless I can get my SE/30 fixed. >> I was a DOS master, once. Probably knew the most about it from any OS >> I've used! > > I wouldn't call myself a master, but definitely an experienced power-user. > I did quite a bit of coding using 386|VMM and other such things with > mostly Borland tools. Ah, well, I meant supporting it -- networking it, optimising its memory, etc. I never coded much for it past a bit of QuickBASIC 3 and 4. (Which were good for their time and much more pleasant than VB.) > The thing I miss most about DOS was it's "standalone" mentality. You want > to backup your word processor ? Zip the directory. You want to backup > Deluxe Paint IIe? Zip the directory. You want to backup Lotus 1-2-3? Zip > the directory. Very true. I miss that simplicity. RISC OS had a similar degree of it in a different way. E.g. GUI apps have a name starting with an exclamation mark: !Edit !Paint !Mastro !Ovation They look and act like a single file. But they're not. You can open them and they're just folders -- the OS handles folders whose name starts with ! differently. Inside, there are bitmaps for the icon, help files for any online help, scripts to launch the binaries, and the binaries themselves -- or BASIC code, which the OS interprets directly, very very quickly indeed. So you can open up an app, explore within it, in a way impossible on Windows or in classic MacOS. (Yes I know about ResEdit. No it's not the same. ResEdit was a doorway into an arcane realm of black magic.) > Everyone took a really long drag from the dynamic library joint and passed > it around in the 90's, too. I took a hit, too, and I get that there are > many advantages to them, but the big DISadvantage is now many binaries > become version-specific to a library that may get deprecated in subsequent > releases. Heh! True. Never thought of it like that. > On DOS, that wasn't a problem. Just keep running the old one. True. > Sure you can still compile (most) things statically or include old > libraries, but it's seldom done, fiddly for users, and oft overlooked. I > often lament how most apps now want "merge" with your OS not simply run on > their own in a super-self-contained way DOS apps did. I also tend to hate > registries (not just on Windows, I despise AIX's ODM, too). DOS had no > such BS, and it's one of the things I liked about it. It's going away again. The containers trend will kill it, I think. And a lot else besides. >> 98, 98SE or ME? 3 different things. > > ME was the one that pissed me off the most and seemed to understand my > hatred and return it in kind. That OS seemed to me to crash for the > smallest and most trivial of reasons. Windows didn't seem to get stable > until the 3.x branch of NT matured into W2k in my opinion. However you are > WAY more well versed in the M$ black arts, so I believe you when you say > you could make it behave. All the Win9x line were hacks, but they were clever hacks. They behaved OK if you treated 'em right. I lost a few hundred pounds on one job. A customer bought a 1st gen PC iPod, meaning Firewire. His Sony Vaio ran 98SE and didn't have the specs to run 2K. I spent *days* trying to get 'em to talk. No joy. I later discovered that 98SE only has basic pre-standard Firewire support, like Win 95B only had basic pre-standard USB support. Win98 can't even mount USB pendrives unless you feed it a proprietary driver. ME was the first version with full Firewire support. All I would have had to do was upgrade his Vaio to ME and the iPod would've worked and I'd have made a decent day's money -- a week's rent. I didn't know, Apple hadn't documented it yet, and I always work no-fix, no-fee. So a lot of effort down the drain for no reward. Everyone hates ME, but it did mature into something usable. >> It's why I collected so many later. All these shiny toys I couldn't >> afford when they were new! > > Same here. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Yep. But I am asking myself, with my much-simplified life, moved here to a single room in suitcases, how much I need all the houseful of clutter still in storage in London? I never played with most of it. So I think I will sell the lot and move on, lighter. >> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=345783926690&set=a.345781786690.162428.608866690&type=3&theater > > Whoa. Czech! I love that place. I was there in my 20's for a while and I > have never seen so many beautiful women in my life Yep! > (and they will actually > talk to you occasionally, even if you aren't Fabio). I don't know who Fabio is, but yes, Czech girls are very friendly. :-) > The people were super > friendly and welcoming to me, too. I'll never forget it. Of course it was > pre-USA-terror-freakout days when folks in Europe loved Americans. :-) It's not changed that much. Now we Brits attract pity. You will if President Trump gets in. But only briefly. WW3 will sort it out. > Nowadays when I go to Europe I pray people will think I'm from Canada. > I've had some bad experiences when they found out otherwise :-( :-( >> It's what I run on non-Ubuntu distros. > > XFCE is a pretty solid workhorse that doesn't do to shabby at staying > thin. I love me a vertical taskbar though. Xfce does that better than any other Linux desktop, but still not well, compared to how smooth it is on Windows -- or BeOS! >> True. But I think Android is going to be what gets the other 2 billion >> humans online, by and large, and the implications of that will be >> staggering. > > I'm guessing you are going to be correct, and I try to keep that in mind > as I bash on it. :-) > > To me it's a mole/privacy-invader, to others is a stepladder out of > poverty. So, they win the relative importance comparison, for sure. I just > wish we could both be satisfied. Competitors will arise. Every monoculture falls, either to diversity or death. >> Well in a way, yes. But people use them to *communicate* and that's a >> good thing. > > Well, riding on trains a lot and seeing people constantly on the phones, > I see essentially three archetypes of glued-to-their-phones: > > 1. Young women (and men to a slightly lesser extent) who can't overcome > their social drive and are just plain addicted to checking every > possible social media channel (SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, > Instagram, rinse-repeat). That's pretty much all the do. I'm not sure > that communication is beneficial or just plain compulsive/addictive > behavior. Don't knock it, if that's what they want to do. Never hate on someone because they like things you don't like, so long as those things do no harm. > 2. The I-have-a-million-apps-and-feel-empowered-by-technology hipster. > This is the guy with not only his smartphone out. He's got the Apple > Watch, two tablets, and an (unused) laptop in his bag behind him. He > feels like a ninja because in his world, no matter what, "there is an > app for that". He's wrong of course, and I'll eat him if we are ever > stranded in the wilderness. http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ > 3. Business-weasels who are surreptitiously glancing at the other weasels > to see if they have a more *expensive* phone, laptop, suit, or watch. > If not, all is well. Now, he can settle in and try to figure out how to > get this malware off his phone he got from surfing porn sites in Chrome > from his phone. Don't care. Decided long ago not to become one. So long as they aren't banksters screwing over the whole world, they don't bother me. > All humor and cynicism aside, I'm still on the fence when it comes to the > benefit of phones in the first-world. The benefits come with some fairly > heavy drawbacks, too. You don't have to accept 'em. Some still have good privacy options. FB etc aren't mandatory. >> > Didn't Sergei Brin say they'd probably get merged? I seem to remember >> > that, but who knows. >> I don't think so. > > No seriously, I found it. It's in the Wikipedia page for ChromeOS. He > doesn't sound super-committed, though. Well quite. :-) > >> I've seen both half-hearted "yes probably" statements and also flat-out >> denials. Basically, I don't think they know. > > ha! That sounds about right. https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/may/21/everyone-is-totally-just-winging-it >> No, me either, but I do kinda fancy a cheap light ChromeBook! > > TBH, me too. However, the damn thing better run NetBSD. :-) Nope, ChromeOS. I mean I'd like to dual-boot Ubuntu but there's no point running something where the hardware is fighting you. Go with the flow. Be a reed that bends in the wind, not a tree that resists it and breaks. > Ohh, I just had an idea... I wonder if they can be hacked to run RISCOS. > That would be really cool. I'll have to Google it. They are mostly ARM > boxes, IIRC. A few are, but most are low-end Intel chips. RISC OS, no, not yet. The best RISC OS laptop is one of these: https://www.pi-top.com/product/pi-top I have a friend who has a RasPi, in a case, velcroed onto the back of the lid of a Motorola Atrix phone dock. Works very well. Bit of a lash-up but it goes. The sad thing is that although RISC OS is maintained, it's very obsolete. There have been no RISC OS laptops or tablets since the '90s so although the OS did once contain power-management code, it's all long-gone and unmaintained. It needs to be brought back, updated and re-incorporated. Same as the JVM which is 15+y out of date. And it doesn't support Wifi, either. Or Bluetooth. >> Fair enough. I find it so useful, the amazing range of stuff you can do >> now, all for free, that I'm deeply tied into it. > > It's true. The panoply of online services offering for free things that > would have cost thousands (or been impossible) 15 years ago is staggering. > >> Recommended reading: Cory Doctorow, /Little Brother/ >> Free ebook, from the author: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ >> You'll appreciate "Paranoid Linux". > > Ha! Yep, I've read it. Good reference: right on point. :-D >> Buy mine? Please? :-D I'm serious, it's for sale. > > I'd consider it if I hadn't just dropped $150 to buy a buddy's used Punkt > phone. If you ain't sold it by this time next year, hit me up again ! :-) I'll have to cut the price 'til it goes. In a year it'll be hopelessly obsolete and worthless. >> Oh dear gods. No no no. I use my phone for many hours a day. > > I don't use mine for weeks at a time. When it rings it's never a good sign > (it's work, someone has died, or someone is wanting something from me I'm > not going to be happy about). > >> I reckon I use it for *phone calls* about 2-3 times a month and SMS >> about 2-3 times a week. That's almost a legacy feature it happens to >> have! > > I probably would do the same, but I've always got that little bird on my > shoulder saying "They are watching you and trying to screw you." I can't > feel comfortable in what I consider to be such a user-hostile environment. > So, I'm that Luddite on the train where there are 90 people in the train > car and nobody under 60 is doing anything but staring at their phone... > but me. I'm reading a some Stevens hardcover book or a trashy fantasy or > SF novel. I might be tempted to use a laptop with a wireless 4G data card > in there, but it's expensive and I get plenty of time on the metal anyway. > Reading when I'm on the console helps me sharpen my mind (and it always > needs sharpening, hehe). Fair enough. Whatever you choose. I've embraced this tech more than most other near-50somethings. I'm a leading player of Swarm, a social-networking geolocation game which means I win points by telling all my friends where I am all the time. You'd *hate* it. >> Cool, but no, I use Google Translate and Google Maps and Google Calendar >> and things many times a day. A pocket device without them now is a >> paperweight to me. > > You'd have fun ridiculing my desk, then. I still have a Rolodex (paper > one), a (very) old HP calculator, an At-a-glance paper calendar, and in my > car I have a small bag with 4-5 books of maps. Yes, paper maps. In my > pocket are a rinky-dink phone (as discussed), a 3" folding knife with > screwdriver, a Fischer Space Pen, my leather wallet, and usually 4-5 3x5 > notecards in my opposite pocket. Also, I often carry an Sony NEX-7 digital > camera, if I have my pack. Rarely do I carry a "real" computer et al. It's > probably because I have a different kind of job and travel needs versus > you. You sound like you bounce around a lot. I have a pretty static > routine these days. I am coming to love my Kindle and can almost see myself getting rid of all paper books soon. Ditto physical music media. The videos I gave away to charity shops before I left the UK. I love the idea of owning a few tiny lightweight devices which automatically sync everything I own, know, need, am doing and reading/watching/listening to, all the time, without any intervention from me. All using free services on cheap COTS hardware running free OSes. It's terrific. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 12:10:23 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:10:23 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: On 7/18/16 9:11 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 18 July 2016 at 17:03, Al Kossow wrote: >> "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural >> quirks are remnants of that. > > > This is not enough for me to Google. Could you clarify, please? > you won't find anything on the web about any of this From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 12:12:27 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:12:27 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <4b25401b-c0fe-7aab-280c-35bf019a3312@bitsavers.org> "Shiner" shipped as the ANS with AIX http://www.erik.co.uk/ans/ though that isn't what the original "Shiner" was at all. On 7/18/16 10:10 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > On 7/18/16 9:11 AM, Liam Proven wrote: >> On 18 July 2016 at 17:03, Al Kossow wrote: >>> "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural >>> quirks are remnants of that. >> >> >> This is not enough for me to Google. Could you clarify, please? >> > > you won't find anything on the web about any of this > > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Jul 18 12:11:02 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:11:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: KT11-B ? Message-ID: <20160718171102.2604B18C095@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Al Kossow > nice system > www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 Anyone want to guess how much it will go for? Noel From austinpass at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 12:21:52 2016 From: austinpass at gmail.com (Austin Pass) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:21:52 +0100 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> > On 18 Jul 2016, at 18:10, Al Kossow wrote: > > you won't find anything on the web about any of this ...which is why this ClassicCMP'er just drew his chair closer and cracked out the popcorn! Finding this fascinating, Al. Any time you take to relay your Apple experiences here is very much appreciated, let me assure you. -Austin. From cisin at xenosoft.com Mon Jul 18 12:27:40 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:27:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> Message-ID: > you won't find anything on the web about any of this now you have our attention! From alexandre.tabajara at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 12:36:58 2016 From: alexandre.tabajara at gmail.com (Alexandre Souza) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:36:58 -0300 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> Message-ID: Grabbing the popcorn... :) Enviado do meu Tele-Movel Em 18/07/2016 14:27, "Fred Cisin" escreveu: > you won't find anything on the web about any of this >> > > now you have our attention! > > > > From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 12:49:56 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:49:56 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> Message-ID: <9e9e885d-2251-bff8-519e-6cf24ff8e179@bitsavers.org> Give me a while to collect what I have together. I haven't looked at what paper documents i still have since the early 90s. I need to do this since someone I worked with then saved some prototype 88k CPU boards that I need to give to CHM. I only know of one 88100 si that survived into this century, and I don't know if the guy still has it. Very little from the server group that did the ANS survived after the division imploded. On 7/18/16 10:21 AM, Austin Pass wrote: > Finding this fascinating, Al. Any time you take to relay your Apple experiences here is very much appreciated, let me assure you. > From kirkbdavis at me.com Mon Jul 18 12:47:54 2016 From: kirkbdavis at me.com (Kirk Davis) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:47:54 -0700 Subject: KT11-B ? In-Reply-To: <20160718171102.2604B18C095@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160718171102.2604B18C095@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <8A209908-F908-42E9-ABCD-8F0FBA6B8CAD@me.com> Like. Want. My guess since its pick up only is the teens. But you never know on eBay. Sent from my iPhone On Jul 18, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> From: Al Kossow > >> nice system >> www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 > > Anyone want to guess how much it will go for? > > Noel From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Mon Jul 18 13:18:12 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:18:12 -0400 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: apples support seems hosed... Load of URL http://support.apple.com/index.html failed with error code -310. but from this page.... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202888 there is a good guide. ------------------------------ this is my 1.1 Mac Pro --- MacPro1,1 --- MA356LL/A it works... it is a good representative artifact too . will not load curvet os because? "This is caused by the lack of the 64 bit EFI bios. The hardware of the Mac Pro 1.1 is already complete 64bit capable but they do ship the efi bios only in 32bit version." Ed says..... OK whatever an EFI Bios is.... (( remember this is my first real exposure to USING a MAC - yes we have a 9 inch screen one in the museum but have never even used that)) ------- Ha wish it was a Mac Pro (Early 2008) -- MacPro3,1 --- MA970LL/A then I could current OS upgrade it. --------------------- ok we also have a - "The Power Macintosh G5 shipped from 2003 until 2006. All models pack 64-bit PowerPC 970 (G5) processors in an easy-to-upgrade aluminum tower case design with a single external optical drive bay" This one is missing disc drives... this has the neatest form fitting insides of any of the macs I have seen. ---------------------------- then we have Blue iMAC still in box ------------------------------------ Then we have the old 9 inch one in museum collection. ( I do not see many of these around as I used to) --------------------------------- thanks for any help and tips Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) In a message dated 7/17/2016 7:23:10 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, spectre at floodgap.com writes: > that is interesting to know the old os can be run under the newer. > I am confused on some of the G5 stuff. > there is a real early one that has non intel processor > then there is a 1.1 ( i have one too) but you can not upgrade to the > latest os (bummer) > > then there is the G% 3 or 3.3 dated one that will run currect os too. > > is there a way to force the 1.1 one to run currest os somehow!? I'm not sure what you're referring to. If the 1.1 is clock speed, the slowest G5 is 1.6GHz. No Power Mac can run anything past 10.5.8; there is no PowerPC code left in the kernel to run. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Don't be humble ... you're not that great. -- Golda Meir ------------------- From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 13:21:38 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 11:21:38 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <9e9e885d-2251-bff8-519e-6cf24ff8e179@bitsavers.org> References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> <8DF64981-27FE-4DD9-B4CF-357CFD0562B4@gmail.com> <9e9e885d-2251-bff8-519e-6cf24ff8e179@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <6ba27299-b177-0cfe-4f60-fcdfd2c069fe@bitsavers.org> On 7/18/16 10:49 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > Give me a while to collect what I have together. My memory was fuzzy, BLT was a part of "Tesseract", PPC follow-on to "Hurricane" 88110. Tesseract became "TNT" ("The New Tesseract" aka the 9500) when Steve Manzer ordered the group to use PCI instead of BLT because PCI already had an installed base of 3rd party cards. I ul'ed a picture of the Tesseract protype to bitsavers under apple/powerpc/Prototypes. Mirrors should have it in about an hour. I should have the Hurricane proto board somewhere along with Nubus 88100 and IBM RSC CPU development boards (like http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102674143) From useddec at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 13:59:35 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:59:35 -0500 Subject: KT11-B ? In-Reply-To: <20160718171102.2604B18C095@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160718171102.2604B18C095@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: $4850 On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Al Kossow > > > nice system > > www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 > > Anyone want to guess how much it will go for? > > Noel > From n0body.h0me at inbox.com Mon Jul 18 14:44:53 2016 From: n0body.h0me at inbox.com (N0body H0me) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 11:44:53 -0800 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: aek at bitsavers.org > Sent: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:41:10 -0700 > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. > > > > On 7/18/16 12:38 AM, N0body H0me wrote: > >The 88k should have >> been in RISC-based Mac's. But of course, the 88k's absence was not >> really >> Apple's fault, either. Just another example of 'what could have been'. >> > > I worked on Apple's 88K Macs. You wouldn't have liked them. I'm astounded. I didn't think any ever made it to prototype or hard-model stage! I've seen bare boards for these (up to this point) mythical beasts, but never a living, breathing machine. Must have been a piece of work. Do any functional machines still exist? How did you encounter them? ____________________________________________________________ FREE ONLINE PHOTOSHARING - Share your photos online with your friends and family! Visit http://www.inbox.com/photosharing to find out more! From aek at bitsavers.org Mon Jul 18 14:59:44 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 12:59:44 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7ec1162e-0a50-a2f1-0981-9888ae924ade@bitsavers.org> On 7/18/16 12:44 PM, N0body H0me wrote: > I'm astounded. I didn't think any ever made it to prototype or hard-model > stage! I've seen bare boards for these (up to this point) mythical > beasts, but never a living, breathing machine. Must have been a piece > of work. Do any functional machines still exist? How did you encounter > them? > The 88100 si worked. Hurricane never got a functional 88110 before the IBM/Apple deal. Tessaract never booted MacOS. Which bare board did you see? I was in the RISC products group doing driver and cpu board bringup starting with the 88100 nubus boards to IBM RSC (never had a functional 88110) then 601 over to high end desktop product development with TNT. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Mon Jul 18 15:21:35 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 16:21:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: More PDP-11 front console scans Message-ID: <20160718202135.33CC318C097@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> I recently got access to an orginal PDP-11/70 front console (the one in magenta and rose), and also an 'Industrial' -11/70 (blue and red). Scans of both of these front panels have been added to my PDP-11 stuff page: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Stuff.html My A3 scanner won't _quite_ eat the whole thing in one gulp, but it did manage to 'see' all the printed stuff. The actual panel is very slightly larger, so there are some thin sections on either side missing from the scan, _but_ on that page there is a mechanical drawing that gives the dimensions of the whole thing. So the two together should enable a complete reproduction. Noel From jwsmail at jwsss.com Mon Jul 18 15:58:12 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:58:12 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> 25,000, Alexandria, Va. Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. BTW, about the other nice system noted here, I was hoping the 11/20 would stay off the radar and not go for a zillion bucks, so much for that idea. At least I have the means to go to Tucson and get it if I'm nuts and go for it. Thanks Jim From ethan at 757.org Mon Jul 18 16:02:43 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:02:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: > 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. Is that a dream price for such a system or realistic? I notice the corrosion on the front key. From derschjo at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 16:04:01 2016 From: derschjo at gmail.com (Josh Dersch) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 14:04:01 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 1:58 PM, jim stephens wrote: > 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > > Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > Yeah, that's a pleasant dream :). I'd have to sell my car and a couple of vital organs first... > > BTW, about the other nice system noted here, I was hoping the 11/20 would > stay off the radar and not go for a zillion bucks, so much for that idea. > At least I have the means to go to Tucson and get it if I'm nuts and go for > it. > It was on the radar before it was posted here; it had 11 bids when I got up this morning and it had barely been listed for 12 hours. If it doesn't break $10K I'll be surprised. - Josh > > Thanks > Jim > From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 16:17:13 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:17:13 -0400 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 5:02 PM, wrote: >> 25,000, Alexandria, Va. >> Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > > Is that a dream price for such a system or realistic? Curious myself. They don't come up every day. The description says: "Last turned on the lights worked but the memory appeared not to work." I think from posts on similar systems, it could easily be dirty marginal switch contacts or PSU issues, etc, vs damaged core. > I notice the corrosion on the front key. I'll happily sell him a clean key for a mere 1%... -ethan From lproven at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 14:03:22 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 21:03:22 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 18 July 2016 at 20:18, wrote: Ed, *please* will you get a proper email client? They work fine with AOL mail. I know, I am also liamproven at aol.com & have been for 20y! > > will not load curvet os because? > "This is caused by the lack of the 64 bit EFI bios. The hardware of the > Mac Pro 1.1 is already complete 64bit capable but they do ship the efi bios > only in 32bit version." > > Ed says..... OK whatever an EFI Bios is.... There are ways around it. http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2015/3/2/how-to-resurrect-a-2006-mac-pro-11-so-it-can-run-osx-yosemit.html Ask the Hackintosh community: http://hq-a.weebly.com/ > --------------------- > ok we also have a - > > "The Power Macintosh G5 shipped from 2003 until 2006. All models pack > 64-bit PowerPC 970 (G5) processors in an easy-to-upgrade aluminum tower case > design with a single external optical drive bay" > > This one is missing disc drives... this has the neatest form fitting > insides of any of the macs I have seen. Takes any old SATA drive, as far as I recall. No special firmware needed. Will run up to OS X 10.5, nothing later. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Mon Jul 18 15:39:08 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 16:39:08 -0400 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. Message-ID: Liam, thank you so much for this information! I did not know about all the HACKINTOSH action out there! Good to hear that one system will use SATA drive > I will just have to find some old installable OS for it. The family of the deceased engineer that passed these on to us at the SMECC Museum project tossed most any paperwork or media , so we have what is installed on the system and of course for the diskless one we are empty handed. We we were out scrounging now I wish I had picked up more vintage MAC paperwork and discs now. We saved stuff related to the early MAC and of course ANYTHING we could find for the APPLE II. We do also have something that looks like an APPLE LISA but not the twiggi (sp?) drive model I have heard reference to. it turned on last time I tried but just a bunch of diddle crap all over the screen. (bogus contents of memory mapped video or!?? wrote: Ed, *please* will you get a proper email client? They work fine with AOL mail. I know, I am also liamproven at aol.com & have been for 20y! > > will not load curvet os because? > "This is caused by the lack of the 64 bit EFI bios. The hardware of the > Mac Pro 1.1 is already complete 64bit capable but they do ship the efi bios > only in 32bit version." > > Ed says..... OK whatever an EFI Bios is.... There are ways around it. http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2015/3/2/how-to-resurrect-a-2006-m ac-pro-11-so-it-can-run-osx-yosemit.html Ask the Hackintosh community: http://hq-a.weebly.com/ > --------------------- > ok we also have a - > > "The Power Macintosh G5 shipped from 2003 until 2006. All models pack > 64-bit PowerPC 970 (G5) processors in an easy-to-upgrade aluminum tower case > design with a single external optical drive bay" > > This one is missing disc drives... this has the neatest form fitting > insides of any of the macs I have seen. Takes any old SATA drive, as far as I recall. No special firmware needed. Will run up to OS X 10.5, nothing later. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From geneb at deltasoft.com Mon Jul 18 15:50:04 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:50:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > Liam, thank you so much for this information! > I did not know about all the HACKINTOSH action out there! > If you've got an Intel cpu, you can run it with VMWare too. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Mon Jul 18 16:22:51 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:22:51 -0600 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: On 7/18/2016 11:10 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > On 7/18/16 9:11 AM, Liam Proven wrote: >> On 18 July 2016 at 17:03, Al Kossow wrote: >>> "Shiner" started out as an 88110 machine, and some of the architectural >>> quirks are remnants of that. >> >> >> This is not enough for me to Google. Could you clarify, please? >> > > you won't find anything on the web about any of this > Can you enlighten the masses, or have you sold your soul to Lucifer for this knowlage? From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Mon Jul 18 16:54:58 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:54:58 -0400 Subject: Found some stuff at the scrapyard Message-ID: In a message dated 7/17/2016 9:45:20 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk writes: > The HPIL thinkjet version was also used with the hp portable and hp > portable plus laptops. > we have some of them in the SMECC here... but back when I was CEO > Computer Exchange inc we sold lost of these.. it was a small laptop > with applications in ROM but also had a HPIL 3 1/2 disc and an HPIL Yes. 80C86 (not 8088) based, there is a 16 bit data bus in there. The Portable (HP110) has built-in RAM that can't be expanded. One of the boards contains the processor and a lot of DIP-packaged 8K*8 SRAMs. The Portable Plus used surface-mount 8K*8 SRAMs and could take more on a plug-in 'RAM Drawer'. > Hey! > Remember to the hp 45 calc.. had HPIL interface also... I think you mean the HP41 (LCD alphanumeric calculator) or maybe the HP75 (handheld machine running BASIC, very similar to the HP85 in architecture). The HP45 was a simple-ish non-programmable scientific calculator with an LED display. And an undocumented stopwatch Yes that is the 41 ! I know better! sorry! sold oddles of 41s to surveyors etc... in the day... > There was also a gaggle of cards to the PC and the HP 150 TOUCHSCREEN > that would talk to HPIL and also on IBM side HPIL plus I seem to > remember HPIB cards too. The HP150 had HPIB as standard. There was an optional card that added HPIL and a Centronics port. That Centronics port was a mess. HP decided to use female DB25s for the serial ports. So to avoid confusion they used a male DB25 for the Centronics port. Only problem was the PCB was laid out for a female DB25 using IBM PC pinouts. With the result that the male version ended up effectively mirror-reversed, strobe on pin 13, etc. There were, indeed, HP ISA HPIB and HPIL cards. From memory the latter (at least) will not run in any reasonbly fast machine (8MHz CPU clock tops?) There was also an HPIL card for the Integral (portable unix machine) but I have never seen it. Was there a DIO HPIL card? [...] > I may be wrong but I remember a HPIL a HPIB a Parallel and maybe a > Serial interface version of the HP Thinkjet I have come across 6 versions : HPIB, HPIL, RS232, Centronics, Portable (battery powered Centronics) and IIRC an enhanced version of the RS232 one. > Now there was another interface not to be confused with the HPIL it was > called HP HIL HP HUMAN INTERFACE LOOP I remember? it was what the mouse > used on the hp 150 etc... Yes. They are often confused... But very different to the user and electrically. > I may still still have my orig HP Thinkjet service training course I think you can get the service manual for the Thinkjet (probably only covers the original 4 versions) from the Australian Museum. -tony = thanks for all this info! great brain refresh! Ed# _www.smecc.oprg_ (http://www.smecc.oprg) From glen.slick at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 17:27:21 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:27:21 -0700 Subject: Wanted: VT5x roll-around stand In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 11:49 AM, Jason T wrote: >> http://www.ebay.com/itm/262528352526?orig_cvip=true >> >> Someone bought that. Anyone here want to fess up as the buyer? If it >> was local and cheaper I might have grabbed it myself, even without >> having space to put it to use at the moment. > > It were me what dunnit. Mea culpa for crimes of hoarding and against > basement floor space. Eh, I'll get rid of some generic table to make > room. Cool it found a good home. When you finally receive you'll have to post a photo of it with a VT220 and LK201 installed for use on it. From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 17:34:05 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:34:05 -0500 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards (was: DEC boards at recycler) In-Reply-To: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> I hauled the DEC + friends boards home earlier which I mentioned finding on the list last week. The "unknown" board I'd noted down as M7961 is actually M7951, which Google suggests is a DUV11 interface board (whatever one of those may be ;-) The board with the 128 mmc3764 ICs on it has what I think is a National Semiconductor logo on it. Google's no help in IDing the 3764, but I'm guessing it's a 64kx1 DRAM or related. Next up we have the Emulex boards - all "FH" ("full height", 4 bus connectors) or "HH" ("half height", 2 bus connectors): TU0310401, FH, 2x50-pin headers on outer edge. SU0210401, FH, 1x60-pin and 2x26-pin headers on outer edge. CU0210402, FH, 2x50 pin and 1x16-pin headers on outer edge. QD3310401, HH, 1x60-pin on outer edge and 2x26-pin headers just inboard. QD2110402, HH, 2x20-pin headers on outer edge, then a 34-pin and 10-pin header just inboard. I think all of these boards have at least one 40-pin IC on them with a label which generally bears a number close to the ones on the PCBs quoted above; I can reel those off if needs be. But anyway... anyone know from that what any of these boards are? I suspect there's some SMD in there, possibly ST506/412 in the case of the one with the 34-pin connector. Not sure if I'm lucky* enough for any of the others to be SCSI though, or if they're some form of tape (or something else entirely). * I only say that because I have a vague notion to see if I can rustle up a backplane somehow and get a minimal system running; it would be kind of fun. cheers Jules From derschjo at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 17:48:35 2016 From: derschjo at gmail.com (Josh Dersch) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:48:35 -0700 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards (was: DEC boards at recycler) In-Reply-To: <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Jules Richardson < jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: > I hauled the DEC + friends boards home earlier which I mentioned finding > on the list last week. > > The "unknown" board I'd noted down as M7961 is actually M7951, which > Google suggests is a DUV11 interface board (whatever one of those may be ;-) > > The board with the 128 mmc3764 ICs on it has what I think is a National > Semiconductor logo on it. Google's no help in IDing the 3764, but I'm > guessing it's a 64kx1 DRAM or related. > > Next up we have the Emulex boards - all "FH" ("full height", 4 bus > connectors) or "HH" ("half height", 2 bus connectors): > > TU0310401, FH, 2x50-pin headers on outer edge. > SU0210401, FH, 1x60-pin and 2x26-pin headers on outer edge. > CU0210402, FH, 2x50 pin and 1x16-pin headers on outer edge. > QD3310401, HH, 1x60-pin on outer edge and 2x26-pin headers just inboard. > QD2110402, HH, 2x20-pin headers on outer edge, then a 34-pin and 10-pin > header just inboard. > > I think all of these boards have at least one 40-pin IC on them with a > label which generally bears a number close to the ones on the PCBs quoted > above; I can reel those off if needs be. > > But anyway... anyone know from that what any of these boards are? I > suspect there's some SMD in there, possibly ST506/412 in the case of the > one with the 34-pin connector. Not sure if I'm lucky* enough for any of the > others to be SCSI though, or if they're some form of tape (or something > else entirely). > The QD33 is an SMD controller, the QD21 is an ESDI controller. I'd wager the TU03 is a Pertec-compatible tape controller. Nothing looks to be SCSI to me, unfortunately... - Josh > > * I only say that because I have a vague notion to see if I can rustle up > a backplane somehow and get a minimal system running; it would be kind of > fun. > > cheers > > Jules > > From glen.slick at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 17:51:20 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:51:20 -0700 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards (was: DEC boards at recycler) In-Reply-To: <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > I hauled the DEC + friends boards home earlier which I mentioned finding on > the list last week. > > The "unknown" board I'd noted down as M7961 is actually M7951, which Google > suggests is a DUV11 interface board (whatever one of those may be ;-) > > The board with the 128 mmc3764 ICs on it has what I think is a National > Semiconductor logo on it. Google's no help in IDing the 3764, but I'm > guessing it's a 64kx1 DRAM or related. > > Next up we have the Emulex boards - all "FH" ("full height", 4 bus > connectors) or "HH" ("half height", 2 bus connectors): > > TU0310401, FH, 2x50-pin headers on outer edge. > SU0210401, FH, 1x60-pin and 2x26-pin headers on outer edge. > CU0210402, FH, 2x50 pin and 1x16-pin headers on outer edge. > QD3310401, HH, 1x60-pin on outer edge and 2x26-pin headers just inboard. QD33 = QBus MSCP compatible SMD-E disk controller http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/emulex/QD3351002-M_QD33_Dec90.pdf > QD2110402, HH, 2x20-pin headers on outer edge, then a 34-pin and 10-pin > header just inboard. QD21 = QBus MSCP compatible ESDI disk controller http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/emulex/QD2151002-J_QD21_Jun90.pdf From spacewar at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 18:23:19 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:23:19 -0600 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: <201607181439.u6IEdwxH60884464@floodgap.com> <77036567-a133-8c9e-089d-4933e25890f8@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: On 7/18/2016 11:10 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > you won't find anything on the web about any of this On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 3:22 PM, ben wrote: > Can you enlighten the masses, or have you sold your soul to Lucifer > for this knowlage? Even worse! It was sold to Apple! :-) From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 19:07:36 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:07:36 -0500 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards In-Reply-To: References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> On 07/18/2016 05:48 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: > The QD33 is an SMD controller, the QD21 is an ESDI controller. I'd wager > the TU03 is a Pertec-compatible tape controller. Nothing looks to be SCSI > to me, unfortunately... Rats, I was leaning toward there not being any SCSI ones - the ones with 50 pin connectors didn't seem to match anything I could find online. I hear that the PSUs that went with the systems these boards came from might still survive (they did as of last week, anyway), but the word is that everything else - drives, racks, cables etc. - went to landfill long ago. From js at cimmeri.com Mon Jul 18 19:16:11 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:16:11 -0500 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards In-Reply-To: <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578D714B.3040304@cimmeri.com> On 7/18/2016 7:07 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > > I hear that the PSUs that went with the systems these boards came from > might still survive (they did as of last week, anyway), but the word > is that everything else - drives, racks, cables etc. - went to > landfill long ago. Landfill? Or metals recycling? - J. From isking at uw.edu Mon Jul 18 19:29:29 2016 From: isking at uw.edu (Ian S. King) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:29:29 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: Absent physical trauma, core seems pretty durable. The electronics around it may fail but the core planes themselves seem robust. At least that's been my experience. -- Ian On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 5:02 PM, wrote: > >> 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > >> Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > > > > Is that a dream price for such a system or realistic? > > Curious myself. They don't come up every day. The description says: > "Last turned on the lights worked but the memory appeared not to > work." I think from posts on similar systems, it could easily be > dirty marginal switch contacts or PSU issues, etc, vs damaged core. > > > I notice the corrosion on the front key. > > I'll happily sell him a clean key for a mere 1%... > > -ethan > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From jwsmail at jwsss.com Mon Jul 18 19:34:19 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:34:19 -0700 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards In-Reply-To: <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> Message-ID: <1b268a55-2d79-2795-4830-120d37946bf4@jwsss.com> On 7/18/2016 5:07 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: > Rats, I was leaning toward there not being any SCSI ones - the ones > with 50 pin connectors didn't seem to match anything I could find online. Here is a Qbus Emulex UC07 image. http://web.frainresearch.org:8080/projects/pdp-11/troy/images/uc07.jpg I don't know if there were any wide controllers (68 pin) or what they ran from the controller at this time. From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 20:02:20 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 20:02:20 -0500 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards In-Reply-To: <578D714B.3040304@cimmeri.com> References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> <578D6F48.6070401@gmail.com> <578D714B.3040304@cimmeri.com> Message-ID: <578D7C1C.2060900@gmail.com> On 07/18/2016 07:16 PM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: > On 7/18/2016 7:07 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: >> >> I hear that the PSUs that went with the systems these boards came from >> might still survive (they did as of last week, anyway), but the word is >> that everything else - drives, racks, cables etc. - went to landfill long >> ago. > > > Landfill? Or metals recycling? Pass :-) I was told the town dump - and although they do have a big dumpster for metals, I know they prefer them to be as uncontaminated as possible, so I could see them rejecting something that was still full of PCBs. There is a separate metal recyclers north of town and I expect they might take complete systems, but I think they've only been around a few years and perhaps weren't there "back then". I also know they outright refuse to sell anything that hits the yard, so it's not as though their existence would have saved the original hardware. cheers Jules From couryhouse at aol.com Mon Jul 18 20:22:21 2016 From: couryhouse at aol.com (couryhouse) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:22:21 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: Our core in any of our classic 8 has never worked it didn't 30 years ago either. ...... ?just the thought of how many failed components.... yikes! ..... ?something to procrastinate ?about.. ?but I hate to hack out ?buckets of components. ............... Ed# ?www.smecc.org Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: "Ian S. King" Date: 7/18/16 17:29 (GMT-07:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Subject: Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Absent physical trauma, core seems pretty durable.? The electronics around it may fail but the core planes themselves seem robust.? At least that's been my experience.? -- Ian On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 5:02 PM,? wrote: > >> 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > >> Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > > > > Is that a dream price for such a system or realistic? > > Curious myself.? They don't come up every day.? The description says: > "Last turned on the lights worked but the memory appeared not to > work."? I think from posts on similar systems, it could easily be > dirty marginal switch contacts or PSU issues, etc, vs damaged core. > > > I notice the corrosion on the front key. > > I'll happily sell him a clean key for a mere 1%... > > -ethan > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From tmfdmike at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 20:37:34 2016 From: tmfdmike at gmail.com (Mike Ross) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:37:34 +1200 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: On Jul 18, 2016 2:30 PM, "Ian S. King" wrote: > > Absent physical trauma, core seems pretty durable. The electronics around > it may fail but the core planes themselves seem robust. At least that's > been my experience. -- Ian There are known cases of IBM System/3 core that had failed beyond practical repair due to products of decayed air-sealing foam contacting and dissolving core plane wires. Mike From n0body.h0me at inbox.com Mon Jul 18 22:36:16 2016 From: n0body.h0me at inbox.com (N0body H0me) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:36:16 -0800 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <7ec1162e-0a50-a2f1-0981-9888ae924ade@bitsavers.org> References: Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: aek at bitsavers.org > Sent: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 12:59:44 -0700 > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. > > > > On 7/18/16 12:44 PM, N0body H0me wrote: > >> I'm astounded. I didn't think any ever made it to prototype or >> hard-model >> stage! I've seen bare boards for these (up to this point) mythical >> beasts, but never a living, breathing machine. Must have been a piece >> of work. Do any functional machines still exist? How did you encounter >> them? >> > > The 88100 si worked. Hurricane never got a functional 88110 before the > IBM/Apple > deal. Tessaract never booted MacOS. > > Which bare board did you see? Long ago, on "The auction site that must not be named", some guy was selling an apple-branded case, with a bare motherboard inside (or, perhaps only sparsely populated). The seller stated it was the prototype motherboard for an 88k Mac that was never built. It sold for a stupid amount of money.... > I was in the RISC products group doing driver and cpu board bringup > starting with > the 88100 nubus boards to IBM RSC (never had a functional 88110) then 601 > over to high end desktop product development with TNT. Wow, so as Walter Cronkite would have said: "...and you were there." The question I'm dying to ask is: Given the choice between the PPC and the 88k (and ignoring Motorola's propensity to shoot itself in the foot), which archetecture would you tend to favor (and why)? ____________________________________________________________ Receive Notifications of Incoming Messages Easily monitor multiple email accounts & access them with a click. Visit http://www.inbox.com/notifier and check it out! From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 23:25:20 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:25:20 +0900 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 Message-ID: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? I think the HP 9895 8" floppy would work. What about the HP 82901 5.25" floppy drive? How do I read/write program files from the disc interface? Marc Sent from my iPad From spacewar at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 23:30:42 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 22:30:42 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > In detailed > technical ways I confess I do not fully understand, the ARM2 and its > chipset's design was optimised to work with cheap DRAM with relatively > slow cycle times. I've seen this claim in the past. I've looked over the chipset design, and I don't think it did any more wonderful a job of supporting cheap commodity DRAM than the other common chipsets of the era. Perhaps someone with greater familiarity with the MEMC chip can tell us if there is some tricky DRAM support feature I've overlooked. The only uncommon and particularly clever thing I saw a system do to optimize for DRAM (as opposed to any other read/write memory type) was to use the low-order address lines for the DRAM row address, and to start the DRAM cycle (assert RAS strobe) before the MMU had done the address translation. This avoids a portion of the DRAM cycle latency by taking advantage of the DRAM only needing half of the address bits at the start of the cycle. If a translation fault occurs, or the upper part of the translated address turns out not to be intended for the DRAM array (e.g., ROM or I/O access), the DRAM cycle has to be either: * completed normally (OK for read cycles, discard the data) * completed but forced to be a read (OK for read or write cycles, but for write, don't assert WE signal, and somehow prevent bus contention) * aborted (never assert CAS strobe, OK for read or write cycles). I saw this done on at least one MC68000-based systems with a discrete logic MMU, but I don't recall which one. The technique became generally inapplicable when MMUs were integrated into tthe CPU chips, because such CPUs generally don't give you the untranslated low address bits any sooner than the translated upper address bits. The technique wasn't generally useful with the MC68451 segmented MMU or MC68851 paged MMU, because those supported translation granularity down to 256-byte boundaries, so only six or seven low-order address lines were unmapped (for 16-bit or 32-bit memory systems, respectively). DRAMs at 64K and larger capacities require at least eight row address bits. Paged MMUs with a minimum page size of 4K bytes would be somewhat better suited to this technique. The major drawback to this technique is that it isn't possible to use DRAM page-mode access to read consecutive locations, because consecutive locations are in different rows of the DRAM, rather than in different columns. However, the technique was used in machines that didn't have hardware support for the processor to request multiple consecutive sequential accesses, so it didn't matter. The bus support for bursts of consecutive addresses mostly appeared when caches became integrated into CPU chips. Note that bursts could still be supported by interleaving multiple DRAM banks, but that would cut down on the number of unmapped low address lines available for use for the DRAM row address, which was barely adequate without interleaving. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Mon Jul 18 23:35:36 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:35:36 -0400 Subject: DEC and Emulex boards (was: DEC boards at recycler) In-Reply-To: References: <5786B900.6050505@gmail.com> <578D595D.7090602@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 6:48 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Jules Richardson < > jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I hauled the DEC + friends boards home earlier which I mentioned finding >> on the list last week. >> >> The "unknown" board I'd noted down as M7961 is actually M7951, which >> Google suggests is a DUV11 interface board (whatever one of those may be ;-) It's the Qbus version of a DU11 sync serial interface that can implement character-based (not bit-stuffed) protocols. ISTR that includes HASP and 3780 but I'm not sure what else off the top of my head. >> The board with the 128 mmc3764 ICs on it has what I think is a National >> Semiconductor logo on it. Google's no help in IDing the 3764, but I'm >> guessing it's a 64kx1 DRAM or related. Probably a good guess. >> Next up we have the Emulex boards - all "FH" ("full height", 4 bus >> connectors) or "HH" ("half height", 2 bus connectors): >> >> TU0310401, FH, 2x50-pin headers on outer edge. >> SU0210401, FH, 1x60-pin and 2x26-pin headers on outer edge. >> CU0210402, FH, 2x50 pin and 1x16-pin headers on outer edge. >> QD3310401, HH, 1x60-pin on outer edge and 2x26-pin headers just inboard. >> QD2110402, HH, 2x20-pin headers on outer edge, then a 34-pin and 10-pin >> header just inboard. >> >> But anyway... anyone know from that what any of these boards are? I >> suspect there's some SMD in there, possibly ST506/412 in the case of the >> one with the 34-pin connector. > > The QD33 is an SMD controller, the QD21 is an ESDI controller. I'd wager > the TU03 is a Pertec-compatible tape controller. Nothing looks to be SCSI > to me, unfortunately... Right. The connectors also bear that out (SMD is 1x60 + 2(or 4)x26, Pertec interface is 2x50 (not exclusively), ESDI is the same number of pins as ST506/MFM, 1x34 and 2(typically)x20, but not interchangable). ISTR it's not hard to find QD21 and QD33 controllers, but the SMD and ESDI drives aren't as abundant as they once were. The CU02 is a serial mux, and Emulex (and DEC) did make 50-pin mux output connectors for Unibus boards (CS/21, DZ-11...). You will probably see on that CS02, 8xSCN2641 UARTs and a bunch of 26LS32 differential line receivers (RS-422 not RS-232, if so) or something functionally similar. Cheers, -ethan From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Tue Jul 19 00:06:46 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 05:06:46 +0000 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: > Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just > scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version > with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work > save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both > have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? Which flexible disk ROM? There are 2. The older one, AFAIK supports the HP9885 8" drive which has a 16 bit parallel interface and needs the right version of the 98032 to hook it up. The later disk ROM supports the HP9895 on HPIB. The older ROM needs a disk with various programs on it to work, it is essentially just a bootstrap. Have any such disks survived? -tony From barythrin at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 00:23:05 2016 From: barythrin at gmail.com (Sam O'nella) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:23:05 -0500 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <5577h4is82bipan6ffvo9anq.1468905785131@email.android.com> There may be some archives here or vcf with enough prices. ?Iirc i thought i remember one selling for something pretty high (8000/12000?) X years ago although i think like this it's a calculated price of doubling the last sale they saw. Although apple 1s seem to accomplish whatever that law is called :-) From spectre at floodgap.com Tue Jul 19 00:25:08 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 22:25:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: <4b25401b-c0fe-7aab-280c-35bf019a3312@bitsavers.org> from Al Kossow at "Jul 18, 16 10:12:27 am" Message-ID: <201607190525.u6J5P86i19857620@floodgap.com> > "Shiner" shipped as the ANS with AIX > > http://www.erik.co.uk/ans/ > > though that isn't what the original "Shiner" was at all. Chuck Goulsbee talked about a prototype 601 in a Q950 case, but that sounds like the ancestor to the WGS 9150, not the ANS. Was the original "Shiner" that system, or was it something else? I keep hoping another ANS 300 turns up (the only extant one I know is Chuck's). However, my 500 and 700 systems are still doing just fine. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- MOVIE IDEA: E.T.E.S.: The Extra Terrestrial E-Mail Signature --------------- From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Tue Jul 19 00:29:27 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 22:29:27 -0700 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <2A26628F-B9CF-4421-8887-1BA4034AAFC7@eschatologist.net> On Jul 18, 2016, at 10:06 PM, tony duell wrote: > >> Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just >> scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version >> with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work >> save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both >> have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? > > Which flexible disk ROM? There are 2. The older one, AFAIK > supports the HP9885 8" drive which has a 16 bit parallel interface > and needs the right version of the 98032 to hook it up. The later > disk ROM supports the HP9895 on HPIB. I didn't look at the back to see what interface it has, but there was an HP 9885M that looked pretty decent at Weird Stuff on Sunday ($75). It was atop an HP 9000/236 ($150). There were a couple other HP PA-RISC systems there, as well as a couple IBM RS/6000 desktops and what looked like a PS/2 Model 80, an Epson of some sort, and a Panasonic Sr. Partner. And a nice looking Macintosh LC III for which they were asking too much, though I still considered it seriously since it was an LC III with an included 10Base-T card? -- Chris From jwsmail at jwsss.com Tue Jul 19 02:07:19 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:07:19 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <5577h4is82bipan6ffvo9anq.1468905785131@email.android.com> References: <5577h4is82bipan6ffvo9anq.1468905785131@email.android.com> Message-ID: <2e3c83bc-e664-03a3-a9c3-ea8860a7d4f9@jwsss.com> On 7/18/2016 10:23 PM, Sam O'nella wrote: > There may be some archives here or vcf with enough prices. Iirc i thought i remember one selling for something pretty high (8000/12000?) X years ago although i think like this it's a calculated price of doubling the last sale they saw. Although apple 1s seem to accomplish whatever that law is called :-) I think Straight 8's are nearly to the point that other systems which have published tracking inventories. There are very few, this one looks complete, or near complete. That said I'd figure though some of the higher prices such as the current PDP8/I and GT40 are setting for want of bids, they aren't that far from what you have to pay to get said systems on demand. This one may go for around the opportunistic price, and be lower, but $10 to $12k isn't going to be surprising. From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Tue Jul 19 04:01:04 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 05:01:04 -0400 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> there is an 8i with similar crazy price but different user id.... hmmm.... beware? also a Rare Digital DEC H-500 Computer Lab, 1960s, Same Switches as PDP-8/I, Vintage for 700+ ( we have an extra one of these Computer Lab, if anyone here is interested) Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) In a message dated 7/19/2016 12:07:02 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, jwsmail at jwsss.com writes: On 7/18/2016 10:23 PM, Sam O'nella wrote: > There may be some archives here or vcf with enough prices. Iirc i thought i remember one selling for something pretty high (8000/12000?) X years ago although i think like this it's a calculated price of doubling the last sale they saw. Although apple 1s seem to accomplish whatever that law is called :-) I think Straight 8's are nearly to the point that other systems which have published tracking inventories. There are very few, this one looks complete, or near complete. That said I'd figure though some of the higher prices such as the current PDP8/I and GT40 are setting for want of bids, they aren't that far from what you have to pay to get said systems on demand. This one may go for around the opportunistic price, and be lower, but $10 to $12k isn't going to be surprising. From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Tue Jul 19 03:55:53 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 04:55:53 -0400 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <1003a1.264c2cde.44bf4519@aol.com> EEEKK!!! and it is not the one with the Plexiglas surrounds... kaaa ching..$$$ It does have a nice a/d unit Ed# In a message dated 7/19/2016 12:07:02 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, jwsmail at jwsss.com writes: On 7/18/2016 10:23 PM, Sam O'nella wrote: > There may be some archives here or vcf with enough prices. Iirc i thought i remember one selling for something pretty high (8000/12000?) X years ago although i think like this it's a calculated price of doubling the last sale they saw. Although apple 1s seem to accomplish whatever that law is called :-) I think Straight 8's are nearly to the point that other systems which have published tracking inventories. There are very few, this one looks complete, or near complete. That said I'd figure though some of the higher prices such as the current PDP8/I and GT40 are setting for want of bids, they aren't that far from what you have to pay to get said systems on demand. This one may go for around the opportunistic price, and be lower, but $10 to $12k isn't going to be surprising. From phb.hfx at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 07:54:21 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:54:21 -0300 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578E22FD.6050103@gmail.com> On 2016-07-19 2:06 AM, tony duell wrote: > >> Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just >> scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version >> with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work >> save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both >> have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? > Which flexible disk ROM? There are 2. The older one, AFAIK > supports the HP9885 8" drive which has a 16 bit parallel interface > and needs the right version of the 98032 to hook it up. The later > disk ROM supports the HP9895 on HPIB. The only difference between the different versions of 98032A is the cable and some jumpers inside but it appears to all be documented so even if you don't have the option 085 98032A, the 50 pin D shell connector used on the 9885 is pretty common. > > The older ROM needs a disk with various programs on it to > work, it is essentially just a bootstrap. Have any such disks > survived? There is an image of one on the hpmuseum.net site. > > -tony Paul. From phb.hfx at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 08:00:41 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 10:00:41 -0300 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578E2479.60207@gmail.com> On 2016-07-19 1:25 AM, Curious Marc wrote: > Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? I think the HP 9895 8" floppy would work. What about the HP 82901 5.25" floppy drive? How do I read/write program files from the disc interface? > Marc > > Sent from my iPad There was only ever support for 8" diskette drives, and to support 9895 you need the second version of the Diskette ROM which appears to be very rare. I t sure would be nice if someone who has one of these ROMs would dump the contents or loan it to someone who could dump it, so that we might be able to clone the ROM module. Paul. From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 08:30:19 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:30:19 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> Message-ID: On 19 July 2016 at 06:30, Eric Smith wrote: > > I've seen this claim in the past. I've looked over the chipset design, > and I don't think it did any more wonderful a job of supporting cheap > commodity DRAM than the other common chipsets of the era. Perhaps > someone with greater familiarity with the MEMC chip can tell us if > there is some tricky DRAM support feature I've overlooked. I will look. There's a hint here, though: https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson/feature.html -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 08:37:19 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:37:19 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 18 July 2016 at 22:50, geneb wrote: > On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: > >> Liam, thank you so much for this information! >> I did not know about all the HACKINTOSH action out there! >> > If you've got an Intel cpu, you can run it with VMWare too. :) I've heard that but I have never once got it to work, either in VMware or VirtualBox. :-( -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From geneb at deltasoft.com Tue Jul 19 08:44:55 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:44:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > On 18 July 2016 at 22:50, geneb wrote: >> On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote: >> >>> Liam, thank you so much for this information! >>> I did not know about all the HACKINTOSH action out there! >>> >> If you've got an Intel cpu, you can run it with VMWare too. :) > > I've heard that but I have never once got it to work, either in VMware > or VirtualBox. :-( You have to patch VMWare to turn on the MacOS support - it's not available by default. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 08:48:11 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:48:11 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 19 July 2016 at 15:44, geneb wrote: > You have to patch VMWare to turn on the MacOS support - it's not available > by default. Ah. Well, since I don't own it and prefer FOSS, I'll stick to VirtualBox and try to uncover the secret. I know people manage to do it. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 09:08:00 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:08:00 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > I've heard that but I have never once got it to work, either in VMware > or VirtualBox. :-( IMHO, it's a PITA and not really worth it. Hardware-based Hackintoshes can be fast and somewhat well supported. You just have to be very careful about what hardware you pick. If one decides to build one, I'd recommend checking the Buyers Guide on http://www.tonymacx86.com. As far as VMware or VirtualBox goes, that's a different story. I've used both of them and as of about a year or so ago, I didn't get satisfactory results. For one, even when you use an EFI BIOS, you still need to load EFI hackery-loaders, and driver-hacks to get it working. I tried to do it the "legal way" by buying a copy of OSX Server standalone etc... https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005793 Eventually I got a working guest VM with OSX on it, but I think the graphics drivers and other niggly bits were non-optimal to the point it was just painful and slow to use. It took quite a bit of time even to get it that far (lots of trial and error with the guest VM settings). Perhaps things are easier these days, but I certainly couldn't recommend the process unless you just wanted/needed OSX Server running in a VM for some kind of infrastructure stuff. That's probably exactly what Apple intended, too. BTW, I've heard it all runs peachy under OSX. Obviously, I'm talking about the host-server being FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows. With Mac Minis and other OSX hardware being pretty accessible, and with my bad-attitude toward most modern commercial OSs (app store full of malware anyone?) I'm not enthusiastic enough to jack with VM'ing it much. My impression is that Apple seems much more interested in iPhones and perhaps tablets these days than some "old" desktop OS. http://www.osnews.com/story/29299/Apple_PC_sales_fall_below_market You'd think a company with a bazillion notional dollars equity value would have a few spare cycles for keeping the OS interesting. However, lately, my impression is that their idea of "interesting" seems to mean they put higher walls around the garden. Oh, wait, they are making it mo' betta' for to read in traditional Chinese and throwing in a bunch of bundled application tweaks that have little to do with the actual OS. Uhh. Grreeeeaaaaat. http://www.apple.com/osx/all-features/ Hey Apple, you might want a modern volume management scheme (ie.. not Core Storage) before you slap "Server" on anything else. It's no small wonder OSX Server was a failure in the marketplace. I'd rather install a 20 year old OS I've never seen versus OSX on VMware, but that's just me. -Swift From ethan at 757.org Tue Jul 19 09:25:39 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 10:25:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: > That said I'd figure though some of the higher prices such as the > current PDP8/I and GT40 are setting for want of bids, they aren't that > far from what you have to pay to get said systems on demand. This one > may go for around the opportunistic price, and be lower, but $10 to $12k > isn't going to be surprising. Hmp. Well the Cray J932SE on there is legit :-) -- Ethan O'Toole From geneb at deltasoft.com Tue Jul 19 09:30:39 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 07:30:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > On 19 July 2016 at 15:44, geneb wrote: >> You have to patch VMWare to turn on the MacOS support - it's not available >> by default. > > > Ah. Well, since I don't own it and prefer FOSS, I'll stick to > VirtualBox and try to uncover the secret. I know people manage to do > it. VMWare Player can do it as well, but does need the patch tweak to make it work properly. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From lproven at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 09:33:02 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 16:33:02 +0200 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 19 July 2016 at 16:08, Swift Griggs wrote: > > IMHO, it's a PITA and not really worth it. That's my impression, yes. > Hardware-based Hackintoshes can > be fast and somewhat well supported. I know, because I hackintoshed my PC in London before I left. It was a decent machine off the local Freecycle group -- Core 2 Quad Extreme, 8GB RAM, SATA DVD-RW. No hard disks or graphics card, which I cannibalised off my old PC. As it was the first all-Intel machine I'd had in a long long time -- well over a decade -- I tried hackintoshing it. (At first, it ran Ubuntu, natch, and I also tried Windows 8 on it for a month or so before the eval period expired and it started nagging.) It took days of trial and error but it worked. I intentionally used Snow Leopard (although Mountain Lion was by then current) because [a] I wanted PowerPC app support, mainly for MS Office 2004 and [b] it was an old version already, so probably no patches would come along and break my installtion. It worked fine and was a fast, useful, stable machine. I intentionally didn't try to get sleep/resume working -- it was a desktop; when not in use, I turned it off. One boot in 50 might fail but a press of the reset button and it always came up. Floppy drive and PS/2 ports didn't work, but I could always just reboot into Ubuntu for them. When I get the box over here, I might try to get it running a more modern version, just for kicks. > You just have to be very careful > about what hardware you pick. If one decides to build one, I'd recommend > checking the Buyers Guide on http://www.tonymacx86.com. I'm not that rich! I bought a used Mac mini, with my 26Y old Apple ABD keyboard on it. :-) > As far as VMware or VirtualBox goes, that's a different story. I've used > both of them and as of about a year or so ago, I didn't get satisfactory > results. For one, even when you use an EFI BIOS, you still need to load > EFI hackery-loaders, and driver-hacks to get it working. Yes, tried that. > I tried to do it > the "legal way" by buying a copy of OSX Server standalone etc... > > https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005793 OK, never tried that! > Eventually I got a working guest VM with OSX on it, but I think the > graphics drivers and other niggly bits were non-optimal to the point it > was just painful and slow to use. It took quite a bit of time even to get > it that far (lots of trial and error with the guest VM settings). Perhaps > things are easier these days, but I certainly couldn't recommend the > process unless you just wanted/needed OSX Server running in a VM for some > kind of infrastructure stuff. That's probably exactly what Apple intended, > too. I'm tempted to, but the machine I'd want to run it on is AMD-based, so I think the chances are not good. > BTW, I've heard it all runs peachy under OSX. Obviously, I'm talking about > the host-server being FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows. > > With Mac Minis and other OSX hardware being pretty accessible, and with my > bad-attitude toward most modern commercial OSs (app store full of malware > anyone?) I'm not enthusiastic enough to jack with VM'ing it much. My > impression is that Apple seems much more interested in iPhones and perhaps > tablets these days than some "old" desktop OS. Up to a point, yes. But it's still a damned fine desktop, and the least-hassle Unix there is. Ubuntu is getting close, though. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/17/computing-opensource http://lifehacker.com/5993401/im-cory-doctorow-and-this-is-how-i-work > You'd think a company with a bazillion notional dollars equity value would > have a few spare cycles for keeping the OS interesting. However, lately, > my impression is that their idea of "interesting" seems to mean they put > higher walls around the garden. Oh, wait, they are making it mo' betta' > for to read in traditional Chinese and throwing in a bunch of bundled > application tweaks that have little to do with the actual OS. Uhh. > Grreeeeaaaaat. I have no issues with it myself. I don't use Apple phones or laptops, I don't have a tablet, so the integration features are irrelevant to me. I don't use Apple's email client, chat client, calendar, notes, cloud storage, anything. Mostly I use FOSS and freeware apps, so there's no tie-in for me. But the integration is, I hear, amazing and best-of-breed. I gather they're adding Siri to the next version, macOS Sierra, and after that, there will be more AI features. Not sure that I want any of that, but we'll see. > Hey Apple, you might want a modern volume management scheme (ie.. not Core > Storage) before you slap "Server" on anything else. It's no small wonder > OSX Server was a failure in the marketplace. Well, they nearly added ZFS, but bottled out, possibly due to Oracle and its licensing. Now they're working on a new one: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/digging-into-the-dev-documentation-for-apfs-apples-new-file-system/ > I'd rather install a 20 year old OS I've never seen versus OSX on VMware, > but that's just me. Partly. ;-) -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 09:54:53 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:54:53 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: > Hmp. Well the Cray J932SE on there is legit :-) The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very happy. I worked with a Cray for a while of about the same vintage (pre-SGI Cray running UNICOS and using an Sun SPARC Classic as a helper). It was a large telco (MCI) and used for fraud-detection on calling cards. It was a UNICOS-based system in a private Colorado Springs datacenter about two blocks from some sort of manufacturing site for Cray (the building is on Rockrimmon in Colorado Springs - the former home of the late Seymour Cray). I thought the whole rig was interesting, but it was barely a few weeks before the whole company went through a near-death experience (two words: Bernie Ebbers) and I walked across the street to another company and scored a new gig (it was the late 90's, you could do that sort of thing then). I never got a chance to get really proficient with the hardware or with UNICOS. It was my singular regret with that gig, though. -Swift From ethan at 757.org Tue Jul 19 10:03:20 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:03:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: > The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup > 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very > happy. At the old small office I would just pop some breakers out and replace them with 2 pole 30 amp ones. When it was at the hackerspace there was some sort of fused cut off switch box on the wall, so I terminated a twistlock 30A and ran from there over to a subpanel that had the 3 twistlocks for the Cray cabinets. I used A-B B-C C-A phases, so 208V each. I still have the subpanel and also a SquareD Powerlogic monitor w/ CTs and stuff that are mounted to the board that was with the system (might be visible in the picture.) I used a rubber core cable to run between the two -- which I originally had picked up to temporary run a 6 watt argon laser system with from time to time. I originally had 4 of the J932SE systems, they were all HIPPI'ed together to form one system when used for power engineering for nuclear subs or something (Bechtel.) I dunno, it was all secret and they destroyed all of the hard drives and such from the system. I never really thought the power was that crazy, I work in datacenters and these days there are single racks using twice what the Cray takes! > I worked with a Cray for a while of about the same vintage (pre-SGI Cray > running UNICOS and using an Sun SPARC Classic as a helper). It was a large > telco (MCI) and used for fraud-detection on calling cards. It was a > UNICOS-based system in a private Colorado Springs datacenter about two > blocks from some sort of manufacturing site for Cray (the building is on > Rockrimmon in Colorado Springs - the former home of the late Seymour > Cray). > I thought the whole rig was interesting, but it was barely a few weeks > before the whole company went through a near-death experience (two words: > Bernie Ebbers) and I walked across the street to another company and > scored a new gig (it was the late 90's, you could do that sort of thing > then). I never got a chance to get really proficient with the hardware or > with UNICOS. It was my singular regret with that gig, though. Very cool! NASA LaRC had a J916 system used by some scientists for something, other than that I don't know of any others. I was a SGI guy at the same place, had some nice boxes. From abuse at cabal.org.uk Tue Jul 19 10:04:11 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 17:04:11 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> Message-ID: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 03:30:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: [...] > There's a hint here, though: > https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson/feature.html >From there, it seems to be saying that the essence of the invention is that the ARM ISA is RISC, it is a load-store architecture, and the CPU was pipelined. RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. Pipelining is an older idea: the 1979-vintage 68000 does it, and the 1982-vintage 68010 even detects certain string/loop instructions in its pipeline and avoids re-fetching them from memory when repeating the sequence. IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the real innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be just a 32 bit wide 6502 knockoff. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 10:29:30 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:29:30 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 5:01 AM, wrote: > also a Rare Digital DEC H-500 Computer Lab, 1960s, Same Switches as > PDP-8/I, Vintage for 700+ > > ( we have an extra one of these Computer Lab, if anyone here is > interested) Does anyone have a modern source of pins that fit the socket holes in the Computer Lab? ISTR there are a few of us here who have an H-500, but very few, or no, patch cables. I think Molex pins have been tried and rejected. Also, the 1969 Computer Lab Handbook is on bitsavers (in 'dec/handbooks'). I recall a 8.5"x11" book on the Computer Lab, newer layout, probably a 1970s publication date, possibly a teacher's guide. I was given one as a kid, but it vanished decades ago. Anyone remember this? Anyone have one for scanning? -ethan From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 10:29:35 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:29:35 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 19, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: >> Hmp. Well the Cray J932SE on there is legit :-) > > The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup > 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very > happy. Or hobbyist. It's pretty trivial, after all. If you live in a state where that's not allowed, that would be an issue. But in NH, for example, homeowners can do their own electrical work. I wouldn't do work on the meter box or other always-live parts, but anything that can be powered down isn't an issue. For one thing, I know from experience that the fact someone has a license doesn't necessarily make him qualified to do electrical work. paul From billdegnan at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 10:32:53 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:32:53 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 5:01 AM, wrote: > > also a Rare Digital DEC H-500 Computer Lab, 1960s, Same Switches as > > PDP-8/I, Vintage for 700+ > > > > ( we have an extra one of these Computer Lab, if anyone here is > > interested) > > Does anyone have a modern source of pins that fit the socket holes in > the Computer Lab? ISTR there are a few of us here who have an H-500, > but very few, or no, patch cables. I think Molex pins have been tried > and rejected. > > Also, the 1969 Computer Lab Handbook is on bitsavers (in > 'dec/handbooks'). I recall a 8.5"x11" book on the Computer Lab, newer > layout, probably a 1970s publication date, possibly a teacher's guide. > I was given one as a kid, but it vanished decades ago. Anyone > remember this? Anyone have one for scanning? > > -ethan > I have the Computer Lab Workbook, not Handbook. Maybe that's what you're looking for. -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 10:36:20 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:36:20 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <2F1A219E-10F0-4CFA-8247-F3EFBD514772@comcast.net> > On Jul 19, 2016, at 11:04 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 03:30:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > [...] >> There's a hint here, though: >> https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson/feature.html > > From there, it seems to be saying that the essence of the invention is that the > ARM ISA is RISC, it is a load-store architecture, and the CPU was pipelined. > > RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. > > Pipelining is an older idea: the 1979-vintage 68000 does it, and the 1982-vintage > 68010 even detects certain string/loop instructions in its pipeline and avoids > re-fetching them from memory when repeating the sequence. > > IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the real > innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be just a 32 > bit wide 6502 knockoff. The article, as usual, talks about a whole bunch of things that are much older than the author seems to know. RISC, as a term, may come from IBM, but the concept goes back at least as far as the CDC 6000 series. Pipelining, to the CDC 7600. And if you equate RISC to load/store with simple regular instruction patterns, you can probably go all the way back to the earliest computers; certainly I can point to early 1950s Dutch computers with load/store single-address instructions. Finally, predicated instructions are also much older. It may be that the ARM team reinvented them independently, but you can find them in the Electrologica X-1, which shipped in 1958. In fact, that machine and its successor X-8 had a significantly more powerful scheme, because the flag controlling the conditional execution could be set on request, rather than being a condition code set by fixed rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrologica_X1 has a brief example. paul From aek at bitsavers.org Tue Jul 19 10:46:24 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:46:24 -0700 Subject: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 7/18/16 8:36 PM, N0body H0me wrote: >> Which bare board did you see? > > Long ago, on "The auction site that must not be named", some guy > was selling an apple-branded case, with a bare motherboard inside > (or, perhaps only sparsely populated). The seller stated it was > the prototype motherboard for an 88k Mac that was never built. It > sold for a stupid amount of money.... > If it was a Mac si case, that would have been "RLC" (RISC Low Cost) They most definitely did work, and was what demonstrated that you could run MacOS with an emulated 68K on a RISC processor. I also remembered that at the same time as the 88100, a consultant was working on bringing up the code on an AMD 29000 but that was abandoned when RLC ran. The only thing I can think of offhand that I liked better on PPC were the bitfield insert/extract instructions, which are very useful in the core of the 68K emulator. It's unlikely that there would have been as many implementations of the 88k as PPC if only Moto would have been involved, and they wouldn't have gotten IBM's copper fab process, which was critical in getting faster parts. From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 10:50:17 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:50:17 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:32 AM, william degnan wrote: >> Also, the 1969 Computer Lab Handbook is on bitsavers (in >> 'dec/handbooks'). I recall a 8.5"x11" book on the Computer Lab, newer >> layout, probably a 1970s publication date, possibly a teacher's guide. >> I was given one as a kid, but it vanished decades ago. Anyone >> remember this? Anyone have one for scanning? >> > I have the Computer Lab Workbook, not Handbook. Maybe that's what you're > looking for. The PDF floating around (bitsavers, elsewhere) is entitled "Computer Lab Workbook", my mistake, but it's the size of DEC handbooks. I've seen a cover for the first edition dated 1968, and the PDF is of a second edition, dated 1969. What I'm looking for is a (probably) later publication, approx 8.5"x11" and around 1/2" thick. Totally different contents. -ethan From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 10:58:48 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:58:48 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > > On Jul 19, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: > >> Hmp. Well the Cray J932SE on there is legit :-) > > The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup > > 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very > > happy. > Or hobbyist. It's pretty trivial, after all. If you live in a state > where that's not allowed, that would be an issue. With respect, in my view, it's not trivial. As you point out, it's not actually allowed everywhere. Unless you are some kind of local townie who knows all the bylaws, you'd need to call your local building/permitting office to be sure. I've lived in several places where it was definitely not allowed. In (al)most all places, you also need a permit to do the work, even if the PtB let you do it as an unlicensed hobbyist. Also, any given rinky-dink home electrical panel box isn't always going to support 30A breakers, might be out of room, or might not magically grant you the service-line current you may require (or in the case of 3-phase, the third phase you are going to need). You'll also need to find a route to get the proper sized wire in to the walls to feed the L6-30 or whatever receptacles you need, and install the outlets. That's real physical work in my book and may non-trivially eat your weekend. The other thing that's not trivial is that if you make a mistake, you will likely either: 1. Die. 2. Burn down your house. 3. Ruin some expensive and rare gear. To me, that all sounds like a helluva pain and != trivial. Then again, I'm a software guy. What do I know? :-P -Swift From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Jul 19 11:10:02 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:10:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Reproduction micros Message-ID: <20160719161002.3509B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Paul Koning > The article, as usual, talks about a whole bunch of things that are > much older than the author seems to know. "The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." OK, so technically it's ignorance, not stupidity, but in my book it's stupid to not know when one's ignorant. > RISC, as a term, may come from IBM, but the concept goes back at least > as far as the CDC 6000 series. Hmm; perhaps. I always felt that RISC meant 'making the basic cycle time as fast as possible by finding the longest path through the logic - i.e. the limiting factor on the cycle time - and removing it (thereby making the instruction set less rich); then repeat'. (And there's also an aspect of moving complexity from the hardware to the compiler - i.e. optimizing system performance across the _entire_ system, not just across a limited subset like the hardware only). As I've previously discussed, RISC only makes (system-wide) sense in an environment in which memory bandwidth is plentiful (so that having programs contain more, simpler instructions make sense) - does that apply to the CDC machines? > Pipelining, to the CDC 7600. Didn't STRETCH have pipelining? Too busy/lazy to check... > And if you equate RISC to load/store with simple regular instruction > patterns, you can probably go all the way back to the earliest > computers Well, I'm not at all sure that load-store is a good indicator for RISC - note that that the PDP-10 is load-store... But anyway, moving on. One of the books about Turing argues that the ACE can be seen as a RISC machine (it's not just that it's load-store; its overall architectural philosophy is all about maximizing instruction rates). Noel From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 11:10:01 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:10:01 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: <032A2733-5D11-476C-BD51-3D70144AAF57@comcast.net> > On Jul 19, 2016, at 11:58 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: >>> On Jul 19, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: >>> On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: >>>> Hmp. Well the Cray J932SE on there is legit :-) >>> The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup >>> 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very >>> happy. >> Or hobbyist. It's pretty trivial, after all. If you live in a state >> where that's not allowed, that would be an issue. > > With respect, in my view, it's not trivial. ... That's real physical work > in my book and may non-trivially eat your weekend. > > The other thing that's not trivial is that if you make a mistake, you will > likely either: 1. Die. 2. Burn down your house. 3. Ruin some expensive > and rare gear. > > To me, that all sounds like a helluva pain and != trivial. Then again, I'm > a software guy. What do I know? :-P It all depends on what you're comfortable with. There are plenty of books explaining to homeowners how to wire outlets, add breakers, and even larger scale stuff like replacing whole panels. https://www.amazon.com/Wiring-Simplified-Based-National-Electrical/dp/097929455X is one nice example, compact but densely packed. Yes, it takes time to do it right, and installing conduit and thick wire demands some muscle. Clearly, it's not for everyone. Then again, neither is carpentry, or plumbing. Personally, I will readily do electrical work, plumbing on a more limited basis, carpentry hardly at all. Other people have a completely different list of what they would undertake. For example, a lot of people would not tinker with software or networks. This very definitely is an area where, if you're not 100% comfortable with the job, the right answer is to pay to have it done. paul From ethan at 757.org Tue Jul 19 11:18:47 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:18:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: > The other thing that's not trivial is that if you make a mistake, you will > likely either: 1. Die. 2. Burn down your house. 3. Ruin some expensive > and rare gear. > To me, that all sounds like a helluva pain and != trivial. Then again, I'm > a software guy. What do I know? :-P Some fun pics: https://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/office/IMG_0208.JPG https://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/office/IMG_0209.JPG 30A 208 pulled from panel temporary to run argon laser. That was before I installed the 36KvA UPS. The little power supply in the back takes in 3 phase 208A @ 30A and uses 2 gallons a minute of water, then drops like 70 amps of DC at 60V or something to the laser. Something really nasty and lethal. There might be other pics on my flickr of the Cray through the years at www.flickr.com/photos/ethanotoole Had 4, sold 3, kept one for years... but it's up for sale cause hobbies/interests have changed a bit and storage space/power (still have more than my fair share of older computers.) I work near all the datacenters in Ashburn Virginia and I've been tempted to see about finding some space for it. The buildings often have a ton of unused space. -- Ethan O'Toole From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 11:23:23 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:23:23 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160719161002.3509B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160719161002.3509B18C09F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <87C84A70-B229-4DD9-B669-826E5A3C0F7C@comcast.net> > On Jul 19, 2016, at 12:10 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> From: Paul Koning > >> The article, as usual, talks about a whole bunch of things that are >> much older than the author seems to know. > > "The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." OK, > so technically it's ignorance, not stupidity, but in my book it's stupid to > not know when one's ignorant. > >> RISC, as a term, may come from IBM, but the concept goes back at least >> as far as the CDC 6000 series. > > Hmm; perhaps. I always felt that RISC meant 'making the basic cycle time as > fast as possible by finding the longest path through the logic - i.e. the > limiting factor on the cycle time - and removing it (thereby making the > instruction set less rich); then repeat'. (And there's also an aspect of > moving complexity from the hardware to the compiler - i.e. optimizing system > performance across the _entire_ system, not just across a limited subset like > the hardware only). "Making the cycle time as fast as possible" certainly applies, in spades, to the 6600. The deeper you dig into its details, the more impressed you will be by the many different ways in which it does things faster than you would expect to be possible. (For example, how many other machines have divide logic -- not "reciprocal approximation -- that divides N bit values in N/2 cycles?) Or context switching that requires just a single block-memory transaction? > As I've previously discussed, RISC only makes (system-wide) sense in an > environment in which memory bandwidth is plentiful (so that having programs > contain more, simpler instructions make sense) - does that apply to the CDC > machines? Yes, 32 way interleaving, 1 microsecond full memory cycle, 100 ns CPU cycle. The Cybers are not memory bandwidth limited. Note that the 6600 has quite advanced memory operation scheduling and queueing. >> Pipelining, to the CDC 7600. > > Didn't STRETCH have pipelining? Too busy/lazy to check... Could be. I meant to apply "goes back at least as far as" here as well. > >> And if you equate RISC to load/store with simple regular instruction >> patterns, you can probably go all the way back to the earliest >> computers > > Well, I'm not at all sure that load-store is a good indicator for RISC - note > that that the PDP-10 is load-store... But anyway, moving on. No, but I said "load/store with simple regular instruction patterns". On reconsideration, I think I'll cancel what I said, though. Early machines tended to be single address but not load store; rather, you'd find operations like "add memory to register". A CDC 6000, though, clearly is strictly load store. > One of the books about Turing argues that the ACE can be seen as a RISC > machine (it's not just that it's load-store; its overall architectural > philosophy is all about maximizing instruction rates). I think a lot of machine designers, though not all, were seriously interested in making them go fast. For an example I'd point to the Dutch ARMAC, from around 1956, a drum main memory machine with a one-track RAM buffer, allowing the programmer to make things go much faster by arranging for bits of code and associated data to be all in one track. When your basic machine has a 20 millisecond operation time because of the drum, the need to optimize becomes rather obvious... paul From kwwacker at ptd.net Tue Jul 19 11:25:27 2016 From: kwwacker at ptd.net (Karl-Wilhelm Wacker) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:25:27 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) References: Message-ID: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> Does anyone have one of the patch cables, and can they measure the diameter of the pin and it's length? Also, is it a straight pin or like a bannana jack with springy sides? There is a company www.mill-max.com that makes almost any type of pin/socket that you can think of - take a look thru their con-line catalog. Karl ----- Original Message ----- From: "william degnan" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 11:32 AM Subject: Re: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Ethan Dicks > wrote: > >> On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 5:01 AM, wrote: >> > also a Rare Digital DEC H-500 Computer Lab, 1960s, Same Switches as >> > PDP-8/I, Vintage for 700+ >> > >> > ( we have an extra one of these Computer Lab, if anyone here is >> > interested) >> >> Does anyone have a modern source of pins that fit the socket holes in >> the Computer Lab? ISTR there are a few of us here who have an H-500, >> but very few, or no, patch cables. I think Molex pins have been tried >> and rejected. >> >> Also, the 1969 Computer Lab Handbook is on bitsavers (in >> 'dec/handbooks'). I recall a 8.5"x11" book on the Computer Lab, newer >> layout, probably a 1970s publication date, possibly a teacher's guide. >> I was given one as a kid, but it vanished decades ago. Anyone >> remember this? Anyone have one for scanning? >> >> -ethan >> > > > I have the Computer Lab Workbook, not Handbook. Maybe that's what you're > looking for. > -- > @ BillDeg: > Web: vintagecomputer.net > Twitter: @billdeg > Youtube: @billdeg > Unauthorized Bio From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Tue Jul 19 11:26:13 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:26:13 -0700 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: Ethan Dicks: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 8:29 AM > Does anyone have a modern source of pins that fit the socket holes in > the Computer Lab? ISTR there are a few of us here who have an H-500, > but very few, or no, patch cables. I think Molex pins have been tried > and rejected. Nope. I've been looking for those for some time. I didn't like the Molex pins, as their retention clips aren't really the right thing and scratch the brass rings that should interface smoothly with the proper brass taper pins. > Also, the 1969 Computer Lab Handbook is on bitsavers (in > 'dec/handbooks'). I recall a 8.5"x11" book on the Computer Lab, newer > layout, probably a 1970s publication date, possibly a teacher's guide. > I was given one as a kid, but it vanished decades ago. Anyone > remember this? Anyone have one for scanning? I have an old scan of the teacher's guide at http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/pdf/ This came from another listmember, years ago. Perhaps I should link to it from http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/computerlab/computerlab.php Vince From cclist at sydex.com Tue Jul 19 11:27:18 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:27:18 -0700 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: On 07/19/2016 08:29 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > Or hobbyist. It's pretty trivial, after all. If you live in a state > where that's not allowed, that would be an issue. But in NH, for > example, homeowners can do their own electrical work. I wouldn't do > work on the meter box or other always-live parts, but anything that > can be powered down isn't an issue. For one thing, I know from > experience that the fact someone has a license doesn't necessarily > make him qualified to do electrical work. A big concern would be getting basic service. I'd probably want a secondary 200A panel for this, so the local utility would probably drop a second transformer in my front yard (there's buried 12KV service running up my driveway). At least getting the extra panel would involve a licensed electrician and inspections. What would be a bigger concern is any HVAC needs. The EPA has been getting very predatory in their regulation of refrigerants and who is qualified to handle them. New proposed regulations are even more stringent. Life is very good if you're a licensed HVAC tech today. --Chuck From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Tue Jul 19 11:43:57 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:43:57 -0700 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> References: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> Message-ID: <983026231E4D4D11B12DD2DDF3FDB84C@Vincew7> From: Karl-Wilhelm Wacker: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 9:25 AM > Does anyone have one of the patch cables, and can they measure the diameter of > the pin and it's length? > > Also, is it a straight pin or like a bannana jack with springy sides? It is a smooth-walled brass taper pin with a crimp connector for the wire. There's a photo at http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/computerlab/computerlab.php you can click on for a (slightly) better view. The diameter is similar to the pins that go in the old connectors that DEC used for current loop connectors. Wider at the wire end, though, to provide the wedging action. The central feature, which is seldom seen anymore, is the taper that allows the pin to smoothly insert, yet firmly wedge in there when inserted. That makes it more suitable, in my opinion, as it's really hard to screw anything up (other than having it still a little loose because you didn't insert it firmly). I can attempt to measure one up. Vince From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Tue Jul 19 11:47:17 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:47:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <032A2733-5D11-476C-BD51-3D70144AAF57@comcast.net> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <032A2733-5D11-476C-BD51-3D70144AAF57@comcast.net> Message-ID: <201607191647.MAA18563@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> [...electrical wiring...] > This very definitely is an area where, if you're not 100% comfortable with t$ Also, know your own limits. A depressing number of people think they're more competent than they are. For example, I once had a neighbour who replaced an outlet in his kitchen. Turned off the breaker, removed the old one, put in the new one, all very nice. Turned the breaker for that circuit back on and popped the service main breaker. When I investigated, it turned out the new outlet still had the bridging piece that shorts together the hots for the two outlets, and this was a kitchen outlet and thus had separate circuits for each half (and, as is often the case, they were on adjacent fingers in the breaker box and thus on different phases). So, of course, the new outlet shorted the two hot phases together. He didn't have the experience to recognize that those shorting pieces exist, to realize that having four conductors instead of three coming to the outlet - or its being a kitchen outlet - likely means the two halves are on different circuits and thus likely different phases, or the electrical understanding to put those facts together. Which wouldn't've been a problem, except that he thought he was fine - he didn't bring me in until the main service breaker blew. (He did, fortunately, have enough sense for that to tickle his "something I don't understand happened, call for help" reaction.) I've been doing electrical work since I was maybe ten or twelve, when I helped my parents wire the house they were building. (My father inspected my work first; then, this being de rigeur there-and-then, it was inspected by a suitable authority. Only then was it energized.) I don't hesitate to do routine house electrical work, maybe even installing 30A outlets (though I'd make sure I looked up the appropriate gauge of wire, and probably then used the next larger gauge). But I'd call in someone more experienced for something well outside my own experience, like (say) dealing with 600/600 service. I would say that, if you don't have a good deal of experience, find someone who does to look over your work before you energize it. Indeed, some jurisdictions require that for work done by unlicensed persons - or at least used to, and I would assume some still do. Even if yours doesn't, it strikes me as the smart thing to do. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de Tue Jul 19 11:49:13 2016 From: cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de (Christian Corti) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 18:49:13 +0200 (CEST) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: > The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys it will need to setup > 3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very > happy. Why? 32A 3-phase CEE connectors (the red ones) are very common, especially since most electrical installations (even domestic) are 3-phase. We have several in our museum, for example for the IBM 1130, the IBM 3340 disk drives and the three-rack HP system. You can also have 16A CEE connectors. Older installations may still have Perilex connectors. Christian From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Tue Jul 19 11:53:31 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:53:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> Message-ID: <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > [...], especially since most electrical installations (even domestic) > are 3-phase. This, I believe, must be location-specific. In North America, it is usual for domestic electrical feeds to be only two-phase (that is, they are the two sides of a centre-tapped secondary - the two hot wires are 180 degrees out of phase with one another). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 11:56:19 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:56:19 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > From: Ethan Dicks: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 8:29 AM >> >> Does anyone have a modern source of pins that fit the socket holes in >> the Computer Lab? ISTR there are a few of us here who have an H-500, >> but very few, or no, patch cables. I think Molex pins have been tried >> and rejected. > > Nope. I've been looking for those for some time. I didn't like the Molex > pins, as their retention clips aren't really the right thing and scratch the > brass rings that should interface smoothly with the proper brass taper pins. Right. It was your experiences I was thinking of with Molex pins. I myself have no original pins to measure. > I have an old scan of the teacher's guide at > http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/pdf/ This is certainly a contemporary teacher's guide, but it's stylistically and typographically 1960s and does not resemble the one I'm remembering. Was there perhaps a later DEC logic lab from 1972 to 1975 that would have had a later manual? Perhaps that's what I'm thinking of. I just remember being given a workbook by a relative who was a school teacher right about the time I was first learning logic and BASIC. It had problems and large blank sections for drawing your work, among other differences. -ethan From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 12:14:15 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:14:15 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 12:53 PM, Mouse wrote: >> [...], especially since most electrical installations (even domestic) >> are 3-phase. > > This, I believe, must be location-specific. In North America, it is > usual for domestic electrical feeds to be only two-phase (that is, they > are the two sides of a centre-tapped secondary - the two hot wires are > 180 degrees out of phase with one another). Right... and in my area (hardly unique, I'd wager), you cannot get 3-phase in residential areas. The shared transformers on the poles don't provide it and you can't pay them to add/change a transformer. You have to be in a commercial area to get that. Fortunately for me, my tastes in minicomputers runs "small", so my largest machines have a 30A 110V single-phase plug (frequently to an H-861, but not always). Code in my area allows for homeowners to do some of their own wiring, but for projects larger than, essentially, outlet and toggle-switch replacement, permits are required (but enforcement is, of course, negligible unless something goes horribly wrong). They did just amend code locally to _prohibit_ landlords from self-repair of electrical (and I think gas and plumbing) in rental properties, because of several high-profile fires caused by inexpert work. So you can work on your own domicile, but not your tenants'. -ethan From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Tue Jul 19 12:25:07 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 17:25:07 +0000 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <578E2479.60207@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com>, <578E2479.60207@gmail.com> Message-ID: > There was only ever support for 8" diskette drives, and to support 9895 > you need the second version of the Diskette ROM which appears to be very > rare. I t sure would be nice if someone who has one of these ROMs would > dump the contents or loan it to someone who could dump it, so that we > might be able to clone the ROM module. It's not totally trivial. The later version module is so large that part of the ROM is bank-switched. So you would have to make sure you copied the entire ROM and the copied the bank-switching circuitry in the cloned module. -tony From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 12:30:20 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:30:20 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <563241A0-B1C3-4071-8884-7F98BF339113@comcast.net> > On Jul 19, 2016, at 12:53 PM, Mouse wrote: > >> [...], especially since most electrical installations (even domestic) >> are 3-phase. > > This, I believe, must be location-specific. In North America, it is > usual for domestic electrical feeds to be only two-phase (that is, they > are the two sides of a centre-tapped secondary - the two hot wires are > 180 degrees out of phase with one another). Yes, and time dependent as well. I grew up in Holland; in the 1970s, we had 3 phase in our house because we had an electric cooking range. But ours was the only house in the block with 3 phase service; all our neighbors cooked with gas. In the USA, if you're a home owner with a need for 3 phase power, you probably have to get a phase converter. Fortunately those are not hard to get, and solid state ones (variable frequency motor controllers) can be rather inexpensive. I have one for the 3-phase motor on the lathe in the barn. $100 for a 3 hp model, as I recall, though that may have been on sale. VFCs should even work for 3 phase 400 Hz power, just the thing if you have a CDC Cyber tucked away in the basement. paul From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 12:34:56 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:34:56 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <032A2733-5D11-476C-BD51-3D70144AAF57@comcast.net> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <032A2733-5D11-476C-BD51-3D70144AAF57@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > It all depends on what you're comfortable with. My original point was that it's not trivial. I'd stand by that point no matter how comfortable someone is with the install. Of course, even that is subjective, I suppose. If you have tons of time, money, and you were born with rubber duck feet, okay, sure, it's trivial for that particular human-duck hybrid. :-) My real point is that if someone thinks they are just going to un-do a few screws on the breaker panel, slap in a 30A breaker, and they are done: that's not realistic. That's kinda how using the word "trivial" struck me along with the original description, at least. Maybe I'm over-thinking it. > There are plenty of books explaining to homeowners how to wire outlets, > add breakers, and even larger scale stuff like replacing whole panels. Perhaps it wasn't obvious, but I've also done this type of work myself before, IRL. I choose not to use as much jargon, but that does not mean I'm speaking about hypotheticals. Personally, I don't need the Amazon book, though others might appreciate that. Again, I wasn't saying, "OMG, that's impossible!" My points were, simply "It's not trivial" and "It's a tad bit dangerous to trivialize it.". > Yes, it takes time to do it right, and installing conduit and thick wire > demands some muscle. Clearly, it's not for everyone. I think most able-bodied folks would have the "muscle" to do it. It doesn't require winning any strongman competitions. No matter if you are a skinny little waif like me or some bodybuilding strongman, as I'm sure you all are. The issue I was bringing up wasn't despair at the inhuman physical strength required (joke!), but that it's going to take time, energy, and money... ie... subjectively non-trivial resources. To your point, it's definitely going to be cheaper to do it yourself versus using a licensed electrician, and it's not black magic. > Then again, neither is carpentry, or plumbing. Fair enough, but there isn't as much of a chance for instant-electrocution-death involved with plumbing and carpentry. Putting in 3-phase 208 isn't rocket science, but it can definitely kill you, burn your house down, or ruin your gear if you do it wrong. Of course, plumbing and carpentry done wrong could eventually flood your house or cause it to fall down in some extreme cases, too. The results just *usually* aren't quite as immediate and dramatic as electrical mistakes are. > Personally, I will readily do electrical work, plumbing on a more > limited basis, carpentry hardly at all. To your point, I'm quite the opposite. I'm a woodworker and setup to do just about any kind of carpentry imaginable. I don't have the butt-crack power (or the slightest detectable will) to properly plumb, that's for sure. When it comes to electrical work the issue is often permitting and inspection that are a problem in my area (building boom etc..) that makes it non-trivial. That and dealing with Xcel Energy, who could probably screw up a wet-dream, for the feeds. > Other people have a completely different list of what they would > undertake. For example, a lot of people would not tinker with software > or networks. Agreed. > This very definitely is an area where, if you're not 100% comfortable > with the job, the right answer is to pay to have it done. Yeah, that's sort of my underlying point. While it might be easy to some people in terms of them not feeling intimidated by the task, it still will take some time, effort, money, and risk to your person (small or large depending on your levels of caution and experience). -Swift From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 12:47:57 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:47:57 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <563241A0-B1C3-4071-8884-7F98BF339113@comcast.net> References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <563241A0-B1C3-4071-8884-7F98BF339113@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > Yes, and time dependent as well. I grew up in Holland; in the 1970s, we > had 3 phase in our house because we had an electric cooking range. As you probably know, that's not usual the setup in North America, even for folks with electric ranges. > In the USA, if you're a home owner with a need for 3 phase power, you > probably have to get a phase converter. Fortunately those are not hard > to get, and solid state ones (variable frequency motor controllers) can > be rather inexpensive. I've been responsible for bringing 3-phase into several new buildings. I'd totally endorse a VFC in most cases (except that it's one more part to break if that's a concern). The reason is that the lowest cost I've seen in Colorado was $4500 and the most is $7000 from Xcel. I've *never* heard of them simply saying "Oh your old transformer will handle that just fine." YMMV -Swift From ethan at 757.org Tue Jul 19 12:51:59 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:51:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: > Right... and in my area (hardly unique, I'd wager), you cannot get > 3-phase in residential areas. The shared transformers on the poles > don't provide it and you can't pay them to add/change a transformer. > You have to be in a commercial area to get that. Fortunately for me, > my tastes in minicomputers runs "small", so my largest machines have a > 30A 110V single-phase plug (frequently to an H-861, but not always). The Cray is single phase, the only thing I've ever owned that was 3 phase was the laser stuff. Now my solid state laser projector uses 100 watts and producsed half the power of the argon that used to take 3ph @ 30A (and still tripped the breaker sometimes.) I've heard sometimes the utility will indeed give you 3phase but you have to pay them to replace the transformer and it's very very expensive. Normally it's people buying used milling equipment that are after it from my experience. There are rotary converters and solid state converters but probably not ideal for huge loads. The Cray uses 5 x Pioneer magnetics power supplies that I believe are identical to those in the Sun E10000. The smaller rack with the VME chassis and hard drives -- good chance the power supplies are okay with 110/120v. The disk trays at least are just good quality SMPS that do 5/12 in each drawer (was 4 x 9GB full height disk per drawer.) The Pioneer Magnetics supplies that run the computational part are like 48vdc out @ 5000W each.... so not sure if they would run on 120V but if so -- it would be a real high amperage load. Note - in the modern datacenter in the US it's not uncommon for everything to be run on 208, but everything would run on 120. -- Ethan O'Toole From jplist2008 at kiwigeek.com Tue Jul 19 13:04:36 2016 From: jplist2008 at kiwigeek.com (JP Hindin) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:04:36 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: > The Cray uses 5 x Pioneer magnetics power supplies that I believe are > identical to those in the Sun E10000. The smaller rack with the VME chassis > and hard drives -- good chance the power supplies are okay with 110/120v. The > disk trays at least are just good quality SMPS that do 5/12 in each drawer > (was 4 x 9GB full height disk per drawer.) I can confirm the Pioneer Magnetics in the Cray J90s are precisely the same model numbers as the E10k supplies and appear 100% identical to my eyes. If they're not the same unit, someone is playing a nasty joke. (This is definitely a good discovery, as I have about 40 E10k PSUs) - JP From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 13:04:52 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:04:52 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: > The Cray is single phase, the only thing I've ever owned that was 3 > phase was the laser stuff. Now my solid state laser projector uses 100 > watts and producsed half the power of the argon that used to take 3ph @ > 30A (and still tripped the breaker sometimes.) I haven't been able to articulate anything witty, but I'll go ahead and just say: Ethan I don't know what you do with those BF-lasers, but it sounds damn awesome, anyway. Your stock just went up. It's hard to make lasers anything but sci-fi radical coolness. > I've heard sometimes the utility will indeed give you 3phase but you > have to pay them to replace the transformer and it's very very > expensive. Yep. It's happened in every case I've been involved with here in Colorado (ie.. residential or small buildings, not in data centers). > Normally it's people buying used milling equipment that are after it > from my experience. There are rotary converters and solid state > converters but probably not ideal for huge loads. ... and as I mentioned before, they can break. So, even if your VCF will handle the load, your uptime requirement might be a dealbreaker if you have commercial intentions. > The Cray uses 5 x Pioneer magnetics power supplies that I believe are > identical to those in the Sun E10000. "back in the day" I was a certified (not as an FE, though) in various ways for the E10k, E15k, and E25k. We had several at Oracle when I worked there. However, I don't remember that detail (the brand of the PSs). I'm sure you are right, though. > Note - in the modern datacenter in the US it's not uncommon for > everything to be run on 208, but everything would run on 120. Yep, that's my experience, too. Although many telco datacenters still use DC. They are funny like that. -Swift From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 13:08:25 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:08:25 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: > On Jul 19, 2016, at 1:51 PM, ethan at 757.org wrote: > > ... > I've heard sometimes the utility will indeed give you 3phase but you have to pay them to replace the transformer and it's very very expensive. Normally it's people buying used milling equipment that are after it from my experience. There are rotary converters and solid state converters but probably not ideal for huge loads. Anything powered by electric motor above 2 hp or so often comes in 3 phase, and when you get to somewhat higher power (5 hp or so) it seems to be about the only option. Lathes and milling machines are good examples. The expense of a new service for 3 phase is one issue; it may not be available at all. A lot of US rural areas have a single wire running along the street. The only way you could get 3 phase service is for the utility to replace that by 3 wires, for however many miles it takes to get to the spot where their 3 phase service ends. Rotary converters have a good reputation among home workshop types. You can build them or buy them. I liked the VFC approach when I realized how inexpensive a basic one can be, plus I get variable speed and instant reverse and controlled braking as well. paul From paulkoning at comcast.net Tue Jul 19 13:11:48 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:11:48 -0400 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: > On Jul 19, 2016, at 2:04 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > ... and as I mentioned before, they can break. So, even if your VCF will > handle the load, your uptime requirement might be a dealbreaker if you > have commercial intentions. I wonder, though. In modern machinery, a whole lot of them are run by VFCs as a matter of normal practice. That includes very large ones; I recently read an article about replacing large DC motors by AC VFC-powered ones. I forgot exactly how large, but I'm pretty sure they were over 1000 hp, driving factory machinery, perhaps rolling mills or stuff like that. I wouldn't run my $100 little VFC in production, but I expect that the more expensive ones from serious companies like Yaskawa or Allen-Bradley will do just fine. paul From phb.hfx at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 13:22:20 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:22:20 -0300 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> <578E2479.60207@gmail.com> Message-ID: <578E6FDC.4060802@gmail.com> On 2016-07-19 2:25 PM, tony duell wrote: >> There was only ever support for 8" diskette drives, and to support 9895 >> you need the second version of the Diskette ROM which appears to be very >> rare. I t sure would be nice if someone who has one of these ROMs would >> dump the contents or loan it to someone who could dump it, so that we >> might be able to clone the ROM module. > It's not totally trivial. The later version module is so large that part of the > ROM is bank-switched. So you would have to make sure you copied the > entire ROM and the copied the bank-switching circuitry in the cloned > module. > > -tony Yes I saw your schematic, it does not seem too big of a challenge, but on the other hand it may be bank switched just because it supports both diskette drives and both halve may not be required to support only 9895, but without a dump that is only speculation. Paul. From cisin at xenosoft.com Tue Jul 19 13:41:14 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:41:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > Anything powered by electric motor above 2 hp or so often comes in 3 > phase, and when you get to somewhat higher power (5 hp or so) it seems > to be about the only option. Lathes and milling machines are good > examples. and air compressors in automotive shops, maintaining a large tank of compressed air. 3-phase comes in "delta" or "Wye"("Y") some installers don't know the difference! I experienced TWO misdone installations. One was an auto garage, and resulted in high voltage to the 110 outlets, damaging a bunch of minor stuff, such as grinder, space heater, clock, etc. The other was was a PDP installation. After excessive downtime of third party disk drive, the community college had sold it to a neighboring school district, and bought a roomful of PCs. Microsoft PC COBOL and Fortran were crap, but quite adequate for teaching the languages, and it was great to have dozens of machines for students to use without fear of downtime. PG&E (our power company) agreed to buy a new replacement computer, if those involved would go along with the fiction that it had been a lightning strike (NOT common here). The bad drive ceased to be a problem. Everybody was happy, and PG&E got to call it a donation on their taxes. From jfoust at threedee.com Tue Jul 19 13:47:41 2016 From: jfoust at threedee.com (John Foust) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:47:41 -0500 Subject: Rescue Fwd: Atari 1040ST (w/Hybrid Arts, Apple 7100AV (w/Digidesign) Utah Message-ID: A rescue available... contact Ric directly below. - John >From: Ric Chitwood >Subject: Atari 1040ST >Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:56:05 -0600 > >I have a fully functioning Atari 1040ST with monitor in the original boxes that I would like to donate. >It also has the Hybrid Arts Smpte Track hardware and software included. > >I also have a fully functioning Apple 7100AV computer with monitor and Digidesign sound card and software floppy discs. Are you interested in these computers or do you know of someone who is? > >Ric Chitwood >Pleasant Grove, Utah From cclist at sydex.com Tue Jul 19 14:08:26 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:08:26 -0700 Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <63da00f2-4478-8168-3491-d1ca72aa57ec@sydex.com> On 07/19/2016 11:08 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > The expense of a new service for 3 phase is one issue; it may not be > available at all. A lot of US rural areas have a single wire > running along the street. The only way you could get 3 phase service > is for the utility to replace that by 3 wires, for however many miles > it takes to get to the spot where their 3 phase service ends. Depends upon your "rural area" and the local utility. Ours is a rural co-op and service is very good. The neighborhood is wired on a buried 12KV three-phase setup with a large disconnect box at each driveway. This allows the utility folks to perform "load balancing" on an individual basis. >From discussions with the utility personnel, I did have (but didn't know about) the option of having an extra wire buried along the driveway to the transformer pad by the house for 3-phase service, had I requested it. Now, of course, it would cost real money. Some of the farms out here have large high-draw electrical gear, such as hay dryers--which do take 3-phase power. Many of my neighbors have single-phase 400A installations. Compared to the service that folks in town get from their municipal utility board (higher rates and lousy service), I consider myself to be fortunate. I recently replaced my home's heat pump (the old one had 24 years on it and used R22 refrigerant) and was a bit surprised to see how the business of motors has changed in that time. Compared to the original blower and fan motors, the new ones look almost tiny. They're BLDC or VFD models and apparently develop more (and better controlled) power. The controllers are, as one might expect, PCBs full of SMT--I think I spotted a couple of ST MCUs there. The thermostat has a color touch-screen display and monitors not only temperature but humidity and uses only 2 wires to communicate with the rest of the system. It's like looking under the hood of my wife's Prius. --Chuck From ethan at 757.org Tue Jul 19 14:22:23 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:22:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: > I haven't been able to articulate anything witty, but I'll go ahead and > just say: Ethan I don't know what you do with those BF-lasers, but it > sounds damn awesome, anyway. Your stock just went up. It's hard to make > lasers anything but sci-fi radical coolness. Light show hobby. Inspired by the Def Leppard music video "Pour some sugar on me." Everything is from China and solid state now. There is a laser "con/fest" of sorts and a small bit of vintage computing cross-over. Like any technology I suppose it grew up along side of personal computing. Early animation/graphics systems probably existed (low quantity) on S100 systems then moved to things like the Commodore Amiga (Pangolin) and then IBM PC (but using coprocessor cards and stuff.) SELEM event in NC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S75y8-StKE There are more videos on youtube but I just grabbed one I know. Just another geekfest, and that's just one of a number of rooms. -- Ethan O'Toole From pontus at Update.UU.SE Tue Jul 19 14:24:09 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 21:24:09 +0200 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> I can't find it, does anyone have a URL? /P On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 01:58:12PM -0700, jim stephens wrote: > 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > > Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > > BTW, about the other nice system noted here, I was hoping the 11/20 would > stay off the radar and not go for a zillion bucks, so much for that idea. > At least I have the means to go to Tucson and get it if I'm nuts and go for > it. > > Thanks > Jim From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Tue Jul 19 14:26:23 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:26:23 -0400 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <120941.6c1aed08.44bfd8df@aol.com> I just put in pdp-8 in ebay search and saw it last nite -Ed# In a message dated 7/19/2016 12:24:15 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, pontus at Update.UU.SE writes: I can't find it, does anyone have a URL? /P On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 01:58:12PM -0700, jim stephens wrote: > 25,000, Alexandria, Va. > > Josh Dersch can have one for his home and for work. > > BTW, about the other nice system noted here, I was hoping the 11/20 would > stay off the radar and not go for a zillion bucks, so much for that idea. > At least I have the means to go to Tucson and get it if I'm nuts and go for > it. > > Thanks > Jim From glen.slick at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 14:29:31 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:29:31 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: On Jul 19, 2016 12:24 PM, "Pontus Pihlgren" wrote: > > I can't find it, does anyone have a URL? > Straight PDP-8 http://www.ebay.com/itm/152171436497 PDP-11/20 http://www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 14:33:37 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:33:37 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > I wouldn't run my $100 little VFC in production, but I expect that the > more expensive ones from serious companies like Yaskawa or Allen-Bradley > will do just fine. I forgot about those. I think you are right. I've seen what I believe to be massive VCFs in a metal-powder mill with multiple inputs. Those probably can provide you with even more redundancy since you can run multiple input lines. -Swift From sales at elecplus.com Tue Jul 19 14:40:28 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:40:28 -0500 Subject: Seagate 50-pin SCSI drives Message-ID: <028001d1e1f5$6761e100$3625a300$@com> A reseller in GA is dumping some online inventory that they used to sell on ebay. Included are 23 SEAGATE ST32500N HARD DRIVE If interested, email to Mike Roetzer [mike at tbfcomputing.com] Not affiliated with the seller at all. Cindy Croxton From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Tue Jul 19 15:20:08 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:20:08 -0700 Subject: Seagate 50-pin SCSI drives In-Reply-To: <028001d1e1f5$6761e100$3625a300$@com> References: <028001d1e1f5$6761e100$3625a300$@com> Message-ID: Are they dumping it on eBay, or did they used to sell it on eBay? If the former, do you know their eBay ID? -- Chris Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 19, 2016, at 12:40 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > > A reseller in GA is dumping some online inventory that they used to sell on > ebay. Included are > > 23 SEAGATE ST32500N HARD DRIVE > > > > If interested, email to Mike Roetzer [mike at tbfcomputing.com] > > > > Not affiliated with the seller at all. > > > > Cindy Croxton > From sales at elecplus.com Tue Jul 19 15:26:13 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:26:13 -0500 Subject: Seagate 50-pin SCSI drives In-Reply-To: References: <028001d1e1f5$6761e100$3625a300$@com> Message-ID: <02a001d1e1fb$cba8e720$62fab560$@com> They are no longer selling these on ebay. Sorry, I don't know their seller ID. Cindy -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chris Hanson Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 3:20 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Seagate 50-pin SCSI drives Are they dumping it on eBay, or did they used to sell it on eBay? If the former, do you know their eBay ID? -- Chris Sent from my iPhone > On Jul 19, 2016, at 12:40 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > > A reseller in GA is dumping some online inventory that they used to > sell on ebay. Included are > > 23 SEAGATE ST32500N HARD DRIVE > > > > If interested, email to Mike Roetzer [mike at tbfcomputing.com] > > > > Not affiliated with the seller at all. > > > > Cindy Croxton > From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Tue Jul 19 15:42:13 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:42:13 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 7/19/2016 9:04 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 03:30:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: [...] >> There's a hint here, though: >> https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson/feature.html > >> From there, it seems to be saying that the essence of the >> invention is that the > ARM ISA is RISC, it is a load-store architecture, and the CPU was > pipelined. > > RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. > > Pipelining is an older idea: the 1979-vintage 68000 does it, and the > 1982-vintage 68010 even detects certain string/loop instructions in > its pipeline and avoids re-fetching them from memory when repeating > the sequence. > > IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and > the real innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, > it'd be just a 32 bit wide 6502 knockoff. And I go the other way, no CPU speed up was really was needed back then. Cpu's bigger than 8 bits could have decoded and executed the 1st instruction, with empty bus cycle then for video or dma or dynamic ram refresh. As for any RISC the 32 bit fetch and the ability to cache effective addresses makes its speed. Ben. PS: With the amount cache to today's cpu's, would a delay line computer be a better working model, than that of Random Access Memory? From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 15:50:34 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 16:50:34 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> References: <01bc01d1dc5c$39f0f650$add2e2f0$@gmail.com> <00a901d1dd50$fb947df0$f2bd79d0$@gmail.com> <921c5257-70f9-15ec-3cf6-c22b0d480176@jetnet.ab.ca> <003201d1dd5e$69dab420$3d901c60$@gmail.com> <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 6:25 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 01:03:31PM -0600, ben wrote: > [...] >> I had hopes on the Amiga until they came out with the 2000*. >> * Lets add a brain dead cpu and run DOS. > > The A2088 was an add-in option. Back in the day, only one of my A2000-owning > friends had a bridgecard. I was given a demo, and it was rather clunky. Clunky, yes, but it enabled government and some commercial sales back in the day because of mandatory "DOS Compatible" purchasing requirements. There were some forms that literally had a checkbox for "is this computer DOS compatible" on IT requisition forms, and if you didn't/couldn't check that box, you would likely be turned down for desktop hardware. -ethan From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Tue Jul 19 17:43:03 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:43:03 -0700 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> References: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> Message-ID: <654E3AD536F541A4ABCBF49199D1803F@Vincew7> From: Karl-Wilhelm Wacker: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 9:25 AM > Does anyone have one of the patch cables, and can they measure the diameter > of the pin and it's length? The width goes from about .093" near the tip to 0.1" near the crimp. The length of the tapered region is about 0.32". The rounded tip has a radius of .046" or so, and the crimp area is about .28" long, accommodating the stranded hook-up wire and insulation. The wire extends beyond the crimp into the tapered section, but I can't see in there to determine if it is soldered or what. > Also, is it a straight pin or like a bannana jack with springy sides? Miniature banana jacks (not the regular ones) actually fit the holes OK, but are horribly expensive, and also wear on the soft brass holes. I've bought some of the stackable jumpers, and used them in a pinch, but it isn't that great of a solution. (It was actually on H901 lab panels, which have similar brass grommets.) http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/lab/lab.php Vince From spacewar at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 19:10:07 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 18:10:07 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <2F1A219E-10F0-4CFA-8247-F3EFBD514772@comcast.net> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <2F1A219E-10F0-4CFA-8247-F3EFBD514772@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 9:36 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > RISC, as a term, may come from IBM, but the concept goes back at least as far as the CDC 6000 series. Pipelining, to the CDC 7600. Possibly depending on exactly how you define it, pipelining may go back to the IBM 7030 "Stretch" (1961). Also speculative execution. A lot of "modern" computer architecture concepts are actually quite old. From kwwacker at ptd.net Tue Jul 19 19:21:48 2016 From: kwwacker at ptd.net (Karl-Wilhelm Wacker) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 20:21:48 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) References: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> <654E3AD536F541A4ABCBF49199D1803F@Vincew7> Message-ID: <95A3FAB039FA4E5780A50CB192EEB366@mefac9c05dd643> This company does custom tapered pins in brass - There are others out there I'm sure. I would find out what their minimum is and get a bulk order together. http://www.stanlok.com/Taper_Pin_Pages/an386.html A place I worked for in the past had www.mill-max.com do a custon part for them, in the 100's - I would talk to them about a part also. Karl ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vincent Slyngstad" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 6:43 PM Subject: Re: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) > From: Karl-Wilhelm Wacker: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 9:25 AM >> Does anyone have one of the patch cables, and can they measure the >> diameter of the pin and it's length? > > The width goes from about .093" near the tip to 0.1" near the crimp. The > length of the tapered region is about 0.32". The rounded tip has a radius > of .046" or so, and the crimp area is about .28" long, accommodating the > stranded hook-up wire and insulation. The wire extends beyond the crimp > into the tapered section, but I can't see in there to determine if it is > soldered or what. > >> Also, is it a straight pin or like a bannana jack with springy sides? > > Miniature banana jacks (not the regular ones) actually fit the holes OK, > but are horribly expensive, and also wear on the soft brass holes. > I've bought some of the stackable jumpers, and used them in a pinch, but > it isn't that great of a solution. (It was actually on H901 lab panels, > which have similar brass grommets.) > http://www.so-much-stuff.com/pdp8/lab/lab.php > > Vince From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 21:03:52 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:03:52 +0900 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <35F45F21-2424-43C6-99AD-94587C1FC43A@gmail.com> Great info. I'm on travel but I will check which ROMs I have when I come back on Friday. Marc > On Jul 19, 2016, at 2:06 PM, tony duell wrote: > > > >> Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just >> scored two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version >> with all the fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work >> save the usual tape drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both >> have the flexible disc ROM. What kind of discs can I hook up? > > Which flexible disk ROM? There are 2. The older one, AFAIK > supports the HP9885 8" drive which has a 16 bit parallel interface > and needs the right version of the 98032 to hook it up. The later > disk ROM supports the HP9895 on HPIB. > > The older ROM needs a disk with various programs on it to > work, it is essentially just a bootstrap. Have any such disks > survived? > > -tony From barythrin at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 22:21:46 2016 From: barythrin at gmail.com (Sam O'nella) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 22:21:46 -0500 Subject: Another pdp-8 auction at 25k Message-ID: <51r456pna6oog2rg5k4da5t2.1468984906475@email.android.com> http://m.ebay.com/itm/DEC-PDP8-I-MINICOMPUTER-PDP8-PDP-8-PDP-8-/201627112300 Did someone already post this other pdp-8 auction? Same semi-ridiculous starting price as other straight 8 but i honestly don't know enough about PDP to know what this is or if its not a straight version. ?Seems like a museum piece though although perhaps all of you PDP collectors have a similar setup :-)? From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 22:40:10 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 23:40:10 -0400 Subject: Another pdp-8 auction at 25k In-Reply-To: <51r456pna6oog2rg5k4da5t2.1468984906475@email.android.com> References: <51r456pna6oog2rg5k4da5t2.1468984906475@email.android.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:21 PM, Sam O'nella wrote: > http://m.ebay.com/itm/DEC-PDP8-I-MINICOMPUTER-PDP8-PDP-8-PDP-8-/201627112300 > > Did someone already post this other pdp-8 auction? This PDP-8/i has been up at this price for some time. This might or might not be the original auction, but it's been around for a while. > Same semi-ridiculous starting price as other straight 8 but i honestly don't > know enough about PDP to know what this is or if its not a straight version. It says in the auction (and on the front panel) that it's a PDP-8/i. It's from approx 1968, and has TTL innards, not transistors. It also has a quantity of addons. > Seems like a museum piece though although perhaps all of you PDP collectors have a similar setup :-) My 4K PDP-8/i does not have any TU55 drives. I'd call the TC08 and 4 drives unusual. This unit could fire up OS/8 from DECtape, but it would be tight on RAM. -ethan From useddec at gmail.com Tue Jul 19 23:03:45 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 23:03:45 -0500 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts Message-ID: I just dug out what might be my last extra DECmate II CPU for a list member, and now have access to several Pro and Rainbow CPUs and other parts. If you have any interest, please contact me off list. Shipping from Illinois. Thanks, Paul From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Wed Jul 20 01:29:08 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 23:29:08 -0700 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now) In-Reply-To: <95A3FAB039FA4E5780A50CB192EEB366@mefac9c05dd643> References: <9921CD61A4D643A48CCACC7977F73452@mefac9c05dd643> <654E3AD536F541A4ABCBF49199D1803F@Vincew7> <95A3FAB039FA4E5780A50CB192EEB366@mefac9c05dd643> Message-ID: From: Karl-Wilhelm Wacker: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:21 PM > This company does custom tapered pins in brass - > There are others out there I'm sure. > > I would find out what their minimum is and get a bulk order together. > > http://www.stanlok.com/Taper_Pin_Pages/an386.html > > A place I worked for in the past had www.mill-max.com do a custon part for > them, > in the 100's - I would talk to them about a part also. >From what I can gather from the websites you referred me to, the tapered part of the pin's dimensions are very close to the narrow end of a standard taper #4/0 in the 3/4" length? Have I done the math right on that? >From there it would seem to be a matter of getting a way to mount the wire, and optionally to shorten the overall length of the pin and wire attachment to .65" from .75". (Or maybe just slot the pin's fat end, solder in the wire, and call it good.) I also thought about using a taper reamer to create molds and perhaps casting with solder around the fluxed wire. (Casting brass or bronze seemed to require more heat than I could generate easily.) (For some reason that I've forgotten over the years, my eBay search for suitable pins looks for "42107" and "42279". Never gotten any results for it, though.) Vince From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Wed Jul 20 02:08:53 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 03:08:53 -0400 Subject: DEC H-500 Computer Lab pins and docs (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just ... Message-ID: <74d4ce.36d74b23.44c07d85@aol.com> I wonder if any of the other digi labs leads are comparable? We have fabratek and a few other brands. We got a bit obsessed with trainer type gear for electronics and physics 'this what that got young people interested back when' display. if there are any list member with a small turret lathe that would be nice to make pins with. pretty labor intensive. Better would be small Brown and Sharpe screw machine would make buckets of them once you got the machine all set up to make the run. Or cnc machine ( I never ran one of those) --- or as mentioned casting some. I will look and see is we need any pins. Ed#. In a message dated 7/19/2016 11:30:10 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, v.slyngstad at frontier.com writes: From: Karl-Wilhelm Wacker: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:21 PM > This company does custom tapered pins in brass - > There are others out there I'm sure. > > I would find out what their minimum is and get a bulk order together. > > http://www.stanlok.com/Taper_Pin_Pages/an386.html > > A place I worked for in the past had www.mill-max.com do a custon part for > them, > in the 100's - I would talk to them about a part also. >From what I can gather from the websites you referred me to, the tapered part of the pin's dimensions are very close to the woner if fabratecnarrow end of a standard taper #4/0 in the 3/4" length? Have I done the math right on that? >From there it would seem to be a matter of getting a way to mount the wire, and optionally to shorten the overall length of the pin and wire attachment to .65" from .75". (Or maybe just slot the pin's fat end, solder in the wire, and call it good.) I also thought about using a taper reamer to create molds and perhaps casting with solder around the fluxed wire. (Casting brass or bronze seemed to require more heat than I could generate easily.) (For some reason that I've forgotten over the years, my eBay search for suitable pins looks for "42107" and "42279". Never gotten any results for it, though.) Vince From spedraja at ono.com Wed Jul 20 02:46:22 2016 From: spedraja at ono.com (SPC) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:46:22 +0200 Subject: Getting rid of books and documentation Message-ID: Hello everyone. My employer plans to close the data center where I have been working for several years usually. This involves the destruction or elimination of all kinds of manuals, books, documents and diverse equipment considering that this is deprecated. In general the hardware belongs to IBM for contractual reasons, but not so with the documentation I have mentioned. In my case I saved from destruction several old manuals and training courses that I will begin to scan in the coming months. But I can not take care of all available material. As an example there are enough red books related IBM OS / 2 and its environment. There are also several CICS 2.1 ... it is difficult to make an accurate count. I will try to make some more detailed photos as possible and post them somewhere so that anyone interested can review. Given my residence in the European Union, I think it would be easier to send these documents to interested persons who also reside in the EU, if necessary. On the other hand I must say that we store yet one IBM 3705 operative until few years ago. I don't know what plans have IBM for it. But that's another story. With kind regards Sergio From rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com Wed Jul 20 05:41:25 2016 From: rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com (Rod Smallwood) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:41:25 +0100 Subject: More PDP-11 front console scans In-Reply-To: <20160718202135.33CC318C097@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160718202135.33CC318C097@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: Hi Noel Most interesting and will aid no end with the panel project. The Panel Palace is having a top to bottom remodel so no systems for a few days more Rod (Panelman) Smallwood Sent from my iPad > On 18 Jul 2016, at 21:21, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > I recently got access to an orginal PDP-11/70 front console (the one in > magenta and rose), and also an 'Industrial' -11/70 (blue and red). Scans of > both of these front panels have been added to my PDP-11 stuff page: > > http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Stuff.html > > My A3 scanner won't _quite_ eat the whole thing in one gulp, but it did manage > to 'see' all the printed stuff. The actual panel is very slightly larger, so > there are some thin sections on either side missing from the scan, _but_ on > that page there is a mechanical drawing that gives the dimensions of the whole > thing. So the two together should enable a complete reproduction. > > Noel From robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com Wed Jul 20 09:35:53 2016 From: robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com (Rob Jarratt) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:35:53 +0100 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <02e901d1e294$0528c450$0f7a4cf0$@ntlworld.com> Possibly for a Pro, I haven't actually worked out what it is that doesn't work on mine yet though... Regards Rob > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul > Anderson > Sent: 20 July 2016 05:04 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > ; cctech at vax-11.org > Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts > > I just dug out what might be my last extra DECmate II CPU for a list member, > and now have access to several Pro and Rainbow CPUs and other parts. > > If you have any interest, please contact me off list. Shipping from Illinois. > > Thanks, Paul From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Wed Jul 20 08:56:25 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:56:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Reproduction micros Message-ID: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Paul Koning >> I always felt that RISC meant 'making the basic cycle time as fast as >> possible by finding the longest path through the logic - i.e. the >> limiting factor on the cycle time - and removing it (thereby making the >> instruction set less rich); then repeat'. > "Making the cycle time as fast as possible" certainly applies, in > spades, to the 6600. The deeper you dig into its details, the more > impressed you will be by the many different ways in which it does things > faster than you would expect to be possible. My formulation for RISC had two parts, though: not just minizing the cycle time, but doing so by doing things that (as a side-effect) make the instruction set less capable. I'm not very familiar with the 6600 - does this part apply too? >> RISC only makes (system-wide) sense in an environment in which memory >> bandwidth is plentiful (so that having programs contain more, simpler >> instructions make sense) I should have pointed out that programs of that sort take not just more memory bandwidth, but more memory to hold them. In this day of massive memories, no biggie, but back in the core memory days, it was more of an issue. >> One of the books about Turing argues that the ACE can be seen as a RISC >> machine (it's not just that it's load-store; its overall architectural >> philosophy is all about maximizing instruction rates). I looked, and it's "Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine"; in Chapter 8, "Computer architecture and the ACE computers", by Robert Doran (which is not, for some reason, listed in the ToC). > I think a lot of machine designers, though not all, were seriously > interested in making them go fast. Again, RISC has two legs, not just making the machine fast, but making them fast by using techniques that, as a side-effect, make them inscrutable, and difficult to program. The concept was that they would not, in general, be programmed in assembler - precisely because they were so finicky. Remember, the 801 was a combined hardware/compiler project, in which complexity was moved from the hardware to the compiler; and early RISC machines has things like no interlocks between pipeline stages. So they really were not intended to be programmed in assembler - the compiler was critical. The ACE, on the surface, didn't follow this, as it had no compiler. However, at a higher level, Turing definitely followed the RISC philosophy of making the machine as fast as possible, by using techniques that made it very hard to program; instead of moving the complexity to the compiler, he moved it to the programmer - the latter not being a problem, if you're Alan Turing! :-) Noel From pete at dunnington.plus.com Wed Jul 20 10:17:07 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:17:07 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <2fe2dba2-884e-e393-b8ff-c9fe434d8478@dunnington.plus.com> On 20/07/2016 14:56, Noel Chiappa wrote: > My formulation for RISC had two parts, though: not just minizing the cycle > time, but doing so by doing things that (as a side-effect) make the > instruction set less capable. At least for some RISC, that's more than a side effect. While at Acorn in about 1987, I attended talks run by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber where they described some of the design criteria for ARM. They were very clear that the design goal was for every instruction to be executed in a single cycle[1], not just discarding longer instructions. Thus the process wasn't about removing instructions but rather about deciding what (instructions and hardware) to put in as necessary and useful, so that more complex operations could be built up from short sequences of very fast instructions. Kind of like the Unix philosophy of pipelining small utilities, in a way. They also studied what had gone before: IBM 801, the Berkeley RISC project, Clipper, and others. Steve describes some of this in his book "VLSI RISC Architecture and Organisation", which is a good read if you can find a copy. [1] actually it's three clock cycles - fetch,decode,execute - but there's a three-stage pipeline so although the duration of any given instruction is 3 clocks, overall you get one instruction per clock [2]. [2] except I'm simplifying; for example there's only one memory port so load and store instructions take an extra cycle, since they need one memory access for the instruction fetch and one for the data - or more if it's a block data transfer, obviously. And BTW it does have a mode to take advantage of reduced access times for sequential access in memories that support it. That's why the data sheets quote instruction times in terms of S (sequential) and N (non-sequential) cycles. -- Pete From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 10:44:00 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:44:00 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> > On Jul 20, 2016, at 9:56 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > >> From: Paul Koning > >>> I always felt that RISC meant 'making the basic cycle time as fast as >>> possible by finding the longest path through the logic - i.e. the >>> limiting factor on the cycle time - and removing it (thereby making the >>> instruction set less rich); then repeat'. > >> "Making the cycle time as fast as possible" certainly applies, in >> spades, to the 6600. The deeper you dig into its details, the more >> impressed you will be by the many different ways in which it does things >> faster than you would expect to be possible. > > My formulation for RISC had two parts, though: not just minizing the cycle > time, but doing so by doing things that (as a side-effect) make the > instruction set less capable. I'm not very familiar with the 6600 - does this > part apply too? Depending on what you mean by "less capable", I don't know that I would agree with that. For example, I doubt that anyone would argue MIPS isn't a RISC architecture. Yet MIPS is certainly very capable, and it certainly has a rather large instruction set. The key point is that those instructions are, by and large, conceptually straightforward, and lend themselves to efficient (small cycle count, small transistor count) implementation. Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. In that sense, the 6000 certainly qualifies. It has load/store, integer and float arithmetic on registers, boolean ops, and basic transfer of control instructions. That's about it. And the implementation is certainly straightforward. A 6600 has a fair number of gates, but that stems from its multiple functional units, memory scheduling, and intense emphasis on speed, not from the inherent complexity of its instruction set. A 6400, which is a single functional unit implementation of the same instruction set, is a whole lot smaller. I recommend the excellent (and rather short) book by Thornton, one of the 6600 designers: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cdc/cyber/books/DesignOfAComputer_CDC6600.pdf It will take you through the design all the way from transistor considerations and circuit elements to the instruction and memory scheduling machinery. >>> RISC only makes (system-wide) sense in an environment in which memory >>> bandwidth is plentiful (so that having programs contain more, simpler >>> instructions make sense) > > I should have pointed out that programs of that sort take not just more memory > bandwidth, but more memory to hold them. In this day of massive memories, no > biggie, but back in the core memory days, it was more of an issue. I don't think that's necessarily all that big a delta. Again using MIPS as an example, its program sizes are not that much larger than, say, the PDP11 for the same source code. > ... >> I think a lot of machine designers, though not all, were seriously >> interested in making them go fast. > > Again, RISC has two legs, not just making the machine fast, but making them > fast by using techniques that, as a side-effect, make them inscrutable, and > difficult to program. The concept was that they would not, in general, be > programmed in assembler - precisely because they were so finicky. It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no problem for any competent assembly language programmer. Alpha is a bit harder but definitely doable too. The burden on compiler optimizers tends to be higher. But I would argue that's true for any high performance design: those have multiple pipelines, caches and prefetch, and lots of other stuff that affects performance. The code optimizer has to know about these things. (So does the assembly language programmer, if assembly is used for performance rather than for esoteric bare metal stuff like boot or diagnostic code.) But, with the possible exception of extremely bizarre designs like Itanium, that's all perfectly doable. paul From pete at dunnington.plus.com Wed Jul 20 11:42:27 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:42:27 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 20/07/2016 16:44, Paul Koning wrote: > It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. > Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many > RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no > problem for any competent assembly language programmer. Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but it's not hard. -- Pete From spectre at floodgap.com Wed Jul 20 12:32:07 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 10:32:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: RISC assembly by hand dammit was Re: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: from Pete Turnbull at "Jul 20, 16 05:42:27 pm" Message-ID: <201607201732.u6KHW7Et59637872@floodgap.com> > > It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. > > Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many > > RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no > > problem for any competent assembly language programmer. > > Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for > MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all > inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but > it's not hard. I actually find PowerPC assembly very tractable. No branch delay slots, for example, and reasonable orthogonality. The major thing that's annoying about it is the "mscdfr" instructions (Means Something Completely Different For r0 -- addi(s), for example). I've handwritten a great deal of PPC assembly over the years, and even written a JIT for it. The late PA-RISC was also a very sane ISA to handwrite assembly in. SPARC is a little tricky with the register windows, but I guess that's really no different than writing for any other particular ABI. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Po-Ching Lives! ------------------------------------------------------------ From spectre at floodgap.com Wed Jul 20 12:34:01 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 10:34:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> from Paul Koning at "Jul 20, 16 11:44:00 am" Message-ID: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> > Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. I'm not sure what you mean by this, but (for example) many POWER implementations have microcode (example: the 970/G5, which is descended from POWER4). -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- There are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't. -- From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 12:42:09 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:42:09 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> References: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > >> Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. > > I'm not sure what you mean by this, but (for example) many POWER > implementations have microcode (example: the 970/G5, which is descended from > POWER4). What I meant is that I had no idea such things existed. Very curious. Learn something new every day. What do they use this for? The closest to microcode I'd ever heard of before is the "epicode" in Alpha. Or was that Prism? Anyway, a DEC RISC architecture where some privileged stuff was done in code running in a corner of the chip. Not actual microcode because it was essentially the standard instruction set, somewhat extended and running in a special processor state. paul From swiftgriggs at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 12:53:21 2016 From: swiftgriggs at gmail.com (Swift Griggs) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:53:21 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: > The closest to microcode I'd ever heard of before is the "epicode" in > Alpha. Or was that Prism? PALcode? That's sort of an amalgamation of microcode and emulation, IIRC. I don't know what 'epicode' is, though. -Swift From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 12:56:55 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:56:55 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 1:53 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > > On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: >> The closest to microcode I'd ever heard of before is the "epicode" in >> Alpha. Or was that Prism? > > PALcode? That's sort of an amalgamation of microcode and emulation, IIRC. > I don't know what 'epicode' is, though. PALcode sounds right. I think "epicode" was the same thing, but in PRISM -- which was the second RISC chip architecture DEC built, and canceled before shipping it. (Titan was the first; Alpha the third.) paul From spacewar at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 12:57:38 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:57:38 -0600 Subject: Who Loves IBM Tape? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 10:41 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > 7340 Hypertape was developed for the Stretch project, and were mainly used by NSA. You might be confusing Hypertape (7340 drive) with the "Tractor" robotic tape cartridge system (7955), which was designed for the NSA Harvest system (7950).* I don't think Hypertape was ever used on Stretch or Harvest. Tractor used 1.75 inch tape. Only one Tractor system was built, and was used from 1962 to 1976 by the NSA. Hypertape cartridges were physically smaller than Tractor cartridges. Hypertape used 1 inch tape with phase encoding, at a tape speed of 112.5 inches per second for data transfer and 225 ips for rewind. The original transfer rate was 170,000 characters per second. The 7340 Model 1 drive was used on the 7074 and other 70xx systems with the 7640 control unit. The first customer for the 7340 Model 1 was the National Revenue Service of Canada. The 7340 Model 3 drive doubled the recording denisty and transfer rate, and was used on 360 systems with the 2802 control unit. There were only two 7340 Model 3 installations outside IBM, at the Internal Revenue Service and Boeing. Source for Hypertape information: _IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems_, by Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer * The 7950 Harvest system was a 7030 Stretch system with the addition of the 7951 stream processing unit, 7952 high-performance core memory, 7955 Tractor tape system, and 7959 high-speed exchange. From aek at bitsavers.org Wed Jul 20 13:19:59 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:19:59 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> References: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <4b3bff1e-1636-3715-624e-e58fa7741797@bitsavers.org> On 7/20/16 10:34 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: >> Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. > this confuses architecture and implementation the Ridge 32 has a RISC instruction set, but was implemented in micrcode From spectre at floodgap.com Wed Jul 20 13:16:27 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:16:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: from Paul Koning at "Jul 20, 16 01:42:09 pm" Message-ID: <201607201816.u6KIGRpJ65863966@floodgap.com> > > > Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. > > > > I'm not sure what you mean by this, but (for example) many POWER > > implementations have microcode (example: the 970/G5, which is descended from > > POWER4). > > What I meant is that I had no idea such things existed. Very curious. > Learn something new every day. What do they use this for? A number of instructions on G5 processors are broken down into smaller uops which are sequenced, and affect execution flow and instruction level parallelism. The microcode used by the uops is purely internal to the chip and is stored in a sidecar ROM. Part of my optimizing code for G5 systems was to avoid microcoded/cracked instructions as much as possible except where there was no alternative for functionality. The Cell PPU, also Power ISA, also contains microcoded instructions and they have similar penalties. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx ------------- From lproven at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 13:52:22 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 20:52:22 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 20 July 2016 at 17:44, Paul Koning wrote: > It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. Hang on. Itanium is not RISC -- it *is* VLIW. Isn't it? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 13:54:20 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 20:54:20 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> References: <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> <201607201734.u6KHY1xx32964994@floodgap.com> Message-ID: On 20 July 2016 at 19:34, Cameron Kaiser wrote: >> Also, RISC does not use, or need, microcode. > > I'm not sure what you mean by this, but (for example) many POWER > implementations have microcode (example: the 970/G5, which is descended from > POWER4). Isn't the general belief that many successful architectures that started out as RISC, and are still marketed as RISC, aren't actually very RISC-like at all any more? And, secondarily, that ARM is one of the ones that has stayed closest to its roots, unlike, e.g., POWER, SPARC and, well, most of the big hot UNIX workstation chips of the '90s? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From billdegnan at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 17:02:44 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 18:02:44 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 Message-ID: Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was discussing with Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work (from 000000). Bill -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 14:29:13 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:29:13 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 3:02 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > > ... > I think it's fair to say that ARM was a relatively early RISC > implementation *in term of single chip processors*, that it was > remarkably simple compared to others of that time (as in, smaller, > more reduced, fewer transistors, etc.), that its power consumption > always was remarkably low and its performance, for its first decade or > so, remarkably high. I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in low power (especially power per MHz of clock speed). Interestingly enough, StrongARM was one of the few (and the first?) independent designs; it used the ARM architecture specification but not the actual logic design as others did. paul From lproven at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 14:02:41 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 21:02:41 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 19 July 2016 at 17:04, Peter Corlett wrote: > From there, it seems to be saying that the essence of the invention is that the > ARM ISA is RISC, it is a load-store architecture, and the CPU was pipelined. > > RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. Could you expand on that, please? I think that IKWYM but I'm not sure. > Pipelining is an older idea: the 1979-vintage 68000 does it, and the 1982-vintage > 68010 even detects certain string/loop instructions in its pipeline and avoids > re-fetching them from memory when repeating the sequence. I don't think that article or anything else is claiming that ARM invented RISC, was the first RISC processor, or even significantly advanced the RISC art. What is says is that ARM was built by a very small team -- which it was. That part of that is that Wilson did a lot of the design single-handed -- which is true. I don't know about her simulating the design in her head; from what I've heard from several sources, including Wilson herself in a talk at ROUGOL, was that the first simulation of the ARM instruction set was a BBC BASIC program running on a BBC Micro. That in itself is quite remarkable. I think it's fair to say that ARM was a relatively early RISC implementation *in term of single chip processors*, that it was remarkably simple compared to others of that time (as in, smaller, more reduced, fewer transistors, etc.), that its power consumption always was remarkably low and its performance, for its first decade or so, remarkably high. > IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the real > innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be just a 32 > bit wide 6502 knockoff. Do tell...? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From tingox at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 14:36:14 2016 From: tingox at gmail.com (Torfinn Ingolfsen) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 21:36:14 +0200 Subject: Getting rid of books and documentation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 9:46 AM, SPC wrote: > Hello everyone. My employer plans to close the data center where I have > been working for several years usually. This involves the destruction or > elimination of all kinds of manuals, books, documents and diverse equipment A longshot: if there is any Norsk Data documentation there, a list of titles would be interesting. A few of us are preserving what we can on NDWiki.org -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 14:52:47 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:52:47 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. Message-ID: I have a few GRiD compass systems and some are suffering from massively decreased contrast on the edges of the displays: [See the system on the left] https://www.instagram.com/p/BIGGzUzgat-/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n [Or this one:] http://www.ripstick.com/USCM/images/Grid_Compass_1101_Laptop_in_Box_002.jpg Meanwhile, other EL systems I have- like my HP integral PC- haven't succumbed to this. I have seen similar issues on amLCD displays in my Tadpole, Toshiba and other machines, so this is something we all may have to confront. ------- I was wondering if the folks here had theories? I'm thinking moisture (or air) might be leaking in from the edges of the glass panes, perhaps from a compromised seal- sorry for the silly picture but you can see the composition of the display here: https://www.instagram.com/p/6BXaLBtSzd/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage tips? Could it be reversed? Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the display? Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may eventually succumb to this. Perhaps it is just oxidation and not moisture, but I'd love to hear any theories. Thanks, - Ian -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 14:56:55 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:56:55 -0400 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 3:52 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > ... > Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage tips? > > Could it be reversed? > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the display? > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may eventually > succumb to this. I don't know how to address that problem. But FWIW, it doesn't happen to all two-glass pane displays; my 1970s era PLATO terminal (with the orange plasma panel) still works perfectly. paul From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 15:02:09 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:02:09 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yes, but as I mentioned: "> I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may eventually > succumb to this." I have plenty of good displays. It seems like it may happen eventually. Also aren't plasmas pressurized, unlike LCD and EL? On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > > > On Jul 20, 2016, at 3:52 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > > > ... > > Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage > tips? > > > > Could it be reversed? > > > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the > display? > > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may > eventually > > succumb to this. > > I don't know how to address that problem. But FWIW, it doesn't happen to > all two-glass pane displays; my 1970s era PLATO terminal (with the orange > plasma panel) still works perfectly. > > paul > > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 15:09:56 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:09:56 -0400 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 4:02 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > Yes, but as I mentioned: > > "> I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may > eventually >> succumb to this." > > I have plenty of good displays. It seems like it may happen eventually. > Also aren't plasmas pressurized, unlike LCD and EL? They aren't vacuum, but close. I don't know what the pressure is, but it's way below outside air pressure. paul From spectre at floodgap.com Wed Jul 20 15:15:33 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:15:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: from Paul Koning at "Jul 20, 16 03:56:55 pm" Message-ID: <201607202015.u6KKFXnP19596722@floodgap.com> > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the display? > > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may eventually > > succumb to this. > > I don't know how to address that problem. But FWIW, it doesn't happen to > all two-glass pane displays; my 1970s era PLATO terminal (with the orange > plasma panel) still works perfectly. My Solbourne S3000 (also flaring orange gas plasma) looks great too, ca. 1991. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. -- Euripedes ---------------- From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 15:23:08 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:23:08 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: <201607202015.u6KKFXnP19596722@floodgap.com> References: <201607202015.u6KKFXnP19596722@floodgap.com> Message-ID: I'm happy for everyone with great displays, but I have never seen a repro on plasma because they are pressurized. And I've seen plenty of EL displays that still look great... So far. So can we stay on topic a little :) On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 1:15 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the > display? > > > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > > > > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may > eventually > > > succumb to this. > > > > I don't know how to address that problem. But FWIW, it doesn't happen to > > all two-glass pane displays; my 1970s era PLATO terminal (with the orange > > plasma panel) still works perfectly. > > My Solbourne S3000 (also flaring orange gas plasma) looks great too, ca. > 1991. > > -- > ------------------------------------ personal: > http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- > Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * > ckaiser at floodgap.com > -- Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. -- Euripedes > ---------------- > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 15:28:05 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 13:28:05 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: <201607202015.u6KKFXnP19596722@floodgap.com> Message-ID: If anyone has a plasma that *DOES* repro, that would be very interesting, but I expect the technology is different enough that that won't happen due to the pressurization. From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Wed Jul 20 17:32:03 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 15:32:03 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9A23D482-9FEB-4054-BC49-1A4DDDB12124@cs.ubc.ca> On 2016-Jul-20, at 12:52 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > I have a few GRiD compass systems and some are suffering from massively > decreased contrast on the edges of the displays: > > [See the system on the left] > https://www.instagram.com/p/BIGGzUzgat-/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n > > [Or this one:] > http://www.ripstick.com/USCM/images/Grid_Compass_1101_Laptop_in_Box_002.jpg > > Meanwhile, other EL systems I have- like my HP integral PC- haven't > succumbed to this. > > I have seen similar issues on amLCD displays in my Tadpole, Toshiba and > other machines, so this is something we all may have to confront. > > ------- > > I was wondering if the folks here had theories? > > I'm thinking moisture (or air) might be leaking in from the edges of the > glass panes, perhaps from a compromised seal- sorry for the silly picture > but you can see the composition of the display here: > > https://www.instagram.com/p/6BXaLBtSzd/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n > > Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage tips? > > Could it be reversed? > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the display? > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may eventually > succumb to this. > > Perhaps it is just oxidation and not moisture, but I'd love to hear any > theories. Are you convinced this is a panel problem rather than a driver electronics problem? In one picture it looks like the sort of thing that happens when you have to turn up the brightness (for some types of display), resulting in partial illumination in other areas of the screen. I've never had opportunity to repair or work on EL flat-panel displays, I'm not familiar with the driving techniques and requirements, so this is just a query/guess. (I see it's an X/Y matrix drive scheme, but the voltages & timing & phasing I don't know about.) From pete at dunnington.plus.com Wed Jul 20 17:28:52 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 23:28:52 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <3e70f62c-ce75-5897-cab4-ceee3feced2f@dunnington.plus.com> On 20/07/2016 20:29, Paul Koning wrote: > I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression > that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in > low power (especially power per MHz of clock speed). Interestingly > enough, StrongARM was one of the few (and the first?) independent > designs; it used the ARM architecture specification but not the > actual logic design as others did. That's almost right. An ARM2 dissipates less than 2W (according to my data sheet, but that's maximum allowed dissipation and I think typical consumption is much less than 1W) with its normal 5V supply, averaging some 6-8 MIPS with a 12MHZ clock. It's a 2micron CMOS process. The original ARM used a 3micron process but was only used for testing and development; I can't remember what ARM3 used but IIRC it was a lot smaller though still the same core design, and it's certainly low power (under 1W) despite having a lot more transistors (largely for cache) and a higher clock speed. StrongARM SA-110 uses roughly 450mW, but with Vcc around 1.75V it claimed about 100 MIPS at 100MHz, in a 0.35micron process. It was a collaboration between ARM and Digital, but AIUI the hardware design was done mainly or perhaps completely by Digital. Yes, it was the first independent design, as far as I know. Earliest designs were done by Acorn and later I think by Acorn with VLSI, and ARM with Digital (ARM6/7). I had access to early SA-110 development stuff for a project in 1996 but I had to go to Digital to get it, not Acorn/ARM. -- Pete From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 20 17:50:18 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 18:50:18 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <3e70f62c-ce75-5897-cab4-ceee3feced2f@dunnington.plus.com> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <3e70f62c-ce75-5897-cab4-ceee3feced2f@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: > On Jul 20, 2016, at 6:28 PM, Pete Turnbull wrote: > > On 20/07/2016 20:29, Paul Koning wrote: > >> I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression >> that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in >> low power (especially power per MHz of clock speed). Interestingly >> enough, StrongARM was one of the few (and the first?) independent >> designs; it used the ARM architecture specification but not the >> actual logic design as others did. > > That's almost right. An ARM2 dissipates less than 2W (according to my data sheet, but that's maximum allowed dissipation and I think typical consumption is much less than 1W) with its normal 5V supply, averaging some 6-8 MIPS with a 12MHZ clock. It's a 2micron CMOS process. The original ARM used a 3micron process but was only used for testing and development; I can't remember what ARM3 used but IIRC it was a lot smaller though still the same core design, and it's certainly low power (under 1W) despite having a lot more transistors (largely for cache) and a higher clock speed. > > StrongARM SA-110 uses roughly 450mW, but with Vcc around 1.75V it claimed about 100 MIPS at 100MHz, in a 0.35micron process. It was a collaboration between ARM and Digital, but AIUI the hardware design was done mainly or perhaps completely by Digital. Yes, it was the first independent design, as far as I know. Earliest designs were done by Acorn and later I think by Acorn with VLSI, and ARM with Digital (ARM6/7). I had access to early SA-110 development stuff for a project in 1996 but I had to go to Digital to get it, not Acorn/ARM. Thanks for the backup data. I have the impression that power gating and clock gating (essentially only running small parts of the chip rather than all of it all the time) is one big reason why the SA-110 is so power-efficient. I still have an SA-110 eval board tucked away in the workshop. paul From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 18:13:30 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:13:30 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: <9A23D482-9FEB-4054-BC49-1A4DDDB12124@cs.ubc.ca> References: <9A23D482-9FEB-4054-BC49-1A4DDDB12124@cs.ubc.ca> Message-ID: No, I'm not convinced the EL repro isn't a driver electronics issue. I'm just a little confused about why the issue congregates at the edges of the displays. Any ideas why that might be? I may try swapping the panels around this evening if I am feeling brave. On Wednesday, July 20, 2016, Brent Hilpert wrote: > On 2016-Jul-20, at 12:52 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > > > I have a few GRiD compass systems and some are suffering from massively > > decreased contrast on the edges of the displays: > > > > [See the system on the left] > > https://www.instagram.com/p/BIGGzUzgat-/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n > > > > [Or this one:] > > > http://www.ripstick.com/USCM/images/Grid_Compass_1101_Laptop_in_Box_002.jpg > > > > Meanwhile, other EL systems I have- like my HP integral PC- haven't > > succumbed to this. > > > > I have seen similar issues on amLCD displays in my Tadpole, Toshiba and > > other machines, so this is something we all may have to confront. > > > > ------- > > > > I was wondering if the folks here had theories? > > > > I'm thinking moisture (or air) might be leaking in from the edges of the > > glass panes, perhaps from a compromised seal- sorry for the silly picture > > but you can see the composition of the display here: > > > > https://www.instagram.com/p/6BXaLBtSzd/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n > > > > Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage > tips? > > > > Could it be reversed? > > > > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the > display? > > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. > > > > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may > eventually > > succumb to this. > > > > Perhaps it is just oxidation and not moisture, but I'd love to hear any > > theories. > > > Are you convinced this is a panel problem rather than a driver electronics > problem? > > In one picture it looks like the sort of thing that happens when you have > to turn up the brightness (for some types of display), resulting in partial > illumination in other areas of the screen. > > I've never had opportunity to repair or work on EL flat-panel displays, > I'm not familiar with the driving techniques and requirements, so this is > just a query/guess. (I see it's an X/Y matrix drive scheme, but the > voltages & timing & phasing I don't know about.) > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From ian.finder at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 18:35:34 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:35:34 -0700 Subject: Flat panel display rot - "tunnel vision" in electroluminescent and other displays- bad seals. In-Reply-To: References: <9A23D482-9FEB-4054-BC49-1A4DDDB12124@cs.ubc.ca> Message-ID: Hmm. I suppose recapping is a logical next step. There are also four adjustable inductors and a single trimpot inside the display assembly. I haven't been able to find a single clue about what they do. On Wednesday, July 20, 2016, Ian Finder wrote: > No, I'm not convinced the EL repro isn't a driver electronics issue. > > I'm just a little confused about why the issue congregates at the edges of > the displays. Any ideas why that might be? > > I may try swapping the panels around this evening if I am feeling brave. > > On Wednesday, July 20, 2016, Brent Hilpert > wrote: > >> On 2016-Jul-20, at 12:52 PM, Ian Finder wrote: >> >> > I have a few GRiD compass systems and some are suffering from massively >> > decreased contrast on the edges of the displays: >> > >> > [See the system on the left] >> > https://www.instagram.com/p/BIGGzUzgat-/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n >> > >> > [Or this one:] >> > >> http://www.ripstick.com/USCM/images/Grid_Compass_1101_Laptop_in_Box_002.jpg >> > >> > Meanwhile, other EL systems I have- like my HP integral PC- haven't >> > succumbed to this. >> > >> > I have seen similar issues on amLCD displays in my Tadpole, Toshiba and >> > other machines, so this is something we all may have to confront. >> > >> > ------- >> > >> > I was wondering if the folks here had theories? >> > >> > I'm thinking moisture (or air) might be leaking in from the edges of the >> > glass panes, perhaps from a compromised seal- sorry for the silly >> picture >> > but you can see the composition of the display here: >> > >> > https://www.instagram.com/p/6BXaLBtSzd/?taken-by=tr1nitr0n >> > >> > Does anyone know how one might prevent this from progressing- storage >> tips? >> > >> > Could it be reversed? >> > >> > Better yet, does anyone have ideas on how to rapidly dehydrate the >> display? >> > Perhaps there is even a way to re-seal them. >> > >> > I think all two-glass-pane displays that don't have a vacuum may >> eventually >> > succumb to this. >> > >> > Perhaps it is just oxidation and not moisture, but I'd love to hear any >> > theories. >> >> >> Are you convinced this is a panel problem rather than a driver >> electronics problem? >> >> In one picture it looks like the sort of thing that happens when you have >> to turn up the brightness (for some types of display), resulting in partial >> illumination in other areas of the screen. >> >> I've never had opportunity to repair or work on EL flat-panel displays, >> I'm not familiar with the driving techniques and requirements, so this is >> just a query/guess. (I see it's an X/Y matrix drive scheme, but the >> voltages & timing & phasing I don't know about.) >> >> > > -- > Ian Finder > (206) 395-MIPS > ian.finder at gmail.com > > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From lproven at gmail.com Wed Jul 20 18:46:37 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 01:46:37 +0200 Subject: The emulator that needs 3GHz In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: *Accuracy takes power: one man?s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator* *Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from a gentleman who has created the Super Nintendo emulator **bsnes**. He wants to share his thoughts on the most important part of the emulation experience: accuracy.* http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/1/ -- Sent from my phone - please pardon brevity & typos. From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 07:38:05 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:38:05 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 20 July 2016 at 21:29, Paul Koning wrote: > I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in low power (especially power per MHz of clock speed). Interestingly enough, StrongARM was one of the few (and the first?) independent designs; it used the ARM architecture specification but not the actual logic design as others did. Hmm. That wasn't my impression at the time, no. The big deal with StrongARM was that it had a dramatically increased speed -- whereas Acorn ARMs ran from 8MHz in my original Archimedes A305 to 12MHz for the first SoC ones (A3010 with ARM 250) to 25MHz for the ARM3-powered A5000, Digital's first StrongARM ran at 100-200MHz. To keep the core fed with data at this ridiculous speed, it had onboard L1 instruction & data caches. http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/decs-40-years-of-innovation/10/ https://www.netogram.com/strongarmprocessor.htm Original PR: http://www.cpushack.com/CIC/embed/announce/DigitalStrongARMIntro.html Self-modifying code could write back to and thus run from the cache before it was propagated to the main RAM, which meant that some RISC OS code had to be rewritten. E.g. http://www.riscos.com/ftp_space/370/index.htm The "Kinetic" StrongARM upgrade for the RISC PC therefore had RAM on the CPU daughterboard, as the motherboard RAM was not even close to fast enough. http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Kinetic So at least in the marketing to the Acorn user community, no, power draw wasn't even mentioned. It never came up. The original ARMs were low-power, and so was StrongARM. StrongARM wasn't a big win for the Newton, inasmuch as the Original MessagePad (OMP) had an ARM610 in it. The Newton 2000 was the first model with a StrongARM but it was merely an upgraded CPU for the newer hardware. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From pete at dunnington.plus.com Thu Jul 21 08:24:37 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:24:37 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> On 21/07/2016 13:38, Liam Proven wrote: > On 20 July 2016 at 21:29, Paul Koning > wrote: >> I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression >> that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in >> low power > Hmm. That wasn't my impression at the time, no. > > The big deal with StrongARM was that it had a dramatically increased > speed -- whereas Acorn ARMs ran from 8MHz in my original Archimedes > A305 to 12MHz for the first SoC ones (A3010 with ARM 250) to 25MHz > for the ARM3-powered A5000, Digital's first StrongARM ran at > 100-200MHz. To keep the core fed with data at this ridiculous speed, > it had onboard L1 instruction & data caches. > So at least in the marketing to the Acorn user community, no, power > draw wasn't even mentioned. It never came up. The original ARMs were > low-power, and so was StrongARM. Yes and no. StrongARM was even lower power as well as faster. If you're suggesting that that's just evolution due to things like reduced process size, I possibly agree. But a StrongARM has many times as many transistors as an ARM3 (for example) let alone an ARM2, and initially ran 3 times as fast (100MHz vs 33MHz - the earliest ARM3s were 20MHz, but production runs were 25MHz and later 33MHz, and eventually SA-110 ran to over 200MHz) yet uses less power. I don't have the data sheets for ARM6 and ARM7 so I can't compare, though. As for the marketing, I recently came across an Acorn press release announcing ARM, in which Sam Wauchope (CEO) was quoted saying it delivered 100MIPS per watt, so power was indeed a selling point. I worked for Sam at the time[1], so I remember that. OK that's for one of the Acorn ARM chips, not StrongARM, but the point is still made. Not all the marketing was directed at the Acorn community. [1] and I still have my Archimedes A310 Serial No. 0000002 (and the box with all the bits and pieces :-)) as well as my A410 and R260, both from the first batches. I wish I'd kept an A500, though. All I have now is the podule to connect it to a Beeb. Anybody got the machine to put it in? -- Pete Pete Turnbull From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 09:12:10 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:12:10 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: On 21 July 2016 at 15:24, Pete Turnbull wrote: > > Yes and no. StrongARM was even lower power as well as faster. If you're > suggesting that that's just evolution due to things like reduced process > size, I possibly agree. But a StrongARM has many times as many transistors > as an ARM3 (for example) let alone an ARM2, and initially ran 3 times as > fast (100MHz vs 33MHz - the earliest ARM3s were 20MHz, but production runs > were 25MHz and later 33MHz, and eventually SA-110 ran to over 200MHz) yet > uses less power. I don't have the data sheets for ARM6 and ARM7 so I can't > compare, though. OK. I think the first announced StrongARM, the SA110, was announced as running at 100, 133 and 200, mind you. But the point about transistor count is well made. For the casual, it was displayed by the packaging. The SA110 came in a plastic QFP, and it came from the same company and around the same time as the Alpha, with threaded shanks on the packaging for screwing a heatsink into place. Spoke volumes. :-) > As for the marketing, I recently came across an Acorn press release > announcing ARM, in which Sam Wauchope (CEO) was quoted saying it delivered > 100MIPS per watt, so power was indeed a selling point. I worked for Sam at > the time[1], so I remember that. OK that's for one of the Acorn ARM chips, > not StrongARM, but the point is still made. Not all the marketing was > directed at the Acorn community. Fair dos! > [1] and I still have my Archimedes A310 Serial No. 0000002 (and the box with > all the bits and pieces :-)) as well as my A410 and R260, both from the > first batches. I wish I'd kept an A500, though. All I have now is the > podule to connect it to a Beeb. Anybody got the machine to put it in? I have an A5000, near-new in box. But it's not been removed for about 15y and I've no idea what working condition it's in. I could post it to you when I'm next in the UK -- probably early next month. If you're interested, make drop me a line off-list. It's in my storage unit in South Wimbledon, where I have no power or anything, so I can't plausibly get it out and test it. I am planning to move the rest of my stuff here to Czechia next month, mainly for cost reasons due to the falling GBP. If you wished you could come and meet me and inspect it in person? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From paulkoning at comcast.net Thu Jul 21 09:20:48 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 10:20:48 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <7BD6E130-81C7-4B30-9D94-0C30A3960772@comcast.net> > On Jul 21, 2016, at 8:38 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > > On 20 July 2016 at 21:29, Paul Koning wrote: >> I don't remember the earlier ARM designs, but it was my impression that DEC's StrongARM was the one that made really large strides in low power (especially power per MHz of clock speed). Interestingly enough, StrongARM was one of the few (and the first?) independent designs; it used the ARM architecture specification but not the actual logic design as others did. > > Hmm. That wasn't my impression at the time, no. > > ... > So at least in the marketing to the Acorn user community, no, power > draw wasn't even mentioned. It never came up. The original ARMs were > low-power, and so was StrongARM. Remember that the marketing in question was DEC marketing, well known for its utter ineptitude. That had its origin in Ken Olsen's belief that marketing wasn't really needed (and, for that matter, that sales people didn't need to be paid commission). I very definitely remember discussions at the time about the unprecedented power/bandwidth value delivered by the SA110. "One mW per MIPS" is one phrase that I remember from that time. paul From lars at nocrew.org Thu Jul 21 09:45:24 2016 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:45:24 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> (Peter Corlett's message of "Tue, 19 Jul 2016 17:04:11 +0200") References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Peter Corlett writes: > IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and > the real innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, > it'd be just a 32 bit wide 6502 knockoff. I have both the ARM and the 6502 instruction sets very fresh in my mind right now. I don't see how the ARM could be a 6502 knockoff, even without that sauce. Care to explain in more detail? From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 21 10:08:49 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:08:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: MS11-P FMPS missing page Message-ID: <20160721150849.9B27D18C0A5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> So the online set of MS11-P Field Maintainence prints is missing page 3 of the prints (data drivers page). Does anyone have an original hard-copy, and can supply a scan of the missing page? Thanks (in advance, and hopefully :-). Noel From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 10:20:53 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:20:53 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On 21 July 2016 at 16:45, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > I have both the ARM and the 6502 instruction sets very fresh in my mind > right now. I don't see how the ARM could be a 6502 knockoff, even > without that sauce. Care to explain in more detail? This is a matter of historical record, AIUI. http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=1892 There's a little more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ In essence, Wilson designed it and Furber implemented it. Wilson knew 6502 inside-out and had been designing 6502 systems while still a student, before Acorn existed, so it inspired the ARM ISA, rather than ARM actually being based on it. 6502 is widely held as being, if not actually RISC, then at least RISC-like, or as Brits put it, RISCy. http://everything2.com/title/6502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703717 -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 21 11:28:53 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:28:53 -0700 Subject: MS11-P FMPS missing page In-Reply-To: <20160721150849.9B27D18C0A5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160721150849.9B27D18C0A5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <090e9195-f29a-11a7-16ce-818322516344@bitsavers.org> I should have access to an original (somewhere..) There are also some scans that have come in over the past couple of months I can check On 7/21/16 8:08 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > So the online set of MS11-P Field Maintainence prints is missing page 3 of the > prints (data drivers page). Does anyone have an original hard-copy, and can > supply a scan of the missing page? Thanks (in advance, and hopefully :-). > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 21 11:27:53 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 12:27:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info Message-ID: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> So I'm trying to work out how the PDP-11/24 memory works - in particular, how the memory slots in the backplane can also support SPC devices. Chapter 5 of the -11/24 Technical Manual does not help - irritatingly! It spends a lot of time talking about the CPU's memory mapping (well documented elsewhere), and little on these blasted busses! Alas, there seems to be no KT-24 prints online (although the tech manual makes reference to various pages in it); prints of the backplane would also be really useful, but again, don't seem to be in what is online. Does anyone have either one? Failing that, I guess it will require getting ahold of a backplane, and seeing what I can find out with an ohm-meter. In general, I am not absolutely positive about how the UNIBUS and the Extended UNIBUS manage to co-exist on the backplane (although I think I have worked it out - see below). The tech manual acts as if the KT-24 acts as an intermediary between the two... which is fine, except that how are the both carried on the backplane, separately, but at the same time? When there _is_ a KT-24 (the system can work without one - more below on this), how is the EUB (which is just the UNIBUS plus a couple of extra address lines) separated from the UB? The way the UNIBUS mapping registers work, the EUB address for any given cycle can vary from the UB address by an arbitrary amount, so lower address bits can't be shared between the two busses. (Because address bit X might have to simultaneously be '0' for one bus, and '1' for the other.) I.e. the two busses can't somehow mostly share the same pins, through some kludge... It appears likely that somehow the UNIBUS is on connectors C-F (i.e. where it normally is on SPC slots), and the EUB is on the A-B connectors (as in MUD slots) - and the two are not connected together. (Note that on the 11/24 backplane, 4 slots are marked "SPC/Mem", and two "SPC/MUD", which supports this theory; the 4 slots would have the EUB and the UB not connected together - as they would be in a normal MUD/SPC slot.) Looking at the CPU prints (which _are_ available), it appears to confirm this theory; the 22-bit EUB address bus is carried on the MUD/EUB address lines (connectors A/B), and the 18-bit UNIBUS addresses are carried on the SPC address pins (connector E). Dollars to donuts those pins are carried across slots 1-6, and not intereconnected vertically (I have yet to verify that, either with the backplane prints, or with an ohm-meter, but I would put a very large bet on it.) Oddly enough, the CPU uses the UNIBUS SPC data pins (connector C), instead of the MUD ones (connector A). The thing is that EUB memory boards (e.g. MM11-M - the relevant page of the MS11-P prints are missing from the online set, alas) pick up the MUD pins for data. So the backplane must connect together the SPC data pins and the MUD data pins. The system can apparently also work _without_ a KT-24! Which raises the question 'how do DMA devices get to the memory when there's no KT-24'? >From looking at the CPU prints, (pg. K11) it _looks_ like the UNIBUS is automagically mapped through to the EUB when there's no KT24 (there's a pin which is apparently pulled low by the KT-24); the low (256-8=248) KB of UNIBUS address space is mapped straight across to low address space on the EUB memory bus. With no KT24 in, a standard EUB memory can go in 2. Slot 2 is special, though; the KT24 needs not just the UNIBUS lines, and EUB address lines (to map from one to the other); it also has some special interconnects with the CPU, e.g. that 'UNIBUS adapter present' line. Guess I should document all this in the Computer History Wiki, but those prints (KT-24, and -11/24 backplane) would still be useful. Noel From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Thu Jul 21 11:27:14 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:27:14 +0000 Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info In-Reply-To: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: > So I'm trying to work out how the PDP-11/24 memory works - in particular, how > the memory slots in the backplane can also support SPC devices. > > Chapter 5 of the -11/24 Technical Manual does not help - irritatingly! It > spends a lot of time talking about the CPU's memory mapping (well documented > elsewhere), and little on these blasted busses! If it's anything like the 11/44 (which I have, and which also has 22 bit memory addressing), the memory bus is carried on the A and B connectors, the peripheral bus on the C,D,E,F connectors. -tony From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 21 11:56:38 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:56:38 -0700 Subject: MS11-P FMPS missing page In-Reply-To: <090e9195-f29a-11a7-16ce-818322516344@bitsavers.org> References: <20160721150849.9B27D18C0A5@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <090e9195-f29a-11a7-16ce-818322516344@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <86f05987-4281-a005-419d-7bb438988837@bitsavers.org> On 7/21/16 9:28 AM, Al Kossow wrote: > There are also some scans that have come in over the past couple of months I can check > It's there, I'll upload it now and the mirrors should have it in two hours From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 21 12:00:47 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 13:00:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: MS11-P FMPS missing page Message-ID: <20160721170047.7F9B418C0B2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Al Kossow > It's there, I'll upload it now Great; thanks! Noel From ethan at 757.org Thu Jul 21 12:02:53 2016 From: ethan at 757.org (ethan at 757.org) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 13:02:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now)) In-Reply-To: References: <1004d0.4bb9c9fe.44bf4650@aol.com> <201607191653.MAA10236@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: > The only ones worth using that I'm aware of are Scream Tracker and Impulse > Tracker and neither was around in the 16 bit ISA days pre-386, IIRC. I > doubt Scream Tracker would be able to function on a 286 anyhow. It puts a > 486DX2/66 at about 50% CPU load, from my recollection. The Amiga trackers > were more efficient, but you got fewer channels, too. OctaMED was > 8-channel and that seemed massive until it wasn't. IT was VGA but I think Scream Tracker was a 50 line text mode or something. I guess it depends if Scream Tracker used protected mode. Hmm intarnet says 386s were out during 1990 which was the year the more popular Scream Tracker was released. I swear my friend was playing coma.s3m on his Northgate 286-16 via PC Speaker.... > Several made it there over the years. I can't remember which ones, but I > do remember one day I was listening to Nectarine Radio and heard one of my > own Protracker MODs. That was awesome. Awesome! > Ahhh, those air-car-mounted-on-hydraulics "ride" thingys? Huh. Laser disc > was always a cool thing, too. Remember "Time Traveler" ? That > "holographic" (it wasn't really but it looked damn cool) game were the > characters appeared in front of some kind of curved mirror volumetric > display uhm, thingamabob? It used a Laserdisc too. Of course I loved Space > Ace and Dragons Lair along with every other self-respecting geek, too. > Also, my favorite was called "Thayer's Quest" in which you were a wizard's > apprentice. Yes. There is an arcade in Chicago called Galloping Ghost which has both of the Sega holographic machines, and some of the laserdisc games like Space Ace and Dragons Lair. In the arcade world, due to the unreliability of the laserdisc players often used in games like Dragons Lair (it uses a real HeNe laser tube!) it's okay for people to move them to the MS-DOS Daphne replacement system and such. Normally MAME/emulation is frowned upon by collectors but the LD games get an okay. The way they work is amusing, the game board drives the LED score and just watches for joystick directions and sends the chapter skip commands via RS-232 or RS-422 to the serial port equipped commercial LD player in the cabinet. Pretty simple but legendary. > Most commercial real estate weasels think you are the next "sucker" coming > through the door. They seem to believe that some old crufty warehouse > that's been empty for a decade is actually worth the ridiculous rents they > charge. You'd think it'd be better to have the buildings occupied and > someone giving you a bit or two to cover the property taxes, but they > still don't seem to see their clients as anything more than walking cash > registers. It's definitely a hard slog to find a screaming deal on space. > All the hacker-spaces here in big-D have lots of folks pitching in to make > ends meet. The first one here with an Ethan-style laser arcade will > definitely get my membership dues. Hah awesome! > Then there is the problem that nobody but old dudes remember how fun/cool > arcades could be, back in a time when they looked a lot more like > nightclubs. I remember them so crowded you had to go out for some fresh > air. Flynn's Arcade may never live again, but it's still a paradigm of > cool in my mind. Then again, I'm probably too old now to adjudicate "cool" > for anyone. If you do open an laser-illuminated LED-walled arcade, let us > all know so we can put you on the cctalk road-trip map. We'll rent a bus > in Seattle, and drive to your place (or visa versa). I nominate Fred to > run the logistics. I'll drive. :-P I help with an event each year called MAGFest which is currently in the DC area. We had 278 arcade cabinets in the arcade room and a decent deployment of classic computers in the museum. The attendance is 20,000 people or so -- it's a large event. Much of it is video game music related, and there is a ton of history and classic computer tie ins there. All the synth chips all the machines. The event is an insane amount of work though, I think it was 14 26' penske trucks some of which made 3 trips full of arcade cabinets, and the computer museum stuff occupied 2/3rds of a truck and was all owned by 3 people (just their personal stash.) No big metal mostly plastic micros but it's all hands on. There is a big arcade event in Seattle / Tacoma that has 450+ games, and there is CAX in California which just happened that has a large collection. They have a lot more people with lower numbers of games from what I understand where MAGFest has a handful of collectors with very large collections. There is definitely interest in the retro computer stuff growing outside of the age group the reminisces about it. There is also some cross over I think between the arcade and classic computer (plastic micro) crowd. -- Ethan O'Toole From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Thu Jul 21 12:11:26 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 13:11:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info Message-ID: <20160721171126.C23FA18C0B2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Tony Duell > If it's anything like the 11/44 ... the memory bus is carried on the A > and B connectors, the peripheral bus on the C,D,E,F connectors. I have yet to totally grok the -11/44, but the documentation indicates the slots for memory are memory only (i.e. EUB on the A/B connectors). Are you saying they are also SPC on the C/F connectors? (If so, ever tried plugging an SPC device into a 'memory' slot? :-) If so, that would make it very similar to the -11/24, then - although does it also have the thing where the data lines are connected from the EUB (connector A) to the SPC UNIBUS (connector C)? The CPU prints show data from the CPU going to connector A, unlike the -11/24, which sends data to C - although if the backplane has the EUB and SPC data busses connected, it would all be the same in the end. Noel From ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk Thu Jul 21 12:37:26 2016 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (tony duell) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:37:26 +0000 Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info In-Reply-To: <20160721171126.C23FA18C0B2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160721171126.C23FA18C0B2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: > > If it's anything like the 11/44 ... the memory bus is carried on the A > > and B connectors, the peripheral bus on the C,D,E,F connectors. > I have yet to totally grok the -11/44, but the documentation indicates the > slots for memory are memory only (i.e. EUB on the A/B connectors). Are you > saying they are also SPC on the C/F connectors? (If so, ever tried plugging an > SPC device into a 'memory' slot? :-) I thought there were the SPC signals on at least some of the memory slots, but I can't find the module allocation diagram right now. > If so, that would make it very similar to the -11/24, then - although does it > also have the thing where the data lines are connected from the EUB (connector > A) to the SPC UNIBUS (connector C)? The CPU prints show data from the CPU I would think so. The memory management circuitry and Unibus Map affect the address lines. There is one 16 bit data bus for memory and peripherals in these machines I think. -tony From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 13:00:06 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:00:06 -0400 Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info In-Reply-To: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > Alas, there seems to be no KT-24 prints online I have an 11/24 with KT-24. I bought the KT-24 and maybe some RAM from Terry Kennedy long, long ago (1986?) so I could stuff more than 256K in my machine and run 2BSD on it. I was successful more or less, but lack of disks over 10MB (RL02) made things less than pleasant. It is very likely I have the prints for the KT-24. I might have even see it this month. I will be back over there next week and will look in that stack. It sounds like the sort of thing that ought to be widely available. -ethan From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 21 13:38:21 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:38:21 -0700 Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info In-Reply-To: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160721162753.F07FE18C0AB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <21c3363b-66a0-b716-b5d7-75b6a5ba672b@bitsavers.org> I'm ul'ing it now On 7/21/16 9:27 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > Alas, there seems to be no KT-24 prints online From abuse at cabal.org.uk Thu Jul 21 15:22:37 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:22:37 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 09:02:41PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > On 19 July 2016 at 17:04, Peter Corlett wrote: [...] >> RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. > Could you expand on that, please? I think that IKWYM but I'm not sure. A load-store architecture is one where the ALU only operates on registers. The name comes from having separate instructions to load registers from memory, and store them to memory. The converse is register-memory, where ALU instructions can work directly on memory. However, this means that the instructions have to do quite a lot of work because now data has to be brought in from memory to an anonymous register to be worked on and then stored back to the same location. This also results in a proliferation of instruction and addressing mode combinations. Sounds rather CISCy, doesn't it? Meanwhile, a load-store architecture would have to decompose that into simpler independent load, operate, store instructions. Hey presto, RISC! [...] >> IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the >> real innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be >> just a 32 bit wide 6502 knockoff. > Do tell...? You've already answered the "6502 knockoff" elsethread, so I assume you're asking about the predicated instructions. A predicated instruction is one that does or does not execute based on some condition. CISC machines generally use condition codes (aka flags), and only have predicated branch instructions. Branch-not-equal, that kind of things. In ARM, *all* instructions can be predicated. Because instructions are 32 bits wide, it has the luxury of allocating four bits to select from one of 16 possible predicates based on the CPU flags. One predicate is "always" so one can also unconditionally execute instructions. An occasionally forgotten feature is that ALU operations also have a S-bit to indicate whether they should update the flags based on the result, or leave them alone. Between these, a conditional branch over a handful of instructions can be replaced by making those instructions predicated, and the S bit set to not update the flags. Not only has the conditional branch been deleted completely from the instruction stream which makes code noticably more compact, but there's now no branch-induced pipeline stall. Specila sauce. Unsurprisingly, x86 eventually noticed this sort of thing is useful and pinched the idea, but did it in the usual half-arsed fashion that it is famous for. From ryan at hack.net Thu Jul 21 15:32:39 2016 From: ryan at hack.net (Ryan K. Brooks) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 15:32:39 -0500 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <16921198-a038-3296-98b0-eb3cd89dc74c@hack.net> > In ARM, *all* instructions can be predicated. Until recently. From paulkoning at comcast.net Thu Jul 21 15:33:16 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:33:16 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <59E8D6BE-1B49-40FC-927E-EDB3CE88201F@comcast.net> > On Jul 21, 2016, at 4:22 PM, Peter Corlett wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 09:02:41PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: >> On 19 July 2016 at 17:04, Peter Corlett wrote: > [...] >>> RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. >> Could you expand on that, please? I think that IKWYM but I'm not sure. > > A load-store architecture is one where the ALU only operates on registers. The > name comes from having separate instructions to load registers from memory, and > store them to memory. > > The converse is register-memory, where ALU instructions can work directly on > memory. However, this means that the instructions have to do quite a lot of > work because now data has to be brought in from memory to an anonymous register > to be worked on and then stored back to the same location. This also results in > a proliferation of instruction and addressing mode combinations. Sounds rather > CISCy, doesn't it? > > Meanwhile, a load-store architecture would have to decompose that into simpler > independent load, operate, store instructions. Hey presto, RISC! I would point out that RISC is not a goal in itself. Instead, the reason RISC is interesting is that -- at least at some point in the evolution of technology -- it was an architecture approach that results in more cost effective computers. That is, faster for the same money or less expensive for a given speed. It's easy to be led to the equivalence "register-memory instructions" == "complex instructions". If you're most familiar with Intel x86, or even saner architectures like VAX (which have memory to memory instructions, with a pile of addressing modes), that seems plausible. But, for example, the PDP-8 has register-memory instructions but it has a very simple instruction set and can be implemented in a tiny amount of logic. Similarly, register-memory instruction sets were used in many older architectures, and clearly were easy to do -- if your logic is tubes, you're not likely to implement large execution units! Even machines like the CDC 6000 peripheral processors, which have a pile of extra logic for controlling the CPU and surprising features like a barrel shifter, take only a few thousand gates. paul From paulkoning at comcast.net Thu Jul 21 15:36:57 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:36:57 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: > On Jul 21, 2016, at 4:22 PM, Peter Corlett wrote: > > ... > A predicated instruction is one that does or does not execute based on some > condition. CISC machines generally use condition codes (aka flags), and only > have predicated branch instructions. Branch-not-equal, that kind of things. > > In ARM, *all* instructions can be predicated. Because instructions are 32 bits > wide, it has the luxury of allocating four bits to select from one of 16 > possible predicates based on the CPU flags. One predicate is "always" so one > can also unconditionally execute instructions. > > An occasionally forgotten feature is that ALU operations also have a S-bit to > indicate whether they should update the flags based on the result, or leave > them alone. I didn't realize that. This feature makes it more like the Electrologica machines, which invented this approach back in 1958. paul From lars at nocrew.org Thu Jul 21 15:39:22 2016 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:39:22 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: (Liam Proven's message of "Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:20:53 +0200") References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <86oa5qk9ol.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Liam Proven writes: > On 21 July 2016 at 16:45, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: >> I have both the ARM and the 6502 instruction sets very fresh in my mind >> right now. I don't see how the ARM could be a 6502 knockoff, even >> without that sauce. Care to explain in more detail? > > This is a matter of historical record, AIUI. > http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?t=1892 I know it's a widely circulated claim, but I haven't seen much evidence for it. The link you posted above says "Sophie maintains that "inspired by" isn't the right choice of words." In which case I suppose "knockoff" is even less right. I'm just genuinely curious exactly which features of the 6502 and ARM instruction sets people think are so alike? Please, name specific details! From cctalk at snarc.net Thu Jul 21 15:42:36 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:42:36 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction Message-ID: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> Possibly the rarest Apple 1 ever is up for auction. The seller is working through CharityBuzz, which will display the computer at VCF West next month. CB's auction site: http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ MacRumors covered it: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/21/charitybuzz-auctioning-unique-celebration-apple-1/ From pete at dunnington.plus.com Thu Jul 21 16:26:22 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:26:22 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> On 21/07/2016 15:12, Liam Proven wrote: > On 21 July 2016 at 15:24, Pete Turnbull wrote: >> >>But a StrongARM [ ... ] initially ran 3 times as >> fast [ ... ] and eventually SA-110 ran to over 200MHz) yet >> uses less power. > OK. I think the first announced StrongARM, the SA110, was announced as > running at 100, 133 and 200, mind you. Um, isn't that pretty much what I wrote? I'm pretty sure the first batch(es) weren't rated for the full 200. > But the point about transistor count is well made. For the casual, it > was displayed by the packaging. The SA110 came in a plastic QFP, and > it came from the same company and around the same time as the Alpha, > with threaded shanks on the packaging for screwing a heatsink into > place. Spoke volumes. :-) Hmm. Never seen one like that. None of the ones I've seen in real life are PQFPs, and none have a heatsink. They're all plastic pin grid array packages. No heatsink at all. Nor does the datasheet for the PQFP show anything related to a heatsink. It also shows a PLCC version; no heatsink there either, and again I've never seen one. Maybe that's just because I normally only saw them in Acorn machines, of course. >> I wish I'd kept an A500, though. All I have now is the >> podule to connect it to a Beeb. Anybody got the machine to put it in? > > I have an A5000, near-new in box. But it's not been removed for about > 15y and I've no idea what working condition it's in. I could post it > to you when I'm next in the UK -- probably early next month. If you're > interested, make drop me a line off-list. It's in my storage unit in > South Wimbledon, where I have no power or anything, so I can't > plausibly get it out and test it. > > I am planning to move the rest of my stuff here to Czechia next month, > mainly for cost reasons due to the falling GBP. If you wished you > could come and meet me and inspect it in person? There's a thought. I'd be up for that, though it's not actually an A5000 I meant; the A500 was the development system - looks rather like an A310 but without the fancy front bezel, and painted blue/grey. There were only a few made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule to connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the later stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to software developers. -- Pete From pb at pbcl.net Thu Jul 21 17:36:58 2016 From: pb at pbcl.net (Phil Blundell) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 23:36:58 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <1469140618.2228.113.camel@pbcl.net> On Thu, 2016-07-21 at 17:20 +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > On 21 July 2016 at 16:45, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > > I have both the ARM and the 6502 instruction sets very fresh in my mind > > right now. I don't see how the ARM could be a 6502 knockoff, even > > without that sauce. Care to explain in more detail? > This is a matter of historical record, AIUI. It's certainly an often-repeated claim but I don't think that necessarily makes it true. Clearly yes, Acorn had done a lot of work with the 6502 previously, the original ARM architects were obviously familiar with its instruction set, and there are some similarities in terminology and conventional assembler mnemonics/syntax between the two. But in terms of the actual structure of the instruction set it's hard to see all that much that they really have in common. 6502 is a three-register machine with variable-length instructions that require varying numbers of cycles to complete, complex and not entirely orthogonal addressing modes (indirect addressing works differently for X and Y), arithmetic instructions that operate on memory directly (INC &1234), global flags which change the behaviour of instructions ("decimal" mode), dedicated instructions for stack manipulation, no direct ALU access to the program counter or stack pointer, and no predication other than on branches. ARM was, in its original incarnation at least, a 16-register machine (of which 2 registers are architecturally special) with fixed-length instructions, almost-entirely orthogonal addressing modes, memory access restricted to dedicated load/store instructions, support for direct ALU operation on the program counter (albeit with slightly weird semantics due to early implementation decisions), no specific architecturally-defined stack, and explicit predication on every instruction, again orthogonal to the operation itself (even to the point of reserving 268 million of the possible instruction patterns for "never execute" instructions that were effectively NOPs). So it's certainly not a trivial derivative or imitation of the 6502 in the way that "knockoff" might imply, and even without the predication the architectures would still be quite different. Obviously though the ARM architecture has evolved somewhat over the past three decades and not all the points above are still true of the latest versions. FWIW there are now at least a few 32-bit CPU designs floating around that really are stretched 6502s, usually including binary compatibility with old 8-bit programs, and could legitimately be called "knock-offs". p. From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 18:03:09 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 01:03:09 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 21 July 2016 at 22:22, Peter Corlett wrote: > On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 09:02:41PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: >> On 19 July 2016 at 17:04, Peter Corlett wrote: > [...] >>> RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant. >> Could you expand on that, please? I think that IKWYM but I'm not sure. > > A load-store architecture is one where the ALU only operates on registers. The > name comes from having separate instructions to load registers from memory, and > store them to memory. > > The converse is register-memory, where ALU instructions can work directly on > memory. However, this means that the instructions have to do quite a lot of > work because now data has to be brought in from memory to an anonymous register > to be worked on and then stored back to the same location. This also results in > a proliferation of instruction and addressing mode combinations. Sounds rather > CISCy, doesn't it? > > Meanwhile, a load-store architecture would have to decompose that into simpler > independent load, operate, store instructions. Hey presto, RISC! Thanks for that. It confirms, in a considerably clearer way, what I had a dim apprehension of. But load/store automatically RISC? Aren't there non-RISC load/store processors, and indeed, RISC non-load/store ones? > [...] >>> IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the >>> real innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be >>> just a 32 bit wide 6502 knockoff. >> Do tell...? > > You've already answered the "6502 knockoff" elsethread, so I assume you're > asking about the predicated instructions. > > A predicated instruction is one that does or does not execute based on some > condition. CISC machines generally use condition codes (aka flags), and only > have predicated branch instructions. Branch-not-equal, that kind of things. > > In ARM, *all* instructions can be predicated. Because instructions are 32 bits > wide, it has the luxury of allocating four bits to select from one of 16 > possible predicates based on the CPU flags. One predicate is "always" so one > can also unconditionally execute instructions. Aha. Interesting. This I did not know. If I understand it correctly, this caused considerable problems for the RISC OS people later. The original Acorn ARM machines used 26 bits of the program counter as the PC, and the rest as flags. Later ARM chips do not support this mode, and the OS had to be partially rewritten for ARMs with a true 32-bit PC -- breaking binary compatibility with 26-bit code. I'm not sure this is the same phenomenon you're describing. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 21 18:07:41 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 01:07:41 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: On 21 July 2016 at 23:26, Pete Turnbull wrote: > Um, isn't that pretty much what I wrote? I'm pretty sure the first > batch(es) weren't rated for the full 200. I don't know; I'm basing this comment mainly on Wikipedia. > > Hmm. Never seen one like that. None of the ones I've seen in real life are > PQFPs, and none have a heatsink. Perhaps you misread my message. My point was that DEC's own Alpha RISC CPU was so dependent on good cooling that the actual chip package included bolts to screw a heatsink on. In comparison, StrongARM, a DEC chip based on a licensed-in ISA, needed so little cooling it shipped in a plastic package. No need for ceramics here. > They're all plastic pin grid array > packages. No heatsink at all. Nor does the datasheet for the PQFP show > anything related to a heatsink. It also shows a PLCC version; no heatsink > there either, and again I've never seen one. Maybe that's just because I > normally only saw them in Acorn machines, of course. You seem to misunderstand my remark about heatsinks. It is also possible that I am misusing the term "PQFP" but I have attempted to confirm it with Google image searches and I think it's what I meant. PQFP: https://www.google.com/search?q=pqfp&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjSy5jp04XOAhUCsxQKHdGLBZIQ_AUICCgB&biw=1650&bih=985 StrongARM SA110: https://www.google.com/search?q=strongarm+sa110&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiT-Mbv04XOAhXB1hQKHUb4CxQQ_AUICSgC&biw=1650&bih=985 Is that not a PQFP chip? A flat plastic package with pins on all 4 sides? >>> I wish I'd kept an A500, though. All I have now is the >>> podule to connect it to a Beeb. Anybody got the machine to put it in? >> >> >> I have an A5000, near-new in box. But it's not been removed for about >> 15y and I've no idea what working condition it's in. I could post it >> to you when I'm next in the UK -- probably early next month. If you're >> interested, make drop me a line off-list. It's in my storage unit in >> South Wimbledon, where I have no power or anything, so I can't >> plausibly get it out and test it. >> >> I am planning to move the rest of my stuff here to Czechia next month, >> mainly for cost reasons due to the falling GBP. If you wished you >> could come and meet me and inspect it in person? > > > There's a thought. I'd be up for that, though it's not actually an A5000 I > meant; the A500 was the development system - looks rather like an A310 but > without the fancy front bezel, and painted blue/grey. Ah, sorry, that was my mistake! > There were only a few > made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule to > connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the later > stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to software > developers. This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk Thu Jul 21 18:33:10 2016 From: witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk (Adrian Graham) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:33:10 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 00:07, "Liam Proven" wrote: >> There were only a few >> made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule to >> connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the later >> stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to software >> developers. > > This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. Pretty sure I've got 2 of those, the keyboards are made of Dark Matter. I've never dared power one up though. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection? From paulkoning at comcast.net Thu Jul 21 18:56:23 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:56:23 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.c om> Message-ID: <79471282-E89C-4B82-BC1C-81D9AC8F66AC@comcast.net> > On Jul 21, 2016, at 7:07 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > > ... >> They're all plastic pin grid array >> packages. No heatsink at all. Nor does the datasheet for the PQFP show >> anything related to a heatsink. It also shows a PLCC version; no heatsink >> there either, and again I've never seen one. Maybe that's just because I >> normally only saw them in Acorn machines, of course. > > You seem to misunderstand my remark about heatsinks. > > It is also possible that I am misusing the term "PQFP" but I have > attempted to confirm it with Google image searches and I think it's > what I meant. > ... > Is that not a PQFP chip? A flat plastic package with pins on all 4 sides? PLCC and PQFP both are plastic packages with leads on all 4 sides. But PLCC specifically means a package with J-leads: the legs come out the package side, go straight down, and tuck under the package in a J-shaped curve. PQFP (and variations with similar acronyms) have "gull wing" leads: out the side, down to near the board, and then outward resting on the board. SA110 is definitely PQFP. Here's a PLCC for comparison: http://www.batronix.com/images/products/chips/PLCC32-500-330.jpg PLCCs have fairly limited lead counts; they were common for 44 lead packages, and perhaps a bit more. PQFP goes well over 100, especially in the "fine pitch" ones with lead pitch under 1 mm. (Pain in the *** to solder...) Beyond what those can do, or for extra small packaging, we get BGA -- ball grid array. paul From cclist at sydex.com Thu Jul 21 20:20:20 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 18:20:20 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <79471282-E89C-4B82-BC1C-81D9AC8F66AC@comcast.net> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.c om> <79471282-E89C-4B82-BC1C-81D9AC8F66AC@comcast.net> Message-ID: <406db67d-290f-14a0-6932-57200a6ead63@sydex.com> On 07/21/2016 04:56 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > PLCCs have fairly limited lead counts; they were common for 44 lead > packages, and perhaps a bit more. I"ve probably got more 68 pin PLCCs than anything else; I've got various ICs in 84 pin PLCC, including a some CPLDs and CPUs (e.g., 80C188EB). The convenient part is that sockets are available to provide a convenient 0.010" pin spacing by translating one row of pins to two and removal/insertion is simple. Probing for signals is likewise straightforward. After that you have to go to QFP/BGA (not terribly socket-able) or PGA. High pin-count packages are pretty large, however. --Chuck From js at cimmeri.com Thu Jul 21 20:46:28 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 20:46:28 -0500 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> Message-ID: <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> On 7/21/2016 3:42 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Possibly the rarest Apple 1 ever is up > for auction. > > The seller is working through > CharityBuzz, which will display the > computer at VCF West next month. > > CB's auction site: > http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ > > MacRumors covered it: > http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/21/charitybuzz-auctioning-unique-celebration-apple-1/ > The article doesn't appear to say, but does anyone know where this Apple came from? - J. From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Thu Jul 21 20:53:25 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:53:25 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 7/20/2016 10:42 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: > On 20/07/2016 16:44, Paul Koning wrote: > >> It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. >> Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many >> RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no >> problem for any competent assembly language programmer. > > Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for > MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all > inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but > it's not hard. But alas , they seem to change cache and pipeline with every cpu starting with 386. How can one write effective programs for large data memory access, with out this knowlage? Ben. From cctalk at snarc.net Thu Jul 21 21:26:14 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:26:14 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> Message-ID: <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> > The article doesn't appear to say, but does anyone know where this Apple > came from? Go to http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ and click "provenance". From teoz at neo.rr.com Thu Jul 21 21:54:34 2016 From: teoz at neo.rr.com (TeoZ) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:54:34 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> Message-ID: <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. -----Original Message----- From: Evan Koblentz Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 10:26 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction > The article doesn't appear to say, but does anyone know where this Apple > came from? Go to http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ and click "provenance". --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus From linimon at lonesome.com Thu Jul 21 22:09:18 2016 From: linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:09:18 -0500 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <20160717061414.GA3420@lonesome.com> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> <20160717061414.GA3420@lonesome.com> Message-ID: <20160722030917.GA17903@lonesome.com> I see that someone has picked it up via Buy It Now. No, it wasn't me. mcl From ggs at shiresoft.com Thu Jul 21 22:34:57 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 20:34:57 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 21, 2016, at 6:53 PM, ben wrote: > > On 7/20/2016 10:42 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: >> On 20/07/2016 16:44, Paul Koning wrote: >> >>> It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. >>> Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many >>> RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no >>> problem for any competent assembly language programmer. >> >> Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for >> MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all >> inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but >> it's not hard. > > But alas , they seem to change cache and pipeline with every cpu > starting with 386. How can one write effective programs for large > data memory access, with out this knowledge? You read the Intel Optimization Guide. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html TTFN - Guy From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Thu Jul 21 22:55:26 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 21:55:26 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 7/21/2016 9:34 PM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > >> On Jul 21, 2016, at 6:53 PM, ben wrote: >> >> On 7/20/2016 10:42 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: >>> On 20/07/2016 16:44, Paul Koning wrote: >>> >>>> It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. >>>> Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many >>>> RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no >>>> problem for any competent assembly language programmer. >>> >>> Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for >>> MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all >>> inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but >>> it's not hard. >> >> But alas , they seem to change cache and pipeline with every cpu >> starting with 386. How can one write effective programs for large >> data memory access, with out this knowledge? > > You read the Intel Optimization Guide. > > http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html > > TTFN - Guy A read and cuss item I see. Thank you, but it seems it is still big $$$ for good compiler to follow the ever changing rules. Ben. From ggs at shiresoft.com Thu Jul 21 23:02:43 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 21:02:43 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: <0BB877F0-99AD-479E-A079-BC119DE090AD@shiresoft.com> > On Jul 21, 2016, at 8:55 PM, ben wrote: > > On 7/21/2016 9:34 PM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: >> >>> On Jul 21, 2016, at 6:53 PM, ben wrote: >>> >>> On 7/20/2016 10:42 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: >>>> On 20/07/2016 16:44, Paul Koning wrote: >>>> >>>>> It is true that a few RISC architectures are not very scrutable. >>>>> Itanium is a notorious example, as are some VLIW machines. But many >>>>> RISC machines are much more sane. MIPS and ARM certainly are no >>>>> problem for any competent assembly language programmer. >>>> >>>> Indeed. I've written a modest amount of assembly language code for >>>> MIPS, and a bit more for ARM, and I didn't find either at all >>>> inscrutable. Yes, be aware of pipelining and branches and so on, but >>>> it's not hard. >>> >>> But alas , they seem to change cache and pipeline with every cpu >>> starting with 386. How can one write effective programs for large >>> data memory access, with out this knowledge? >> >> You read the Intel Optimization Guide. >> >> http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html >> >> TTFN - Guy > > A read and cuss item I see. Thank you, but it seems it is still big $$$ > for good compiler to follow the ever changing rules. And yet they do. Processors are getting more and more complex in order to deliver power/performance improvements. Larger caches with more ways, deeper/wider pipes, more execution slots, number of rename registers, etc. What do you expect? TNSTAAFL if you want to extract every last cycle of performance out of a particular uArch. The good news is that most of the time the uArch improvements work reasonably well with relatively non-specific optimizations. TTFN - Guy From jwsmail at jwsss.com Thu Jul 21 23:53:18 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 21:53:18 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel Message-ID: Is there anyone with documents on the Nova 3 front panel, and what drives it? It has some number of custom DG chips, which hopefully are good if I want to try to fire it up to play, but am interested in that on good authority there are 28v incandescent lamps. A friend has an Eclipse front panel with nearly identical bezel, which has LED's and a number of differences in the logic (different connector to the system, for instance). So it is probably all run on 5v. I have not had time to figure out the driver circuit for any of the lamps to see what that may turn up, and wanted to know whether it was 28v lamps before I buy 40 of them. (the thing has only 2 out of a lot of lamps). Thanks Jim From spectre at floodgap.com Fri Jul 22 01:23:34 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 23:23:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> from Peter Corlett at "Jul 21, 16 10:22:37 pm" Message-ID: <201607220623.u6M6NYsw15728696@floodgap.com> > An occasionally forgotten feature is that ALU operations also have a S-bit to > indicate whether they should update the flags based on the result, or leave > them alone. Power ISA also has this feature (the so-called "dot" instructions). It also has special forms of instructions for setting the overflow and carry flags, when appropriate. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "Garbage in -- gospel out" ------------------------------------------------- From lars at nocrew.org Fri Jul 22 01:34:41 2016 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:34:41 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: (Liam Proven's message of "Fri, 22 Jul 2016 01:03:09 +0200") References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Liam Proven writes: > Peter Corlett wrote: >> In ARM, *all* instructions can be predicated. Because instructions >> are 32 bits wide, it has the luxury of allocating four bits to select >> from one of 16 possible predicates based on the CPU flags. > > If I understand it correctly, this caused considerable problems for > the RISC OS people later. The original Acorn ARM machines used 26 bits > of the program counter as the PC, and the rest as flags. > > I'm not sure this is the same phenomenon you're describing. It's not. Peter is talking about a four-bit field in the instructions. You're talking about a six-bit field in the program counter. From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Fri Jul 22 02:25:29 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:25:29 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: jim stephens: Thursday, July 21, 2016 9:53 PM > I have not had time to figure out the driver circuit for any of the > lamps to see what that may turn up, and wanted to know whether it was > 28v lamps before I buy 40 of them. (the thing has only 2 out of a lot > of lamps). I mentioned http://www.foxdata.com/blog/tag/nova-312/ to you earlier, which suggested the 28V bulbs. I also found http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ledmod.html which makes it clear that the voltage is likely a fair bit over 12V. The DG Components guide only lists part numbers for the 28V bulbs, 24V bulbs, 5V, and 6V bulbs (at least that I found that fit with the wire base and the form factor). I think installing 28V bulbs in 24V circuits would be fine (they'd last longer). Alas, I have no authoritative information on the exact correct bulb. Vince From rdbrown0au at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 02:43:23 2016 From: rdbrown0au at gmail.com (Rodney Brown) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 17:43:23 +1000 Subject: HP Computer Museum in the (local) News Message-ID: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/vintage-computer-museum-revives-hp2116a-founder-dies/7638458 A keen mountaineer who died trekking in Tibet has left a rare computer collection behind as his legacy. Surrounded by bushland in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne is a wooden shed with barn doors. It closely resembles a shed in California where, in 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched the company that would become HP. The much larger Australian shed is home to the HP Computer Museum, filled with ageing computers, printers and calculators, most of which are a dull light grey. ... From jwsmail at jwsss.com Fri Jul 22 02:46:00 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:46:00 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> On 7/22/2016 12:25 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > From: jim stephens: Thursday, July 21, 2016 9:53 PM >> I have not had time to figure out the driver circuit for any of the >> lamps to see what that may turn up, and wanted to know whether it was >> 28v lamps before I buy 40 of them. (the thing has only 2 out of a >> lot of lamps). > > I mentioned http://www.foxdata.com/blog/tag/nova-312/ to you earlier, > which suggested the 28V bulbs. I also found > http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ledmod.html > which makes it clear that the voltage is likely a fair bit over 12V. > > The DG Components guide only lists part numbers for the 28V bulbs, 24V > bulbs, 5V, and 6V bulbs (at least that I found that fit with the wire > base and the form factor). I think installing 28V bulbs in 24V > circuits would be fine (they'd last longer). > > Alas, I have no authoritative information on the exact correct bulb. > That's not a problem. I was also interested in the info if I ever get around to using it for a simh front panel blink'n version. Unless a Nova 3 drops in my lap. (and still would want info). Thanks for the tips. I see that the foxdata site lamps don't appear quite as bright as the chookfest ones, which is interesting. I'm thinking now if I do anything it will be the LED route, so will evaluate that, as I agree opening the thing back up will suck. Jay did your DG stuff on the back dock move? just curious. PM if you like. thanks Jim > Vince > From cmhanson at eschatologist.net Fri Jul 22 02:47:40 2016 From: cmhanson at eschatologist.net (Chris Hanson) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:47:40 -0700 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <20160722030917.GA17903@lonesome.com> References: <000f01d1df0d$7ed45ab0$7c7d1010$@eastek.com.au> <578A464C.3000005@pico-systems.com> <20160717061414.GA3420@lonesome.com> <20160722030917.GA17903@lonesome.com> Message-ID: On Jul 21, 2016, at 8:09 PM, Mark Linimon wrote: > > I see that someone has picked it up via Buy It Now. No, > it wasn't me. I know the person who acquired it, who last I heard is seeking a good way to move and safely store it near its current site right now. If anyone has any suggestions, I can forward them along. -- Chris From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jul 22 03:26:14 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 09:26:14 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 00:07, Liam Proven wrote: > On 21 July 2016 at 23:26, Pete Turnbull >> Hmm. Never seen one like that. None of the ones I've seen in >> real life are PQFPs, and none have a heatsink. > > Perhaps you misread my message. Ah, I misunderstood. You wrote: > The SA110 came in a plastic QFP, and it came from the same company > and around the same time as the Alpha, with threaded shanks on the > packaging for screwing a heatsink into place. Spoke volumes. :-) I took that as "SA110 came in a plastic QFP, ..., with threaded shanks". I see that what you evidently meant was "the Alpha, which had threaded shanks". -- Pete Pete Turnbull From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jul 22 03:52:44 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 09:52:44 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 00:07, Liam Proven wrote: > On 21 July 2016 at 23:26, Pete Turnbull > wrote: >> There were only a few made. They were used internally during >> development - hence the podule to connect it to a Beeb, which >> provided the I/O early on - and in the later stages before the >> Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to software >> developers. > > This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. Indeed, the Personal Computer World August '87 article does mention he had an A500 on loan, though the photos are of an A310. They appear to me to be Acorn stock photos, which I remember being shot in June (IIRC) 1987. It seems he had an A310 by the time he wrote the article for Byte Vol.12 No.11, though. -- Pete Pete Turnbull From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jul 22 04:04:28 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:04:28 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 00:33, Adrian Graham wrote: > On 22/07/2016 00:07, "Liam Proven" wrote: > >>> There were only a few >>> made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule to >>> connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the later >>> stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to software >>> developers. >> >> This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. > > Pretty sure I've got 2 of those, the keyboards are made of Dark Matter. I've > never dared power one up though. If you have those, I would strongly recommend you arrange an offsite backup. Say, about 170 miles north via the A14/A1 :-) -- Pete Pete Turnbull From abuse at cabal.org.uk Fri Jul 22 04:24:20 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:24:20 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160720135625.0F30718C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <7B348D26-2158-4FA4-A97D-C10A6CC3808B@comcast.net> Message-ID: <20160722092420.GA20489@mooli.org.uk> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 09:55:26PM -0600, ben wrote: [...] > A read and cuss item I see. Thank you, but it seems it is still big $$$ for > good compiler to follow the ever changing rules. Eh? The LLVM backend generates excellent code for at least x86 and ARM, and is effectively BSD-licenced. From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 07:25:10 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:25:10 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> Message-ID: <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> The key to this board is the evidence it wasn't part of either of the two known production runs. It was assembled at a different time. corey cohen u??o? ???o? > On Jul 21, 2016, at 10:54 PM, TeoZ wrote: > > "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. > > -----Original Message----- From: Evan Koblentz > Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 10:26 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction > >> The article doesn't appear to say, but does anyone know where this Apple >> came from? > > Go to http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ and click "provenance". > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 07:25:10 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:25:10 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> Message-ID: <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> The key to this board is the evidence it wasn't part of either of the two known production runs. It was assembled at a different time. corey cohen u??o? ???o? > On Jul 21, 2016, at 10:54 PM, TeoZ wrote: > > "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. > > -----Original Message----- From: Evan Koblentz > Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 10:26 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction > >> The article doesn't appear to say, but does anyone know where this Apple >> came from? > > Go to http://apple1.charitybuzz.com/ and click "provenance". > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > From anders at abc80.net Fri Jul 22 08:44:28 2016 From: anders at abc80.net (Anders Sandahl) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 15:44:28 +0200 Subject: WANTED: PDP-8 KE8E Extended arithmetic element In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8c51f1c05744d5d7c09d20d79eb4a213.squirrel@www.sadata.se> >You used to be able to find a set with connector blocks for $200 to $300 >range on EBay. But I haven't seen any pop up for a couple of years now. > There are actually two individual board on eBay now, but the they are a bit expensive, ~$250 each. The freight change is about $200 to Sweden for each board (don't now if they combine chipping). I'll guess I have to pay for customs as well... >Keep an eye on machines. These options were found in the variants of E's >(F and M) and some A's. You might have to buy another machine in order to >get this option. > If I only could find one... >Remember that you are looking for what I would classify as a fairly rare >option on machines that are becoming rare now. There are not a lot of >these machines in service anymore. > >Good Luck! Thanks, I know that those things starts to get really rare. I could live with a broken set. /Anders From iamcamiel at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 10:24:37 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 17:24:37 +0200 Subject: Looking for HP 9810A keyboard springs Message-ID: Hi Guys, I've got an HP 9810A that has been stored in sub-optimal conditions by a previous owner; a lot of the keyboard springs have rusted away, so I'm looking for a replacement. These are about 15.5mm outer diameter, 0.35mm thick wire, about 10mm high when uncompressed, and have only about 1.5 turns of wire. Any pointers would be appreciated! Camiel. From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jul 22 06:15:50 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:15:50 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <79471282-E89C-4B82-BC1C-81D9AC8F66AC@comcast.net> References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.c om> <79471282-E89C-4B82-BC1C-81D9AC8F66AC@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 00:56, Paul Koning wrote: > PLCC and PQFP both are plastic packages with leads on all 4 sides. > But PLCC specifically means a package with J-leads: the legs come out > the package side, go straight down, and tuck under the package in a > J-shaped curve. PQFP (and variations with similar acronyms) have > "gull wing" leads: out the side, down to near the board, and then > outward resting on the board. > > SA110 is definitely PQFP. The StrongARM data sheet does actually show all three types: PLCC, PQFP, and PPGA. All of mine are PPGA. -- Pete From lproven at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 07:28:45 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 14:28:45 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <1a80fe83-8984-2ec3-5ee0-c07675449da0@dunnington.plus.com> <9d347dbc-7b58-3724-0692-bddf0d629405@dunnington.plus.com> Message-ID: On 22 July 2016 at 10:26, Pete Turnbull wrote: > I took that as "SA110 came in a plastic QFP, ..., with threaded shanks". > > I see that what you evidently meant was "the Alpha, which had threaded > shanks". Well, no, I meant to write exactly what I did write, drawing a comparison between the two. However, you have made me aware of the possible ambiguity in the sentence. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 22 09:24:11 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:24:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: >> "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the >> current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he >> got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: > The key to this board is the evidence it wasn't part of either of the > two known production runs. It was assembled at a different time. So, somebody, perhaps an Apple employee, walked off with a board and assembled it. The first gray/black market unauthorized Apple. Every company has a moment when they realize that they need to tighten up inventory control. From mattislind at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 09:35:35 2016 From: mattislind at gmail.com (Mattis Lind) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:35:35 +0200 Subject: How to open a SUN CDROM drive box? Message-ID: I am probably too stupid to not understand how to get into this box: http://i.imgur.com/7KXKP2l.jpg Before I break some parts of the old plastic I better ask... What is the procedure to open this up? The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive. /Mattis From ed at groenenberg.net Fri Jul 22 09:42:14 2016 From: ed at groenenberg.net (E. Groenenberg) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:42:14 +0200 (CEST) Subject: How to open a SUN CDROM drive box? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <61397.10.10.10.2.1469198534.squirrel@www.groenenberg.net> Mattis, Seen from the front, use a pencil or whatever fits in the holes and count 3 (or 2) holes from the back of each side and push it gently in. There is a notch on each side which locks the cover. Regards, Ed -- Ik email, dus ik besta. BTC : 1J5fajt8ptyZ2V1YURj3YJZhe5j3fJVSHN LTC : LP2WuEmYPbpWUBqMFGJfdm7pdHEW7fKvDz On Fri, July 22, 2016 16:35, Mattis Lind wrote: > I am probably too stupid to not understand how to get into this box: > > http://i.imgur.com/7KXKP2l.jpg > > Before I break some parts of the old plastic I better ask... > > What is the procedure to open this up? > > The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working > somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive. > > /Mattis > From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 09:58:44 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:58:44 -0400 Subject: How to open a SUN CDROM drive box? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 10:35 AM, Mattis Lind wrote: > I am probably too stupid to not understand how to get into this box: > > http://i.imgur.com/7KXKP2l.jpg > > Before I break some parts of the old plastic I better ask... > > What is the procedure to open this up? There are a couple of locking tabs on the sides in the back corner. You poke at them through the holes in the outer shell. They look decorative. Two of them are not. Once you depress one, lift lightly on that back corner and it should move up 1mm-2mm. Do the other corner and the back of the lid should tip up towards the front. It has some large plastic tabs on the front edge that act as a hinge, then it pops off, exposing the innards. > The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working > somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive. Could be a lot of things, but a new drive would probably solve most problems. It also depends if the problems are on the SCSI side (won't respond, is at wrong unit number, etc.) or the optical side (can't read any media) or in between (can't eject caddy...) -ethan From jwest at classiccmp.org Fri Jul 22 10:00:59 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:00:59 -0500 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <000f01d1e429$dbaa7af0$92ff70d0$@classiccmp.org> Jim wrote... ------- Jay did your DG stuff on the back dock move? just curious ------- Not yet. One listmember expressed interest but nothing firm. Two racks of DGblue just waiting for someone to cart them off ;) One is an S/200 and it uses bulbs. My S/130 uses LEDS I seem to recall, but haven't had the panel open in a good while. My DG Eclipse S/130 project is at a long impasse for now. But once the S/130 project is done I'll be diving into a sizeable pile of nova 800/1200 stuff and I'll have DGtonnage to make go away then.... I do not have a Nova3, but I will see if I have any docs that speak to the bulbs used there. J From ats at offog.org Fri Jul 22 10:51:23 2016 From: ats at offog.org (Adam Sampson) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:51:23 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <86oa5qk9ol.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> (Lars Brinkhoff's message of "Thu, 21 Jul 2016 22:39:22 +0200") References: <0f8901d1dd76$95bff600$c13fe200$@bettercomputing.net> <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <86shv3jbi3.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <86oa5qk9ol.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: Lars Brinkhoff writes: > The link you posted above says "Sophie maintains that "inspired by" > isn't the right choice of words." [...] I'm just genuinely curious > exactly which features of the 6502 and ARM instruction sets people > think are so alike? I've always interpreted the "inspired by" description as being about *how* the ARM was designed, rather than about the design itself. There's a story Sophie Wilson's told in several interviews about a visit to WDC... >From The Inquirer: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/1687452/birth-world-beater | A visit Wilson and her colleague Steve Furber made to the Western | Design Centre at Phoenix, Arizona, to check out a successor to the | 6502 has passed into UK computing legend. | | The two British engineers, expecting high-tech buildings bristling | with expert brains, were astonished to find just two developers | working in a bungalow with "a bunch of college kids" on holiday | jobs. "We came away thinking if they can do it, so can we." Later in the same article: | The instruction set, Wilson said, "came from that strange place inside | my head where computer design comes from. Most engineers like to | proceed from A to B to C in a series of logical steps. I'm the rare | engineer who says the answer is obviously Z and we will get on with | that while you guys work out how to do all the intermediate steps. It | makes me a dangerous person to employ in IT but a useful one." -- Adam Sampson From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 11:57:30 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:57:30 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of 100 boards each. This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte Shop boards because of all the evidence. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? On Jul 22, 2016, at 10:24 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: >>> "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. > >> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: >> The key to this board is the evidence it wasn't part of either of the two known production runs. It was assembled at a different time. > > So, somebody, perhaps an Apple employee, walked off with a board and assembled it. > The first gray/black market unauthorized Apple. > > Every company has a moment when they realize that they need to tighten up inventory control. > > > From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 11:57:30 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:57:30 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of 100 boards each. This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte Shop boards because of all the evidence. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? On Jul 22, 2016, at 10:24 AM, Fred Cisin wrote: >>> "Original owner believed to be an early Apple employee ". You have the current owner who has a receipt from the previous owner who had said he got it from "maybe" an Apple employee back in 1977. > >> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: >> The key to this board is the evidence it wasn't part of either of the two known production runs. It was assembled at a different time. > > So, somebody, perhaps an Apple employee, walked off with a board and assembled it. > The first gray/black market unauthorized Apple. > > Every company has a moment when they realize that they need to tighten up inventory control. > > > From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 22 14:01:48 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:01:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: > There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave > soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of > 100 boards each. Then, there were blank boards before the shop making the boards populated them. A bord could have been pulled aside at that time. Obvious possibilities include: 1) It failed some form of quality control, even if just cosmetic or repairable? 2) Sample pulled aside before population for more testing. 3) An Apple technician who was fed up with trying to troubleshoot with crappy sockets requested/demanded/bribed the shop to populate xx of them with half decent sockets. Surely Woz,himself, was fed up with the time that he had wasted due to the bad sockets! 4) the VERY first board got pulled aside for testing, populated with real sockets, wave-soldered, and then, when it passed testing, word was given to put crap sockets on the rest. > This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave > soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI > sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is > from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more > expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte > Shop boards because of all the evidence. None of THAT explicitly implies PREdates. Consider, after completion, it was noticed that there was one more board. Maybe they had run out of, or dumpstered, all of the crap sockets. Or Apple employee or board shop employee simply wanted something better. Although, in #3 above, if it were ME, I would have populated a testing board with Augat. With any of these scenarios, LATER ON, when no longer needed in testing, or Apple lab work, the board could have been given away or sold, such as at Computer Swap America. With, or without, official authorization. There was no attempt to affix a serial number to all of the boards? "At some point, every company realizes the need to tighten inventory." From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 22 14:01:48 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:01:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: > There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave > soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of > 100 boards each. Then, there were blank boards before the shop making the boards populated them. A bord could have been pulled aside at that time. Obvious possibilities include: 1) It failed some form of quality control, even if just cosmetic or repairable? 2) Sample pulled aside before population for more testing. 3) An Apple technician who was fed up with trying to troubleshoot with crappy sockets requested/demanded/bribed the shop to populate xx of them with half decent sockets. Surely Woz,himself, was fed up with the time that he had wasted due to the bad sockets! 4) the VERY first board got pulled aside for testing, populated with real sockets, wave-soldered, and then, when it passed testing, word was given to put crap sockets on the rest. > This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave > soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI > sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is > from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more > expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte > Shop boards because of all the evidence. None of THAT explicitly implies PREdates. Consider, after completion, it was noticed that there was one more board. Maybe they had run out of, or dumpstered, all of the crap sockets. Or Apple employee or board shop employee simply wanted something better. Although, in #3 above, if it were ME, I would have populated a testing board with Augat. With any of these scenarios, LATER ON, when no longer needed in testing, or Apple lab work, the board could have been given away or sold, such as at Computer Swap America. With, or without, official authorization. There was no attempt to affix a serial number to all of the boards? "At some point, every company realizes the need to tighten inventory." From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 18:54:27 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:54:27 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: It was not someone at the PCB manufacturer. They would not have had access to the prom software. This was a pre-NTI board so Apple at the time was only a handful of people, the only technician was Dan Kottke and he was asked about the board already. BTW, The only known defective board is Woz's personal NTI board which was repaired by cutting a short under the green coat between two address lines. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? > On Jul 22, 2016, at 3:01 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > >> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: >> There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of 100 boards each. > > Then, there were blank boards before the shop making the boards populated them. A bord could have been pulled aside at that time. > Obvious possibilities include: > 1) It failed some form of quality control, even if just cosmetic or repairable? > 2) Sample pulled aside before population for more testing. > 3) An Apple technician who was fed up with trying to troubleshoot with crappy sockets requested/demanded/bribed the shop to populate xx of them with half decent sockets. Surely Woz,himself, was fed up with the time that he had wasted due to the bad sockets! > 4) the VERY first board got pulled aside for testing, populated with real sockets, wave-soldered, and then, when it passed testing, word was given to put crap sockets on the rest. > >> This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte Shop boards because of all the evidence. > > None of THAT explicitly implies PREdates. > Consider, after completion, it was noticed that there was one more board. Maybe they had run out of, or dumpstered, all of the crap sockets. > Or Apple employee or board shop employee simply wanted something better. > > > Although, in #3 above, if it were ME, I would have populated a testing board with Augat. > > > With any of these scenarios, LATER ON, when no longer needed in testing, or Apple lab work, the board could have been given away or sold, such as at Computer Swap America. With, or without, official authorization. > > > There was no attempt to affix a serial number to all of the boards? > "At some point, every company realizes the need to tighten inventory." > > > From applecorey at optonline.net Fri Jul 22 18:54:27 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:54:27 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: It was not someone at the PCB manufacturer. They would not have had access to the prom software. This was a pre-NTI board so Apple at the time was only a handful of people, the only technician was Dan Kottke and he was asked about the board already. BTW, The only known defective board is Woz's personal NTI board which was repaired by cutting a short under the green coat between two address lines. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? > On Jul 22, 2016, at 3:01 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > >> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: >> There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of 100 boards each. > > Then, there were blank boards before the shop making the boards populated them. A bord could have been pulled aside at that time. > Obvious possibilities include: > 1) It failed some form of quality control, even if just cosmetic or repairable? > 2) Sample pulled aside before population for more testing. > 3) An Apple technician who was fed up with trying to troubleshoot with crappy sockets requested/demanded/bribed the shop to populate xx of them with half decent sockets. Surely Woz,himself, was fed up with the time that he had wasted due to the bad sockets! > 4) the VERY first board got pulled aside for testing, populated with real sockets, wave-soldered, and then, when it passed testing, word was given to put crap sockets on the rest. > >> This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte Shop boards because of all the evidence. > > None of THAT explicitly implies PREdates. > Consider, after completion, it was noticed that there was one more board. Maybe they had run out of, or dumpstered, all of the crap sockets. > Or Apple employee or board shop employee simply wanted something better. > > > Although, in #3 above, if it were ME, I would have populated a testing board with Augat. > > > With any of these scenarios, LATER ON, when no longer needed in testing, or Apple lab work, the board could have been given away or sold, such as at Computer Swap America. With, or without, official authorization. > > > There was no attempt to affix a serial number to all of the boards? > "At some point, every company realizes the need to tighten inventory." > > > From jdbryan at acm.org Fri Jul 22 22:29:28 2016 From: jdbryan at acm.org (J. David Bryan) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 23:29:28 -0400 Subject: HP Computer Museum in the (local) News In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Friday, July 22, 2016 at 17:43, Rodney Brown wrote: > http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/vintage-computer-museum-revives-hp21 > 16a-founder-dies/7638458 > > A keen mountaineer who died trekking in Tibet has left a rare computer > collection behind as his legacy. A touching article; thanks for posting it, Rodney. -- Dave From mattislind at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 12:23:25 2016 From: mattislind at gmail.com (Mattis Lind) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:23:25 +0200 Subject: How to open a SUN CDROM drive box? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > There are a couple of locking tabs on the sides in the back corner. > You poke at them through the holes in the outer shell. They look > decorative. Two of them are not. > > Once you depress one, lift lightly on that back corner and it should > move up 1mm-2mm. Do the other corner and the back of the lid should > tip up towards the front. It has some large plastic tabs on the front > edge that act as a hinge, then it pops off, exposing the innards. > That did the trick! Thanks! I think I never would have found out by myself... > > > The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working > > somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive. > > Could be a lot of things, but a new drive would probably solve most > problems. It also depends if the problems are on the SCSI side (won't > respond, is at wrong unit number, etc.) or the optical side (can't > read any media) or in between (can't eject caddy...) > It can eject the caddy. But I am not really sure it actually rotates. Maybe some lubricant has became a little too sticky over the years. The activity LED lights up when the caddy is inserted and then goes dark after some very low noise inside. Nothing more happens and the SUN machine just sits there doing nothing. BTW. It is a SONY drive. > > -ethan > From ethan.dicks at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 12:27:26 2016 From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com (Ethan Dicks) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 13:27:26 -0400 Subject: How to open a SUN CDROM drive box? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 1:23 PM, Mattis Lind wrote: >> There are a couple of locking tabs on the sides in the back corner. >> You poke at them through the holes in the outer shell. They look >> decorative. Two of them are not. > > That did the trick! Thanks! I think I never would have found out by > myself... Excellent! >> > The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working >> > somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive. > > It can eject the caddy. But I am not really sure it actually rotates. Maybe > some lubricant has became a little too sticky over the years. The activity > LED lights up when the caddy is inserted and then goes dark after some very > low noise inside. Nothing more happens and the SUN machine just sits there > doing nothing. > > BTW. It is a SONY drive. If you have a modern machine with SCSI, you could try it there. I think a Linux box would give you better error messages, but even a Windows machine could tell you something. I'd be looking in my logs for the report that it's on the bus, and any traffic that occurs on insertion or when you try to mount the media, and see if lights blink then, etc. OTOH, it's probably not hard to find an old Sony or Plextor mech to drop in there, as long as it has the 512-byte jumper set (ISTR there are some drives that's it's a solder-blob option). -ethan From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Fri Jul 22 12:39:56 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:39:56 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> Message-ID: From: jim stephens: Friday, July 22, 2016 12:46 AM > On 7/22/2016 12:25 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: >> I mentioned http://www.foxdata.com/blog/tag/nova-312/ to you earlier, >> which suggested the 28V bulbs. I also found >> http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ledmod.html >> which makes it clear that the voltage is likely a fair bit over 12V. > > Thanks for the tips. I see that the foxdata site lamps don't appear > quite as bright as the chookfest ones, which is interesting. I'm > thinking now if I do anything it will be the LED route, so will evaluate > that, as I agree opening the thing back up will suck. Those chookfest bulbs are doing just what I'd expect from 12V bulbs in a 28V circuit -- way too bright, and then a drastically shortened lifespan. (The right bulb can last for years; the wrong one for minutes.) I'm not a big fan of the surgery involved in LED conversion, though I understand why folks do it. Particularly if they, like Emil, have used the wrong bulbs and found themselves replacing them all the time. Somewhere, I have Oshino's write-up about bulb rated voltage and bulb operating voltage, but I do remember the lifespan varies as some power of the ratio, and it makes a huge difference. (There are also formulae for derating brightness, etc.) Vince From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 12:47:40 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:47:40 -0700 Subject: HP Computer Museum in the (local) News In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <82769AB1-1DED-4A50-98A9-97432EC4E49C@gmail.com> Thanks for the link. My heart is sinking every time I read about Jon?s passing. Marc From: cctalk on behalf of Rodney Brown Reply-To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" Date: Friday, July 22, 2016 at 12:43 AM To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" Subject: HP Computer Museum in the (local) News http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/vintage-computer-museum-revives-hp2116a-founder-dies/7638458 A keen mountaineer who died trekking in Tibet has left a rare computer collection behind as his legacy. Surrounded by bushland in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne is a wooden shed with barn doors. It closely resembles a shed in California where, in 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched the company that would become HP. The much larger Australian shed is home to the HP Computer Museum, filled with ageing computers, printers and calculators, most of which are a dull light grey. ... From kwwacker at ptd.net Fri Jul 22 15:20:44 2016 From: kwwacker at ptd.net (Karl-Wilhelm Wacker) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:20:44 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros References: Message-ID: <8501E75A51EA4B29A823A9D0EE359452@mefac9c05dd643> If these are switching power supplies, the fizzing may be the output filter caps overheating and about to pop their safety 'corks' due to self heating due to high ripple currents. I can across this probelm in a Clary Datacomp 404 computer that I worked on in the late 60's. The initial fix was a plastic sheild across the top of the caps so that if they vented while a tech was working on the unit, they would not spew the fluid inside them into the tech's face. Karl ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian Graham" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 3:36 PM Subject: Re: Reproduction micros > On 22/07/2016 10:04, "Pete Turnbull" wrote: > >> On 22/07/2016 00:33, Adrian Graham wrote: >>> On 22/07/2016 00:07, "Liam Proven" wrote: >>> >>>>> There were only a few >>>>> made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule >>>>> to >>>>> connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the >>>>> later >>>>> stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to >>>>> software >>>>> developers. >>>> >>>> This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. >>> >>> Pretty sure I've got 2 of those, the keyboards are made of Dark Matter. >>> I've >>> never dared power one up though. >> >> If you have those, I would strongly recommend you arrange an offsite >> backup. Say, about 170 miles north via the A14/A1 :-) > > I remember why I've never fired them up, this is the label on the one with > the Beeb connecting podule: > > http://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/acorna500label.jpg > > Of course 'smoke' in these PSUs just means the mains cap has blown but I'm > not sure about the fizzing. > > -- > Adrian/Witchy > Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator > Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer > collection? > > From pete at dunnington.plus.com Fri Jul 22 15:23:51 2016 From: pete at dunnington.plus.com (Pete Turnbull) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 21:23:51 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 20:36, Adrian Graham wrote: > On 22/07/2016 10:04, "Pete Turnbull" wrote: >> If you have those, I would strongly recommend you arrange an offsite >> backup. Say, about 170 miles north via the A14/A1 :-) > > I remember why I've never fired them up, this is the label on the one with > the Beeb connecting podule: > > http://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/acorna500label.jpg > > Of course 'smoke' in these PSUs just means the mains cap has blown but I'm > not sure about the fizzing. Well, those A500s use a standard Master 128 power supply. I can fix that :-) -- Pete From jwsmail at jwsss.com Fri Jul 22 15:29:26 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 13:29:26 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <6ae0034a-0af4-0f0f-cad9-07732193b943@jwsss.com> On 7/22/2016 10:39 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > I'm not a big fan of the surgery involved in LED conversion, though I > understand why folks do it. Particularly if they, like Emil, have > used the wrong bulbs and found themselves replacing them all the time. I wouldn't do the surgery, but here's the situation. Someone already used this panel for the source of lamps, or they were all burned out. There are only two bulbs left to remove. The surgery wasn't bad, it doesn't look like there are lifted etch pads, so that part is good. So this one is a good candidate for the conversion as any. I'm not a stickler for historic accuracy, and if anyone gets it to use as a running unit, they will hopefully never have to open the panel again. Thanks for the analysis too, that is good to know, as i still have 1600's with 5v bulbs to deal with. Luckily the 1600 uses socketed parts and the main issue with them is pulling the panels two 50 pin ribbon connectors off. The connectors on the ends of that get worn out. The Nova has an edge card connector (as does my buddies Eclipse panel) so that isn't a problem with this design. Between the two problems I'll take the problem with the connector over the problem with soldering lamps any time. thanks again Jim http://jimsoldtoys.blogspot.com/2016/07/nova-3-front-panel.html From witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk Fri Jul 22 15:44:59 2016 From: witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk (Adrian Graham) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 21:44:59 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 21:23, "Pete Turnbull" wrote: > On 22/07/2016 20:36, Adrian Graham wrote: >> On 22/07/2016 10:04, "Pete Turnbull" wrote: > >>> If you have those, I would strongly recommend you arrange an offsite >>> backup. Say, about 170 miles north via the A14/A1 :-) >> >> I remember why I've never fired them up, this is the label on the one with >> the Beeb connecting podule: >> >> http://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/acorna500label.jpg >> >> Of course 'smoke' in these PSUs just means the mains cap has blown but I'm >> not sure about the fizzing. > > Well, those A500s use a standard Master 128 power supply. I can fix > that :-) Feast your eyes. Not pictured are the Dark Matter keyboards because they're in another room probably weighing something down so it won't fly away... http://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/acorna500.jpg It'd be interesting to see if the Rodimes in there power up and start given their sticky head problems, the label on the other one says 'disc works, contains lots of useful stuff'. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection? From tothwolf at concentric.net Fri Jul 22 16:03:23 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:03:23 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <579133BC.90705@snarc.net> <57917AF4.3070301@cimmeri.com> <57918446.9010309@snarc.net> <719A24DE770647A38379BECE50B21C9C@TeoPC> <97A8B838-2089-4B2A-BC2A-BF588EEB8EBE@optonline.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: > There were no blank boards. That's the key. The sockets were wave > soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of > 100 boards each. > > This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave > soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI > sockets even though they were from a different PCB house. This board is > from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more > expensive and reliable RN sockets. Which implies it predates the Byte > Shop boards because of all the evidence. TBH, I'm not sure why people get hung up on wave soldering vs hand soldering. My own hand soldering is practically indistinguishable from a properly wave soldered board and it wouldn't be unreasonable for someone working at Apple to be able to hand solder boards similarly, or even for a prior owner of the board to have retrofitted those sockets. When I stuff boards, I use an assembly jig and form/pre-cut component leads before soldering. This is how I was (re)taught to solder when I began working with high reliability gear (cutting leads after soldering can cause microfractures in the joint) and I continue to use those techniques. I also use supplemental flux because the flux in cored solder is really only sufficient for bright/clean pads and leads. I consistently get better results with the extra flux. From jwest at classiccmp.org Fri Jul 22 16:03:24 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:03:24 -0500 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <6ae0034a-0af4-0f0f-cad9-07732193b943@jwsss.com> References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> <6ae0034a-0af4-0f0f-cad9-07732193b943@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <000401d1e45c$7c71ec20$7555c460$@classiccmp.org> Jim; Thanks for the link... I went up the tree and saw the pics of that ADDS Envoy terminal. I'm exceedingly green with envy. Congrats on an awesome piece of kit! J From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 18:11:08 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:11:08 -0400 Subject: heap of floppy disks Message-ID: I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random old utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for workgroups etc. I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, says dos for the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to anyone, or is it just a stock dos install with a dec sticker on the disk? There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, i will post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone is interested in what is here. I just want some of the software off of the disks, i don't necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks around . There is also an original copy of doom on floppy that looks to be complete. --Devin From geneb at deltasoft.com Fri Jul 22 18:18:00 2016 From: geneb at deltasoft.com (geneb) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:18:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote: > I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random > old utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for > workgroups etc. > I would be interested in any of the Borland stuff! tnx. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_! From tdk.knight at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 18:53:38 2016 From: tdk.knight at gmail.com (Adrian Stoness) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 18:53:38 -0500 Subject: 8i front Message-ID: finaly got some pregress on this 8i from a feild restoration of mine.. now to sit down and do an order for the transistors and go talk to the local ewaste recycler on monday see if they can help me source some slider switches like one i found in the junk pile at the local hacker space last night looks very promising will need to get new rocker peics made to atach the 8i switches to but its looking promising if this works out there may be a suden suply of replacement switch assemblys avail... https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8752/27863539914_a92d0264c7_b.jpg baby steps baby steps From tothwolf at concentric.net Fri Jul 22 19:04:07 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:04:07 -0500 (CDT) Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote: > I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random > old utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for > workgroups etc. > > I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, > says dos for the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to > anyone, or is it just a stock dos install with a dec sticker on the > disk? > > There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, > i will post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone > is interested in what is here. I just want some of the software off of > the disks, i don't necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks > around . There is also an original copy of doom on floppy that looks to > be complete. I'm still on the lookout for Procomm Plus for Windows (ver 2.11) if you happen across that on 3.5" disks. I bought what was supposed to be a boxed copy off eBay years ago and it was mostly complete... box, manuals, license, but no disks :) From spectre at floodgap.com Fri Jul 22 19:10:29 2016 From: spectre at floodgap.com (Cameron Kaiser) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 17:10:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: from Chuck Guzis at "Jul 22, 16 11:59:59 am" Message-ID: <201607230010.u6N0ATg219857654@floodgap.com> > > It's not. Peter is talking about a four-bit field in the > > instructions. You're talking about a six-bit field in the program > > counter. > > Something that's always bothered me about three-address architectures > like ARM is why there is the insistence on that scheduling bottleneck, > the condition code register? You can see how two-address architectures > like the x80 and x86 try to get around the problem by having certain > instructions not modify certain condition code bits I realize I'm a broken record here, but PowerPC does the same thing. You have to ask for the bits to be updated (specialized forms like the "dot" instructions) unless you do an explicit compare instruction, and in many cases there is a special form to only update a certain set of bits instead of them all (e.g., "addo" updates overflow but nothing else, "addo." does overflow and CR bits, "addco." does carry too). > and even have > specialized instructions, such as JCXZ, that don't reply on a specific > condition code. ... bdnz, which decrements CTR and branches if not zero, ... -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "Use gun kata for fun! Because you worth it!" ------------------------------ From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 19:17:34 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (CuriousMarc) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 17:17:34 -0700 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> Message-ID: <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> Unfortunately, I have the older ROM, the HP 98217A. Says 9885 Flexible Disk Drive on it (duh). Only this 9885, single side low density 8" drive, connected with the parallel interface and a special cable is supported. And indeed as Tony says, to start from a blank disk, you need a tape cartridge that has the "disc system" on it and run an initialize program to copy files on the first disc sectors. If you don't have a copy of that cartridge then you are hosed even with that ROM. So I am hosed twice: I don't have a 9885 drive and I don't have the cartridge. And I suspect a cartridge that's readable doesn't exist anymore. The newer ROM is the HP 98228. Which can ONLY work in a later HP 9825T (not the A nor the B), and can drive the aforementioned 8" 9885 with the parallel interface, and also the 9895 double sided double density double drive via the HP-IB interface. But only with the "revised" HP-IB interface, not the original interface. Very picky that ROM. Bu for the 9885 disc, it does not have the cartridge requirement (yeah!). I have the 9825T, the 9895 drive, the revised interface, but not the right ROM. Hosed again. The details are in the 9825 Disc ROM Manual: http://www.hpmuseum.net/document.php?hwfile=1864 Marc > > Probably a question for Tony's encyclopedic knowledge. I just scored > > two HP 9825, one a later "T" option and one "B" version with all the > > fixings (i.e ROM packs). They both seem to work save the usual tape > > drive which I have not gotten to yet. Both have the flexible disc ROM. > > What kind of discs can I hook up? > > Which flexible disk ROM? There are 2. The older one, AFAIK supports the > HP9885 8" drive which has a 16 bit parallel interface and needs the right > version of the 98032 to hook it up. The later disk ROM supports the HP9895 > on HPIB. > > The older ROM needs a disk with various programs on it to work, it is > essentially just a bootstrap. Have any such disks survived? > > -tony From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 12:57:27 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:57:27 -0700 Subject: Looking for HP 9810A keyboard springs In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Springs are a notoriously annoying. In small volume they are very expensive or hard to find. In high volume you basically have them wound for you and they are very cheap per unit, if you make a ton of them. Not much in-between. In the US I have used both of the below for stock springs with good luck: http://www.centuryspring.com/ http://www.asraymond.com/extension-springs.html Marc From: cctech on behalf of Camiel Vanderhoeven Reply-To: "cctech at classiccmp.org" Date: Friday, July 22, 2016 at 8:24 AM To: "cctech at classiccmp.org" Subject: Looking for HP 9810A keyboard springs Hi Guys, I've got an HP 9810A that has been stored in sub-optimal conditions by a previous owner; a lot of the keyboard springs have rusted away, so I'm looking for a replacement. These are about 15.5mm outer diameter, 0.35mm thick wire, about 10mm high when uncompressed, and have only about 1.5 turns of wire. Any pointers would be appreciated! Camiel. From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Fri Jul 22 13:00:16 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:00:16 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <63EBADE38CCC45A398148C3015C636AA@Vincew7> From: Vincent Slyngstad: Friday, July 22, 2016 10:39 AM > Somewhere, I have Oshino's write-up about bulb rated voltage and > bulb operating voltage, but I do remember the lifespan varies as > some power of the ratio, and it makes a huge difference. (There > are also formulae for derating brightness, etc.) I found it -- the lifespan varies as the 12th power of the ratio. The current varies as the 0.55 power, and the brightness as the 3.5th power (of the reciprocal). So, a 12V bulb in a 28V circuit can expect 1/26000 the lifetime, and will take about 1.6X the current to burn about 20X brighter than normal. A 28V bulb in a 24V circuit would last about 6.3X it's rated lifetime, take 92% of the rated current, and about 58% as bright. Vince From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Fri Jul 22 13:16:21 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:16:21 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> Message-ID: On 2016-Jul-22, at 10:39 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > From: jim stephens: Friday, July 22, 2016 12:46 AM >> On 7/22/2016 12:25 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: >>> I mentioned http://www.foxdata.com/blog/tag/nova-312/ to you earlier, which suggested the 28V bulbs. I also found >>> http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ledmod.html >>> which makes it clear that the voltage is likely a fair bit over 12V. >> Thanks for the tips. I see that the foxdata site lamps don't appear quite as bright as the chookfest ones, which is interesting. I'm thinking now if I do anything it will be the LED route, so will evaluate that, as I agree opening the thing back up will suck. > > Those chookfest bulbs are doing just what I'd expect from 12V bulbs in a 28V circuit -- way too bright, and then a drastically shortened lifespan. (The right bulb can last for years; the wrong one for minutes.) > > I'm not a big fan of the surgery involved in LED conversion, though I understand why folks do it. Particularly if they, like Emil, have used the wrong bulbs and found themselves replacing them all the time. > > Somewhere, I have Oshino's write-up about bulb rated voltage and bulb operating voltage, but I do remember the lifespan varies as some power of the ratio, and it makes a huge difference. (There are also formulae for derating brightness, etc.) Not to mention that the extra heat from a bulb run over-voltage can damage plastic front panels and light shrouds. Even at the rated voltage, different bulb models can have a wide range of specified lifetimes, from a few thousand hours to 25,000 or 40,000 or more hours. Although the common trick with computer front panels seems to have been to just run bulbs under-rated, e.g. a 6V bulb in a circuit with Vcc=5V, with some further voltage drop in the drive circuit the bulb sees well under 5V. From Bruce at Wild-Hare.com Fri Jul 22 13:20:07 2016 From: Bruce at Wild-Hare.com (Bruce Ray) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:20:07 -0600 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3d3a091f-de79-ffda-11d9-98b7be8f76ee@Wild-Hare.com> DG generally used 28V, 0.040 Ma (nominal), fragile wire-lead incandescent bulbs for the Nova/SuperNova/Nova2/Nova3 front panels as well as the early Eclipses. The S/130 was DG's first LED-based front panel and was much-appreciated by Field Service. More followup off-list... Bruce On 7/21/2016 10:53 PM, jim stephens wrote: > Is there anyone with documents on the Nova 3 front panel, and what > drives it? It has some number of custom DG chips, which hopefully are > good if I want to try to fire it up to play, but am interested in that > on good authority there are 28v incandescent lamps. > > A friend has an Eclipse front panel with nearly identical bezel, which > has LED's and a number of differences in the logic (different connector > to the system, for instance). So it is probably all run on 5v. > > I have not had time to figure out the driver circuit for any of the > lamps to see what that may turn up, and wanted to know whether it was > 28v lamps before I buy 40 of them. (the thing has only 2 out of a lot > of lamps). > > Thanks > Jim From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Fri Jul 22 13:18:14 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:18:14 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <63EBADE38CCC45A398148C3015C636AA@Vincew7> References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> <63EBADE38CCC45A398148C3015C636AA@Vincew7> Message-ID: On 2016-Jul-22, at 11:00 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > From: Vincent Slyngstad: Friday, July 22, 2016 10:39 AM >> Somewhere, I have Oshino's write-up about bulb rated voltage and bulb operating voltage, but I do remember the lifespan varies as some power of the ratio, and it makes a huge difference. (There are also formulae for derating brightness, etc.) > > I found it -- the lifespan varies as the 12th power of the ratio. > The current varies as the 0.55 power, and the brightness as the 3.5th power (of the reciprocal). > > So, a 12V bulb in a 28V circuit can expect 1/26000 the lifetime, and will take about 1.6X the current to burn about 20X brighter than normal. > > A 28V bulb in a 24V circuit would last about 6.3X it's rated lifetime, take 92% of the rated current, and about 58% as bright. Nice to see the data & math on that. From cisin at xenosoft.com Fri Jul 22 13:27:10 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:27:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <63EBADE38CCC45A398148C3015C636AA@Vincew7> References: <19515c41-5651-5efd-3a4d-e258860f5463@jwsss.com> <63EBADE38CCC45A398148C3015C636AA@Vincew7> Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: >> Somewhere, I have Oshino's write-up about bulb rated voltage and bulb >> operating voltage, but I do remember the lifespan varies as some power of >> the ratio, and it makes a huge difference. (There are also formulae for >> derating brightness, etc.) > I found it -- the lifespan varies as the 12th power of the ratio. > The current varies as the 0.55 power, and the brightness as the 3.5th power > (of the reciprocal). > So, a 12V bulb in a 28V circuit can expect 1/26000 the lifetime, and will > take about 1.6X the current to burn about 20X brighter than normal. > A 28V bulb in a 24V circuit would last about 6.3X it's rated lifetime, take > 92% of the rated current, and about 58% as bright. . . . and that presumably clarifies the "Livermore Firehouse Bulb". From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Fri Jul 22 13:32:04 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 14:32:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction Message-ID: <20160722183204.8B37218C0B8@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Corey Cohen > This board is from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards > but has the more expensive and reliable RN sockets. Maybe someone at the 1st PCB house made an extra board for themselves, and used better sockets (since it was for themselves)? Noel From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 22 13:59:59 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 11:59:59 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> References: <558ffdab-55b6-32fb-280e-a51edde3e64a@jetnet.ab.ca> <20160716102533.GA5602@mooli.org.uk> <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On 07/21/2016 11:34 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > It's not. Peter is talking about a four-bit field in the > instructions. You're talking about a six-bit field in the program > counter. Something that's always bothered me about three-address architectures like ARM is why there is the insistence on that scheduling bottleneck, the condition code register? You can see how two-address architectures like the x80 and x86 try to get around the problem by having certain instructions not modify certain condition code bits and even have specialized instructions, such as JCXZ, that don't reply on a specific condition code. Anyone have a clue? --Chuck From witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk Fri Jul 22 14:36:09 2016 From: witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk (Adrian Graham) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 20:36:09 +0100 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 22/07/2016 10:04, "Pete Turnbull" wrote: > On 22/07/2016 00:33, Adrian Graham wrote: >> On 22/07/2016 00:07, "Liam Proven" wrote: >> >>>> There were only a few >>>> made. They were used internally during development - hence the podule to >>>> connect it to a Beeb, which provided the I/O early on - and in the later >>>> stages before the Archimedes launch in 1987, several were loaned to >>>> software >>>> developers. >>> >>> This is the machine Dick Pountain reviewed, I think. >> >> Pretty sure I've got 2 of those, the keyboards are made of Dark Matter. I've >> never dared power one up though. > > If you have those, I would strongly recommend you arrange an offsite > backup. Say, about 170 miles north via the A14/A1 :-) I remember why I've never fired them up, this is the label on the one with the Beeb connecting podule: http://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/acorna500label.jpg Of course 'smoke' in these PSUs just means the mains cap has blown but I'm not sure about the fizzing. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection? From paulkoning at comcast.net Fri Jul 22 19:51:44 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 20:51:44 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <201607230010.u6N0ATg219857654@floodgap.com> References: <201607230010.u6N0ATg219857654@floodgap.com> Message-ID: <0C424FD3-C65E-4F89-A551-1B9F6A1C1B7D@comcast.net> > On Jul 22, 2016, at 8:10 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: > >>> It's not. Peter is talking about a four-bit field in the >>> instructions. You're talking about a six-bit field in the program >>> counter. >> >> Something that's always bothered me about three-address architectures >> like ARM is why there is the insistence on that scheduling bottleneck, >> the condition code register? You can see how two-address architectures >> like the x80 and x86 try to get around the problem by having certain >> instructions not modify certain condition code bits > > I realize I'm a broken record here, but PowerPC does the same thing. It seems that a great many things that some modern reporter thinks are new, or recent, and unusual, have been done in any number of places. And possibly (as in this case) at least 20 years earlier than the reporter is aware of. paul From phb.hfx at gmail.com Fri Jul 22 20:58:58 2016 From: phb.hfx at gmail.com (Paul Berger) Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 22:58:58 -0300 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5792CF62.4010901@gmail.com> On 2016-07-22 9:17 PM, CuriousMarc wrote: > Unfortunately, I have the older ROM, the HP 98217A. Says 9885 Flexible Disk > Drive on it (duh). Only this 9885, single side low density 8" drive, > connected with the parallel interface and a special cable is supported. And > indeed as Tony says, to start from a blank disk, you need a tape cartridge > that has the "disc system" on it and run an initialize program to copy files > on the first disc sectors. If you don't have a copy of that cartridge then > you are hosed even with that ROM. So I am hosed twice: I don't have a 9885 > drive and I don't have the cartridge. And I suspect a cartridge that's > readable doesn't exist anymore. > > The newer ROM is the HP 98228. Which can ONLY work in a later HP 9825T (not > the A nor the B), and can drive the aforementioned 8" 9885 with the parallel > interface, and also the 9895 double sided double density double drive via > the HP-IB interface. But only with the "revised" HP-IB interface, not the > original interface. Very picky that ROM. Bu for the 9885 disc, it does not > have the cartridge requirement (yeah!). I have the 9825T, the 9895 drive, > the revised interface, but not the right ROM. Hosed again. > > The details are in the 9825 Disc ROM Manual: > http://www.hpmuseum.net/document.php?hwfile=1864 > > Marc On the hpmuseum.net page for the 98217A ROM here is an image of what is reputed to be an initialized diskette for use with 9825 and 98217A http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=166. When I get my 9825T I will look into 9885 emulation, I don't think it will be too difficult but you may still need a GPIO unless I build the whole thing onto a plug-in card I don't think the GPIO would be too difficult to clone. But ideally I would still like to get access to a 98228A ROM to dump and clone it, even though it is bank switched it should still be possible. Paul. From robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com Fri Jul 22 22:30:42 2016 From: robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com (Rob Jarratt) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 04:30:42 +0100 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <013001d1e492$97a16530$c6e42f90$@ntlworld.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of devin > davison > Sent: 23 July 2016 00:11 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > Subject: heap of floppy disks > > I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random old > utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for workgroups > etc. > > I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, says dos for > the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to anyone, or is it just a > stock dos install with a dec sticker on the disk? > > There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, i will > post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone is interested in > what is here. I just want some of the software off of the disks, i don't > necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks around . There is also an > original copy of doom on floppy that looks to be complete. > Looking forward to seeing the list. Could you also tell us where they are located? Thanks Rob From billdegnan at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 00:04:26 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 01:04:26 -0400 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: <013001d1e492$97a16530$c6e42f90$@ntlworld.com> References: <013001d1e492$97a16530$c6e42f90$@ntlworld.com> Message-ID: It would not take much time to archive these disks and post somewhere for those who have the disks that have gone bad, have docs but lost the/s disk in the set, etc. Bill Degnan twitter: billdeg vintagecomputer.net On Jul 22, 2016 11:30 PM, "Rob Jarratt" wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of devin > > davison > > Sent: 23 July 2016 00:11 > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > > > > Subject: heap of floppy disks > > > > I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random > old > > utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for > workgroups > > etc. > > > > I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, > says dos for > > the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to anyone, or is it > just a > > stock dos install with a dec sticker on the disk? > > > > There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, > i will > > post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone is > interested in > > what is here. I just want some of the software off of the disks, i don't > > necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks around . There is > also an > > original copy of doom on floppy that looks to be complete. > > > > > Looking forward to seeing the list. Could you also tell us where they are > located? > > Thanks > > Rob > > From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 02:40:24 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (CuriousMarc) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 00:40:24 -0700 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <5792CF62.4010901@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> <5792CF62.4010901@gmail.com> Message-ID: <011801d1e4b5$799e8360$6cdb8a20$@gmail.com> Thanks, I didn't know, I grabbed the image. That offers a path if I can ever get an 9885 and single sides 8" discs... Marc > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul > Berger > On the hpmuseum.net page for the 98217A ROM here is an image of what is > reputed to be an initialized diskette for use with 9825 and 98217A > http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=166. When I get my > 9825T I will look into 9885 emulation, I don't think it will be too difficult but > you may still need a GPIO unless I build the whole thing onto a > plug-in card I don't think the GPIO would be too difficult to clone. > But ideally I would still like to get access to a 98228A ROM to dump and clone > it, even though it is bank switched it should still be possible. > > Paul. From evan.linwood at eastek.com.au Sat Jul 23 03:02:42 2016 From: evan.linwood at eastek.com.au (Evan Linwood) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 18:02:42 +1000 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas Message-ID: <000901d1e4b8$97850e50$c68f2af0$@eastek.com.au> Hi Mark, it wasn't myself either. Apologies (and to Brian, James and Jon) I was watching & wanting to respond but got hit by a wall of things, then noticed that someone had bid on it. Very glad to see it was acquired, and that Chris could confirm. From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat Jul 23 07:55:41 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 08:55:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction Message-ID: <20160723125541.6F5AE18C0BE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Corey Cohen > It was not someone at the PCB manufacturer. They would not have had > access to the prom software. So, do you have a theory about where this came from? (There is absolutely zero snark here, this is a serious question. It's quite a puzzle, and an interesting one.) Maybe a collaboration between two people, one at Apple, one at the PCB house? 'Make two extra boards, and I'll trade you the PROMs for one of them.' Can't do it with just a person at the PCB house - as you point out, need the ROMs. But you'd think that if someone at Apple just pulled a board, that would be noticed (board count wrong). Noel From aek at bitsavers.org Sat Jul 23 08:21:29 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 06:21:29 -0700 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: <013001d1e492$97a16530$c6e42f90$@ntlworld.com> Message-ID: <57936F59.1020906@bitsavers.org> On 7/22/16 10:04 PM, william degnan wrote: > It would not take much time to archive these disks and post somewhere for > those who have the disks that have gone bad, have docs but lost the/s disk > in the set, etc. > It would also really, really help preservation if people would start compiling a list of known copy-protected software. This came up again at CHM trying to set priorities for what to image from the physical collection. From applecorey at optonline.net Sat Jul 23 08:37:15 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 09:37:15 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <20160723125541.6F5AE18C0BE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160723125541.6F5AE18C0BE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <2696F654-CC42-4292-9959-ED986DD7CD09@optonline.net> My guess is that is was a test board for Apple. There are some weird mods to the ram timing with a variable cap and to the negative supply that looks like they were experiments to figure out the tolerances of the chips. The board was wave soldered. You can't fake that on an Apple-1 because of what happens to the back of the board by the regulators. I had conversations about this board with Woz and Daniel Kottke who along with Steve Jobs were the only ones who could have had access to the roms and would have known what the board was. The PCB house workers wouldn't have cared or known what to do with it. This is before anyone even knew the name Apple. Other than a single replacement IC. All the chips and soldered components are correct for something put together before the byte shop order just different parts than the rest of the boards. All the pre NTI boards are very consistent in parts just the edge connectors were installed backwards on some. The NTI varied on the smaller electrolytic caps. There is only one other known but lost to time Apple-1 with the same decoupling caps (they are different than the NTI, though similar). That board was the preproduction board used for the Apple-1 printed Advertisement. That board also used the same RAM chips, which Apple did not use in the end when they shipped the Apple-1, they used the cheaper plastic ones. So lots of evidence this was not something where someone grabbed a PCB for an unknown computer company risking their job and built their own. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? On Jul 23, 2016, at 8:55 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: >> From: Corey Cohen > >> It was not someone at the PCB manufacturer. They would not have had >> access to the prom software. > > So, do you have a theory about where this came from? (There is absolutely zero > snark here, this is a serious question. It's quite a puzzle, and an > interesting one.) > > Maybe a collaboration between two people, one at Apple, one at the PCB house? > 'Make two extra boards, and I'll trade you the PROMs for one of them.' Can't > do it with just a person at the PCB house - as you point out, need the ROMs. > But you'd think that if someone at Apple just pulled a board, that would be > noticed (board count wrong). > > Noel From lars at nocrew.org Sat Jul 23 09:14:56 2016 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 16:14:56 +0200 Subject: VT420 schematics Message-ID: <86oa5oigpr.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Hello, Does anyone have schematics for the DEC VT420 terminal? Thank you, Lars Brinkhoff From tothwolf at concentric.net Sat Jul 23 09:20:24 2016 From: tothwolf at concentric.net (Tothwolf) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 09:20:24 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: <2696F654-CC42-4292-9959-ED986DD7CD09@optonline.net> References: <20160723125541.6F5AE18C0BE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2696F654-CC42-4292-9959-ED986DD7CD09@optonline.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 23 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: > My guess is that is was a test board for Apple. There are some weird > mods to the ram timing with a variable cap and to the negative supply > that looks like they were experiments to figure out the tolerances of > the chips. The board was wave soldered. You can't fake that on an > Apple-1 because of what happens to the back of the board by the > regulators. [...] If you mean the crinkle tin plate under the solder mask, that doesn't happen due to wave soldering. The heavy tin plate was applied that way in a separate process before the solder mask was applied to the board. It used to be common to do that to all sorts of boards in the 1970s-1980s. With modern boards, is much more common now to just leave exposed copper/gaps in the solder mask and allow those areas to take up solder from the wave soldering (or reflow) processes. From applecorey at optonline.net Sat Jul 23 10:30:38 2016 From: applecorey at optonline.net (Corey Cohen) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 11:30:38 -0400 Subject: Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction In-Reply-To: References: <20160723125541.6F5AE18C0BE@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <2696F654-CC42-4292-9959-ED986DD7CD09@optonline.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 23, 2016, at 10:20 AM, Tothwolf wrote: > >> On Sat, 23 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote: >> >> My guess is that is was a test board for Apple. There are some weird mods to the ram timing with a variable cap and to the negative supply that looks like they were experiments to figure out the tolerances of the chips. The board was wave soldered. You can't fake that on an Apple-1 because of what happens to the back of the board by the regulators. [...] > > If you mean the crinkle tin plate under the solder mask, that doesn't happen due to wave soldering. The heavy tin plate was applied that way in a separate process before the solder mask was applied to the board. It used to be common to do that to all sorts of boards in the 1970s-1980s. With modern boards, is much more common now to just leave exposed copper/gaps in the solder mask and allow those areas to take up solder from the wave soldering (or reflow) processes. The crinkle is exaggerated by the heat from the wave soldering. Your right doesn't happen in modern boards because of how the tin was applied. Mike Newton tried to reproduce the technique in China for his replicas. After many failed/peeling attempts he came close but even when wave soldered, it doesn't match the 1970's effect exactly, though it does crinkle. The other thing with wave soldered boards is how the Vias get filled in. They sorta pucker, it's hard to explain but easy to show. You can fill the Vias by hand, but they don't look the same as a wave soldered board. In experiments I have tried a lot of different ways to replicate it. You can always tell the difference if you look under a loupe. Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o? From draeger5 at hotmail.com Sat Jul 23 10:40:54 2016 From: draeger5 at hotmail.com (Matthias Draeger) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:40:54 +0000 Subject: Compucorop 122E - Manual Message-ID: Hello, just came across this site. I recently got a Compucorp 122E, but without any manual. I would like to use this calculator for tests in programming - does anyone have a manual/pdf? Thanks, Matthias ps.: this mail is for the "list" - how can I have access to the list? How do I see a reply, in case there is one? Tel.0049-6741-1720 http://m-draeger.com/ Matthias Draeger Auf dem Haehnchen 32 56329 St. Goar/ Germany From henk.gooijen at hotmail.com Sat Jul 23 12:36:43 2016 From: henk.gooijen at hotmail.com (Henk Gooijen) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 19:36:43 +0200 Subject: Nova 3 front panel Message-ID: Ahhh, thanks Ray. I still need to replace several bulbs of my NOVA3 console. Somebody knows of a source for 28V 40 mA ?grain? bulbs with wires? I could use some 10 ? and 20 as spare ? BTW, I read somewhere that the bulb to LED replacement is not as straight-forward as you may think. The small continuous current through the bulbs (to prevent thermal shock) is enough to make LEDs appear continuous on! - Henk. Van: Bruce Ray Verzonden: vrijdag 22 juli 2016 20:16 Aan: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Onderwerp: Re: Nova 3 front panel DG generally used 28V, 0.040 Ma (nominal), fragile wire-lead incandescent bulbs for the Nova/SuperNova/Nova2/Nova3 front panels as well as the early Eclipses. The S/130 was DG's first LED-based front panel and was much-appreciated by Field Service. More followup off-list... Bruce On 7/21/2016 10:53 PM, jim stephens wrote: > Is there anyone with documents on the Nova 3 front panel, and what > drives it? It has some number of custom DG chips, which hopefully are > good if I want to try to fire it up to play, but am interested in that > on good authority there are 28v incandescent lamps. > > A friend has an Eclipse front panel with nearly identical bezel, which > has LED's and a number of differences in the logic (different connector > to the system, for instance). So it is probably all run on 5v. > > I have not had time to figure out the driver circuit for any of the > lamps to see what that may turn up, and wanted to know whether it was > 28v lamps before I buy 40 of them. (the thing has only 2 out of a lot > of lamps). > > Thanks > Jim From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Sat Jul 23 12:57:29 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 10:57:29 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: Henk Gooijen: Saturday, July 23, 2016 10:36 AM > Somebody knows of a source for 28V 40 mA ?grain? bulbs with wires? > I could use some 10 ? and 20 as spare ? Mouser has 950 CM2185 bulbs in stock, which should work nicely. The Netherlands version of the site has the same quantity. Maybe ships from the same warehouses? (Part number 606-CM2185.) Vince From jwsmail at jwsss.com Sat Jul 23 13:41:56 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 11:41:56 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> On 7/23/2016 10:57 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: > From: Henk Gooijen: Saturday, July 23, 2016 10:36 AM >> Somebody knows of a source for 28V 40 mA ?grain? bulbs with wires? >> I could use some 10 ? and 20 as spare ? > > Mouser has 950 CM2185 bulbs in stock, which should work nicely. > The Netherlands version of the site has the same quantity. Maybe > ships from the same warehouses? (Part number 606-CM2185.) > > Vince > Vince, Henk, I was looking at this sale on ebay from Vince's part number. Also it is a US shipping source, so may not save Henk anything. But it is the lowest cost I found around. 10-PACK-Bulb-for-MINIATURE-LAMP-2187D-LAMP-28VOLTS-1-12WATTS http://www.ebay.com/itm/152150229625 The Mouser sale for the CM2187 (think that may be the above ebay part) shows it a 28v lamp, 44 cents, and 3000+ in stock. Not sure why the ebay sale is for so much, but Mouser looks like the place to buy if there isn't a minimum order amount or bad shipping / service fee costs from Mouser. thanks Jim From mattislind at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 14:16:13 2016 From: mattislind at gmail.com (Mattis Lind) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 21:16:13 +0200 Subject: MM11-L / G231 repair advice? Message-ID: So after replacing a microcode PROM on the PDP-11/05 control board and then concluding that the remaining problem relating to indexed addressing was caused by one single micro code line that got missing when typed in, desoldering the PROM, program two more bits (0xf to 0x5), the CPU is now working. Passing the D0OA diagnostics and the D0NB (except for the mov r0, (r0)+ tests) But during the journey the core memory died. I am used to things failing in my face. The M9301 board started of working. Then it developed some kind of amnesia, permanently forgetting what was once stored. When this was cured with yet another PROM, one, then a second DEC8881 driver on the M9301-YF gave up. But now it seems to work. So finally I am back to the core memory. Luckily I had a spare set so I could find at least what board that was failing. Card swapping gave that the G231 module was at fault. The failure mode is that it does read out the contents once. The second time it reads out all zeros. Write never works. Apparently it is the write / write back mechanism that is failing completely in the G231 module. Since it is in fact reading, the X / Y selection seems to work and most of the writing takes place on the G110 as far as I understand since it contains the Inhibit drivers. So what part of the G231 is specific for the write? I have a few other G110 / G231 modules with different types of failure modes so it would be really nice if someone with MM11-L know-how would step forward and share all the details on this board set. I will continue to browse the schematic and the user manual to try to find the failing component, but help is highly appreciated! /Mattis From henk.gooijen at hotmail.com Sat Jul 23 14:16:52 2016 From: henk.gooijen at hotmail.com (Henk Gooijen) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 21:16:52 +0200 Subject: Nova 3 front panel Message-ID: Van: jim stephens From paulkoning at comcast.net Sat Jul 23 14:16:54 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:16:54 -0400 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> References: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <5131E514-7547-4F32-B933-AA27DBBE7E8B@comcast.net> > On Jul 23, 2016, at 2:41 PM, jim stephens wrote: > > > > On 7/23/2016 10:57 AM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote: >> From: Henk Gooijen: Saturday, July 23, 2016 10:36 AM >>> Somebody knows of a source for 28V 40 mA ?grain? bulbs with wires? >>> I could use some 10 ? and 20 as spare ? >> > > The Mouser sale for the CM2187 (think that may be the above ebay part) shows it a 28v lamp, 44 cents, and 3000+ in stock. Not sure why the ebay sale is for so much, but Mouser looks like the place to buy if there isn't a minimum order amount or bad shipping / service fee costs from Mouser. Mouser and its competitor Digikey are both large and well established electronic parts distributors. They may have a minimum order, or a service charge for very small orders, but if so it's probably something modest like $25. And you can go to them for pretty much every electronic part you might ever want, at least if it's current production. I'm not sure about tubes, but apart from that... I've used them both, Digikey more often. Excellent outfits. 28V lightbulbs should be readily available, after all 28V is standard DC power in airplanes. paul From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 14:19:43 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:19:43 -0400 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I indeed do have procomm plus. disks 1 and 2. Let me see if they can be read. On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 8:04 PM, Tothwolf wrote: > On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote: > > I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random >> old utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for >> workgroups etc. >> >> I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, says >> dos for the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to anyone, or >> is it just a stock dos install with a dec sticker on the disk? >> >> There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, >> i will post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone is >> interested in what is here. I just want some of the software off of the >> disks, i don't necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks around >> . There is also an original copy of doom on floppy that looks to be >> complete. >> > > I'm still on the lookout for Procomm Plus for Windows (ver 2.11) if you > happen across that on 3.5" disks. I bought what was supposed to be a boxed > copy off eBay years ago and it was mostly complete... box, manuals, > license, but no disks :) > From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 14:27:08 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:27:08 -0400 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Unfourtunately alot of the sun and os/2 stuff from the larger crate seems to be incomplete. Less than half of the numbered disks for each set. Next to useless in my eyes. All of the software from the first crate is complete, i can get to listing what is there tonight. I am making images of the disks. They will be available on my server, and ill put them up on bitsavers or something of the like. --Devin On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 3:19 PM, devin davison wrote: > I indeed do have procomm plus. disks 1 and 2. Let me see if they can be > read. > > On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 8:04 PM, Tothwolf wrote: > >> On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote: >> >> I picked up two crates jam packed full of floppys today. Bunch of random >>> old utilities in there, borland turbo asm, turbo pascal, windows for >>> workgroups etc. >>> >>> I found a set of disks with the DEC digital logo on them. 4-5 disks, >>> says dos for the dec pc. Some utilitys too. Are these of any use to anyone, >>> or is it just a stock dos install with a dec sticker on the disk? >>> >>> There are little heaps of disks on just about every surface around here, >>> i will post back with a complete list of what is here to see if anyone is >>> interested in what is here. I just want some of the software off of the >>> disks, i don't necessarily want to keep the two full crates of disks around >>> . There is also an original copy of doom on floppy that looks to be >>> complete. >>> >> >> I'm still on the lookout for Procomm Plus for Windows (ver 2.11) if you >> happen across that on 3.5" disks. I bought what was supposed to be a boxed >> copy off eBay years ago and it was mostly complete... box, manuals, >> license, but no disks :) >> > > From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Sat Jul 23 14:32:58 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 12:32:58 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> References: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> Message-ID: From: jim stephens: Saturday, July 23, 2016 11:41 AM > I was looking at this sale on ebay from Vince's part number. Also it is a US > shipping source, so may not save Henk anything. But it is the lowest cost I > found around. > > 10-PACK-Bulb-for-MINIATURE-LAMP-2187D-LAMP-28VOLTS-1-12WATTS > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/152150229625 That price of $2+ per bulb is high, but the bulbs used to retail for prices like that. They were scarce, being replaced by LEDs or whatever, and they just weren't making them anymore. The Mouser prices and inventory seem to indicate that this has changed, unless Mouser just has them on clearance or something. (Maybe 28V happens to still have demand?) > The Mouser sale for the CM2187 (think that may be the above ebay part) shows > it a 28v lamp, 44 cents, and 3000+ in stock. The CM2185 has a longer life (but half as bright) and is $0.35 qty 1. Qty 10 is more likely, so $0.32 vs .40 for the CM2187. Either way it is pretty reasonable. > Not sure why the ebay sale is for so much, but Mouser looks like the place to > buy if there isn't a minimum order amount or bad shipping / service fee costs > from Mouser. Agreed. Shipping is probably $6 to $12 in the USA, and I don't see any a minimum order. Vince From jwest at classiccmp.org Sat Jul 23 15:04:31 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:04:31 -0500 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000001d1e51d$6ce9a9c0$46bcfd40$@classiccmp.org> I emailed privately... but I do have original pcplus 242, and pcplus 2.1 for win, and all the Borland packages. From theevilapplepie at gmail.com Sat Jul 23 15:11:13 2016 From: theevilapplepie at gmail.com (James Vess) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 15:11:13 -0500 Subject: Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas In-Reply-To: <000901d1e4b8$97850e50$c68f2af0$@eastek.com.au> References: <000901d1e4b8$97850e50$c68f2af0$@eastek.com.au> Message-ID: Awesome news! I'm happy it's going somewhere to be cared for or at least stored. Seeing systems like this get scrapped hurts my heart, losing history that is there and still alive ( reasonably anyway ) is a shame. I'm just happy that it will live to blink another day ;) On Saturday, July 23, 2016, Evan Linwood wrote: > Hi Mark, it wasn't myself either. > Apologies (and to Brian, James and Jon) I was watching & wanting to respond > but got hit by a wall of things, then noticed that someone had bid on it. > Very glad to see it was acquired, and that Chris could confirm. > > > From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 23 15:22:42 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 13:22:42 -0700 Subject: heap of floppy disks In-Reply-To: <000001d1e51d$6ce9a9c0$46bcfd40$@classiccmp.org> References: <000001d1e51d$6ce9a9c0$46bcfd40$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: On 07/23/2016 01:04 PM, Jay West wrote: > I emailed privately... but I do have original pcplus 242, and pcplus > 2.1 for win, and all the Borland packages. Isn't at least some of this archived in the SIMTEL20 set? --Chuck From henk.gooijen at hotmail.com Sat Jul 23 15:45:47 2016 From: henk.gooijen at hotmail.com (Henk Gooijen) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 22:45:47 +0200 Subject: Nova 3 front panel Message-ID: Van: jim stephens From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Sat Jul 23 15:56:23 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2016 13:56:23 -0700 Subject: MM11-L / G231 repair advice? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2016-Jul-23, at 12:16 PM, Mattis Lind wrote: > So after replacing a microcode PROM on the PDP-11/05 control board and then > concluding that the remaining problem relating to indexed addressing was > caused by one single micro code line that got missing when typed in, > desoldering the PROM, program two more bits (0xf to 0x5), the CPU is now > working. Passing the D0OA diagnostics and the D0NB (except for the mov r0, > (r0)+ tests) > > But during the journey the core memory died. I am used to things failing in > my face. The M9301 board started of working. Then it developed some kind of > amnesia, permanently forgetting what was once stored. When this was cured > with yet another PROM, one, then a second DEC8881 driver on the M9301-YF > gave up. But now it seems to work. > > So finally I am back to the core memory. Luckily I had a spare set so I > could find at least what board that was failing. Card swapping gave that > the G231 module was at fault. The failure mode is that it does read out the > contents once. The second time it reads out all zeros. Write never works. > > Apparently it is the write / write back mechanism that is failing > completely in the G231 module. Since it is in fact reading, the X / Y > selection seems to work and most of the writing takes place on the G110 as > far as I understand since it contains the Inhibit drivers. So what part of > the G231 is specific for the write? > > I have a few other G110 / G231 modules with different types of failure > modes so it would be really nice if someone with MM11-L know-how would step > forward and share all the details on this board set. > > I will continue to browse the schematic and the user manual to try to find > the failing component, but help is highly appreciated! Speaking generally, without specific familiarity with these dec modules . . Writing is performed by driving the X/Y lines in the opposite polarity (current direction) than for reading. Have you checked whether it affects the entire memory module or some block or selection of addresses within the module? If it's a limited set of addresses it may just be an X/Y driver transistor for the polarity appropriate to writing. If it's the entire module, you might look at how the drive polarity selection is done for the X/Y drivers, somewhere it should trace back to the R/W/restore state sequencing for a memory cycle. The problem may then be in that polarity selection or the state sequencing. The inhibit circuitry does just that: inhibits writing (inhibits setting the cores to the 'set' or 'written' state), so it doesn't sound as much like an inhibit issue, unless it's something like the inhibits always being enabled. From nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com Sun Jul 24 02:01:42 2016 From: nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com (Nigel Williams) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 17:01:42 +1000 Subject: seeking DEC VAXmate software Message-ID: I'm on the hunt for diskette images of DEC VAXmate software. From a post to comp.sys.dec there appears to be at least the following diskettes, but possibly more: VAXmate MS-DOS version 3.10 for VAXmate Oper Environ V1.1 VAXMATE S/A INSTALL V1.1 VT240 EMULATOR UPDATE For VAXmate Oper Environ V1.1 VAXMATE INFO. SYSTEM V1.1 FOR VAXMATE OPER ENVIRON V1.1 VAXMATE MS-WINDOWS V1.03 (three disks) If anyone has the diskettes or can point me somewhere to look, it would be appreciated. thanks. Other notes: If anyone is desperate to own a VAXmate I can provide contact details of someone who has a few. Here is my VAXmate running a generic MS-DOS 4.0, the screen is very dim, and a few other pictures (as it arrived, so before any cleaning - quote dusty inside): https://goo.gl/photos/cQkbekoLiWBCZoad9 From mattislind at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 02:48:08 2016 From: mattislind at gmail.com (Mattis Lind) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:48:08 +0200 Subject: MM11-L / G231 repair advice? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > Speaking generally, without specific familiarity with these dec modules . . > > Writing is performed by driving the X/Y lines in the opposite polarity > (current direction) than for reading. > OK. That explains why the read signal is routed to the driver selection circuitry. A couple of inverter was connected in parallel here from the READ signal coming form the G110. But they were all right. > > Have you checked whether it affects the entire memory module or some block > or selection of addresses within the module? > It was the entire memory. > > If it's a limited set of addresses it may just be an X/Y driver transistor > for the polarity appropriate to writing. > > If it's the entire module, you might look at how the drive polarity > selection is done for the X/Y drivers, > somewhere it should trace back to the R/W/restore state sequencing for a > memory cycle. > The problem may then be in that polarity selection or the state sequencing. > > The inhibit circuitry does just that: inhibits writing (inhibits setting > the cores to the 'set' or 'written' state), > so it doesn't sound as much like an inhibit issue, unless it's something > like the inhibits always being enabled. > With a scope I checked the outputs of E2 which is involved in the sequence logic. And yes, two outputs were floating. Not normal since this was a 74H00. Replacing it with a 74S00 (no 74H00 available) actually made the module working again! Thanks for the advice! Yet again it was a plastic NS manufactured chip from 1973 that had failed. So now the entire 11/05 is working just fine. Next step is the TC11 controller... /Mattis From henk.gooijen at hotmail.com Sun Jul 24 03:24:58 2016 From: henk.gooijen at hotmail.com (Henk Gooijen) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 10:24:58 +0200 Subject: Nova 3 front panel Message-ID: Van: jim stephens From mattislind at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 04:01:37 2016 From: mattislind at gmail.com (Mattis Lind) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 11:01:37 +0200 Subject: Signetics N8251 source? Message-ID: After successfully repairing the G231 module of the MM11-L set I continued with the next one. This one was not able to access addresses ending 0100 (binary). Luckily it was not the transistors arrays that were bad but the selector chip. A Signetics N8251 chip. I found a source on ebay at $4.95 each plus $13 shipping. A little bit to much for my taste (although I could make an offer) Anyone know of a cheaper source? I could use five or ten maybe. /Mattis From davidk.collins at bigpond.com Sun Jul 24 05:22:37 2016 From: davidk.collins at bigpond.com (David Collins) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 20:22:37 +1000 Subject: HP 9845B Model 100 PSU - looking for transformer In-Reply-To: <81E4EB5EC7B8014EA8E52D4FF9290437305945B4@dlrexmbx02.intra.dlr.de> References: <81E4EB5EC7B8014EA8E52D4FF9290437305945B4@dlrexmbx02.intra.dlr.de> Message-ID: <000f01d1e595$4d2eb710$e78c2530$@bigpond.com> Martin, apologies for taking so long to reply to this - but I have one of the transformers you are after. It's in a defective 9845 power supply but I'm happy to extract it from the supply if you still need one. Send me an email at curator at hpmuseum.net and we can work out the details. Regards, David Collins Curator, HP Computer Museum -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Martin.Hepperle at dlr.de Sent: Friday, 3 June 2016 11:26 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: HP 9845B Model 100 PSU - looking for transformer Hi, I have got a 9845B which has a defective power supply unit - obviously a very common problem. After replacing the cracking epoxy capacitors I found that the mains transformer seems to have a broken input winding. Maybe someone tried to run it at 220V using the 110V input selector switch. What I am now looking for is a defective PSU with a good transformer, resp. just the transformer which may also have been used in other HP devices.. The transformer is located on the PSU mother board between the two large capacitors. It has the part number "9100-4037" and the date code "8-81" printed on it. It has two input windings and three output windings. Thus the output is a bit different (one additional winding compared to Tony Duells schematics). Maybe someone can help? Martin From davidk.collins at bigpond.com Sun Jul 24 05:30:30 2016 From: davidk.collins at bigpond.com (David Collins) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 20:30:30 +1000 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <011801d1e4b5$799e8360$6cdb8a20$@gmail.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> <5792CF62.4010901@gmail.com> <011801d1e4b5$799e8360$6cdb8a20$@gmail.com> Message-ID: <001001d1e596$67210f50$35632df0$@bigpond.com> Guys, I've looked for a 98228A ROM in the HP Computer Museum but haven't been able to find one - but it looks like we've had one at some stage judging by the photo. If I come across it I'll come back to you. David Collins Curator -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of CuriousMarc Sent: Saturday, 23 July 2016 5:40 PM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 Thanks, I didn't know, I grabbed the image. That offers a path if I can ever get an 9885 and single sides 8" discs... Marc > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul > Berger On the hpmuseum.net page for the 98217A ROM here is an image of > what is reputed to be an initialized diskette for use with 9825 and > 98217A http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=166. When I get my > 9825T I will look into 9885 emulation, I don't think it will be too difficult but > you may still need a GPIO unless I build the whole thing onto a > plug-in card I don't think the GPIO would be too difficult to clone. > But ideally I would still like to get access to a 98228A ROM to dump > and clone > it, even though it is bank switched it should still be possible. > > Paul. From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 06:31:29 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (curiousmarc3 at gmail.com) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 04:31:29 -0700 Subject: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 In-Reply-To: <001001d1e596$67210f50$35632df0$@bigpond.com> References: <2F4209D3-3D1D-45E8-AB1F-99F61E76F5B5@gmail.com> <008c01d1e477$9d04be70$d70e3b50$@gmail.com> <5792CF62.4010901@gmail.com> <011801d1e4b5$799e8360$6cdb8a20$@gmail.com> <001001d1e596$67210f50$35632df0$@bigpond.com> Message-ID: Thanks for looking! Marc > On Jul 24, 2016, at 3:30 AM, David Collins wrote: > > Guys, I've looked for a 98228A ROM in the HP Computer Museum but haven't > been able to find one - but it looks like we've had one at some stage > judging by the photo. > > If I come across it I'll come back to you. > > David Collins > Curator > > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of CuriousMarc > Sent: Saturday, 23 July 2016 5:40 PM > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' > > Subject: RE: Flex Disc options for the HP 9825 > > Thanks, I didn't know, I grabbed the image. That offers a path if I can ever > get an 9885 and single sides 8" discs... > Marc > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul >> Berger On the hpmuseum.net page for the 98217A ROM here is an image of >> what is reputed to be an initialized diskette for use with 9825 and >> 98217A http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=166. When I get my >> 9825T I will look into 9885 emulation, I don't think it will be too > difficult but >> you may still need a GPIO unless I build the whole thing onto a >> plug-in card I don't think the GPIO would be too difficult to clone. >> But ideally I would still like to get access to a 98228A ROM to dump >> and > clone >> it, even though it is bank switched it should still be possible. >> >> Paul. > > From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Sun Jul 24 07:58:16 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 08:58:16 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> >On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan wrote: >Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was discussing with >Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work (from >000000). > >Bill > You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, including sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question about using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 starting with V05.00 or RT-11. Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, so there might be a difference with actual hardware. If you have any more questions, please ask. Jerome Fine From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 10:06:01 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 11:06:01 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> Message-ID: On Jul 24, 2016 8:58 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" wrote: > > >On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan wrote: > >> Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was discussing with >> Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work (from >> 000000). >> >> Bill >> > You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, > there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, including > sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. > > Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which > was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. > > Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K > bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of > memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since > it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question about > using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 starting with > V05.00 or RT-11. > > Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K > bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of > memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The > error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work > might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not > ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? > > NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, > so there might be a difference with actual hardware. > > If you have any more questions, please ask. > > Jerome Fine Thanks for the details. I had been trying to boot rt-11 v5.3 on a 16k core 11/40 using RL11 (rl02) and it did not work. The system was unable to complete the initialization. CPU diagnostics passed, I could load BASIC papertape. RL11 working correctly. In this context I posted my question. After I posted my message here I loaded up simh and emulated an 11 with 32k. RT-11 v5.3 disk boots. When I re-built the system and reduced to 16k, I could not boot, bombed. One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future readers of this thread. Bill From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sun Jul 24 07:11:02 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 14:11:02 +0200 Subject: seeking DEC VAXmate software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160724121101.GA12196@Update.UU.SE> On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 05:01:42PM +1000, Nigel Williams wrote: > I'm on the hunt for diskette images of DEC VAXmate software. From a > post to comp.sys.dec there appears to be at least the following > diskettes, but possibly more: > > VAXmate MS-DOS version 3.10 for VAXmate Oper Environ V1.1 > VAXMATE S/A INSTALL V1.1 > VT240 EMULATOR UPDATE For VAXmate Oper Environ V1.1 > VAXMATE INFO. SYSTEM V1.1 FOR VAXMATE OPER ENVIRON V1.1 > VAXMATE MS-WINDOWS V1.03 (three disks) > > If anyone has the diskettes or can point me somewhere to look, it > would be appreciated. > thanks. > > Other notes: > If anyone is desperate to own a VAXmate I can provide contact details > of someone who has a few. > > Here is my VAXmate running a generic MS-DOS 4.0, the screen is very > dim, and a few other pictures (as it arrived, so before any cleaning - > quote dusty inside): > > https://goo.gl/photos/cQkbekoLiWBCZoad9 Thanks for sharing! I can't help you with the software but it's fun to see the innards of one of those. Is the bulk of the computer in the monitor and the box it stands on "just" an ISA expansion, PSU and hard disk? Curious construction. /P From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sun Jul 24 08:11:00 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:11:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info Message-ID: <20160724131100.A77AB18C0A2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > Guess I should document all this in the Computer History Wiki OK, done: http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/24 > those prints (KT-24, and -11/24 backplane) would still be useful. Big thanks for Al for putting the KT24 prints up - very good to have them. > I guess it will require getting ahold of a backplane, and seeing what I > can find out with an ohm-meter. It looks like I'll still have to do this at some point, to confirm my theories about how the two busses are wired on the backplane (separation of UB and EUB address lines, and cross-connection of the data lines, for the EUB/SPC slots), since we still don't have any backplane info. Another mystery: The "PDP-11 UNIBUS Processor Handbook" (1985) says (pg. 4-10) that in the 5.25" box, "only one MS11-P memory module can be configured". Anyone know the cause/source of that restriction? I don't think it can be the backplane; i) AFAIK, the 5.25" and 10.5" (for which no limitation is stated) boxes use the same backplane, and ii) the 5.25" box can take more of the smaller MS11-L cards (albeit, again, limited - to three). So I don't think it can be 'the backplane doesn't carry all 22 address lines to all EUB slots' (although I will check); and the CPU does drive all 22. My next thought was that it's some power supply current issue, but on checking, that board only uses +5V, and there's nothing about limiting the number of ordinary boards when an MS11-P is in use. (I have to check the power supply specs, and compare with the board power consumption specs, to make completely positive there's no issue there.) So I can't come up with any technical rationale for that limit? Am I missing something? Or is it just DEC marketing, trying to limit how powerful the machine can be? Noel From iamcamiel at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 08:30:35 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 15:30:35 +0200 Subject: seeking DEC VAXmate software In-Reply-To: References: <20160724121101.GA12196@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: > Is the bulk of the computer in the monitor and the box it stands on "just" > an ISA expansion, PSU and hard disk? Yes, it's an optional expansion box. The idea behind the vaxmate was that instead of from a hard disk, it could run from a disk image on a VAX, so a local hard disk was optional. Camiel From jules.richardson99 at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 09:29:00 2016 From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com (Jules Richardson) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:29:00 -0500 Subject: FTGH: DEC 54-17507 backplane; Sun type-4 keyboards In-Reply-To: <201607140058.UAA22040@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607140058.UAA22040@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: <5794D0AC.7060601@gmail.com> On 07/13/2016 07:58 PM, Mouse wrote: > - One DEC 54-17507. Google makes me think this is the Qbus backplane > from a BA123. It appears to be in good shape; while I am not set up > to test it, it looks pretty much "too simple to break". It consists > of the PCB, the Qbus connectors on one side, two 18-pin power > connectors and one ten-pin connector with blue plastic shroud on the > other side, and a piece of heavy sheet steel all this is bolted to. > (And the bolts, of course. :-) Oh, all four resistor packs are > installed. Did you find a home for this yet? I'm tempted, just because it might be what I need to try powering up the 11/84 CPU that I got in my recent pile of DEC boards. cheers Jules From js at cimmeri.com Sun Jul 24 11:01:25 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 11:01:25 -0500 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> Message-ID: <5794E655.6090102@cimmeri.com> On 7/24/2016 10:06 AM, william degnan wrote: > ... > > One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh > refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this > distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future readers > of this thread. > > Bill What is the distinction? - J. From aek at bitsavers.org Sun Jul 24 11:38:54 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:38:54 -0700 Subject: ISO Televideo 965 eprom images Message-ID: <5794EF1E.7080208@bitsavers.org> I was digging around in storage and found a 965 board that is missing its eproms. Does anyone have one handy that they could dump the proms from? It's kind of unusual in that it uses a 65816 cpu. Seems to be a midway design between the earlier 6502's and the later 68000's. From kwwacker at ptd.net Sun Jul 24 12:13:41 2016 From: kwwacker at ptd.net (Karl-Wilhelm Wacker) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 13:13:41 -0400 Subject: Signetics N8251 source? References: Message-ID: Mattis: By the description, it is a 1 of 10 decoder chip. Have you looked to see if it pinout compatable with a 7442? Karl ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mattis Lind" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016 5:01 AM Subject: Signetics N8251 source? > After successfully repairing the G231 module of the MM11-L set I continued > with the next one. This one was not able to access addresses ending 0100 > (binary). Luckily it was not the transistors arrays that were bad but the > selector chip. A Signetics N8251 chip. > > I found a source on ebay at $4.95 each plus $13 shipping. A little bit to > much for my taste (although I could make an offer) > > Anyone know of a cheaper source? I could use five or ten maybe. > > /Mattis From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Sun Jul 24 15:07:03 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 16:07:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: FTGH: DEC 54-17507 backplane; Sun type-4 keyboards In-Reply-To: <5794D0AC.7060601@gmail.com> References: <201607140058.UAA22040@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> <5794D0AC.7060601@gmail.com> Message-ID: <201607242007.QAA05257@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> - One DEC 54-17507. Google makes me think this is the Qbus >> backplane from a BA123. [...] > Did you find a home for this yet? Yes, though it depends on figuring out a place/time to meet the recipient when on a trip I'm going to be making in mid-August. If that falls through (which currently looks unlikely), then it'll be looking for a home. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From north at alum.mit.edu Sun Jul 24 16:29:59 2016 From: north at alum.mit.edu (Don North) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 14:29:59 -0700 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> Message-ID: On 7/24/2016 8:06 AM, william degnan wrote: > On Jul 24, 2016 8:58 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" wrote: >>> On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan wrote: >>> Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was discussing > with >>> Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work (from >>> 000000). >>> >>> Bill >>> >> You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, >> there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, including >> sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. >> >> Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which >> was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. >> >> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K >> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >> memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since >> it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question >> about using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 starting with >> V05.00 or RT-11. >> >> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? >> >> NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, >> so there might be a difference with actual hardware. >> >> If you have any more questions, please ask. >> >> Jerome Fine > Thanks for the details. I had been trying to boot rt-11 v5.3 on a 16k core > 11/40 using RL11 (rl02) and it did not work. The system was unable to > complete the initialization. CPU diagnostics passed, I could load BASIC > papertape. RL11 working correctly. In this context I posted my question. > > After I posted my message here I loaded up simh and emulated an 11 with > 32k. RT-11 v5.3 disk boots. When I re-built the system and reduced to > 16k, I could not boot, bombed. > > One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh > refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this > distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future readers > of this thread. > > Bill RT-11 v5.03 single job monitor boots fine and runs in just 32KB (16KW) of memory. You need to be more specific about how you specify the memory configuration (words vs bytes). DEC routinely specified everything in KW (words) but most users and tools use KB (bytes) nowadays. Note that to force RT11SJ (vs RT11FB) to boot on the below image I booted first using FB in a larger memory configuration, did a: COPY/BOOT DL1:RT11SJ.SYS DL1: to force it to boot using the SJ monitor the next time. Don PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f CPU 11/34, FPP, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled 32KB NOTE: ctrl-E to exit to SIMH monitor sim> boot rl1 RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 .sho all RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 Booted from DL1:RT11SJ USR is set SWAP EXIT is set SWAP KMON is set NOIND TT is set NOQUIET ERROR is set ERROR SL is set OFF EDIT is set KED KMON nesting depth is 3 PDP 11/34 Processor 32KB of memory FP11 Hardware Floating Point Unit Extended Instruction Set (EIS) Memory Management Unit 60 Cycle System Clock From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 24 16:37:25 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 17:37:25 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> Message-ID: <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> > On Jul 24, 2016, at 11:06 AM, william degnan wrote: > >> ... >> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? FWIW, I used to run RT11SJ on an 11/20 with 8 kW (16 kB) of memory and RC11 system disk, in college. That fit with no trouble, enough room to run RT BASIC and a reasonably application program. paul From kwwacker at ptd.net Sun Jul 24 18:40:12 2016 From: kwwacker at ptd.net (Karl-Wilhelm Wacker) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 19:40:12 -0400 Subject: Signetics N8251 source? References: Message-ID: <10544F7A1F1341178946C2103F4BF8F7@mefac9c05dd643> I have looked at the pinout, it is different, but you can use a method called "dead-bug" to wire the 7442 in place of the n8251. I've attached the spec sheet for the n8251 to this email. Karl ----- Original Message ----- From: "Karl-Wilhelm Wacker" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016 1:13 PM Subject: Re: Signetics N8251 source? > Mattis: > > By the description, it is a 1 of 10 decoder chip. > > Have you looked to see if it pinout compatable > with a 7442? > > Karl > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Mattis Lind" > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" > > Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016 5:01 AM > Subject: Signetics N8251 source? > > >> After successfully repairing the G231 module of the MM11-L set I >> continued >> with the next one. This one was not able to access addresses ending 0100 >> (binary). Luckily it was not the transistors arrays that were bad but the >> selector chip. A Signetics N8251 chip. >> >> I found a source on ebay at $4.95 each plus $13 shipping. A little bit to >> much for my taste (although I could make an offer) >> >> Anyone know of a cheaper source? I could use five or ten maybe. >> >> /Mattis > From thebri at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 20:12:24 2016 From: thebri at gmail.com (Brian Walenz) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 21:12:24 -0400 Subject: Signetics N8251 source? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 5:01 AM, Mattis Lind wrote: > After successfully repairing the G231 module of the MM11-L set I continued > with the next one. This one was not able to access addresses ending 0100 > (binary). Luckily it was not the transistors arrays that were bad but the > selector chip. A Signetics N8251 chip. > I suspect that since you've debugged it already, this won't help. Just in case, the datasheet is on page 52 of: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_signeticsdcs8000SeriesTTLMSI_11847693 /Mattis > b From glen.slick at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 22:08:53 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 20:08:53 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: > > Straight PDP-8 > http://www.ebay.com/itm/152171436497 > > PDP-11/20 > http://www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today, it just sold for $5,655.55 From couryhouse at aol.com Sun Jul 24 22:40:15 2016 From: couryhouse at aol.com (couryhouse) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 20:40:15 -0700 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: Think it was add on box that went for the $$$$$! ---Ed# Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: Glen Slick Date: 7/24/16 20:08 (GMT-07:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Subject: Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now > > Straight PDP-8 > http://www.ebay.com/itm/152171436497 > > PDP-11/20 > http://www.ebay.com/itm/201624309371 For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today, it just sold for $5,655.55 From linimon at lonesome.com Sun Jul 24 22:50:02 2016 From: linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:50:02 -0500 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: <20160725035002.GA32343@lonesome.com> On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 08:08:53PM -0700, Glen Slick wrote: > For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today, it > just sold for $5,655.55 well, there goes that fantasy. mcl From tdk.knight at gmail.com Sun Jul 24 22:55:00 2016 From: tdk.knight at gmail.com (Adrian Stoness) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:55:00 -0500 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <20160725035002.GA32343@lonesome.com> References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> <20160725035002.GA32343@lonesome.com> Message-ID: buyer aranges pick prolly hurt the price as well On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 10:50 PM, Mark Linimon wrote: > On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 08:08:53PM -0700, Glen Slick wrote: > > For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today, it > > just sold for $5,655.55 > > well, there goes that fantasy. > > mcl > From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sun Jul 24 23:05:32 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:05:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <20160725040532.A62B918C0A2@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Glen Slick > For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today That one was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, though: not only a KA11 in absolutely pristine condition, but also an additional BA11 stuffed to the gills with memory; the most complete set of original documentation I have _ever_ seen with a computer that old; a complete H960 in perfect condition, with all the blank panels, the rear door, etc; trays and trays of original paper tape software, etc, etc. When you consider that that PDP-11/70 that went a while back for $10K - and -11/70's are a lot more common that -11/20's - I think this one was easily worth what it went for. I'm quite serious - I doubt we'll ever see another -11/20 in this good a shape, and this complete, for sale, at least, not in my remaining lifetime. Noel From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Sun Jul 24 23:20:31 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:20:31 -0600 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now In-Reply-To: <20160725035002.GA32343@lonesome.com> References: <08db0fb0-1445-bde0-8e6e-277871fe0c32@jwsss.com> <20160719192408.GB9010@Update.UU.SE> <20160725035002.GA32343@lonesome.com> Message-ID: On 7/24/2016 9:50 PM, Mark Linimon wrote: > On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 08:08:53PM -0700, Glen Slick wrote: >> For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today, it >> just sold for $5,655.55 > > well, there goes that fantasy. > > mcl > Well in 1972 you could get ... http://www.village.org/pdp-11/faq.pages/pricing.pdp11-05-15-apr-1972.html Too bad I/O other than TTY is not listed. Ben. From axelsson at acc.umu.se Mon Jul 25 07:25:43 2016 From: axelsson at acc.umu.se (=?UTF-8?Q?G=c3=b6ran_Axelsson?=) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:25:43 +0200 Subject: ExpandaCore 18 core memory Message-ID: Hi again... My recent adventures with the StorageTek tape unit is on hold since I got a whole new computer to play with... (and because the disk on my linux with SCSI card had gone bad). A NORD-1 by Norsk Data AS (or Norsk Dataelektronikk AS as the company was called in those days). It is a computer built from TTL chips, a whopping 2250 of them. I seems to be in great shape and I even have drawings of the most of the CPU. More about it here : http://www.ndwiki.org/wiki/NORD-1_Serial_47 ... with pictures. :-) The NORD-1 was designed in 1967, the first one was sold in 1969 and somewhere between 60 and 120 were produced until it was succeeded by the NORD-10. A few NORD-1 ended up in Cern. The power supplies all was within 0,05V from nominal, not bad for a 44 year old computer. And except from a few broken switches, a shorted capacitor (mechanical damage) and a few missing cards it is in "running condition". Well, liberally used definition, it sort of runs. I can set the address register and inspect the different registers. When put in continuous mode the program counter runs through and loops the memory. My guess so far is that there is a problem with reading and writing to the memory. The problem is that I have no documentation over the memory module except a drawing of the circuitry used to access it. ND bought several different models of core memory for it's early computers and just adapted the interface. So once again I turn to the cctech for help, does anybody have instructions about ExpandaCore 18 from by Cambridge Memories INC, Newton, Massachusetts (also known as CMI but probably not the CMI on bitsavers). So far the only thing I've found was a newsflash in a computer magazine about a sale of memories to another computer maker. My plan is to have this machine up and running within a year, in time for the 50 year anniversary of ND founding. :-) ... and this is a long shot, if anyone has a copy of ND-NEWS (ND-NYTT in Norwegian) I would like to have a scan of it. There might be an article in it about delivering this machine to the school that I got it from. Thanks in advance, G?ran From iamcamiel at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 07:37:54 2016 From: iamcamiel at gmail.com (Camiel Vanderhoeven) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:37:54 +0200 Subject: ExpandaCore 18 core memory In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Op 25 jul. 2016 2:25 p.m. schreef "G?ran Axelsson" : > My guess so far is that there is a problem with reading and writing to the memory. The problem is that I have no documentation over the memory module except a drawing of the circuitry used to access it. ND bought several different models of core memory for it's early computers and just adapted the interface. > > So once again I turn to the cctech for help, does anybody have instructions about ExpandaCore 18 from by Cambridge Memories INC, Newton, Massachusetts (also known as CMI but probably not the CMI on bitsavers). > So far the only thing I've found was a newsflash in a computer magazine about a sale of memories to another computer maker. I can't help you with that, but is it just the core stack itself you don't have docs for, or does the CMI part include some driver circuitry? If it's just the stack, you should be able to do without docs for that. Core memory doesn't go bad unless it's physically damaged. If it is physically damaged, repair can be very difficult, depending on the diameter of the cores. How are you troubleshooting this? Can you deposit a value in memory from the front panel, then read it back? If that works, but one or more bits are off, there's a good reason to look at the core driver circuitry. If it doesn't work at all, the problem could be anywhere. Try hooking a logic analyzer to the address and data lines, clock, and read/write control lines for a start. Good luck! Camiel From turing at shaw.ca Mon Jul 25 08:07:10 2016 From: turing at shaw.ca (Norman Jaffe) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 07:07:10 -0600 (MDT) Subject: APL-100 In-Reply-To: <1580983551.37691771.1469451956959.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <282330530.37692833.1469452030024.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Hi: I just recently acquired a Cybernex APL-100 APL/ASCII terminal; it appears to be complete, but the only documentation that I have for it is a sales brochure. Is there anyone familiar with this? It was manufactured in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) in the late '70s - any technical information would be appreciated. From leec2124 at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 10:12:41 2016 From: leec2124 at gmail.com (Lee Courtney) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 08:12:41 -0700 Subject: APL-100 In-Reply-To: <282330530.37692833.1469452030024.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> References: <1580983551.37691771.1469451956959.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> <282330530.37692833.1469452030024.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Message-ID: Hi Norman, I don;t have any specific information on this terminal, but wanted to make sure you are aware of the APL archive hosted at the Computer History Museum - http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/ If you run across any APL material not already in the archive please pass along a copy and I'd love to add it. Thanks! Lee Courtney On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Norman Jaffe wrote: > Hi: > > I just recently acquired a Cybernex APL-100 APL/ASCII terminal; it appears > to be complete, but the only documentation that I have for it is a sales > brochure. > Is there anyone familiar with this? It was manufactured in Ottawa, Ontario > (Canada) in the late '70s - any technical information would be appreciated. > -- Lee Courtney +1-650-704-3934 cell From turing at shaw.ca Mon Jul 25 10:17:40 2016 From: turing at shaw.ca (Norman Jaffe) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 09:17:40 -0600 (MDT) Subject: APL-100 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1061179544.37787200.1469459860415.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Hi Lee: I am aware of the CHM files and I have a number of APL documents that might not be in the archive - I'll check sometime this week. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Courtney" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" , turing at shaw.ca Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 8:12:41 AM Subject: Re: APL-100 Hi Norman, I don;t have any specific information on this terminal, but wanted to make sure you are aware of the APL archive hosted at the Computer History Museum - http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/ If you run across any APL material not already in the archive please pass along a copy and I'd love to add it. Thanks! Lee Courtney On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Norman Jaffe < turing at shaw.ca > wrote: Hi: I just recently acquired a Cybernex APL-100 APL/ASCII terminal; it appears to be complete, but the only documentation that I have for it is a sales brochure. Is there anyone familiar with this? It was manufactured in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) in the late '70s - any technical information would be appreciated. -- Lee Courtney +1-650-704-3934 cell From mhs.stein at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 11:10:08 2016 From: mhs.stein at gmail.com (Mike Stein) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:10:08 -0400 Subject: APL-100 References: <282330530.37692833.1469452030024.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <7D5811B1CE5D4D739885D116D5A11317@310e2> Is there a picture of this terminal available anywhere? TIA, m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Norman Jaffe" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 9:07 AM Subject: APL-100 > Hi: > > I just recently acquired a Cybernex APL-100 APL/ASCII terminal; it appears to be complete, but the only documentation that I have for it is a sales brochure. > Is there anyone familiar with this? It was manufactured in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) in the late '70s - any technical information would be appreciated. From turing at shaw.ca Mon Jul 25 11:24:50 2016 From: turing at shaw.ca (Norman Jaffe) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 10:24:50 -0600 (MDT) Subject: APL-100 In-Reply-To: <7D5811B1CE5D4D739885D116D5A11317@310e2> Message-ID: <2500726.37881571.1469463889993.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Hi: I found a picture at http://omolini.steptail.com/mirror/www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/tty/index.htm that looks just like the terminal that I received. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Stein" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 9:10:08 AM Subject: Re: APL-100 Is there a picture of this terminal available anywhere? TIA, m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Norman Jaffe" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts" Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 9:07 AM Subject: APL-100 > Hi: > > I just recently acquired a Cybernex APL-100 APL/ASCII terminal; it appears to be complete, but the only documentation that I have for it is a sales brochure. > Is there anyone familiar with this? It was manufactured in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) in the late '70s - any technical information would be appreciated. From north at alum.mit.edu Mon Jul 25 00:17:24 2016 From: north at alum.mit.edu (Don North) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:17:24 -0700 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> Message-ID: <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> On 7/24/2016 2:37 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 24, 2016, at 11:06 AM, william degnan wrote: >> >>> ... >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? > FWIW, I used to run RT11SJ on an 11/20 with 8 kW (16 kB) of memory and RC11 system disk, in college. That fit with no trouble, enough room to run RT BASIC and a reasonably application program. > > paul > > And it still works today: PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f sim> set cpu 11/05 16k sim> sho cpu CPU 11/05, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled 16KB sim> att rk0 rt11.dsk sim> boot rk0 RT-11SJ V02C-02 . .R PIP */L DTMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DTMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 RK .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 RF .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 TT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 LP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 BA .SYS 7 27-NOV-75 SYSMAC.SML 18 27-NOV-75 SYSMAC.8K 25 27-NOV-75 BATCH .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 EDIT .SAV 19 27-NOV-75 MACRO .SAV 31 27-NOV-75 ASEMBL.SAV 21 27-NOV-75 EXPAND.SAV 12 27-NOV-75 CREF .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 LINK .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 PIP .SAV 14 27-NOV-75 PATCH .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 ODT .OBJ 9 27-NOV-75 VTHDLR.OBJ 8 27-NOV-75 DEMOFG.MAC 5 27-NOV-75 DEMOBG.MAC 4 27-NOV-75 KB .MAC 33 27-NOV-75 LIBR .SAV 15 27-NOV-75 MONITR.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 RKMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 RFMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 RFMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DPMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DPMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DXMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DXMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 DX .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 CR .SYS 3 27-NOV-75 MT .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 MM .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 PR .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 PP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 CT .SYS 5 27-NOV-75 DS .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 FILEX .SAV 11 27-NOV-75 SRCCOM.SAV 11 27-NOV-75 DUMP .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 PATCHO.SAV 33 27-NOV-75 VTMAC .MAC 7 27-NOV-75 SYSF4 .OBJ 33 27-NOV-75 BASIC .SAV 36 BAS8K .SAV 34 DEMO .BAS 3 51 FILES, 1014 BLOCKS 3760 FREE BLOCKS * . .R BAS8K BASIC V01B-02 * READY OLD OLD FILE NAME--DEMO READY LIST DEMO BASIC V01B-02 10 REM BASIC PROGRAM TO GENERATE N TERMS OF A FIBONACCI SERIES, 20 REM THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF WHICH ARE SPECIFIED BY THE USER. 30 REM 40 REM PRINT IDENTIFYING MESSAGE 50 PRINT "PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES" 60 REM 70 REM GET THE LENGTH AND FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES 80 PRINT "HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED"; 90 INPUT L 100 IF L<>0 THEN 130 110 REM IF HE REQUESTS 0 TERMS,TERMINATE EXECUTION 120 STOP 130 PRINT "WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM"; 140 INPUT T1 150 PRINT "WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM"; 160 INPUT T2 170 REM MAKE SURE L IS NOT NEGATIVE OR TOO LARGE 180 IF L<3 THEN 200 190 IF L<50 THEN 220 200 PRINT L;"TERMS DOES NOT REALLY MAKE SENSE." 210 GO TO 80 220 REM PRINT THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES 230 PRINT "THE REQUESTED SERIES IS" 240 PRINT T1 250 PRINT T2 260 L=L-2 270 REM CALCULATE NEXT TERM AND PRINT IT 280 N=T1+T2 290 T1=T2 300 T2=N 310 PRINT N 320 REM DETERMINE IF SERIES IS FINISHED. IF SO,DO NEXT ONE. 330 L=L-1 340 IF L<=0 THEN 80 350 GO TO 280 360 END READY RUN DEMO BASIC V01B-02 PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?4 WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM?12 WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM?5 THE REQUESTED SERIES IS 12 5 17 22 HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?0 STOP AT LINE 120 READY From north at alum.mit.edu Mon Jul 25 00:17:24 2016 From: north at alum.mit.edu (Don North) Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 22:17:24 -0700 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> Message-ID: <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> On 7/24/2016 2:37 PM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 24, 2016, at 11:06 AM, william degnan wrote: >> >>> ... >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? > FWIW, I used to run RT11SJ on an 11/20 with 8 kW (16 kB) of memory and RC11 system disk, in college. That fit with no trouble, enough room to run RT BASIC and a reasonably application program. > > paul > > And it still works today: PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f sim> set cpu 11/05 16k sim> sho cpu CPU 11/05, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled 16KB sim> att rk0 rt11.dsk sim> boot rk0 RT-11SJ V02C-02 . .R PIP */L DTMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DTMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 RK .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 RF .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 TT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 LP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 BA .SYS 7 27-NOV-75 SYSMAC.SML 18 27-NOV-75 SYSMAC.8K 25 27-NOV-75 BATCH .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 EDIT .SAV 19 27-NOV-75 MACRO .SAV 31 27-NOV-75 ASEMBL.SAV 21 27-NOV-75 EXPAND.SAV 12 27-NOV-75 CREF .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 LINK .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 PIP .SAV 14 27-NOV-75 PATCH .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 ODT .OBJ 9 27-NOV-75 VTHDLR.OBJ 8 27-NOV-75 DEMOFG.MAC 5 27-NOV-75 DEMOBG.MAC 4 27-NOV-75 KB .MAC 33 27-NOV-75 LIBR .SAV 15 27-NOV-75 MONITR.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 RKMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 RFMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 RFMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DPMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DPMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DXMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 DXMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 DT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 DX .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 CR .SYS 3 27-NOV-75 MT .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 MM .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 PR .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 PP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 CT .SYS 5 27-NOV-75 DS .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 FILEX .SAV 11 27-NOV-75 SRCCOM.SAV 11 27-NOV-75 DUMP .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 PATCHO.SAV 33 27-NOV-75 VTMAC .MAC 7 27-NOV-75 SYSF4 .OBJ 33 27-NOV-75 BASIC .SAV 36 BAS8K .SAV 34 DEMO .BAS 3 51 FILES, 1014 BLOCKS 3760 FREE BLOCKS * . .R BAS8K BASIC V01B-02 * READY OLD OLD FILE NAME--DEMO READY LIST DEMO BASIC V01B-02 10 REM BASIC PROGRAM TO GENERATE N TERMS OF A FIBONACCI SERIES, 20 REM THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF WHICH ARE SPECIFIED BY THE USER. 30 REM 40 REM PRINT IDENTIFYING MESSAGE 50 PRINT "PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES" 60 REM 70 REM GET THE LENGTH AND FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES 80 PRINT "HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED"; 90 INPUT L 100 IF L<>0 THEN 130 110 REM IF HE REQUESTS 0 TERMS,TERMINATE EXECUTION 120 STOP 130 PRINT "WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM"; 140 INPUT T1 150 PRINT "WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM"; 160 INPUT T2 170 REM MAKE SURE L IS NOT NEGATIVE OR TOO LARGE 180 IF L<3 THEN 200 190 IF L<50 THEN 220 200 PRINT L;"TERMS DOES NOT REALLY MAKE SENSE." 210 GO TO 80 220 REM PRINT THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES 230 PRINT "THE REQUESTED SERIES IS" 240 PRINT T1 250 PRINT T2 260 L=L-2 270 REM CALCULATE NEXT TERM AND PRINT IT 280 N=T1+T2 290 T1=T2 300 T2=N 310 PRINT N 320 REM DETERMINE IF SERIES IS FINISHED. IF SO,DO NEXT ONE. 330 L=L-1 340 IF L<=0 THEN 80 350 GO TO 280 360 END READY RUN DEMO BASIC V01B-02 PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?4 WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM?12 WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM?5 THE REQUESTED SERIES IS 12 5 17 22 HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?0 STOP AT LINE 120 READY From COURYHOUSE at aol.com Mon Jul 25 00:31:57 2016 From: COURYHOUSE at aol.com (COURYHOUSE at aol.com) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 01:31:57 -0400 Subject: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now Message-ID: <61d029.25215802.44c6fe4c@aol.com> agreed. if it would have been 11/20 and a h960 would have been muccchhhh more reasonable.. what was there was totally amazing. Ed# In a message dated 7/24/2016 9:05:37 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu writes: > From: Glen Slick > For the curious about the eBay market value of the PDP-11/20 today That one was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, though: not only a KA11 in absolutely pristine condition, but also an additional BA11 stuffed to the gills with memory; the most complete set of original documentation I have _ever_ seen with a computer that old; a complete H960 in perfect condition, with all the blank panels, the rear door, etc; trays and trays of original paper tape software, etc, etc. When you consider that that PDP-11/70 that went a while back for $10K - and -11/70's are a lot more common that -11/20's - I think this one was easily worth what it went for. I'm quite serious - I doubt we'll ever see another -11/20 in this good a shape, and this complete, for sale, at least, not in my remaining lifetime. Noel From abuse at cabal.org.uk Mon Jul 25 04:31:52 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 11:31:52 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:59:59AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: [..] > Something that's always bothered me about three-address architectures like > ARM is why there is the insistence on that scheduling bottleneck, the > condition code register? You can see how two-address architectures like the > x80 and x86 try to get around the problem by having certain instructions not > modify certain condition code bits and even have specialized instructions, > such as JCXZ, that don't reply on a specific condition code. > Anyone have a clue? The condition code register can be treated as a regular register that partakes in register renaming. Effectively, you have *many* CCRs in flight, so only *reads* of the register may cause stalls. These reads are usually branches, so there's branch prediction caches to try and deal with those stalls. Unsurprisingly, the x86 ISA is brain-damaged here, in that some instructions (e.g. inc") only affect some bits in EFLAGS, which causes a partial register stall. The recommended "fix" is to avoid such instructions. Eliminating condition codes just moves the complexity from the ALU to the branch logic (which now needs its own mini-ALU for comparisons), and there's not much in it either way. Where it *does* win is that the useful instructions are all single-output and so one can use the noddy code generators found in undergraduate-level compiler construction textbooks such as the Dragon Book. From nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com Mon Jul 25 05:50:25 2016 From: nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com (Nigel Williams) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 20:50:25 +1000 Subject: seeking DEC VAXmate software In-Reply-To: References: <20160724121101.GA12196@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 11:30 PM, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > Yes, it's an optional expansion box. The idea behind the vaxmate was that > instead of from a hard disk, it could run from a disk image on a VAX, so a > local hard disk was optional. ComputerWorld once wrote: "... In the confusion of DEC's Micro Channel feelers (see page 1), DEC officials said their own Vaxmate is not a PC; it's a networking product. But on Friday, a DEC spokesman included the system in a list of DEC's past PC offerings; this reminded us that DEC President Ken Olsen called the Vaxmate a corporate PC when it was introduced in 1986. Following the Tandy deal, cynics quickly noted, the Vaxmate may soon not be a product at all. If you have the line on DEC's PC strategy of the month, call the hot line at..." From bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca Mon Jul 25 06:54:51 2016 From: bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca (ben) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 05:54:51 -0600 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> References: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <1cf08ba9-8d88-7c5f-027d-74d65adea735@jetnet.ab.ca> On 7/25/2016 3:31 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:59:59AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: > [..] >> Something that's always bothered me about three-address architectures like >> ARM is why there is the insistence on that scheduling bottleneck, the >> condition code register? You can see how two-address architectures like the >> x80 and x86 try to get around the problem by having certain instructions not >> modify certain condition code bits and even have specialized instructions, >> such as JCXZ, that don't reply on a specific condition code. > >> Anyone have a clue? > > The condition code register can be treated as a regular register that partakes > in register renaming. Effectively, you have *many* CCRs in flight, so only > *reads* of the register may cause stalls. These reads are usually branches, so > there's branch prediction caches to try and deal with those stalls. > > Unsurprisingly, the x86 ISA is brain-damaged here, in that some instructions > (e.g. inc") only affect some bits in EFLAGS, which causes a partial register > stall. The recommended "fix" is to avoid such instructions. > > Eliminating condition codes just moves the complexity from the ALU to the > branch logic (which now needs its own mini-ALU for comparisons), and there's > not much in it either way. Where it *does* win is that the useful instructions > are all single-output and so one can use the noddy code generators found in > undergraduate-level compiler construction textbooks such as the Dragon Book. > I favor testing a register rather than using flags.(I also like 9 bit bytes too). The other factor is that the 3 big computers at the time IBM 360/370's PDP 10 and PDP 11 where machines when the Dragon Book came out thus you favored register style code generators. Later you got the Pascal style one pass generators that is still with us. After that the Intel hardware mess, and the growth of (to me useless languages like C++ or JAVA) or features like OBJECTS has made every thing so complex, that only few people can even understand just what a compiler is doing. Ben. PS: Has computer science really advanced since the late 1970's? What about hardware? From abuse at cabal.org.uk Mon Jul 25 08:06:58 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:06:58 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <1cf08ba9-8d88-7c5f-027d-74d65adea735@jetnet.ab.ca> References: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> <1cf08ba9-8d88-7c5f-027d-74d65adea735@jetnet.ab.ca> Message-ID: <20160725130658.GA15047@mooli.org.uk> On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 05:54:51AM -0600, ben wrote: [...] > The other factor is that the 3 big computers at the time IBM 360/370's PDP 10 > and PDP 11 where machines when the Dragon Book came out thus you favored > register style code generators. Later you got the Pascal style one pass > generators that is still with us. Those backend designs are completely obsolete now. Modern machines have more grunt, so can use more complex algorithms to eke out more performance. > After that the Intel hardware mess, and the growth of (to me useless > languages like C++ or JAVA) or features like OBJECTS has made every thing so > complex, that only few people can even understand just what a compiler is > doing. A C++ object is a C struct, and a C++ method is a C function that has an invisible first parameter that is a pointer to the object. The generated machine code is bitwise identical. Dynamic dispatch muddies the water a bit, and is equivalent to (but not usually implemented as) a function pointer in the struct. This is not exactly rocket science. There are more features in C++, and they tend to get overused by newcomers who are blinded by the shinies, but it is possible to exercise good judgement to make it *easier* to read than the equivalent C program by tucking all the boilerplate out of the way. > PS: Has computer science really advanced since the late 1970's? What about > hardware? Is that a rhetorical question? I'm going to answer it anyway :) One of my favourite bits of CS is Andrew Tridgell's PhD thesis, from 1999. The advancement to human knowledge was his algorithm to very efficiently run a sliding window across data using rolling checksums and compute deltas in a network-efficient manner. This is the business end of rsync(1), and it can also be used for data compression. On compilation itself, there are a few interesting advances. Single Static Assignment form was invented by IBM in the 1980s; ISTR it's covered in my 1986 edition of the Dragon Book. The essence of the idea is that variables can only be assigned once, and since they are immutable values, it enables many very worthwhile optimisations that wouldn't be as simple were the values liable to change. Functional programming is finally mainstream. Yes, Lisp has been around since the 1950s, but it's been refined somewhat over the 2000s. It's used for immutability (which Lisp didn't really have) and so is easier to reason about on multi-threaded and multi-processor machines because one now doesn't need to worry about shared mutable state. There are *loads* of novel algorithms and techniques out there, but it seems to take decades for them to appear in algorithm textbooks. From cclist at sydex.com Mon Jul 25 11:19:58 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 09:19:58 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> References: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: On 07/25/2016 02:31 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > Eliminating condition codes just moves the complexity from the ALU to > the branch logic (which now needs its own mini-ALU for comparisons), > and there's not much in it either way. Where it *does* win is that > the useful instructions are all single-output and so one can use the > noddy code generators found in undergraduate-level compiler > construction textbooks such as the Dragon Book. Sorry, I'm not following this bit. I am speaking about a three-address ISA here, BTW. Simply adding a flag to each register reflecting its zero/nonzero content should do the job. The high-order (sign) bit is the only other bit necessary. Branch instructions need only inquire if either, neither or both flags are set. I suppose that one could also have several flags registers, being set selectively as dictated by a field in the instruction. --Chuck From paulkoning at comcast.net Mon Jul 25 11:34:19 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:34:19 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <05D297A0-9FC0-4A18-91F9-4213417EFD4F@cabal.org.uk> <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <62C00E34-AD30-4EFF-8079-18A2F26738DC@comcast.net> > On Jul 25, 2016, at 12:19 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > On 07/25/2016 02:31 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: > >> Eliminating condition codes just moves the complexity from the ALU to >> the branch logic (which now needs its own mini-ALU for comparisons), >> and there's not much in it either way. Where it *does* win is that >> the useful instructions are all single-output and so one can use the >> noddy code generators found in undergraduate-level compiler >> construction textbooks such as the Dragon Book. > > Sorry, I'm not following this bit. I am speaking about a three-address > ISA here, BTW. > > Simply adding a flag to each register reflecting its zero/nonzero > content should do the job. The high-order (sign) bit is the only other > bit necessary. Branch instructions need only inquire if either, neither > or both flags are set. > > I suppose that one could also have several flags registers, being set > selectively as dictated by a field in the instruction. The point is that instructions that set condition codes have two outputs: their output register, and the condition code register. That creates both software and hardware complexity. Software complexity in the compiler, which has to track the assignments to both these outputs and do instruction rearranging accordingly. Hardware complexity, because the instruction issue logic has to issue the instructions for the correct outcome in both these outputs. paul From db at db.net Mon Jul 25 12:27:35 2016 From: db at db.net (Diane Bruce) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 13:27:35 -0400 Subject: APL-100 In-Reply-To: <2500726.37881571.1469463889993.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> References: <7D5811B1CE5D4D739885D116D5A11317@310e2> <2500726.37881571.1469463889993.JavaMail.root@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <20160725172735.GA39236@night.db.net> On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 10:24:50AM -0600, Norman Jaffe wrote: > Hi: > As a local to Ottawa this piqued my curiosity. I found this http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics-Today/70s/Electronics-Today-1979-11.pdf Video Terminal The Cybernex APL -100 terminal fea- tures true overstrikes using a highly legible 9x13 dot character cell and a 1920 character 80 by 24 display with selectable 48 line, 32 character split screen mode which scrolls all 48 lines from bottom right to top left. Standard features of the APL -100 in both ASCII and APL modes include read and write cursor address, four direction cursor control, page printand printer port on/off control. The list price of the APL -100 is $1795.00 Canadian, FOB Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, (no taxes included), with delivery beginning in September, 1979. For full information on the APL -100 terminal or the 6 standard models of video terminals, contact Bruce Doug- las, V.P. Marketing, 2183 Dunwin Drive, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, phone (416) 828-2810 or Wayne Reid in Ottawa, at (613) 741-1540. The University of Ottawa was big into APL\360 at one time. I remember the old golf ball terminals they used. Carleton U eventually got the golf ball terminals and APL terminals on their Xerox system. The 'golf ball' (2741 terminal) were still being used despite the glass TTYs being available at Carleton since no tty at that time had the APL character set. This APL-100 would have been useful to both Carleton and Ottawa U if they were still using APL when it came out ;) but I never one of these in use. The 741 exchange strikes me as being from Eastview (at the time) nowadays known as Vanier I wonder where this guy was. Probably Montreal road. (Just east of Wellington here in Ottawa) - Diane -- - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db From billdegnan at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 15:34:12 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 16:34:12 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> Message-ID: Is there a place where one can get RT11 disks for RL02? I only have rt-11 5.3 and even with 64K I can't get my system to boot. Everything so far checks out, I am at a loss to determine the cause of the problem. In simh I can boot 5.3 on a PDP 11/20 emulated with 32K. It must be my system but I don't know what's wrong. Diagnostics don't fail, or I can't get anything clearly wrong. I can load in programs from papertape just fine. Bill On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 1:17 AM, Don North wrote: > On 7/24/2016 2:37 PM, Paul Koning wrote: > >> On Jul 24, 2016, at 11:06 AM, william degnan >>> wrote: >>> >>> ... >>>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? >>>> >>> FWIW, I used to run RT11SJ on an 11/20 with 8 kW (16 kB) of memory and >> RC11 system disk, in college. That fit with no trouble, enough room to run >> RT BASIC and a reasonably application program. >> >> paul >> >> >> And it still works today: > > PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f > sim> set cpu 11/05 16k > sim> sho cpu > CPU 11/05, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled > 16KB > sim> att rk0 rt11.dsk > sim> boot rk0 > > RT-11SJ V02C-02 > > . > .R PIP > */L > > DTMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 > DTMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 > DP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > RK .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > RF .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > TT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > LP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > BA .SYS 7 27-NOV-75 > SYSMAC.SML 18 27-NOV-75 > SYSMAC.8K 25 27-NOV-75 > BATCH .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 > EDIT .SAV 19 27-NOV-75 > MACRO .SAV 31 27-NOV-75 > ASEMBL.SAV 21 27-NOV-75 > EXPAND.SAV 12 27-NOV-75 > CREF .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 > LINK .SAV 25 27-NOV-75 > PIP .SAV 14 27-NOV-75 > PATCH .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 > ODT .OBJ 9 27-NOV-75 > VTHDLR.OBJ 8 27-NOV-75 > DEMOFG.MAC 5 27-NOV-75 > DEMOBG.MAC 4 27-NOV-75 > KB .MAC 33 27-NOV-75 > LIBR .SAV 15 27-NOV-75 > MONITR.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 > RKMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 > RFMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 > RFMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 > DPMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 > DPMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 > DXMNSJ.SYS 46 27-NOV-75 > DXMNFB.SYS 58 27-NOV-75 > DT .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > DX .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > CR .SYS 3 27-NOV-75 > MT .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 > MM .SYS 6 27-NOV-75 > PR .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > PP .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > CT .SYS 5 27-NOV-75 > DS .SYS 2 27-NOV-75 > FILEX .SAV 11 27-NOV-75 > SRCCOM.SAV 11 27-NOV-75 > DUMP .SAV 5 27-NOV-75 > PATCHO.SAV 33 27-NOV-75 > VTMAC .MAC 7 27-NOV-75 > SYSF4 .OBJ 33 27-NOV-75 > BASIC .SAV 36 > BAS8K .SAV 34 > DEMO .BAS 3 > 51 FILES, 1014 BLOCKS > 3760 FREE BLOCKS > * > . > .R BAS8K > > BASIC V01B-02 > * > > READY > > OLD > OLD FILE NAME--DEMO > > READY > > LIST > > DEMO BASIC V01B-02 > > 10 REM BASIC PROGRAM TO GENERATE N TERMS OF A FIBONACCI SERIES, > 20 REM THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF WHICH ARE SPECIFIED BY THE USER. > 30 REM > 40 REM PRINT IDENTIFYING MESSAGE > 50 PRINT "PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES" > 60 REM > 70 REM GET THE LENGTH AND FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES > 80 PRINT "HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED"; > 90 INPUT L > 100 IF L<>0 THEN 130 > 110 REM IF HE REQUESTS 0 TERMS,TERMINATE EXECUTION > 120 STOP > 130 PRINT "WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM"; > 140 INPUT T1 > 150 PRINT "WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM"; > 160 INPUT T2 > 170 REM MAKE SURE L IS NOT NEGATIVE OR TOO LARGE > 180 IF L<3 THEN 200 > 190 IF L<50 THEN 220 > 200 PRINT L;"TERMS DOES NOT REALLY MAKE SENSE." > 210 GO TO 80 > 220 REM PRINT THE FIRST TWO TERMS OF THE SERIES > 230 PRINT "THE REQUESTED SERIES IS" > 240 PRINT T1 > 250 PRINT T2 > 260 L=L-2 > 270 REM CALCULATE NEXT TERM AND PRINT IT > 280 N=T1+T2 > 290 T1=T2 > 300 T2=N > 310 PRINT N > 320 REM DETERMINE IF SERIES IS FINISHED. IF SO,DO NEXT ONE. > 330 L=L-1 > 340 IF L<=0 THEN 80 > 350 GO TO 280 > 360 END > > READY > > RUN > > DEMO BASIC V01B-02 > > PROGRAM TO GENERATE A FIBONACCI SERIES > HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?4 > WHAT IS THE FIRST TERM?12 > WHAT IS THE SECOND TERM?5 > THE REQUESTED SERIES IS > 12 > 5 > 17 > 22 > HOW MANY TERMS DO YOU WANT GENERATED?0 > > STOP AT LINE 120 > > READY > > -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From jwest at classiccmp.org Mon Jul 25 17:31:02 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:31:02 -0500 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> Message-ID: <000201d1e6c4$39ce60a0$ad6b21e0$@classiccmp.org> WillD wrote... ------ Is there a place where one can get RT11 disks for RL02? ------ Aren't one of these RL02 under RT11/dists? http://www.classiccmp.org/PDP-11/ J From axelsson at acc.umu.se Mon Jul 25 18:15:48 2016 From: axelsson at acc.umu.se (=?UTF-8?Q?G=c3=b6ran_Axelsson?=) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 01:15:48 +0200 Subject: ExpandaCore 18 core memory In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <149cd3f1-c760-0b06-dca7-a86390791cda@acc.umu.se> Den 2016-07-25 kl. 14:37, skrev Camiel Vanderhoeven: > Op 25 jul. 2016 2:25 p.m. schreef "G?ran Axelsson" : >> My guess so far is that there is a problem with reading and writing to > the memory. The problem is that I have no documentation over the memory > module except a drawing of the circuitry used to access it. ND bought > several different models of core memory for it's early computers and just > adapted the interface. >> So once again I turn to the cctech for help, does anybody have > instructions about ExpandaCore 18 from by Cambridge Memories INC, Newton, > Massachusetts (also known as CMI but probably not the CMI on bitsavers). >> So far the only thing I've found was a newsflash in a computer magazine > about a sale of memories to another computer maker. > > I can't help you with that, but is it just the core stack itself you don't > have docs for, or does the CMI part include some driver circuitry? If it's > just the stack, you should be able to do without docs for that. Core memory > doesn't go bad unless it's physically damaged. If it is physically damaged, > repair can be very difficult, depending on the diameter of the cores. Thanks for the answer. The ExpandaCore 18 (tm) ;-) is a unit with the driver electronics and core memory together. One control board per four memory planes and dual ported so a high speed device could write straight into the core memory without going through the CPU. In my case it seems like I have a packet drive interface that uses the second channel. I have put up some more pictures here : http://www.home.neab.net/gandalf/ClassicComputing/Pictures/Nord-1%20%2347/ Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here but there is one "control board" for each four core planes. Maybe it's just a buffer. A problem with the core memories is that it sits tight in a crate and I have no extender for these cards. At least I should be able to measure the signals from the CPU to the control board, and from the control board to the memory planes. > How are you troubleshooting this? Can you deposit a value in memory from > the front panel, then read it back? If that works, but one or more bits are > off, there's a good reason to look at the core driver circuitry. If it > doesn't work at all, the problem could be anywhere. Try hooking a logic > analyzer to the address and data lines, clock, and read/write control lines > for a start. > > Good luck! > > Camiel I can deposit a value in the address register (R) but that is as far as I have come right now. I can also look at the other registers. I think that the memory content should show up when I enter an address but I get back the same value as I entered. The operators panel is a bit broken down, there are a couple of bad switches but new ones is in the mail. Some keys react on vibrations. At the moment I can't do any measurements on the CPU-cards as there are no space in that crowded rack. But yesterday I cadded an extender for the NORD-1 CPU crate so in a week I'll be able to do some measurements on that part at least. I got a cheap USB-connected logic analyzer and a digital sampling oscilloscope, so with the extender cards I will be able to measure or break up and inject any signal I want in the CPU. This is too fun to be healthy! :-) G?ran From michael.99.thompson at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 19:03:35 2016 From: michael.99.thompson at gmail.com (Michael Thompson) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 20:03:35 -0400 Subject: TU56 Tape Heads Message-ID: During our PDP-12 debugging today we found that the left tape head has an open coil for data track 0. The left head was OK a little more than a year ago when we found the open coil in the right head. One TU56 head on my personal PDP-8/e also had an open coil when I got it. Our guess is the chemicals from the epoxy potting, possible flux residue, and poor soldering are causing the failures. Getting the epoxy potting out to repair the solder connection has proved impossible so far. Any source for three TU56 tape heads would be appreciated. We are also interested in ideas on how to get the epoxy potting out without destroying the head. -- Michael Thompson From billdegnan at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 20:21:15 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 21:21:15 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <000201d1e6c4$39ce60a0$ad6b21e0$@classiccmp.org> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> <000201d1e6c4$39ce60a0$ad6b21e0$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 6:31 PM, Jay West wrote: > WillD wrote... > ------ > Is there a place where one can get RT11 disks for RL02? > ------ > > Aren't one of these RL02 under RT11/dists? > http://www.classiccmp.org/PDP-11/ > > J > > > Thanks Jay. I can use PDPGUI...assuming my system can build a disk on its own..to try an earlier version of RT-11. Or build a XXDP. Bill From spc at conman.org Mon Jul 25 15:34:27 2016 From: spc at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 16:34:27 -0400 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> References: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> Message-ID: <20160725203426.GA24414@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Peter Corlett once stated: > > Unsurprisingly, the x86 ISA is brain-damaged here, in that some instructions > (e.g. inc") only affect some bits in EFLAGS, which causes a partial register > stall. The recommended "fix" is to avoid such instructions. I'm not following this. On the x86, the INC instruction modifies the following flags: O, S, Z, A and P. So okay, I need to avoid INC to prevent a partial register stall, therefore, I need to use ADD. Let me check ... hmm ... ADD modifies the following: O, S, Z, A, P and C. So now I need to avoid ADD as well? I suppose I could use LEA but then there goes my bignum addition routine ... -spc (Or am I missing something?) From ggs at shiresoft.com Mon Jul 25 15:46:43 2016 From: ggs at shiresoft.com (Guy Sotomayor Jr) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 13:46:43 -0700 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: <20160725203426.GA24414@brevard.conman.org> References: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> <20160725203426.GA24414@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: > On Jul 25, 2016, at 1:34 PM, Sean Conner wrote: > > It was thus said that the Great Peter Corlett once stated: >> >> Unsurprisingly, the x86 ISA is brain-damaged here, in that some instructions >> (e.g. inc") only affect some bits in EFLAGS, which causes a partial register >> stall. The recommended "fix" is to avoid such instructions. > > I'm not following this. On the x86, the INC instruction modifies the > following flags: O, S, Z, A and P. So okay, I need to avoid INC to prevent > a partial register stall, therefore, I need to use ADD. Let me check ... > hmm ... ADD modifies the following: O, S, Z, A, P and C. So now I need to > avoid ADD as well? I suppose I could use LEA but then there goes my bignum > addition routine ... > > -spc (Or am I missing something?) No Peter is wrong. All of the modern x86 (at least the Intel CPUs) are OOO machines with large register files (192 comes to mind) that do register renaming to map the register(s) used by a particular instruction back into an ?architectural? register (no copy is actually done). The flags register is also part of the register re-naming. The only stalls occur when one instruction needs the results from an instruction that hasn?t committed it?s results yet (ie the instruction is still in ?flight?). TTFN - Guy From abuse at cabal.org.uk Mon Jul 25 16:36:57 2016 From: abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 23:36:57 +0200 Subject: Reproduction micros In-Reply-To: References: <20160719150411.GA3606@mooli.org.uk> <20160721202237.GA12070@mooli.org.uk> <86h9biji4e.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> <20160725093152.GA13776@mooli.org.uk> <20160725203426.GA24414@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <20160725213657.GA18168@mooli.org.uk> On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 01:46:43PM -0700, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: >> On Jul 25, 2016, at 1:34 PM, Sean Conner wrote: >> It was thus said that the Great Peter Corlett once stated: >>> Unsurprisingly, the x86 ISA is brain-damaged here, in that some >>> instructions (e.g. inc") only affect some bits in EFLAGS, which causes a >>> partial register stall. The recommended "fix" is to avoid such >>> instructions. >> I'm not following this. On the x86, the INC instruction modifies the >> following flags: O, S, Z, A and P. So okay, I need to avoid INC to prevent >> a partial register stall, therefore, I need to use ADD. Let me check ... >> hmm ... ADD modifies the following: O, S, Z, A, P and C. So now I need to >> avoid ADD as well? I suppose I could use LEA but then there goes my bignum >> addition routine ... >> -spc (Or am I missing something?) Yes, in that I was taking a potshot at x86's expense, and skipped the technical details because contemporary x86 architecture is seriously off-topic. But since I've now been asked... > No Peter is wrong. All of the modern x86 (at least the Intel CPUs) are OOO > machines with large register files (192 comes to mind) that do register > renaming to map the register(s) used by a particular instruction back into an > ?architectural? register (no copy is actually done). The flags register is > also part of the register re-naming. The only stalls occur when one > instruction needs the results from an instruction that hasn?t committed it?s > results yet (ie the instruction is still in ?flight?). It is the *partial* update that's key. If you do an INC and then read EFLAGS or execute an instruction such as JBE that needs C and some other flag(s), the information has to be derived from *two* renamed registers. This typically involves an extra micro-op in the instruction stream to do this fixup, although the details will obviously vary by CPU model. But I'm only repeating this information from the experts, so if you still think I'm wrong, read their reference material: http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf is Agner Fog's optimisation guide with more detail that mere mortals really need. Page 154 covers this for the latest Skylake CPUs and uses INC in its example. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html is Intel's own optimisation guide. Section 3.5.2.6 discusses partial flag register stalls, although it doesn't specifically mention INC. This stuff is way more complex than any normal person can keep in their head. It's possible to learn all the edge cases and avoid the performance hit in hand-written assembly, but it's a lot easier to just give it to the compiler to puzzle out. That's its job. Can we now go back to talking about interesting CPUs? :) From paulkoning at comcast.net Mon Jul 25 19:09:01 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 20:09:01 -0400 Subject: TU56 Tape Heads In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On Jul 25, 2016, at 8:03 PM, Michael Thompson wrote: > > During our PDP-12 debugging today we found that the left tape head has an > open coil for data track 0. The left head was OK a little more than a year > ago when we found the open coil in the right head. One TU56 head on my > personal PDP-8/e also had an open coil when I got it. DECtapes record everything twice (5 logical tracks, 10 physical tracks). Are there 10 coils or only 5? If 10, does the redundancy work well enough? paul From useddec at gmail.com Mon Jul 25 23:03:56 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 23:03:56 -0500 Subject: Multiplan for the VT180 Message-ID: While looking for some other docs, I found a few new copies of Multiplan for the VT180, NOS. White folder, 2 books, sealed floppy. If you have any questions or interest, please contact me off list. Easy to mail from zip 61853. Paul From glen.slick at gmail.com Tue Jul 26 00:05:45 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 22:05:45 -0700 Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? Message-ID: I just acquired a PDP-11/84 that didn't come with a console panel. That should have a 25-pin D-shell connector for the console serial port, a baud rate selection switch, and a forced dialog switch, with a single 20-pin connector for a ribbon cable that attaches to the KDJ11-B and MDM. The part number should be 54-16508-01 according to the manuals I have seen, although the only hits I find online have it transposed as 54-16058-01. If you have one available let me know offline in private email how much you would want for one. I'm located in the Seattle, WA area. -Glen From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Jul 26 07:25:22 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 08:25:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? Message-ID: <20160726122522.1909418C09C@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Glen Slick glen.slick at gmail.com > a PDP-11/84 that didn't come with a console panel. You should be able to get it running without the DEC panel (I have certainly run M8190 cards in an 11/23 chassis, without the front panel); the serial connection is the same as the DLV11-J, etc, pinout here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEC_asynchronous_serial_line_pinout and most of the functionality of the panel (e.g. the force dialog switch) is repeated on the CPU board as jumpers/switches. > a baud rate selection switch That turns out to be purely off-board (using a clock on the card, and the 'external clock' option on the CPU (same as the 11/23+). > a single 20-pin connector for a ribbon cable that attaches to the > KDJ11-B and MDM. This is the only part I wonder about - I'd have to check to see if there's anything critical in there for controlling the power supplies. Noel From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Tue Jul 26 08:11:31 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 09:11:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? Message-ID: <20160726131131.BFBA518C09C@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> >> a baud rate selection switch > That turns out to be purely off-board (using a clock on the card, and > the 'external clock' option on the CPU (same as the 11/23+). Ooops, my mistake - I _thought_ it was the same as the -11/23+, but now that I look, it brings the baud rate selection lines out to the daughter card. Still, you can select the baud rate without the daughter card - like I said, I have run -11/84 CPU cards in a stock (Q/CD!) QBUS box. >> a single 20-pin connector for a ribbon cable that attaches to the >> KDJ11-B and MDM. > I'd have to check to see if there's anything critical in there for > controlling the power supplies. My guess would be no, since the only things on the serial card that come through that cable from the MDM board are the baud rate and force dialog, which come from the CPU card through the MDM card. (Why on earth DEC did that, instead of just having them come directly from the CPU card, I have no earthly idea. Anyone have a guess?) Noel From glen.slick at gmail.com Tue Jul 26 08:53:39 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 06:53:39 -0700 Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? In-Reply-To: <20160726131131.BFBA518C09C@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160726131131.BFBA518C09C@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Jul 26, 2016 6:11 AM, "Noel Chiappa" wrote: > > >> a baud rate selection switch > > > That turns out to be purely off-board (using a clock on the card, and > > the 'external clock' option on the CPU (same as the 11/23+). > > Ooops, my mistake - I _thought_ it was the same as the -11/23+, but now that I > look, it brings the baud rate selection lines out to the daughter card. Still, > you can select the baud rate without the daughter card - like I said, I have > run -11/84 CPU cards in a stock (Q/CD!) QBUS box. > > >> a single 20-pin connector for a ribbon cable that attaches to the > >> KDJ11-B and MDM. > > > I'd have to check to see if there's anything critical in there for > > controlling the power supplies. > > My guess would be no, since the only things on the serial card that come > through that cable from the MDM board are the baud rate and force dialog, > which come from the CPU card through the MDM card. (Why on earth DEC did > that, instead of just having them come directly from the CPU card, I have > no earthly idea. Anyone have a guess?) > > Noel One thing that needs to happen on the 11/84 is routing the boot diagnostic LED signals from the M8190 KDJ11-B to the two 7-segment displays on the front panel instead of to the LED displays on the BA23 console serial panel of the 11/73, 11/83. The LED signals and baudrate selection signals are on the same 20-pin connector on the M8190. To route those to both the 11/84 front panel and the console serial panel you would either need a split cable, or to route the connections through a distribution board, which is what they did with the MDM. Actually the 11/84 I have is the -E version which did away with the MDM. In its place there are 5 ribbon cable connectors on the 11/84-E backplane and routing on the backplane which has similar functions to the MDM. Two of the connectors are for ribbon cables from the 10-pin and 20-pin connectors on the M8190. One connector is for the ribbon cable to the front panel, which contains the LED display signals, among other signals. One connector is for the 20-pin ribbon cable to the console serial panel. The last connector is for the 10-pin ribbon cable to the H7204 power supply. Yes, I should be able to rig up a DEC standard 10-pin SLU cable directly to the 10-pin connector on the M8190 KDJ11-B and configure the baudrate with jumpers on the M8190. Getting a real 11/84 serial console panel would be mainly a cosmetic restoration to the original setup. Just nice to have. -Glen From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Tue Jul 26 09:11:53 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:11:53 -0400 Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <57976FA9.6010704@compsys.to> >On Tuesday, July 26th, 2016 at 0:05:48 -0500, Glen Slick wrote: >I just acquired a PDP-11/84 that didn't come with a console panel. >That should have a 25-pin D-shell connector for the console serial >port, a baud rate selection switch, and a forced dialog switch, with a >single 20-pin connector for a ribbon cable that attaches to the >KDJ11-B and MDM. The part number should be 54-16508-01 according to >the manuals I have seen, although the only hits I find online have it >transposed as 54-16058-01. > > I am probably wrong, but the part number on the cabinet kit for the serial port with the 25-pin D-shell connector for the PDP-11/83 that I have is 54-16023. About 1/2" to the right is a second number 54-16022-01C1. These numbers are on the solder side of the PCB board. Also stamped on this board in ink is the number 7021150-02-Rev A1. In addition, there are TWO ribbon cables which connect to the quad board, a 20-pin cable AND a 10-pin cable. I may have another cabinet kit somewhere that looks the same at first glance, but has different part numbers. If I find it, I will reply with those numbers. As far as I can remember, all of the quad PDP-11/73 and PDP-11/83 CPU boards use the same cabinet kit since the only differences between the two boards is the J11 chip version and the clock crystal which supports running the PDP-11/83 board at 18 GHz rather than 15 GHz for the PDP-11/73 with an older version of the J11 chip that had a problem with floating point when run at the higher speed. Finally, since the quad CPU board for the PDP-11/83 is the identical board used in the PDP-11/84, I would expect that the same cabinet kit would be used for both systems, but naturally I could be wrong. >If you have one available let me know offline in private email how >much you would want for one. I'm located in the Seattle, WA area. > >-Glen > If you can't find a cabinet kit somewhere, let ne know in a few weeks and I will look to see if I can find the second one. I am in Toronto, so shipping would be much more expensive outside the USA. Jerome Fine From drb at msu.edu Tue Jul 26 09:53:31 2016 From: drb at msu.edu (Dennis Boone) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:53:31 -0400 Subject: Intel 432 floppy flux images for decoding Message-ID: <20160726145331.316E7A58586@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> A collection of intel floppies containing software related to the 432 processor was identified and purchased by Nigel Williams. I made flux images of the diskettes some time ago, but have failed to assemble the attention span to decode most of them. Technical details: These are 8" diskettes, written in several different formats. There are FM and M2FM, and possibly MFM, floppies. The flux images were created using a DiscFerret board. Three flux image files were created from each diskette, at three sampling rates: 25, 50 and 100 MHz. (This is certainly overkill, but I wasn't sure what would end up working best.) Both sides were imaged, and the reader software was told to take two passes over each track. The FM diskettes are SSSD, with 128 byte sectors. (The FM ones are already mostly decoded.) For each floppy, a photo of the label, a text transcription of the label, and the three .dfi image files are available. The files are available here: http://www.kb8zqz.net/intelfloppies/ Documentation of the .dfi file format is here: http://www.discferret.com/wiki/DFI_image_format I'm available (drb at msu.edu) to try to answer questions about the imaging process. Nigel and I hope that this might lie close enough to someone's interests to attract some tuits. De From glen.slick at gmail.com Tue Jul 26 09:58:03 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 07:58:03 -0700 Subject: Anyone have a spare PDP-11/84 serial console panel they could part with? In-Reply-To: <57976FA9.6010704@compsys.to> References: <57976FA9.6010704@compsys.to> Message-ID: This manual shows two ways that the 11/84 console SLU panel can be mounted: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1184/EK-1184A-TM-PR2_May85.pdf Page 5-40 (page 245 of the PDF) shows the 11/84 cabinet style console SLU panel where it is mounted on a separate rack width panel across the rear of the cabinet. Page 5-41 (page 246 of the PDF) shows the 11/84 box style console SLU panel where it is mounted internally in a dedicated cutout on the rear of the 11/84 box. It appears that the actual console SLU PCB would be the same either way it is mounted. I don't have a copy of the corresponding maintenance manual for the 11/84-E. The 11/84-E power supply is located at the rear of the box and there is no dedicated space for mounting the console SLU or any other bulkhead panels. So what I would really like to find is not just a bare 11/84 console SLU PCB but also the rack width panel to mount it in the back of a cabinet. I have an H9645 cabinet that previously held an 11/44 that I would eventually mount the 11/84. That would make it what is called an 11W84 widebody system as shown on page II.16 (page 175 of the PDF) in this catalog: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/catalogs/PDP_Systems_and_Options_Catalog_1988_Jul-Dec.pdf From alex_dumitru at telus.net Tue Jul 26 11:34:22 2016 From: alex_dumitru at telus.net (Alex Dumitru) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:34:22 -0600 (MDT) Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <84EBEE6A-FFF7-454D-80A2-2DBF6407E4C8@comcast.net> <245200ea-2855-626b-18db-6345e8e37168@alum.mit.edu> Message-ID: <349332036.45481453.1469550862013.JavaMail.zimbra@mailid.telus.net> > From: "william degnan" > Subject: Re: memory map for RT-11 v 5 > > Is there a place where one can get RT11 disks for RL02? I only have rt-11 > 5.3 and even with 64K I can't get my system to boot. Everything so far > checks out, I am at a loss to determine the cause of the problem. In simh > I can boot 5.3 on a PDP 11/20 emulated with 32K. It must be my system but > I don't know what's wrong. Diagnostics don't fail, or I can't get anything > clearly wrong. I can load in programs from papertape just fine. > Bill > Bill, Check out: the PDF: http://fafner.dyndns.org/~heuberger/DE0RLV34/README.pdf and the actual file: http://fafner.dyndns.org/~heuberger/DE0RLV34/DE0_RL02_SIMULATOR_V304.zip >From the PDF: (in folder) my_Infos Information about the Hardware, schematics , PIN assignment, chip specifications and informations related to the RL01/RL02 disk drive, like RL01/RL02 technical manuel. You also will find the file: RL02_0.DEC ( 11,2 MB (11.796.992 Bytes ) . This file is a RL02 image and contains a bootable RT-11XM (S) V05.04 C system with MACRO-11, FORTRAN and RT-11 BASIC. Copy this file to a FAT32 formated SD-Card and you can boot RT-11 . Cheers alex From ohland at charter.net Tue Jul 26 11:58:01 2016 From: ohland at charter.net (Louis Ohland) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 11:58:01 -0500 Subject: IBM 3511 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That is a SCSI enclosure built on a 95 frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az7Sg0EHr5E This made sense with small capacity drives, but when you could stuff 1GB or bigger drives into a 95, it wasn't so appealing. IBM came out with OBI SCSI enclosures that cost less to make. 3517? If you look at the video after the dude gets done wasting time about halfway through, you will notice there is a snap on rear blank bezel over Slots 4-8 and the planar ports area. A 68? pin SCSI bulkhead passthrough, a metal guard over the passthrough, and what you can't see behind the PSU is the load card, that has some big sandbars for load regulation. Do the math, the SCSI HDs might pull @ 150W maximum, there are no adapters to power, or planar, or complex. You could stuff a 8595 or 9595 class single serial / single parallel port planar in there, add floppy and op panel cable, floppy cable, op panel, op panel bezel, HD sleds, HDs, and about 19? or so of the black chromate planar screws... Oh, forgot complex, side wall fan, fan power contact assembly... http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/ From sales at elecplus.com Tue Jul 26 18:18:08 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 18:18:08 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff Message-ID: <059201d1e793$f88cc980$e9a65c80$@com> Another fellow is slimming his warehouse. There are 4 pallets, and I have a spreadsheet. Every item has been tested, and there are comments, from "Works OK" to "loud noise and smells burnt". Primarily old Apple gear, but there are also 2 NIB Tandon TM848-E 8" floppy drives. If you want to see the spreadsheet and the pics, send me an email. Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus 500 Pershing Ave. Kerrville, TX 78028 830-370-3239 cell sales at elecplus.com AOL IM elcpls From witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk Tue Jul 26 18:54:43 2016 From: witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk (Adrian Graham) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:54:43 +0100 Subject: Looking for a particular 5.25" floppy drive - Epson SD521 Message-ID: Hi folks, This a long shot but worth an ask. Has anyone got a pair of Epson SD521 5.25" drives going spare? I have two in a Memotech FDX disk subsystem that appear to have gone south on me, and while I can swap out for any other DS/DD drive it'd be nice restore it using original spares. The SD521 is an odd beast since it doesn't have a slide or lever to engage the heads, it's all done on a push button. These ones are aware there's a disk inserted and will home the heads if manually pulled forwards, but seeking doesn't work. Maybe the track0 sensor? Cheers! -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection? From spacewar at gmail.com Tue Jul 26 20:18:46 2016 From: spacewar at gmail.com (Eric Smith) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 19:18:46 -0600 Subject: Intel 432 floppy flux images for decoding In-Reply-To: <20160726145331.316E7A58586@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> References: <20160726145331.316E7A58586@yagi.h-net.msu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 8:53 AM, Dennis Boone wrote: > A collection of intel floppies containing software related to the 432 > processor was identified and purchased by Nigel Williams. I made flux > images of the diskettes some time ago, but have failed to assemble the > attention span to decode most of them. Thanks *very* much for doing this! > These are 8" diskettes, written in several different formats. > There are FM and M2FM, and possibly MFM, floppies. M2FM would be Intel MDS-720/SBC-202 double-density format, which is unique to Intel. Although the SBC-202 was sold for general use, so it *could* appear in other Multibus systems, I've never actually heard of it being used in anything other than an Intel MDS 800, Series II, or Series III development system. These used ISIS-II. I've written some Python code to extract files from ISIS-II disk images (raw sector format, not flux transition) MFM was never used on the MDS 800, Series II, or Series III. Any MFM disks are probably for an 8086-based system (e.g., Intel System 86/330) running iRMX-86 and being used as an I/O processor for the 432. Standard IBM 3740 format FM disks could be either ISIS II on an MDS, or iRMX-86 for an I/O processor. Three flux image files were created from each > diskette, at three sampling rates: 25, 50 and 100 MHz. (This is > certainly overkill, but I wasn't sure what would end up working best.) > Both sides were imaged, and the reader software was told to take two > passes over each track. The FM diskettes are SSSD, with 128 byte > sectors. (The FM ones are already mostly decoded.) I applaud your degree of concern for ensuring that there will be usable data. That said, I can assure you that you are correct about overkill, and that 25 MHz is more than enough to accurately image any normal floppy disk, up to high-density 3.5-inch (so-called "1.44M"). I am not able to resolve your server's IP address. Al was kind enough to package everything up for me in a tarball, which I'm downloading now. I'll look over it soon. Last year I started hacking up code to read M2FM from flux transitions, but I didn't finish it. Now I've got some motivation to hack on it some more! :-) For those not familiar with the iAPX 432, Intel's first 32-bit microprocessor from 1981, the software for it was: * OPL-432 and Object Builder: a dialect of Smalltalk that runs only on the 432/100 eval board (and that's the ONLY software that runs on the 432/100, everything else needs a 432/6xx system) * CDS-432 Cross-Development System: Ada compiler, linker, and related utitlities that run on a VAX, either under VMS or BSD 4.x * iMAX-432 operating system, runs on 432/6xx, supplied as object modules and Ada package specifications for use with CDS-432, and I/O processor code for 8086 * DEBUG-432: debugger, runs on Series III MDS under ISIS II, loads and executes code image * 432/6xx diagnostics, runs on Series III MDS under ISIS II From pete at petelancashire.com Tue Jul 26 20:20:28 2016 From: pete at petelancashire.com (Pete Lancashire) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 18:20:28 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <059201d1e793$f88cc980$e9a65c80$@com> References: <059201d1e793$f88cc980$e9a65c80$@com> Message-ID: Hello I would like to see a copy Thanks -pete On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > Another fellow is slimming his warehouse. There are 4 pallets, and I have a > spreadsheet. Every item has been tested, and there are comments, from "Works > OK" to "loud noise and smells burnt". > > Primarily old Apple gear, but there are also 2 NIB Tandon TM848-E 8" floppy > drives. If you want to see the spreadsheet and the pics, send me an email. > > > > Cindy Croxton > > Electronics Plus > > 500 Pershing Ave. > > Kerrville, TX 78028 > > 830-370-3239 cell > > sales at elecplus.com > > AOL IM elcpls > > > > From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Tue Jul 26 21:17:21 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 22:17:21 -0400 Subject: [SPAM key] - Re: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <1f294805-c252-43d5-bd73-fb4ca8d98850@classiccmp.org> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <1f294805-c252-43d5-bd73-fb4ca8d98850@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <579819B1.5090607@compsys.to> >On Sunday, July 24th, 2016 at 14::29:59 -0700, Don North wrote: > >On 7/24/2016 8:06 AM, william degnan wrote: > >> >On Jul 24, 2016 8:58 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" >> wrote: >> >>>> >On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan >>>> wrote: >>>> Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was >>>> discussing with >>> >>>> Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work >>>> (from >>>> 000000). >>>> >>>> Bill >>>> >>> You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, >>> there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, >>> including >>> sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. >>> >>> Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which >>> was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. >>> >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since >>> it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question >>> about using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 >>> starting with >>> V05.00 or RT-11. >>> >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? >>> >>> NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, >>> so there might be a difference with actual hardware. >>> >>> If you have any more questions, please ask. >>> >>> Jerome Fine >> >> Thanks for the details. I had been trying to boot rt-11 v5.3 on a >> 16k core >> 11/40 using RL11 (rl02) and it did not work. The system was unable to >> complete the initialization. CPU diagnostics passed, I could load BASIC >> papertape. RL11 working correctly. In this context I posted my >> question. >> >> After I posted my message here I loaded up simh and emulated an 11 with >> 32k. RT-11 v5.3 disk boots. When I re-built the system and reduced to >> 16k, I could not boot, bombed. >> >> One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh >> refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this >> distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future >> readers >> of this thread. >> >> Bill > > > RT-11 v5.03 single job monitor boots fine and runs in just 32KB (16KW) > of memory. > > You need to be more specific about how you specify the memory > configuration (words vs bytes). > > DEC routinely specified everything in KW (words) but most users and > tools use KB (bytes) nowadays. > > Note that to force RT11SJ (vs RT11FB) to boot on the below image I > booted first using FB > in a larger memory configuration, did a: > > COPY/BOOT DL1:RT11SJ.SYS DL1: > > to force it to boot using the SJ monitor the next time. NOTE that while the above command is REQUIRED to perform a hardware boot (from boot ROMs on real hardware or from within the SimH emulator. Starting at least with V04.00 of RT-11, a software boot (which uses DUP.SAV) is supported from within RT-11 from within any disk (with the files required to support being a System Disk) to boot any specific monitor file (in this example RT11SJ.SYS) using the RT-11 command: BOOT DL1:RT11SJ Thus even if there has been the RT-11 command to set up a boot block on a specific disk for a specific RT-11 monitor file, it is possible to override the boot block and use any qualified RT-11 monitor file via an RT-11 software boot (which uses DUP.SAV). It is also possible from within RT-11 to force the use of the Primary Boot Code (which is placed in block zero via the COPY/BOOT command) via the RT-11 command: BOOT/FOREIGN DL1: If the user includes a specific monitor in the command: BOOT/FOREIGN DL1:RT11FB then the specified monitor file is ignored and the boot code in block zero of DL1: (placed there via the COPY/BOOT command) is used instead along with the actual monitor file that had been specified during the COPY/BOOT command. > > Don > > > PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f This portion of my reply contains many questions. If possible, answers to all of them would be appreciated, not just the first question. Is this the latest version of SimH? Also, is is possible to support a VT100 display. I have heard that telnet can be used, but I have never been able to do so. Since I always use the RT-11 SL: (Single Line Editor) device driver to support a command stack, it is essential to support a VT100 display, etc. in order to use the ARROW keys to move the cursor around. Is it possible to support VT100 escape sequences when SimH is being used? If so, how is that done in general and what specific programs are required along with the specific commands to implement? I would need to know how to do this from a 64-bit Windows 10 point of view since that is the only system that I will have available after the Windows 98SE system that I currently use to run RT-11 is no longer available. As a default, Ersatz-11 supports running via the Win32 variant under a 64-bit Windows 10 system. > > CPU 11/34, FPP, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled > 32KB > > NOTE: ctrl-E to exit to SIMH monitor > sim> boot rl1 > > RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 > > .sho all If I remember correctly, the above RT-11 command may be incorrect. I seem to remember that the following output is displayed as a result of the RT-11 command: SHOW CONFIGURATION unless, of course, the rest of the display was omitted and there was much more actually output. > > RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 > Booted from DL1:RT11SJ > > USR is set SWAP > EXIT is set SWAP > KMON is set NOIND > TT is set NOQUIET > ERROR is set ERROR > SL is set OFF > EDIT is set KED > KMON nesting depth is 3 > > PDP 11/34 Processor > 32KB of memory > FP11 Hardware Floating Point Unit > Extended Instruction Set (EIS) > Memory Management Unit > 60 Cycle System Clock Jerome Fine From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Tue Jul 26 22:31:16 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 23:31:16 -0400 Subject: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <1f294805-c252-43d5-bd73-fb4ca8d98850@classiccmp.org> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <1f294805-c252-43d5-bd73-fb4ca8d98850@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <57982B04.4020607@compsys.to> I forgot to remove the "Spam Key" notice that my ISP puts into most of my e-mail when I replied the first time - I apologize!!! >On Sunday, July 24th, 2016 at 14::29:59 -0700, Don North wrote: > >On 7/24/2016 8:06 AM, william degnan wrote: > >> >On Jul 24, 2016 8:58 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" >> wrote: >> >>>> On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan >>>> wrote: >>>> Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was >>>> discussing with >>> >>>> Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work >>>> (from >>>> 000000). >>>> >>>> Bill >>>> >>> You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, >>> there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, >>> including >>> sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. >>> >>> Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which >>> was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. >>> >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since >>> it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question >>> about using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 >>> starting with >>> V05.00 or RT-11. >>> >>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? >>> >>> NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, >>> so there might be a difference with actual hardware. >>> >>> If you have any more questions, please ask. >>> >>> Jerome Fine >> >> Thanks for the details. I had been trying to boot rt-11 v5.3 on a >> 16k core >> 11/40 using RL11 (rl02) and it did not work. The system was unable to >> complete the initialization. CPU diagnostics passed, I could load BASIC >> papertape. RL11 working correctly. In this context I posted my >> question. >> >> After I posted my message here I loaded up simh and emulated an 11 with >> 32k. RT-11 v5.3 disk boots. When I re-built the system and reduced to >> 16k, I could not boot, bombed. >> >> One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh >> refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this >> distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future >> readers >> of this thread. >> >> Bill > > RT-11 v5.03 single job monitor boots fine and runs in just 32KB (16KW) > of memory. > > You need to be more specific about how you specify the memory > configuration (words vs bytes). > > DEC routinely specified everything in KW (words) but most users and > tools use KB (bytes) nowadays. > > Note that to force RT11SJ (vs RT11FB) to boot on the below image I > booted first using FB > in a larger memory configuration, did a: > > COPY/BOOT DL1:RT11SJ.SYS DL1: > > to force it to boot using the SJ monitor the next time. > > Don NOTE that while the above command is REQUIRED to perform a hardware boot (from boot ROMs on real hardware or from within the SimH emulator. Starting at least with V04.00 of RT-11, a software boot (which uses DUP.SAV) is supported from within RT-11 from within any disk (with the files required to support being a System Disk) to boot any specific monitor file (in this example RT11SJ.SYS) using the RT-11 command: BOOT DL1:RT11SJ Thus even if there has been the RT-11 command to set up a boot block on a specific disk for a specific RT-11 monitor file, it is possible to override the boot block and use any qualified RT-11 monitor file via an RT-11 software boot (which uses DUP.SAV). It is also possible from within RT-11 to force the use of the Primary Boot Code (which is placed in block zero via the COPY/BOOT command) via the RT-11 command: BOOT/FOREIGN DL1: If the user includes a specific monitor in the command: BOOT/FOREIGN DL1:RT11FB then the specified monitor file is ignored and the boot code in block zero of DL1: (placed there via the COPY/BOOT command) is used instead along with the actual monitor file that had been specified during the COPY/BOOT command. > PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f This portion of my reply contains many questions. If possible, answers to all of them would be appreciated, not just the first question. Is this the latest version of SimH? Also, is is possible to support a VT100 display. I have heard that telnet can be used, but I have never been able to do so. Since I always use the RT-11 SL: (Single Line Editor) device driver to support a command stack, it is essential to support a VT100 display, etc. in order to use the ARROW keys to move the cursor around. Is it possible to support VT100 escape sequences when SimH is being used? If so, how is that done in general and what specific programs are required along with the specific commands to implement? I would need to know how to do this from a 64-bit Windows 10 point of view since that is the only system that I will have available after the Windows 98SE system that I currently use to run RT-11 is no longer available. As a default, Ersatz-11 supports running via the Win32 variant under a 64-bit Windows 10 system. > CPU 11/34, FPP, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled > 32KB > > NOTE: ctrl-E to exit to SIMH monitor > sim> boot rl1 > > RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 > > .sho all If I remember correctly, the above RT-11 command may be incorrect. I seem to remember that the following output is displayed as a result of the RT-11 command: SHOW CONFIGURATION unless, of course, the rest of the display was omitted and there was much more actually output. > RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 > Booted from DL1:RT11SJ > > USR is set SWAP > EXIT is set SWAP > KMON is set NOIND > TT is set NOQUIET > ERROR is set ERROR > SL is set OFF > EDIT is set KED > KMON nesting depth is 3 > > PDP 11/34 Processor > 32KB of memory > FP11 Hardware Floating Point Unit > Extended Instruction Set (EIS) > Memory Management Unit > 60 Cycle System Clock Jerome Fine From north at alum.mit.edu Tue Jul 26 22:44:02 2016 From: north at alum.mit.edu (Don North) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 20:44:02 -0700 Subject: [SPAM key] - Re: memory map for RT-11 v 5 In-Reply-To: <579819B1.5090607@compsys.to> References: <5794BB68.7030603@compsys.to> <1f294805-c252-43d5-bd73-fb4ca8d98850@classiccmp.org> <579819B1.5090607@compsys.to> Message-ID: <849cc7d0-7ec9-aef3-792c-194811ea5085@alum.mit.edu> On 7/26/2016 7:17 PM, Jerome H. Fine wrote: >> On Sunday, July 24th, 2016 at 14::29:59 -0700, Don North wrote: > >> >On 7/24/2016 8:06 AM, william degnan wrote: >> >>> >On Jul 24, 2016 8:58 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" wrote: >>> >>>>> >On Wednesday, July 20th, 2016 at 18:02:44 - 0400, william degnan wrote: >>>>> Is there a minimum memory requirement for RT-11 v5? I was discussing with >>>> >>>>> Ray Fantini about it today, unsure...anyone know if 16K will work (from >>>>> 000000). >>>>> >>>>> Bill >>>>> >>>> You need to be more specific! Starting with V05.00 of RT-11 in 1983, >>>> there were a total of 17 versions released up to V05.07 in 1998, including >>>> sub-versions V05.01B, V05.01C, and V05.04A to V05.04G of RT-11. >>>> >>>> Up until V05.05 of RT-11, RT11SJ.SYS required the least memory which >>>> was replaced with RT11SB.SYS for V05.06 and V05.07 of RT-11. >>>> >>>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V05.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>>> memory were unsuccessful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive since >>>> it is close to the smallest device driver. The answer to your question >>>> about using 16K bytes of memory is NO for all versions of RT-11 starting with >>>> V05.00 or RT-11. >>>> >>>> Attempts to boot from RT11SJ.SYS under V04.00 of RT-11 with 24K >>>> bytes of memory were successful. Attempts to boot with 16K bytes of >>>> memory were also successful. An RK05 was used as the disk drive. The >>>> error message "Insufficient memory" is displayed, but some useful work >>>> might be done with just 16K bytes of memory. However, you did not >>>> ask if useful work being done was one of the criteria? >>>> >>>> NOTE that I used the Ersatz-11 emulator to check the above details, >>>> so there might be a difference with actual hardware. >>>> >>>> If you have any more questions, please ask. >>>> >>>> Jerome Fine >>> >>> Thanks for the details. I had been trying to boot rt-11 v5.3 on a 16k core >>> 11/40 using RL11 (rl02) and it did not work. The system was unable to >>> complete the initialization. CPU diagnostics passed, I could load BASIC >>> papertape. RL11 working correctly. In this context I posted my question. >>> >>> After I posted my message here I loaded up simh and emulated an 11 with >>> 32k. RT-11 v5.3 disk boots. When I re-built the system and reduced to >>> 16k, I could not boot, bombed. >>> >>> One thing to remember is 16KW in a pdp11 is not the same thing that simh >>> refers to when one sets the CPU to 16K. WWW do not all make this >>> distinction clearly. I get it, just making this comment for future readers >>> of this thread. >>> >>> Bill >> >> >> RT-11 v5.03 single job monitor boots fine and runs in just 32KB (16KW) of >> memory. >> >> You need to be more specific about how you specify the memory configuration >> (words vs bytes). >> >> DEC routinely specified everything in KW (words) but most users and tools use >> KB (bytes) nowadays. >> >> Note that to force RT11SJ (vs RT11FB) to boot on the below image I booted >> first using FB >> in a larger memory configuration, did a: >> >> COPY/BOOT DL1:RT11SJ.SYS DL1: >> >> to force it to boot using the SJ monitor the next time. > > NOTE that while the above command is REQUIRED to perform a > hardware boot (from boot ROMs on real hardware or from > within the SimH emulator. Starting at least with V04.00 of RT-11, > a software boot (which uses DUP.SAV) is supported from within > RT-11 from within any disk (with the files required to support being > a System Disk) to boot any specific monitor file (in this example > RT11SJ.SYS) using the RT-11 command: > BOOT DL1:RT11SJ Bill's original issue is he wanted to boot RT-11 v5 on a 16KW 11/40 system, so the only option that would work would be to boot directly to RT11SJ. Booting into XM or FB and then rebooting into SJ via executing the BOOT command is not possible in such a memory configuration. > Thus even if there has been the RT-11 command to set up a > boot block on a specific disk for a specific RT-11 monitor > file, it is possible to override the boot block and use any > qualified RT-11 monitor file via an RT-11 software boot > (which uses DUP.SAV). > > It is also possible from within RT-11 to force the use of the Primary > Boot Code (which is placed in block zero via the COPY/BOOT > command) via the RT-11 command: > BOOT/FOREIGN DL1: > If the user includes a specific monitor in the command: > BOOT/FOREIGN DL1:RT11FB > then the specified monitor file is ignored and the boot code in > block zero of DL1: (placed there via the COPY/BOOT command) > is used instead along with the actual monitor file that had been > specified during the COPY/BOOT command. > >> >> Don >> >> >> PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 4065f47f > > This portion of my reply contains many questions. If possible, > answers to all of them would be appreciated, not just the first > question. > > Is this the latest version of SimH? Also, is is possible to support > a VT100 display. I have heard that telnet can be used, but I have > never been able to do so. Since I always use the RT-11 SL: > (Single Line Editor) device driver to support a command stack, > it is essential to support a VT100 display, etc. in order to use > the ARROW keys to move the cursor around. Is it possible > to support VT100 escape sequences when SimH is being used? > If so, how is that done in general and what specific programs > are required along with the specific commands to implement? > I would need to know how to do this from a 64-bit Windows 10 > point of view since that is the only system that I will have available > after the Windows 98SE system that I currently use to run RT-11 > is no longer available. As a default, Ersatz-11 supports running > via the Win32 variant under a 64-bit Windows 10 system. This was done using a relatively recent SIMH commit (ie within the last week or so). So it is about the latest version of SIMH available. As to the other questions, I only use SIMH in basic terminal mode, so I can't answer any of the emulated VT100 questions. As to your second point, my usage of SIMH is via compiling it for the CYGWIN 32b environment running on a Windows 7 64b system. So all my usage is thru the CYGWIN command window, or sometimes thru a telnet (via TeraTerm). My understanding is that sometime 'soon' Windows 10 will be getting an Ubuntu Linux subsystem so that it will run compiled linux images directly. So you will get a linux command line terminal in a window and can run images directly. So theoretically a precompiled SIMH distribution for Ubuntu linux could be downloaded and run with no compilation (or porting to Windows) necessary. At least this is my understanding at this point, I haven't paid too much attention because I expect to be on Windows 7 64b until the turn of the next century. And then I will decide if I want to upgrade to Windows 42 256b, or not. :-) >> >> CPU 11/34, FPP, idle disabled, autoconfiguration enabled >> 32KB >> >> NOTE: ctrl-E to exit to SIMH monitor >> sim> boot rl1 >> >> RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 >> >> .sho all > > If I remember correctly, the above RT-11 command may be incorrect. > I seem to remember that the following output is displayed as a result of > the RT-11 command: > SHOW CONFIGURATION > unless, of course, the rest of the display was omitted and there was > much more actually output. The above command is correct for RT-11. I just cut off the bottom part of the output as it was irrelevant for this post, as the only relevant issue was the fact that RT11SJ v5.3 will boot and run in a 16KW memory size. >> >> RT-11SJ (S) V05.03 >> Booted from DL1:RT11SJ >> >> USR is set SWAP >> EXIT is set SWAP >> KMON is set NOIND >> TT is set NOQUIET >> ERROR is set ERROR >> SL is set OFF >> EDIT is set KED >> KMON nesting depth is 3 >> >> PDP 11/34 Processor >> 32KB of memory >> FP11 Hardware Floating Point Unit >> Extended Instruction Set (EIS) >> Memory Management Unit >> 60 Cycle System Clock > > Jerome Fine > From aek at bitsavers.org Tue Jul 26 23:48:13 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 21:48:13 -0700 Subject: VT2xx simulation with SIMH Message-ID: <18a9a7ed-7437-d168-e40a-77cc85286649@bitsavers.org> Related to the RT-11 discussion, there is currently work going on to have a simulated VT240 in MAME working with RT-11 running in SIMH. http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=106655#Post106655 From witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk Wed Jul 27 02:10:54 2016 From: witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk (Adrian Graham) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 08:10:54 +0100 Subject: Looking for a particular 5.25" floppy drive - Epson SD521 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi folks, Apologies if this appears twice, I originally sent it from my non-classiccmp email address for some reason. This a long shot but worth an ask. Has anyone got a pair of Epson SD521 5.25" drives going spare? I have two in a Memotech FDX disk subsystem that appear to have gone south on me, and while I can swap out for any other DS/DD drive it'd be nice restore it using original spares. The SD521 is an odd beast since it doesn't have a slide or lever to engage the heads, it's all done on a push button. These ones are aware there's a disk inserted and will home the heads if manually pulled forwards, but seeking doesn't work. Maybe the track0 sensor? Cheers! -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection? From jhfinedp3k at compsys.to Wed Jul 27 07:39:43 2016 From: jhfinedp3k at compsys.to (Jerome H. Fine) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 08:39:43 -0400 Subject: VT2xx simulation with SIMH In-Reply-To: <18a9a7ed-7437-d168-e40a-77cc85286649@bitsavers.org> References: <18a9a7ed-7437-d168-e40a-77cc85286649@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <5798AB8F.1050405@compsys.to> >Al Kossow wrote: >Related to the RT-11 discussion, there is currently work going on to have a simulated VT240 in MAME >working with RT-11 running in SIMH. > >http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=106655#Post106655 > Is there any possibility of plain ordinary VT100 or VT220 emulation with SimH? I have the impression that telnet can do this in some manner, but I have no idea exactly how. IN ADDITION, the RT-11 monitors I use have multi-terminal support, usually for DLV11-J serial ports, but sometimes for DZV11 and / or DHV11 serial ports. Can SimH handle that emulation as well? And can there also be VT100 emulation for those multi-terminal serial ports as well? It may be possible to have a separate PC emulating a VT100 operating via an actual physical hardware serial port. But that would seem to be a huge waste of resources when it is possible for a single PC running SimH to support all of the serial ports with VT100 emulation in some manner although I agree that is not how SimH functions at present. Of course, for minimal testing of certain RT-11 features, it would be possible to execute under SimH using just an simple output device similar to a consol printer. However, I frequently use KED to edit my files and that obviously requires VT100 emulation. TECO is possible, but is so clumsy that other solutions which support VT100 emulation with all types of serial ports are preferred. Jerome Fine From glen.slick at gmail.com Wed Jul 27 09:49:35 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 07:49:35 -0700 Subject: VT2xx simulation with SIMH In-Reply-To: <5798AB8F.1050405@compsys.to> References: <18a9a7ed-7437-d168-e40a-77cc85286649@bitsavers.org> <5798AB8F.1050405@compsys.to> Message-ID: On Jul 27, 2016 5:40 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" wrote: > > Is there any possibility of plain ordinary VT100 or VT220 emulation > with SimH? I have the impression that telnet can do this in some > manner, but I have no idea exactly how. IN ADDITION, the > RT-11 monitors I use have multi-terminal support, usually for > DLV11-J serial ports, but sometimes for DZV11 and / or DHV11 > serial ports. Can SimH handle that emulation as well? And > can there also be VT100 emulation for those multi-terminal > serial ports as well? > > It may be possible to have a separate PC emulating a VT100 > operating via an actual physical hardware serial port. But > that would seem to be a huge waste of resources when it > is possible for a single PC running SimH to support all of > the serial ports with VT100 emulation in some manner > although I agree that is not how SimH functions at present. > Yes you can configure SIMH to listen for incoming Telnet connections for both the console port and for multiplexer ports, for example DHV11 ports. I use that feature all the time using Kermit 95 as the Telnet client and VT100 emulator on the same 64-bit Windows 10 host that is running SIMH PDP-11 or VAX emulation. I don't remember the syntax for configuring this off the top of my head. I'll have to check. From paulkoning at comcast.net Wed Jul 27 10:15:51 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 11:15:51 -0400 Subject: VT2xx simulation with SIMH In-Reply-To: References: <18a9a7ed-7437-d168-e40a-77cc85286649@bitsavers.org> <5798AB8F.1050405@compsys.to> Message-ID: > On Jul 27, 2016, at 10:49 AM, Glen Slick wrote: > > On Jul 27, 2016 5:40 AM, "Jerome H. Fine" wrote: >> >> Is there any possibility of plain ordinary VT100 or VT220 emulation >> with SimH? ... > Yes you can configure SIMH to listen for incoming Telnet connections for > both the console port and for multiplexer ports, for example DHV11 ports. > ... > I don't remember the syntax for configuring this off the top of my head. > I'll have to check. attach devname port number for example: attach dz 9999 paul From nf6x at nf6x.net Wed Jul 27 13:48:02 2016 From: nf6x at nf6x.net (Mark J. Blair) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 11:48:02 -0700 Subject: WTB TRS-80 CoCo Orchestra 90 Cartridge Message-ID: <28A8E800-543F-4DA3-9868-32C395AA885D@nf6x.net> I'm looking for an Orchestra 90 cartridge for my CoCos. Does anybody have an extra for sale or trade? -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X http://www.nf6x.net/ From sales at elecplus.com Wed Jul 27 15:50:54 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:50:54 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff Message-ID: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> Sorry guys, but it seems there was a take all buyer from CA who took the entire lot. It is no longer available. Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus 500 Pershing Ave. Kerrville, TX 78028 830-370-3239 cell sales at elecplus.com AOL IM elcpls From cisin at xenosoft.com Wed Jul 27 17:08:57 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:08:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: > There were also variant models with "Centronics" interface. > narrow and wide carriage. > College dumpstered at least a hundred of them. Almost all working fine at the time. > At one point, they fired a tenured faculty member for dumpster diving. > I didn't get caught. I have a WIDE CARRIAGE QuietJet Plus, with serial/parallel, to get rid of. FREE if you come get it. (Near Berkeley, in El Cerrito) Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. No (missing) [external] power supply (brick) On the back, it has an opening labelled "PARALLEL" with a Blue-ribbon ("Centronics") connector recessed half an inch back, an opening labelled "RS-232-C" and "HP-IB" with a DB25 (HP-IB is only on the 2227B model) (NO idea and DOUBTFUL whether user convertible), and an opening with 4 male pins labelled "20Vac" 16 (DIP) switches inside, with label to partially identify them. The label on the bottom says "2227A" and mentions 20Vac / 18 Watts. No rear paper bales (those pieces of old shopping carts that guide the paper to the printer) Friction and adjustable tractor/pin-feed up to slightly over 15" pin-to-pin A little crud on top surfaces, but not the worst that I've seen. Sides and bottom are clean. Looks like it was in excellent shape before being stored [indoors] without an overhead cover. Plastic not yellowed. Has a [presumably dead and fossilized] ink cartridge that does not seem to have been leaking. Can those be refilled? Same cartridge used in Kodak Diconix, and s'posedly still available at Staples! BLACK AND WHITE. NO color nor colour! 22" x 8" x 4.5" One of the most compact wide carriage printers that were made. Windows 3.x drivers: http://support.hp.com/id-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-Quietjet-Plus-Printer/25501/model/15162 Supposedly drivers for Windoze through 10! and Mac: http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-driver.html#Download_HP_Quietjet_Driver_for_Windows_64_Bit "near letter quality" (19x32) 96 x 96 to 192 x 192 dpi. Documentation "service" manual (NOT repair) ftp://ps-2.kev009.com/incoming/jim/TSSPRT/acroread/tssfact/tfsprt/hp/tfshp036.pdf Specs: http://www.retrocomputing.net/parts/hp/printers/QUIET/docs/TJQJQJPlusTechData-595201446-6pages-Dec89.pdf FREE if you come get it. (near Berkeley, in El Cerrito) Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. OB_Standard_Disclaimer: Guaranteed not to work. In the event of our quality control being shoddy, if it does turn out to be working, you may bring it back (at your expense) for a refund of half your purchase price. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From cisin at xenosoft.com Wed Jul 27 17:25:16 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:25:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: , Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: > I have a WIDE CARRIAGE QuietJet Plus, with serial/parallel, to get rid of. > FREE if you come get it. (Near Berkeley, in El Cerrito) > Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. > . . . > Supposedly drivers for Windoze through 10! and Mac: > http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-driver.html#Download_HP_Quietjet_Driver_for_Windows_64_Bit CORRECTION: I have no idea whether there is a difference between regular and "plus", but that should be: http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-plus-driver.html > OB_Standard_Disclaimer: Guaranteed not to work. In the event of our quality > control being shoddy, if it does turn out to be working, you may bring it > back (at your expense) for a refund of half your purchase price. From shadoooo at gmail.com Wed Jul 27 17:31:58 2016 From: shadoooo at gmail.com (shadoooo) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:31:58 +0200 Subject: Looking for a particular 5.25" floppy drive - Epson SD521 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <648a3b59-15a2-3463-25a7-c7aa79f4ab9a@gmail.com> Hello Adrian, if the head positioning motor works, but the drive simply doesn't read the data, maybe the problem is in some track misalignment or bad head signal amplification / A/D conversion. Don't know about these drives, but if the interface is pretty standard, you could try the correct operation of the positioning motor simply powering the drive setting the signal DIRECTION high or low, and giving pulses to the STEP signal. You can do it connecting simple wires between 5V and GND and the pins on the connector on the back. The positioning motor should move back and forth in steps. For the track-0 sensor simply use a multimeter / oscilloscope and check if the level changes when the head is in track-0 position. For the READ signal the thing is more difficult, because you need an oscilloscope to check the fast changing signals. You can check for good looking output signal, without spurious pulses or bad edges. Then you possibly have to check for correct timings, and this is even more difficult, but doable with the right equipment (powerful oscilloscope). Some drives have a small trimmer to slightly correct the spindle motor speed, whence the timing. Alignment can be corrected loosening slightly the blocking screws between the head carriage and the stepper motor moving it, or in some drive the screws holding the stepper to the chassis frame, and moving head carriage / stepper motor very slowly in both directions until the amplitude of the signal of the read head is at the maximum. Then lock again the screws. Years ago I had to repair four floppy drives for two DG One machines, as they were all failing, not reading nor formatting. Spindle rotated well, head moved correctly, but the drives couldn't read disks, and not even re-read its own data (formatting), hence something bad on read / write circuits. After various tests, the problem was on bad electrolytic capacitors on the spindle board. As the spindle motor started, it emitted high current pulses that caused ripple on the supply and also induced spurious pulses on the analog read signal. Result, the read data was badly interfered, and of course not correctly interpreted by the controller. I changed the capacitors, 3 over 4 drives worked. The last one required head alignment, but I didn't have any alignment disk. So I wrote three test disks with the 3 working drives, and tried to align the 4th to the best match. Then finally even the 4th worked! If you are in willing to try something, let me know. Andrea From jwest at classiccmp.org Wed Jul 27 20:36:52 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 20:36:52 -0500 Subject: Tandy 1000EX found at surplus dealer Message-ID: <000001d1e870$8454b4a0$8cfe1de0$@classiccmp.org> TSIA, let me know if someone wants me to inquire about price. J From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Wed Jul 27 22:53:07 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (Curious Marc) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 20:53:07 -0700 Subject: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I cannot download any drivers from there. Links download link opens a Panasonic driver page, and if you navigate back to the HP QuietJet you get the same links again, nice circuitous path. The Win3.1 driver link was good though. Marc From: cctalk on behalf of Fred Cisin Reply-To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" Date: Wednesday, July 27, 2016 at 3:25 PM To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" Subject: RE: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: I have a WIDE CARRIAGE QuietJet Plus, with serial/parallel, to get rid of. FREE if you come get it. (Near Berkeley, in El Cerrito) Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. . . . Supposedly drivers for Windoze through 10! and Mac: http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-driver.html#Download_HP_Quietjet_Driver_for_Windows_64_Bit CORRECTION: I have no idea whether there is a difference between regular and "plus", but that should be: http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-plus-driver.html OB_Standard_Disclaimer: Guaranteed not to work. In the event of our quality control being shoddy, if it does turn out to be working, you may bring it back (at your expense) for a refund of half your purchase price. From cclist at sydex.com Wed Jul 27 22:53:44 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 20:53:44 -0700 Subject: 20MB 8" Bernoilli transfer wanted Message-ID: <39a79883-83ab-81c9-4821-3e7b42df12a2@sydex.com> I've been asked to refer a customer to someone with a 20MB 8" Bernoulli setup. There are only 2 disks involved and absolutely nothing is known of the provenance. I can put you in contact and you can name your terms to do the work. Note that a sector-by-sector image of the disks might be useful as it's unknown if these are PC or Apple format. Contact me off-list if interested. US only, please. Thanks, Chuck From fast79ta at yahoo.com Wed Jul 27 23:28:44 2016 From: fast79ta at yahoo.com (Joe Piche) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 22:28:44 -0600 Subject: GVP Ram for Amiga Accelerators Message-ID: <1d9c853d-465f-05ae-817f-7089caf83645@yahoo.com> I've got an old amiga 2000, that I have stuffed a GVP G-Force 030 accelerator into. Does any one have, or know a source for the 1mb or 4mb 64pin GVP Simms? Thanks From teoz at neo.rr.com Wed Jul 27 23:47:34 2016 From: teoz at neo.rr.com (TeoZ) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:47:34 -0400 Subject: GVP Ram for Amiga Accelerators In-Reply-To: <1d9c853d-465f-05ae-817f-7089caf83645@yahoo.com> References: <1d9c853d-465f-05ae-817f-7089caf83645@yahoo.com> Message-ID: Try Amibay forums. Somebody there is selling newly built 16MB SIMMs but they are not cheap. -----Original Message----- From: Joe Piche Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 12:28 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: GVP Ram for Amiga Accelerators I've got an old amiga 2000, that I have stuffed a GVP G-Force 030 accelerator into. Does any one have, or know a source for the 1mb or 4mb 64pin GVP Simms? Thanks --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus From cisin at xenosoft.com Thu Jul 28 00:01:37 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 22:01:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, Curious Marc wrote: > I cannot download any drivers from there. Links download link opens a > Panasonic driver page, and if you navigate back to the HP QuietJet you > get the same links again, nice circuitous path. The Win3.1 driver link > was good though. > > Supposedly drivers for Windoze through 10! and Mac: > http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-driver.html#Download_HP_Quietjet_Driver_for_Windows_64_Bit > > and "plus", but that should be: > http://fbdrivers.com/download-hp-quietjet-plus-driver.html It's not a site that I'm familiar with. Hence ny "supposrdly". It's basically a slightly fancy ASCII inkjet printer. Not what I would want to usr on Windoze, anyway. I have heard the excuses. Any new version of any OS should include cspability to use drivets from previous versions, even if doing so does not give you the full smell-o-vision experience. Bill Gates must be made into a millionaire. (loss of how many billions?) From isking at uw.edu Thu Jul 28 09:40:32 2016 From: isking at uw.edu (Ian S. King) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 07:40:32 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> Message-ID: Thanks for keeping us in the loop on these things! -- Ian On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 1:50 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > Sorry guys, but it seems there was a take all buyer from CA who took the > entire lot. It is no longer available. > > > > Cindy Croxton > > Electronics Plus > > 500 Pershing Ave. > > Kerrville, TX 78028 > > 830-370-3239 cell > > sales at elecplus.com > > AOL IM elcpls > > > > -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal Value Sensitive Design Research Lab University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China." From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 28 11:41:35 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 09:41:35 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> Message-ID: <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> What has happened with the terminal stuff in Georgia? On 7/28/16 7:40 AM, Ian S. King wrote: > Thanks for keeping us in the loop on these things! -- Ian > From killingsworth.todd at gmail.com Thu Jul 28 11:50:02 2016 From: killingsworth.todd at gmail.com (Todd Killingsworth) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 12:50:02 -0400 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: Sadly, no word from the owner since I forwarded the warehouse pics to him, and sent over a digest of interested people from the replies. If he was really interested, its not hard to join our list.... Interesting to look over his stuff, but if he's sold anything I've not heard about it. Todd Killingsworth On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > What has happened with the terminal stuff in Georgia? > > On 7/28/16 7:40 AM, Ian S. King wrote: > > Thanks for keeping us in the loop on these things! -- Ian > > > > From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 28 12:38:02 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 10:38:02 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> On 7/28/16 9:50 AM, Todd Killingsworth wrote: > Interesting to look over his stuff, but if he's sold anything I've not > heard about it. > Thanks. I've been working on terminal archiving and simulation the past couple of weeks, and I'm sure there are parts in there I could use. Terminals have reached the other side of the bathtub curve, and keyboard prices are insane. I've been really disappointed in the ones I've been buying off eBay. One of them was literally filled with sawdust, another covered in machine oil from it being used in a machine shop. From killingsworth.todd at gmail.com Thu Jul 28 12:47:22 2016 From: killingsworth.todd at gmail.com (Todd Killingsworth) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 13:47:22 -0400 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: ...and since Cindy's contact has liquidated his Mac stash... Does anyone know a good place to go scouting for a Mac SE/30 around Atlanta? I'd like to play with Apple's Smalltalk, and the iMacs are lonely. :D I'm aware of EPay, but maybe its possible to avoid shipping? Todd Killingsworth On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 1:38 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > On 7/28/16 9:50 AM, Todd Killingsworth wrote: > > > Interesting to look over his stuff, but if he's sold anything I've not > > heard about it. > > > > Thanks. I've been working on terminal archiving and simulation the past > couple of > weeks, and I'm sure there are parts in there I could use. > > Terminals have reached the other side of the bathtub curve, and keyboard > prices > are insane. I've been really disappointed in the ones I've been buying off > eBay. > One of them was literally filled with sawdust, another covered in machine > oil > from it being used in a machine shop. > > > From sales at elecplus.com Thu Jul 28 13:13:55 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 13:13:55 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <03eb01d1e8fb$ce2101c0$6a630540$@com> This last batch with spreadsheet was not from GA, it was from St. Louis. So all the stuff you saw Todd, is pretty much still there. The heat is killing them, almost literally. The temp in the warehouse reaches above 115 this summer, and it is making the workers sick. Rich did say he reached out to several people, but never heard back from them. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Todd Killingsworth Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 12:47 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: more vintage computer stuff ...and since Cindy's contact has liquidated his Mac stash... Does anyone know a good place to go scouting for a Mac SE/30 around Atlanta? I'd like to play with Apple's Smalltalk, and the iMacs are lonely. :D I'm aware of EPay, but maybe its possible to avoid shipping? Todd Killingsworth On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 1:38 PM, Al Kossow wrote: > > > On 7/28/16 9:50 AM, Todd Killingsworth wrote: > > > Interesting to look over his stuff, but if he's sold anything I've > > not heard about it. > > > > Thanks. I've been working on terminal archiving and simulation the > past couple of weeks, and I'm sure there are parts in there I could > use. > > Terminals have reached the other side of the bathtub curve, and > keyboard prices are insane. I've been really disappointed in the ones > I've been buying off eBay. > One of them was literally filled with sawdust, another covered in > machine oil from it being used in a machine shop. > > > From sales at elecplus.com Thu Jul 28 13:16:18 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 13:16:18 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> If you are looking for terminal keyboards, you might subscribe to the RSS on my site, elecshopper.com. There are about 10 different terminal boards there now, and I usually add 20-30 items more per day (although not all keyboards). All of the RSS feeds are available at https://elecshopper.com/rss Sorry if posting my site is not allowed. If so, please delete this post. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Al Kossow Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 12:38 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: more vintage computer stuff On 7/28/16 9:50 AM, Todd Killingsworth wrote: > Interesting to look over his stuff, but if he's sold anything I've not > heard about it. > Thanks. I've been working on terminal archiving and simulation the past couple of weeks, and I'm sure there are parts in there I could use. Terminals have reached the other side of the bathtub curve, and keyboard prices are insane. I've been really disappointed in the ones I've been buying off eBay. One of them was literally filled with sawdust, another covered in machine oil from it being used in a machine shop. From lproven at gmail.com Thu Jul 28 13:57:08 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 20:57:08 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? Message-ID: I'm experimenting with some old DOS versions, notably PC DOS, in VirtualBox. I have a PC-DOS 2000 system with DesqView and DesqView/X working fairly well -- no networking yet but I'm working on it. I am also trying to get a DR-DOS 8 VM up and running. DR-DOS 7.03 is no problem, but I've had no joy getting DR-DOS 8.1 to install to hard disk. It's reluctant to SYS a hard disk, and when it did, it mis-diagnosed it as FAT-12 and wouldn't boot. Using Norton DiskTools, I've managed to transfer the system files, but they display the message DR-DOS 8.1 ... and then it freezes. Can this late version, mainly used for utility floppies, actually boot from HD & be used like a normal DOS? And although I've not tried it yet, the same question applies to PC DOS 7.1, the early-noughties version that can understand FAT32 and long filenames. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From jwest at classiccmp.org Thu Jul 28 14:16:15 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:16:15 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> Message-ID: <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> Cindy wrote.... -------- Sorry if posting my site is not allowed. If so, please delete this post. -------- Cindy - thanks for your post. I have seen on occasion a past commercial seller (not here any longer) not fit in well with the mentality of this list. You are not one of those. You're a perfect model of how a commercial seller can be a fantastic contributor to the list. I'm glad you're here, and appreciate the way you participate! Same goes for Paul A and a couple others. J From sales at elecplus.com Thu Jul 28 14:20:14 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:20:14 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> Thanks Jay! I enjoy helping old things find a new home. It is amazing to me what goes to recyclers! I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. Why are they so dreaded to you guys? I have found them to be fantastically helpful! Cindy -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 2:16 PM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: more vintage computer stuff Cindy wrote.... -------- Sorry if posting my site is not allowed. If so, please delete this post. -------- Cindy - thanks for your post. I have seen on occasion a past commercial seller (not here any longer) not fit in well with the mentality of this list. You are not one of those. You're a perfect model of how a commercial seller can be a fantastic contributor to the list. I'm glad you're here, and appreciate the way you participate! Same goes for Paul A and a couple others. J From sales at elecplus.com Thu Jul 28 14:52:33 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:52:33 -0500 Subject: the value of old test and repair equipment Message-ID: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> I had to pass up a large qty of old test equip at the recycler last time because they wanted too much for it. For instance, an old HP signal generator would have cost me $25, with no way to test it, and no guarantees that it was complete or working. So my question is, does as-is old test and repair equip that won't be particularly cheap have interest to you guys? Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus 500 Pershing Ave. Kerrville, TX 78028 830-370-3239 cell sales at elecplus.com AOL IM elcpls From jwest at classiccmp.org Thu Jul 28 14:57:43 2016 From: jwest at classiccmp.org (Jay West) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:57:43 -0500 Subject: the value of old test and repair equipment In-Reply-To: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> References: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> Message-ID: <000801d1e90a$4dfce860$e9f6b920$@classiccmp.org> Cindy wrote... ----- does as-is old test and repair equip that won't be particularly cheap have interest to you guys? ----- Speaking just for me personally... yes it has interest. I use period gear to work on the computers and enjoy that combination. Not as in "I'm collecting old test gear" but "I like using old test gear with the gear I'm collecting". J From brian at marstella.net Thu Jul 28 15:14:09 2016 From: brian at marstella.net (Brian Marstella) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 16:14:09 -0400 Subject: the value of old test and repair equipment In-Reply-To: <000801d1e90a$4dfce860$e9f6b920$@classiccmp.org> References: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> <000801d1e90a$4dfce860$e9f6b920$@classiccmp.org> Message-ID: I enjoy using vintage test equipment as well, but I'm not usually willing to pay more than $5 or $10 for a piece unless I know it works. Generally, the only time I'll pay more without testing is when it's an automated piece of equipment that included some computer interface capability as part of assembly line testing. On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 3:57 PM, Jay West wrote: > Cindy wrote... > ----- > does as-is old test and repair equip that won't be particularly cheap have > interest to you guys? > ----- > > Speaking just for me personally... yes it has interest. I use period gear > to > work on the computers and enjoy that combination. Not as in "I'm collecting > old test gear" but "I like using old test gear with the gear I'm > collecting". > > J > > > From aek at bitsavers.org Thu Jul 28 16:01:21 2016 From: aek at bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 14:01:21 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> Message-ID: <6e53207c-142a-0fb1-e4b0-b7c7143f75a5@bitsavers.org> On 7/28/16 12:20 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. > Why are they so dreaded to you guys? I have found them to be fantastically helpful! > Well, I find them helpful as well, like the guys who have reversed-engineered the Wyse keyboard protocol and built keyboard adapters. All I've noticed is you don't see terminals with keyboards any more, especially ones with ALPS or Cherry keyswitches, and while you see lots of listings for Wyse keyboards because of the demand for the keyswitches, you see almost none for Televideo and especially Qume. Since they are all out of production now, it will just end up in the future that you'll just use whatever PS/2 or USB keyboard you can find with an adapter to the original protocol. From sales at elecplus.com Thu Jul 28 16:14:07 2016 From: sales at elecplus.com (Electronics Plus) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 16:14:07 -0500 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <6e53207c-142a-0fb1-e4b0-b7c7143f75a5@bitsavers.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> <6e53207c-142a-0fb1-e4b0-b7c7143f75a5@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <04aa01d1e914$fa3acbb0$eeb06310$@com> Televideo keyboards are kind of rare. Qume I believe were rubber dome, so I usually don't pick them up. People always ask for the mechanical boards. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Al Kossow Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 4:01 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: more vintage computer stuff On 7/28/16 12:20 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. > Why are they so dreaded to you guys? I have found them to be fantastically helpful! > Well, I find them helpful as well, like the guys who have reversed-engineered the Wyse keyboard protocol and built keyboard adapters. All I've noticed is you don't see terminals with keyboards any more, especially ones with ALPS or Cherry keyswitches, and while you see lots of listings for Wyse keyboards because of the demand for the keyswitches, you see almost none for Televideo and especially Qume. Since they are all out of production now, it will just end up in the future that you'll just use whatever PS/2 or USB keyboard you can find with an adapter to the original protocol. From radiotest at juno.com Thu Jul 28 17:24:31 2016 From: radiotest at juno.com (Dale H. Cook) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 18:24:31 -0400 Subject: the value of old test and repair equipment In-Reply-To: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> References: <047e01d1e909$955072f0$bff158d0$@com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20160728182216.03e1c190@juno.com> At 03:52 PM 7/28/2016, Electronics Plus wrote: >... does as-is old test and repair equip that won't be particularly cheap have interest to you guys? It depends entirely on the make and model of equipment. I always have a laundry list of stuff I am looking for - one of the reasons why I bring my tablet to meets. Dale H. Cook, GR / HP Collector, Roanoke/Lynchburg, VA http://plymouthcolony.net/starcity/radios/index.html From teoz at neo.rr.com Thu Jul 28 20:58:56 2016 From: teoz at neo.rr.com (TeoZ) Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2016 21:58:56 -0400 Subject: Anybody have a need for some old HP drive sleds (A3647A)? Message-ID: <06A70799352446418882C7B7986A6027@TeoPC> Was cleaning out some stuff and ran across some HP drive sleds I don?t need. HP Model A3647A made for 4.3GB HVD 3.5? SCA 7200 RPM drives. I have 4 of them and all the screws that were inside holding the drives. Any interest? --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus From pontus at Update.UU.SE Fri Jul 29 02:25:43 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 09:25:43 +0200 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160729072542.GK17920@Update.UU.SE> On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:03:45PM -0500, Paul Anderson wrote: > I just dug out what might be my last extra DECmate II CPU for a list > member, and now have access to several Pro and Rainbow CPUs and other parts. > > If you have any interest, please contact me off list. Shipping from > Illinois. Hi Paul I might be a little late to the party. But do you have a color graphics board for a 380? It is distinct from the 350 graphics. Also, a Telephone Management System (TMS) would be interresting. Kind Regards, Pontus. From axelsson at acc.umu.se Sat Jul 30 03:06:12 2016 From: axelsson at acc.umu.se (=?UTF-8?Q?G=c3=b6ran_Axelsson?=) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 10:06:12 +0200 Subject: ExpandaCore 18 core memory In-Reply-To: <149cd3f1-c760-0b06-dca7-a86390791cda@acc.umu.se> References: <149cd3f1-c760-0b06-dca7-a86390791cda@acc.umu.se> Message-ID: Sometimes you are lucky... A friend got a lot of documentation in a haul just a few days ago, among it was some documentation about NORD-1 and the ExpandaCore-18 was among it. So now I have complete schematics and even some timing diagrams. :-) For reference I'll include the link to the document page, https://sites.google.com/site/tingox/nd_documentation Just in case someone would be looking for this document in the future and finds this post. He also had a lot of other good stuff for me but not scanned yet, I'll just have to wait for that. Realistically I don't think I'm ready to add a hard drive to the machine yet as I'm not sure I can even read the memory. :-D G?ran Den 2016-07-26 kl. 01:15, skrev G?ran Axelsson: > Den 2016-07-25 kl. 14:37, skrev Camiel Vanderhoeven: >> Op 25 jul. 2016 2:25 p.m. schreef "G?ran Axelsson" >> : >>> My guess so far is that there is a problem with reading and writing to >> the memory. The problem is that I have no documentation over the memory >> module except a drawing of the circuitry used to access it. ND bought >> several different models of core memory for it's early computers and >> just >> adapted the interface. >>> So once again I turn to the cctech for help, does anybody have >> instructions about ExpandaCore 18 from by Cambridge Memories INC, >> Newton, >> Massachusetts (also known as CMI but probably not the CMI on bitsavers). >>> So far the only thing I've found was a newsflash in a computer magazine >> about a sale of memories to another computer maker. >> >> I can't help you with that, but is it just the core stack itself you >> don't >> have docs for, or does the CMI part include some driver circuitry? If >> it's >> just the stack, you should be able to do without docs for that. Core >> memory >> doesn't go bad unless it's physically damaged. If it is physically >> damaged, >> repair can be very difficult, depending on the diameter of the cores. > > Thanks for the answer. > > The ExpandaCore 18 (tm) ;-) is a unit with the driver electronics and > core memory together. One control board per four memory planes and > dual ported so a high speed device could write straight into the core > memory without going through the CPU. In my case it seems like I have > a packet drive interface that uses the second channel. > > I have put up some more pictures here : > http://www.home.neab.net/gandalf/ClassicComputing/Pictures/Nord-1%20%2347/ > > Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here but there is one "control board" > for each four core planes. Maybe it's just a buffer. A problem with > the core memories is that it sits tight in a crate and I have no > extender for these cards. At least I should be able to measure the > signals from the CPU to the control board, and from the control board > to the memory planes. > >> How are you troubleshooting this? Can you deposit a value in memory from >> the front panel, then read it back? If that works, but one or more >> bits are >> off, there's a good reason to look at the core driver circuitry. If it >> doesn't work at all, the problem could be anywhere. Try hooking a logic >> analyzer to the address and data lines, clock, and read/write control >> lines >> for a start. >> >> Good luck! >> >> Camiel > > I can deposit a value in the address register (R) but that is as far > as I have come right now. I can also look at the other registers. I > think that the memory content should show up when I enter an address > but I get back the same value as I entered. > The operators panel is a bit broken down, there are a couple of bad > switches but new ones is in the mail. Some keys react on vibrations. > At the moment I can't do any measurements on the CPU-cards as there > are no space in that crowded rack. But yesterday I cadded an extender > for the NORD-1 CPU crate so in a week I'll be able to do some > measurements on that part at least. > > I got a cheap USB-connected logic analyzer and a digital sampling > oscilloscope, so with the extender cards I will be able to measure or > break up and inject any signal I want in the CPU. > > This is too fun to be healthy! :-) > > G?ran > From useddec at gmail.com Fri Jul 29 05:05:17 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 05:05:17 -0500 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: <20160729072542.GK17920@Update.UU.SE> References: <20160729072542.GK17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: Only too late if it's gone. I have a complete spare 380 board with ( I think) 3 daughter boards on it, or maybe that was a Rainbow. I haven't found the boards that plug in on the side yet. Any part numbers? On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 2:25 AM, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:03:45PM -0500, Paul Anderson wrote: > > I just dug out what might be my last extra DECmate II CPU for a list > > member, and now have access to several Pro and Rainbow CPUs and other > parts. > > > > If you have any interest, please contact me off list. Shipping from > > Illinois. > > Hi Paul > > I might be a little late to the party. But do you have a color graphics > board for a 380? It is distinct from the 350 graphics. > > Also, a Telephone Management System (TMS) would be interresting. > > Kind Regards, > Pontus. > From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 29 07:22:39 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 08:22:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <6e53207c-142a-0fb1-e4b0-b7c7143f75a5@bitsavers.org> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> <6e53207c-142a-0fb1-e4b0-b7c7143f75a5@bitsavers.org> Message-ID: <201607291222.IAA18880@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. >> Why are they so dreaded to you guys? Well, personally, the biggest reason is that they require that I subject myself to the Web. I recognize that few people share this attitude. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From v.slyngstad at frontier.com Fri Jul 29 09:55:27 2016 From: v.slyngstad at frontier.com (Vincent Slyngstad) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:55:27 -0700 Subject: Nova 3 front panel In-Reply-To: References: <3d17f823-321f-6351-8262-cb2d85c7031a@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <809534E96E6845B98A2EAD641CA43699@Vincew7> Today I received copies of the schematic and parts layout for the Nova 3 panel from Peter Simpson. I believe Perer also sent a copy to bitsavers. Thanks Peter!! The correct part number for the bulbs is 014-000002, which makes it a CM2176 equivalent. The CM2176 has only a 1000 hour expected lifetime. Reviewing the specs for the CM2185 and CM2187 which were proposed as replacements, the CM2187 is the better fit. Both bulbs would be noticeably dimmer than the originals, with the CM2187 about 34% as bright. The CM2187 bulbs powered by 24V can be expected to last 44+ thousand hours. If a bright bulb is desired, the CM8361 is closer, but it would draw 60 mA instead of the 50 mA of the original bulb. (Even so, it would still be only 76% as bright as the original.) Mouser also has the JKL version of the CM7001, which has the correct electrical and brightness specs, but is a bi-pin bulb, rather than wire terminal. (Also only lasts 2000 hours.) Hope this is helping. Vince From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Fri Jul 29 13:08:21 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:08:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: more vintage computer stuff Message-ID: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Mouse > they require that I subject myself to the Web. > I recognize that few people share this attitude. Well, I sorta understand; the modern 'active content' mania causes me to grind my teeth, too. But the non-active Web has major benefits. E.g. I read this list via the (entirely non-active :-) archive page, so my mailbox doesn't get cluttered up with the dross. Noel From shadoooo at gmail.com Fri Jul 29 13:58:56 2016 From: shadoooo at gmail.com (shadoooo) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 20:58:56 +0200 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <579BA770.6070507@gmail.com> Hello Paul, hope you are fine now. I'm interested too to Pro380 boards, because I have a machine with almost no expansion. I'm trying to contact you since weeks, sent some emails but never received an acknowledgement. Maybe there are problems with spam-killers? Please check your email and let me know if you didn't receive anything. Thanks Andrea From js at cimmeri.com Fri Jul 29 14:07:57 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:07:57 -0500 Subject: Question re Teac MT-2ST encoder roller tire In-Reply-To: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <579BA98D.2040702@cimmeri.com> Recently acquired a Teac MT-2ST SCSI cassette tape drive and am attempting to recondition it. Although it does have direct drive motors on both reels (no rubber bands), the design is still plagued by having a rubber roller "tire" on its encoder roller which has turned to a very sticky goo for half its length on my unit. Thankfully, Bitsavers not only has the service manual for this unit, but also photos! This photo shows the encoder roller and tire: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/teac/MT-2ST/photos/2.JPG The tire appears to be 1 cm wide, 1.5mm thick, and ~1/4" tall (for the 1/4" tape). The tire is inset into the metal roller wheel. Has anyone successfully attempted replacing this tire, and if so, how did you do it? I've removed the tire -- half of which was pure goo -- and am thinking maybe to fill the tire inset void with an elastomeric caulk, smoothing it out to meet the outer edge of the rest of the roller. A really short rubber band about the size of a pinky finger would work nicely also. Thank you- -John From cclist at sydex.com Fri Jul 29 14:29:00 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 12:29:00 -0700 Subject: Question re Teac MT-2ST encoder roller tire In-Reply-To: <579BA98D.2040702@cimmeri.com> References: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <579BA98D.2040702@cimmeri.com> Message-ID: <294881ca-d283-a591-03cc-e18ffbb33e87@sydex.com> On 07/29/2016 12:07 PM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: > > Recently acquired a Teac MT-2ST SCSI cassette tape drive and am > attempting to recondition it. > > Although it does have direct drive motors on both reels (no rubber > bands), the design is still plagued by having a rubber roller "tire" > on its encoder roller which has turned to a very sticky goo for half > its length on my unit. Instead of fooling around with a baling-wire-and-bubblegum solution, you're probably best off sending the roller for rebuilding by Terry: http://www.terrysrubberrollers.com/ He does a bang-up job and he's not frighteningly expensive. You'll get something back that will last for many years. --Chuck From useddec at gmail.com Fri Jul 29 14:51:21 2016 From: useddec at gmail.com (Paul Anderson) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:51:21 -0500 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: <579BA770.6070507@gmail.com> References: <579BA770.6070507@gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Andrea, I replied but maybe you didn't get it. I'll check me sent file later. You have a unit with power supply , CPU, and no boards? Which boards do you need? Thanks, Paul On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 1:58 PM, shadoooo wrote: > Hello Paul, > hope you are fine now. > I'm interested too to Pro380 boards, because I have a machine with almost > no expansion. > I'm trying to contact you since weeks, sent some emails but never received > an acknowledgement. > Maybe there are problems with spam-killers? > > Please check your email and let me know if you didn't receive anything. > > Thanks > Andrea > From jwsmail at jwsss.com Fri Jul 29 15:32:00 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 13:32:00 -0700 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: <579BA770.6070507@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 7/29/2016 12:51 PM, Paul Anderson wrote: > Hi Andrea, > > I replied but maybe you didn't get it. I'll check me sent file later. > > You have a unit with power supply , CPU, and no boards? > > Which boards do you need? > > Thanks, Paul Paul, I also sent along a reply, and am interested if Andrea can't swing it, or noone else does. (in the main board, etc). I have a 350 and 380 with no hard drive, and would like to replace the drives and restore the systems to operation of some sort. thanks Jim > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 1:58 PM, shadoooo wrote: > >> Hello Paul, >> hope you are fine now. >> I'm interested too to Pro380 boards, because I have a machine with almost >> no expansion. >> I'm trying to contact you since weeks, sent some emails but never received >> an acknowledgement. >> Maybe there are problems with spam-killers? >> >> Please check your email and let me know if you didn't receive anything. >> >> Thanks >> Andrea >> > From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Fri Jul 29 20:08:18 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 21:08:18 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II Message-ID: I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? From doug-cctalk at dpf.cc Fri Jul 29 20:16:02 2016 From: doug-cctalk at dpf.cc (Doug F) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 21:16:02 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Doug, I've used an SCSI2SD v5 in a Symbolics XL1201 as both CD-ROM and 1280-byte sector Hard Drive mode successfully. I don't know anything about a MicroVax II, but I would be happy to tell you what I know of the SCSI2SD. (I've actually put several in one computer simultaneously.) Cheers, Doug > On Jul 29, 2016, at 9:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? From healyzh at aracnet.com Fri Jul 29 20:30:10 2016 From: healyzh at aracnet.com (Zane Healy) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 18:30:10 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. > > Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? > > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I still do, if it will boot). Ultrix would also be available. What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( Zane From toby at telegraphics.com.au Fri Jul 29 20:36:25 2016 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 21:36:25 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <968b90fa-bccd-88d5-b84c-209c563071fb@telegraphics.com.au> On 2016-07-29 9:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, > RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers > that might come in handy. > > Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? > Anyone have experience with this? > > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS > available? How do you get an OS onto this system? > > > NetBSD is an option. The most recent version I've run on a MicroVAX II (9MB) is 1.4.1, netbooted (couldn't find a netbootable distribution of anything more recent; also a 9MB machine might not run much more recent). You probably want to chase down a DELQA. --Toby From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Fri Jul 29 20:38:14 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 21:38:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> > I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a > TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers > that might come in handy. Ooh, those are (my impression!) substantially rarer than DEQNAs. (I know _I_'d cheerfully swap a DEQNA for Qbus SCSI.) > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Yes. Recent (and some not-so-recent) versions are broken, in that they can't self-host; as far as I know nobody knows exactly what's wrong. My impression (as someone who hasn't tried it, but who has seen it discussed on port-vax) is that something breaks somewhere in the compiler when running native. You may also find recent(ish) versions are too resource-hungry; the MicroVAX-II can't have more than 16M RAM, which is pretty tiny by modern NetBSD's standards (pretty much ever since they relegated most ports to second-class, er, sorry, "organic" status). Fortunately, older NetBSD is still available; I think it's even available from netbsd.org. I don't have any VAXen up at the moment (I'm more constrained than historically usual about how many computers I have live or almost-live), or I'd offer to build you a tarball; I can do that anyway, but I won't be in a position to test whether it actually works, that it may be suboptimal. > Are versions of VMS available? I imagine so, but I don't actually know, since I haven't gone looking for any. (I have fond memories of my VMS days, but as long as it remains closed-source, I'm not running it.) > How do you get an OS onto this system? Same way you would any other system. In your case, I see four options: tapes, floppies (I think the RX50 is a floppy drive?), netboot (if you can find a network for the thing), and putting the disk on another machine and plopping the install on it there. Personally, I'd be installing NetBSD, and I'd probably dig out a spare DEQNA, netboot, then install onto local disk from the netbooted system. In extremis, I might download a grappling-hook program via memory binary deposit commands, then ship stuff over the console serial line. This would work, but would be slow; I think the fastest the console serial can run is 19200, or maybe 38400. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From jsw at ieee.org Fri Jul 29 21:30:25 2016 From: jsw at ieee.org (Jerry Weiss) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 21:30:25 -0500 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> On Jul 29, 2016, at 8:30 PM, Zane Healy wrote: > > >> On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: >> >> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. >> >> The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. >> >> Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? >> >> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? > > The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I still do, if it will boot). > > Ultrix would also be available. > > What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. > > I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( > I have booted both V7.3 and V5.5-2 off a 4GB SD with SCSI2SD V4.6 on a MicroVax II with 16 Mb. Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. You?ll need a DELQA. You should be able to build a system with an emulator and then copy the binary to an SD card. i?ve taken images both ways without problems. Alternately if you get a DELQA, you can netboot off of another Vaxen and build an bootable disk that way. Jerry From glen.slick at gmail.com Fri Jul 29 21:55:25 2016 From: glen.slick at gmail.com (Glen Slick) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 19:55:25 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, > RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that > might come in handy. > > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS > available? How do you get an OS onto this system? What Qbus SCSI controllers do you have? The CMD CQD-200 CQD-220, Dilog SQ706A, Emulex UC07 I have tried were all able to boot from an appropriate SCSI CD-ROM drive. That how I usually go about installing OpenVMS 7.3 on a Qbus VAX. I never got around to picking up a SCSI-SD adapter yet. I just use old fashioned rotating drives, although they are 68-pin drives with 50-pin adapters. I have a BA123 that I maxed out as a something close to a VAXstation III/GPX. Replaced the M7606 KA630 with a M7625 KA655. There are only 4 Q22/CD slots so normally you can only have 48MB using 3 M7622 MS650 16MB boards plus the CPU. I found a couple of third-party 32MB boards to max out at 64MB. Added a (2x) M7168 + M7169 VCB02 set for the GPX graphics. The BA123 is an interesting item for DEC collectors and I'm glad I was able to pick one up, although it's been a while now since I last powered it up. From healyzh at aracnet.com Fri Jul 29 22:01:23 2016 From: healyzh at aracnet.com (Zane Healy) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 20:01:23 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <66C18F3C-2386-4481-9E2E-8258E04AFC39@aracnet.com> > On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? By the way, from an educational standpoint, this is a very good system to run VMS on, if you?re looking to learn about performance tuning. Any changes you make will be very apparent. :-) Zane From robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com Fri Jul 29 22:15:55 2016 From: robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com (Jarratt RMA) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 04:15:55 +0100 (BST) Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <899416566.2105677.1469848555255.JavaMail.open-xchange@oxbe9.tb.ukmail.iss.as9143.net> > > On 30 July 2016 at 02:30 Zane Healy wrote: > > > > > On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor > > wrote: > > > > I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, > > RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > > > > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers > > that might come in handy. > > > > Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? > > Anyone have experience with this? > > > > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS > > available? How do you get an OS onto this system? > > The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist > licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a > SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either > v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I > still do, if it will boot). > > Ultrix would also be available. > > What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to > a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. > > I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like > to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still > work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( > > Zane > > > > Zane, OT reply, but I have been looking for anyone with a working AlphaStation 200 4/233 who could run a test for me. If you get VMS (7.2-1 iirc) running on one of them would you be prepared to run a test program of mine on it that would dump the DROM and the NVRAM? Thanks Rob From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sat Jul 30 03:01:37 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 10:01:37 +0200 Subject: help identify Unisys memory board Message-ID: <20160730080137.GN17920@Update.UU.SE> Hi A rather large Unisys memory board came up for sale locally. The seller doesn't know much about it and I'm curious which machine it comes from. Here are some picture, fairly low resolution I'm afraid: http://www.pdp8.se/slask/unisys_mem/ Do you know what it might be? Thanks, Pontus. From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 10:19:44 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:19:44 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <787289bb-17f1-87da-1683-79501eb9e758@comcast.net> On 7/29/2016 9:30 PM, Zane Healy wrote: >> On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: >> >> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. >> >> The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. >> >> Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? >> >> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? > The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I still do, if it will boot). > > Ultrix would also be available. > > What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. > > I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( > > Zane > > > I have a couple of Viking (TD Systems) scsi controllers which is what I am thinking of using. I have some S-Box SCSI controllers then may come in handy. I like the idea of VMS 5.5 just to restore the system back to its former glory. Doug From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 10:26:26 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:26:26 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> Message-ID: <659de006-43ab-6ad9-dfe9-834c37759f76@comcast.net> On 7/29/2016 10:30 PM, Jerry Weiss wrote: > On Jul 29, 2016, at 8:30 PM, Zane Healy wrote: >> >>> On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: >>> >>> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. >>> >>> The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. >>> >>> Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? >>> >>> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? >> The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I still do, if it will boot). >> >> Ultrix would also be available. >> >> What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. >> >> I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( >> > I have booted both V7.3 and V5.5-2 off a 4GB SD with SCSI2SD V4.6 on a MicroVax II with 16 Mb. Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. You?ll need a DELQA. > > You should be able to build a system with an emulator and then copy the binary to an SD card. i?ve taken images both ways without problems. Alternately if you get a DELQA, you can netboot off of another Vaxen and build an bootable disk that way. > > Jerry That is awfully good news for me. How did you format the SD card? What kind of drive was it emulating? I don't have 16 Mb, but 5 Mb. I understand the DEQNA was not supported in VMS 5, should've kept the one I had. Doug From paulkoning at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 10:50:42 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:50:42 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> Message-ID: <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> > On Jul 29, 2016, at 10:30 PM, Jerry Weiss wrote: > > ... > I have booted both V7.3 and V5.5-2 off a 4GB SD with SCSI2SD V4.6 on a MicroVax II with 16 Mb. Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. You?ll need a DELQA. Yes, VMS stopped supporting the QNA at some point because, even after 12 ECOs, it could not be made to work properly. If I remember right, the issues showed up mostly in clusters; DECnet didn't mind so much. If all you can get is a QNA, you either need a sufficiently old version of VMS, or an OS that is more forgiving of bogus hardware. paul From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 10:52:53 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:52:53 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <224d71ff-975a-97e7-53d2-a60dfa90c0ed@comcast.net> On 7/29/2016 10:55 PM, Glen Slick wrote: > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: >> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, >> RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. >> >> The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that >> might come in handy. >> >> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS >> available? How do you get an OS onto this system? > What Qbus SCSI controllers do you have? The CMD CQD-200 CQD-220, Dilog > SQ706A, Emulex UC07 I have tried were all able to boot from an > appropriate SCSI CD-ROM drive. That how I usually go about installing > OpenVMS 7.3 on a Qbus VAX. I never got around to picking up a SCSI-SD > adapter yet. I just use old fashioned rotating drives, although they > are 68-pin drives with 50-pin adapters. > > I have a BA123 that I maxed out as a something close to a VAXstation > III/GPX. Replaced the M7606 KA630 with a M7625 KA655. There are only 4 > Q22/CD slots so normally you can only have 48MB using 3 M7622 MS650 > 16MB boards plus the CPU. I found a couple of third-party 32MB boards > to max out at 64MB. Added a (2x) M7168 + M7169 VCB02 set for the GPX > graphics. > > The BA123 is an interesting item for DEC collectors and I'm glad I was > able to pick one up, although it's been a while now since I last > powered it up. I agree, I remember using a MicroVax II in the BA123 box back in the mid 1980's and wanted to have one and now I do. The only thing I forgot was just how heavy the damn thing is! I just looked and here is what I have: VMS V5.5-2 BIN Oct 92 Disk 1 of 1 CDROM Viking SCSI controller - I think this is disk only and used it in the past. Viking A/B A4.0 on rom. Alphatronix SCSI controller - this is rebadged Viking not sure how it is set up, disk/tape or disk. Emulex UC07 - this is has S-box handles and have used it in a VAX 4000. DEC KZQSA - this is also S-box also CMD - CQD 223A/TM in S-box configuration DEC - RRD42 external SCSI CDROM drive I've only used the Viking boards to control a single drive in the past ( I think, its been a long time ). I am reluctant to remove the S-box handles as they seem to be riveted to the board. The CD is DEC and I'm not sure of how much is on it, is it just an OS? Can it be used with the MVII? It looks like I could use one of the Viking controllers to talk to the RRD42 and a SCSI to SD card drive and get up and running. How many things could go wrong? Doug From healyzh at aracnet.com Sat Jul 30 10:55:23 2016 From: healyzh at aracnet.com (Zane Healy) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 08:55:23 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <787289bb-17f1-87da-1683-79501eb9e758@comcast.net> References: <787289bb-17f1-87da-1683-79501eb9e758@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 30, 2016, at 8:19 AM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > I have a couple of Viking (TD Systems) scsi controllers which is what I am thinking of using. I have some S-Box SCSI controllers then may come in handy. > > I like the idea of VMS 5.5 just to restore the system back to its former glory. > > Doug I think we?ve discussed your Viking boards before. I think they?ll work just fine, but in all honestly, I?ve never tried. Viking boards are all in PDP-11?s. :-) The reason I suggest 5.5-2 is that you can get a decent TCP/IP stack for it, AND, it?s requirements are low enough to work well on a MicroVAX II. In fact it?s what I tend to prefer to run on VAXen. Having said that, I?d like to get a v4.x system up and running at some point. My MicroVAX III was running 4.something when I got it. I booted it up, played around, powered it down, and the RD53 wouldn?t power back up. I?ve been kicking myself for about 18 years for not grabbing a backup when I first powered it on! If you can get a copy of the Hobbyist V1 CD-ROM, it?s well worth the effort. It has v5 and I think v6, as well as a lot of freeware. IIRC though, it lacks layered products. Zane From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 10:56:20 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:56:20 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> Message-ID: On 7/30/2016 11:50 AM, Paul Koning wrote: >> On Jul 29, 2016, at 10:30 PM, Jerry Weiss wrote: >> >> ... >> I have booted both V7.3 and V5.5-2 off a 4GB SD with SCSI2SD V4.6 on a MicroVax II with 16 Mb. Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. You?ll need a DELQA. > Yes, VMS stopped supporting the QNA at some point because, even after 12 ECOs, it could not be made to work properly. If I remember right, the issues showed up mostly in clusters; DECnet didn't mind so much. If all you can get is a QNA, you either need a sufficiently old version of VMS, or an OS that is more forgiving of bogus hardware. > > paul > If I can get it up and running without networking that would be acceptable. I'm just interested in seeing it running again. Doug From healyzh at aracnet.com Sat Jul 30 10:59:10 2016 From: healyzh at aracnet.com (Zane Healy) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 08:59:10 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <224d71ff-975a-97e7-53d2-a60dfa90c0ed@comcast.net> References: <224d71ff-975a-97e7-53d2-a60dfa90c0ed@comcast.net> Message-ID: > On Jul 30, 2016, at 8:52 AM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > I agree, I remember using a MicroVax II in the BA123 box back in the mid 1980's and wanted to have one and now I do. > > The only thing I forgot was just how heavy the damn thing is! > > I just looked and here is what I have: > > VMS V5.5-2 BIN Oct 92 Disk 1 of 1 CDROM > > Viking SCSI controller - I think this is disk only and used it in the past. Viking A/B A4.0 on rom. > > Alphatronix SCSI controller - this is rebadged Viking not sure how it is set up, disk/tape or disk. > > Emulex UC07 - this is has S-box handles and have used it in a VAX 4000. > > DEC KZQSA - this is also S-box also > > CMD - CQD 223A/TM in S-box configuration > > DEC - RRD42 external SCSI CDROM drive > > I've only used the Viking boards to control a single drive in the past ( I think, its been a long time ). > > I am reluctant to remove the S-box handles as they seem to be riveted to the board. > > The CD is DEC and I'm not sure of how much is on it, is it just an OS? Can it be used with the MVII? > > It looks like I could use one of the Viking controllers to talk to the RRD42 and a SCSI to SD card drive and get up and running. How many things could go wrong? > > Doug IIRC, the Alphatronix SCSI adapter may only talk to their CD-Jukeboxes. You?re in great shape with that CD, that?s an awesome score! I have two HD?s, a Plextor CD-ROM, and a 4mm DAT tape drive on a single Viking QDT in my PDP-11. The RRD42 should work just fine. Zane From jsw at ieee.org Sat Jul 30 11:06:35 2016 From: jsw at ieee.org (Jerry Weiss) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:06:35 -0500 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <659de006-43ab-6ad9-dfe9-834c37759f76@comcast.net> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> <659de006-43ab-6ad9-dfe9-834c37759f76@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Jul 30, 2016, at 10:26 AM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > On 7/29/2016 10:30 PM, Jerry Weiss wrote: >> On Jul 29, 2016, at 8:30 PM, Zane Healy wrote: >>> >>>> On Jul 29, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: >>>> >>>> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. >>>> >>>> The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers that might come in handy. >>>> >>>> Can you use those SD to SCSI convertors in this type of configuration? Anyone have experience with this? >>>> >>>> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Are versions of VMS available? How do you get an OS onto this system? >>> The all around best choice would be VAX/VMS v5.5-2. You can get Hobbyist licenses. The OS was available as part of the Hobbyist program. If you add a SCSI adapter, you can hopefully attach a CD. IIRC, it will run up to either v7.2 or 7.3, at least I know I had v7.2 on a MicroVAX III (well, technically I still do, if it will boot). >>> >>> Ultrix would also be available. >>> >>> What I did though was I gave it a brain transplant, and converted mine to a PDP-11 once I got a better VAX. >>> >>> I need to invest in a couple of those SD adapters myself. I?d really like to put one on one of my AlphaStation 200 4/233?s. Hopefully they?ll still work. It?s been years since I?ve done anything with my DEC HW. :-( >>> >> I have booted both V7.3 and V5.5-2 off a 4GB SD with SCSI2SD V4.6 on a MicroVax II with 16 Mb. Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. You?ll need a DELQA. >> >> You should be able to build a system with an emulator and then copy the binary to an SD card. i?ve taken images both ways without problems. Alternately if you get a DELQA, you can netboot off of another Vaxen and build an bootable disk that way. >> >> Jerry > > That is awfully good news for me. How did you format the SD card? What kind of drive was it emulating? > > I don't have 16 Mb, but 5 Mb. I understand the DEQNA was not supported in VMS 5, should've kept the one I had. > I use a UC07 controller and it presents the SD/SCS2SD as a MSCP drive. It doesn?t matter what type of drive I label the drive using the Emulex built it utilities (RA81, RA92..). VMS sees all the space the SCSI2SD adapter presents. The SD is is a block level device and can be written directly to. No further (lower level) formatting is necessary. 7603200 512 63 255 DEC RA92 4.30 VAX50001 Start off by getting the Hobbyist License. When you sign up you get access to a VMS 7.3 distribution Iso. Then you need to sort out your install method. Either burn the ISO and try to boot it or go the emulation route. Jerry From stark at mit.edu Sat Jul 30 11:09:53 2016 From: stark at mit.edu (Greg Stark) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 17:09:53 +0100 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> References: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 2:38 AM, Mouse wrote: >> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? > > Yes. Recent (and some not-so-recent) versions are broken, in that they > can't self-host; as far as I know nobody knows exactly what's wrong. > My impression (as someone who hasn't tried it, but who has seen it > discussed on port-vax) is that something breaks somewhere in the > compiler when running native. > > You may also find recent(ish) versions are too resource-hungry; the > MicroVAX-II can't have more than 16M RAM, which is pretty tiny by > modern NetBSD's standards (pretty much ever since they relegated most > ports to second-class, er, sorry, "organic" status). The Micro VAX II supports mop booting so you can boot NetBSD entirely diskless with an NFS from a BSD or Linux NFS server just fine. This is supported right up to current versions of NetBSD though I recommend NetBSD 6.1.5. Later versions have bugs GCC which cause massive headaches. Even the GCC in 6.1.5 is a bit buggy. I had to recompile awk with -O0 or else various I followed: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/ I forget where I diverged from it so if you run into any issues just ask and I'll check what I did. The hardest part was getting mopd on Linux to serve up the NetBSD boot loader properly. The mopd for Linux didn't support ELF images and the NetBSD boot loader isn't in mopd format in more recent versions of NetBSD like it was in older versions. Now it's just ELF. But it's finally working. If you use NetBSD to serve mopd this isn't an issue. If you want to use Linux I can send you an mopd format copy of the boot loader. There are lots of advantages of booting diskless but my main motivation was that older hard drives can be quite noisy. The Vaxstation without a drive is fairly quiet, the only noise is the power supply fan. Also they're moving parts that often fail and can be quite small. Having 20G of space for my root filesystem is quite handy too and now I can easily take lvm snapshots, backups, etc so if this Vaxstation dies I could perhaps find another and netboot it from the same root. I should be able to boot simh from the same root too though I haven't tried that. I'm not sure simh supports mopd so I might need to create a boot device that remounts NFS over it. -- greg From stark at mit.edu Sat Jul 30 11:11:31 2016 From: stark at mit.edu (Greg Stark) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 17:11:31 +0100 Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Greg Stark wrote: > headaches. Even the GCC in 6.1.5 is a bit buggy. I had to recompile > awk with -O0 or else various s/$/ configure scripts failed./ -- greg From toby at telegraphics.com.au Sat Jul 30 11:18:17 2016 From: toby at telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 12:18:17 -0400 Subject: Netbooting NetBSD/vax - was Re: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On 2016-07-30 12:09 PM, Greg Stark wrote: > On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 2:38 AM, Mouse wrote: > >>> What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? >> >> Yes. Recent (and some not-so-recent) versions are broken, in that they >> can't self-host; as far as I know nobody knows exactly what's wrong. >> My impression (as someone who hasn't tried it, but who has seen it >> discussed on port-vax) is that something breaks somewhere in the >> compiler when running native. >> >> You may also find recent(ish) versions are too resource-hungry; the >> MicroVAX-II can't have more than 16M RAM, which is pretty tiny by >> modern NetBSD's standards (pretty much ever since they relegated most >> ports to second-class, er, sorry, "organic" status). > > The Micro VAX II supports mop booting so you can boot NetBSD entirely > diskless with an NFS from a BSD or Linux NFS server just fine. This is > supported right up to current versions of NetBSD though I recommend > NetBSD 6.1.5. Later versions have bugs GCC which cause massive > headaches. Even the GCC in 6.1.5 is a bit buggy. I had to recompile > awk with -O0 or else various > > I followed: > > http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/ > > I forget where I diverged from it so if you run into any issues just > ask and I'll check what I did. FWIW I also put this HOWTO together for NetBSD 1.4.1. https://github.com/qu1j0t3/mopd/blob/master/HOWTO-MicroVAX-II.md --Toby > > The hardest part was getting mopd on Linux to serve up the NetBSD boot > loader properly. The mopd for Linux didn't support ELF images and the > NetBSD boot loader isn't in mopd format in more recent versions of > NetBSD like it was in older versions. Now it's just ELF. But it's > finally working. If you use NetBSD to serve mopd this isn't an issue. > If you want to use Linux I can send you an mopd format copy of the > boot loader. > ... From macro at linux-mips.org Sat Jul 30 11:59:10 2016 From: macro at linux-mips.org (Maciej W. Rozycki) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 17:59:10 +0100 (BST) Subject: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: References: <201607300138.VAA20708@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Greg Stark wrote: > The hardest part was getting mopd on Linux to serve up the NetBSD boot > loader properly. The mopd for Linux didn't support ELF images and the > NetBSD boot loader isn't in mopd format in more recent versions of > NetBSD like it was in older versions. Now it's just ELF. But it's > finally working. If you use NetBSD to serve mopd this isn't an issue. > If you want to use Linux I can send you an mopd format copy of the > boot loader. FWIW, I had to deal with a buggy DECstation REX firmware revision which crashes on an attempt to use TFTP for booting (plus FDDI network hardware such as DEFZA, etc. only supports MOP booting by design), so I have added ELF support to Linux `mopd' some 15 years ago, to be able to netboot Linux kernels with no hassle. I guess it's the matter of finding the right patches then, and I'm sorry to hear you had issues despite that you shouldn't have. As I have figured out earlier this year only said ELF support patch as well as some other improvements were imported by Debian soon after I made them, and then the package maintainer broke them later on with another patch applied on top. Obviously nobody noticed or cared to report the breakage and I wasn't aware myself as I have only ever used my own RPM packages which I have created in the first place and then built from sources on a RedHat system. Maciej From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sat Jul 30 12:51:47 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:51:47 +0200 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation Message-ID: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> Hi I'm trying to revive and old unix machine. A Concurrent Computer Corporation series 8000. This seems to be a later version of Masscomp MC5600/MC5700 which has a manual in bitsavers. The system runs RTU (which I assumes means Real Time Unix). My machine is in great condition and both SCSI disks (Seagate ST516) seems to work fine and I've made images. But the machine panics at boot: --- panic: Unauthorized use of RTU For further assistance, contact Concurrent's Customer Service Technical Support Group --- The NVRAM battery is long dead and upon entering the console I get a complaint regarding the TOD clock, but I see no way of setting it. I can boot into a "stand alone mode" but not single user. In the SAM I can poke arround the filesystem and use "date" to set a date, but the clock appears not to be running. Does anyone have experience with this type of machine, either CCC or masscomp and can offer assistance? It's a dual MIPS machine with 16MB of memory. /P From alexmcwhirter at triadic.us Sat Jul 30 12:58:49 2016 From: alexmcwhirter at triadic.us (alexmcwhirter at triadic.us) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 13:58:49 -0400 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> On 2016-07-30 13:51, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > Hi > > I'm trying to revive and old unix machine. A Concurrent Computer > Corporation series 8000. This seems to be a later version of Masscomp > MC5600/MC5700 which has a manual in bitsavers. The system runs RTU > (which I assumes means Real Time Unix). > > My machine is in great condition and both SCSI disks (Seagate ST516) > seems to work fine and I've made images. But the machine panics at > boot: > > --- > panic: Unauthorized use of RTU > For further assistance, contact Concurrent's > Customer Service Technical Support Group > --- > > The NVRAM battery is long dead and upon entering the console I get a > complaint regarding the TOD clock, but I see no way of setting it. > > I can boot into a "stand alone mode" but not single user. In the SAM I > can poke arround the filesystem and use "date" to set a date, but the > clock appears not to be running. > > Does anyone have experience with this type of machine, either CCC or > masscomp and can offer assistance? > > It's a dual MIPS machine with 16MB of memory. > > /P I know nothing about this machine in particular, but i know a decent amount about other unix machines of the era. Chances are that the copy of RTU on that box is licensed to the serial / id number programmed in nvram. Because the nvram is dead, those numbers no longer match and the OS panics from an invalid license. The TOD clock typically part of the nvram chip and loses it's value after every reset. If i had to guess, i would say replace the battery / nvram chip (if it's a self contained chip like the old sun boxes) and see if you can get enough data together to reprogram it. Whether or not the machine in question has a facility to do that like the old sun's do i am not sure. From tdk.knight at gmail.com Sat Jul 30 13:19:38 2016 From: tdk.knight at gmail.com (Adrian Stoness) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 13:19:38 -0500 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: Have u tried replacing said dead battery would start there On Jul 30, 2016 12:51 PM, "Pontus Pihlgren" wrote: > Hi > > I'm trying to revive and old unix machine. A Concurrent Computer > Corporation series 8000. This seems to be a later version of Masscomp > MC5600/MC5700 which has a manual in bitsavers. The system runs RTU > (which I assumes means Real Time Unix). > > My machine is in great condition and both SCSI disks (Seagate ST516) > seems to work fine and I've made images. But the machine panics at boot: > > --- > panic: Unauthorized use of RTU > For further assistance, contact Concurrent's > Customer Service Technical Support Group > --- > > The NVRAM battery is long dead and upon entering the console I get a > complaint regarding the TOD clock, but I see no way of setting it. > > I can boot into a "stand alone mode" but not single user. In the SAM I > can poke arround the filesystem and use "date" to set a date, but the > clock appears not to be running. > > Does anyone have experience with this type of machine, either CCC or > masscomp and can offer assistance? > > It's a dual MIPS machine with 16MB of memory. > > /P > From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sat Jul 30 13:35:34 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 20:35:34 +0200 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> Message-ID: <20160730183533.GP17920@Update.UU.SE> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 01:58:49PM -0400, alexmcwhirter at triadic.us wrote: > I know nothing about this machine in particular, but i know a decent amount > about other unix machines of the era. Chances are that the copy of RTU on > that box is licensed to the serial / id number programmed in nvram. Because > the nvram is dead, those numbers no longer match and the OS panics from an > invalid license. I think you may very well be right. I noticed that the "show" command in the console displays the serial number. I went back and compared it with the serial number printed on the back of the machine. Well, it doesn't match one bit. So.. I either need to figure out to reprogram the NVRAM (simply set serial_number doesn't work and the manual lists the environment variable as "permanent") or I suppose I could figure out where on disk the serial number is.. but it doesn't sound easy. > The TOD clock typically part of the nvram chip and loses > it's value after every reset. If i had to guess, i would say replace the > battery / nvram chip (if it's a self contained chip like the old sun boxes) > and see if you can get enough data together to reprogram it. Whether or not > the machine in question has a facility to do that like the old sun's do i am > not sure. I've battled the NVRAM death and corresponding TOD problems in SGI, SUN and DEC machines before but only succeded because the "set" functionality of the console was enough... this time I'm not so sure. /P From pete at petelancashire.com Sat Jul 30 13:54:03 2016 From: pete at petelancashire.com (Pete Lancashire) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 11:54:03 -0700 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: <20160730183533.GP17920@Update.UU.SE> References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> <20160730183533.GP17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: Remove the part and set it in a device programmer ? On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: > On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 01:58:49PM -0400, alexmcwhirter at triadic.us wrote: > > I know nothing about this machine in particular, but i know a decent > amount > > about other unix machines of the era. Chances are that the copy of RTU on > > that box is licensed to the serial / id number programmed in nvram. > Because > > the nvram is dead, those numbers no longer match and the OS panics from > an > > invalid license. > > I think you may very well be right. I noticed that the "show" command in > the console displays the serial number. I went back and compared it with > the serial number printed on the back of the machine. Well, it doesn't > match one bit. So.. I either need to figure out to reprogram the NVRAM > (simply set serial_number doesn't work and the manual lists the > environment variable as "permanent") or I suppose I could figure out > where on disk the serial number is.. but it doesn't sound easy. > > > The TOD clock typically part of the nvram chip and loses > > it's value after every reset. If i had to guess, i would say replace the > > battery / nvram chip (if it's a self contained chip like the old sun > boxes) > > and see if you can get enough data together to reprogram it. Whether or > not > > the machine in question has a facility to do that like the old sun's do > i am > > not sure. > > I've battled the NVRAM death and corresponding TOD problems in SGI, SUN > and DEC machines before but only succeded because the "set" > functionality of the console was enough... this time I'm not so sure. > > /P > > From ian.finder at gmail.com Sat Jul 30 15:13:31 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 13:13:31 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> Message-ID: Cindy wrote: > I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. > Why are they so dreaded to you guys? Because they do things like ask the seller of the totally complete, obscenely rare Symbolics 3620 on eBay in Finland if they can pay full price but leave the system behind and split off the keyboard. They see an IBM system in a movie, and don't go "Wow, look at that system 360," they say "Wow, look at those beam spring keyboards!" They have no interest in restoring machines, or the history of this stuff- and they often orphan crucial parts from rare systems. They've made it very hard to finish the restorations of some of my systems, as they've come to me without the very desirable keyboards which are now coveted pieces in some nerd's collection, far away from the devices they are to be used with. It's like killing an elephant for ivory, or ripping the hood ornament off of a vintage Mercedes. If it's rare enough and you don't own the system, you have no business owning a critical part. - Ian On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 12:20 PM, Electronics Plus wrote: > Thanks Jay! I enjoy helping old things find a new home. > It is amazing to me what goes to recyclers! > I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. > Why are they so dreaded to you guys? I have found them to be fantastically > helpful! > > Cindy > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West > Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 2:16 PM > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' > Subject: RE: more vintage computer stuff > > Cindy wrote.... > -------- > Sorry if posting my site is not allowed. If so, please delete this post. > -------- > > Cindy - thanks for your post. > > I have seen on occasion a past commercial seller (not here any longer) not > fit in well with the mentality of this list. You are not one of those. > > You're a perfect model of how a commercial seller can be a fantastic > contributor to the list. I'm glad you're here, and appreciate the way you > participate! > > Same goes for Paul A and a couple others. > > J > > > > > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From ian.finder at gmail.com Sat Jul 30 15:24:53 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 13:24:53 -0700 Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: References: <01c201d1e848$91a1bb80$b4e53280$@com> <070394fb-607a-31f8-5dc2-717073a63f7a@bitsavers.org> <523868de-b372-f1a7-7dd1-7fd2ee7ffc6f@bitsavers.org> <03ec01d1e8fc$2371acb0$6a550610$@com> <000501d1e904$831cf8b0$8956ea10$@classiccmp.org> <045001d1e905$116f2520$344d6f60$@com> Message-ID: One other addendum to my last point- oftentimes they mutilate the vintage devices too- They'll dremel out a place to put a USB port on a vintage keyboard, or worse- harvest keyswitches out of them. I once had a keyboard collector offer to buy a working GRiD Compass 1129 off of me so they could remove the keyboard and make a PC keyboard out of it. And they have means and motivation the same as anyone, so they often offer the same kind of prices a real legitimate collector who wants the whole system would. I have also spoken with people who have been contacted by keyboard collectors who go so far as to lie about owning a machine to close a deal on a rare keyboard with someone who would not be willing to sell it otherwise. It's getting to be a trendy hobby for people who want interesting old artifacts without space, learning and restoration commitment necessitated by classic computing, and that's a real problem. - Ian On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 1:13 PM, Ian Finder wrote: > Cindy wrote: > > I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. > > Why are they so dreaded to you guys? > > Because they do things like ask the seller of the totally complete, > obscenely rare Symbolics 3620 on eBay in Finland if they can pay full price > but leave the system behind and split off the keyboard. > > They see an IBM system in a movie, and don't go "Wow, look at that system > 360," they say "Wow, look at those beam spring keyboards!" > > They have no interest in restoring machines, or the history of this > stuff- and they often orphan crucial parts from rare systems. They've made > it very hard to finish the restorations of some of my systems, as they've > come to me without the very desirable keyboards which are now coveted > pieces in some nerd's collection, far away from the devices they are to be > used with. > > It's like killing an elephant for ivory, or ripping the hood ornament off > of a vintage Mercedes. > > If it's rare enough and you don't own the system, you have no business > owning a critical part. > > - Ian > > > On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 12:20 PM, Electronics Plus > wrote: > >> Thanks Jay! I enjoy helping old things find a new home. >> It is amazing to me what goes to recyclers! >> I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. >> Why are they so dreaded to you guys? I have found them to be >> fantastically helpful! >> >> Cindy >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jay West >> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 2:16 PM >> To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' >> Subject: RE: more vintage computer stuff >> >> Cindy wrote.... >> -------- >> Sorry if posting my site is not allowed. If so, please delete this post. >> -------- >> >> Cindy - thanks for your post. >> >> I have seen on occasion a past commercial seller (not here any longer) >> not fit in well with the mentality of this list. You are not one of those. >> >> You're a perfect model of how a commercial seller can be a fantastic >> contributor to the list. I'm glad you're here, and appreciate the way you >> participate! >> >> Same goes for Paul A and a couple others. >> >> J >> >> >> >> >> >> > > > -- > Ian Finder > (206) 395-MIPS > ian.finder at gmail.com > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 30 16:00:07 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 17:00:07 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets Message-ID: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> Pre-order ticket sales for VCF West end tomorrow at midnight ET. More available at the gate. https://t.co/kHKFAAn0TB From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 30 16:19:44 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 14:19:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Pre-order ticket sales for VCF West end tomorrow at midnight ET. More > available at the gate. https://t.co/kHKFAAn0TB $20 one day $30 both days But, what is the price to buy a ticket at the door? From cctalk at snarc.net Sat Jul 30 16:24:50 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 17:24:50 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> Message-ID: <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> >> Pre-order ticket sales for VCF West end tomorrow at midnight ET. More >> available at the gate. https://t.co/kHKFAAn0TB > > $20 one day > $30 both days > > But, what is the price to buy a ticket at the door? Same price. Pre-ordering saves time. From stark at mit.edu Sat Jul 30 17:10:43 2016 From: stark at mit.edu (Greg Stark) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 23:10:43 +0100 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> <20160730183533.GP17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: Is there a part number on the nvram? The chips Sun used with the enbedded battery were a standard part available from Mouser. Or is there a visible battery on the board anywhere? From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sat Jul 30 17:51:54 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 18:51:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: KT-24 and/or -11/24 backplane info Message-ID: <20160730225154.4D62518C08F@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> >> I guess it will require getting ahold of a backplane, and seeing what >> I can find out with an ohm-meter. > It looks like I'll still have to do this at some point, to confirm my > theories about how the two busses are wired on the backplane > (separation of UB and EUB address lines, and cross-connection of the > data lines, for the EUB/SPC slots) I have checked an -11/24 backplane, and the wiring is indeed as I hypothesized (above). > Another mystery: The "PDP-11 UNIBUS Processor Handbook" (1985) says > (pg. 4-10) that in the 5.25" box, "only one MS11-P memory module can be > configured". Anyone know the cause/source of that restriction? > ... > I can't come up with any technical rationale for that limit? Am I > missing something? Or is it just DEC marketing, trying to limit how > powerful the machine can be? I would still be grateful for any insight from anyone about this. Noel From lyokoboy0 at gmail.com Sat Jul 30 18:54:49 2016 From: lyokoboy0 at gmail.com (devin davison) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:54:49 -0400 Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors Message-ID: I have a heap of floppy disks on hand. Most with old junk on them. Some are going bad, and have bad spots in the middle of the disk. Is there a good utility for either windows or dos that can format a floppy and mark the bad parts of the floppy to not be used? If anything, such a utility can let me find what disks are having issues and i can pitch them before i run into the aggravation of finding there is an issue with a disk down the line. --Devin From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 30 18:58:54 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 16:58:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote: > I have a heap of floppy disks on hand. Most with old junk on them. Some are > going bad, and have bad spots in the middle of the disk. Is there a good > utility for either windows or dos that can format a floppy and mark the bad > parts of the floppy to not be used? > If anything, such a utility can let me find what disks are having issues > and i can pitch them before i run into the aggravation of finding there is > an issue with a disk down the line. FORMAT on any old version of DOS. It formats and verifies (confirms readability), and on conclusion reports amount of space locked out. It's not an exhaustive test, but it's there and it works. DO NOT use the "Q" option, which explicitly tells it to not bother checking. From macro at linux-mips.org Sat Jul 30 19:30:51 2016 From: macro at linux-mips.org (Maciej W. Rozycki) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 01:30:51 +0100 (BST) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: > > I have a heap of floppy disks on hand. Most with old junk on them. Some are > > going bad, and have bad spots in the middle of the disk. Is there a good > > utility for either windows or dos that can format a floppy and mark the bad > > parts of the floppy to not be used? > > If anything, such a utility can let me find what disks are having issues > > and i can pitch them before i run into the aggravation of finding there is > > an issue with a disk down the line. > > FORMAT on any old version of DOS. It formats and verifies (confirms > readability), and on conclusion reports amount of space locked out. There used to be a `fdformat' utility available providing fancy stuff for DOS users like sector physical and logical shifting, interleaving, unusual geometries, etc. You could use physical shifting (track lead and inter-sector gap rearrangement) to avoid bad spots in some cases altogether, and logical shifting (out of order sector ID assignment) to improve data transfer performance -- typically ~twice compared to results obtained with the regular `format' utility shipped with DOS. Some other features were available I don't remember offhand anymore; basically you had much control over the NEC ?PD765 FDC chip itself with this tool's command line options. Back in 1990s the software package used to be carried by the usual FTP sites with DOS software, so I guess it still has to be available online somewhere. I highly recommend it if you're still into the floppy business and don't use Linux. The plain `format' command supplied with DOS gives you little control really and produces poor performance floppies. HTH, Maciej From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 30 20:09:23 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 18:09:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, 31 Jul 2016, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > There used to be a `fdformat' utility available providing fancy stuff for > DOS users like sector physical and logical shifting, interleaving, unusual > geometries, etc. Be aware that FDFORMAT is ALSO the name of Linux low-level formatter, AND a Microsoft utility for formatting their 1.7M format. > You could use physical shifting (track lead and inter-sector gap > rearrangement) to avoid bad spots in some cases altogether, and logical > shifting (out of order sector ID assignment) to improve data transfer > performance -- typically ~twice compared to results obtained with the > regular `format' utility shipped with DOS. Some other features were > available I don't remember offhand anymore; basically you had much control > over the NEC ?PD765 FDC chip itself with this tool's command line options. If diskettes were seriously hard to come by, then moving sectors around to put bad spots of the disk in unused places makes sense. If I have a known flaw on a disk, I always assume that there are many more unknown flaws on the same disk. Therefore, in the event of a flaw, I copy then trash that diskette. > Back in 1990s the software package used to be carried by the usual FTP > sites with DOS software, so I guess it still has to be available online > somewhere. Be aware that FDFORMAT is ALSO the name of Linux low-level formatter, AND a Microsoft utility for formatting their 1.7M format. JFORMAT (John Henderson of TallTree Systems) is another fun one to play with. > I highly recommend it if you're still into the floppy business > and don't use Linux. The plain `format' command supplied with DOS gives > you little control really and produces poor performance floppies. My PCs (original 5150 and IBM 5160 being exceptions) can handle 1:1 , reading 9 sectors per revolution, making no need for interleave. IBM and Microsoft were not UNAWARE of the concept of interleave. But, many machines did need it, and most early hard disks, particularly on 5160, called for a a little experimenting based on how YOU used it, to determine YOUR optimum interleave. (Programs that changed interleave for performance were sometimes unaware that the optimum one could be different based on what you were doing with the data) WRONG interleave could result in needing more revolutions to read a track. And, not all 3.5" drives do well with Mode3 ("NEC") format. (I have used PCs with a few formats other than the usual ones) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From js at cimmeri.com Sat Jul 30 20:16:52 2016 From: js at cimmeri.com (js at cimmeri.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 20:16:52 -0500 Subject: Question re Teac MT-2ST encoder roller tire In-Reply-To: <294881ca-d283-a591-03cc-e18ffbb33e87@sydex.com> References: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <579BA98D.2040702@cimmeri.com> <294881ca-d283-a591-03cc-e18ffbb33e87@sydex.com> Message-ID: <579D5184.1080608@cimmeri.com> On 7/29/2016 2:29 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > On 07/29/2016 12:07 PM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: >> Recently acquired a Teac MT-2ST SCSI cassette tape drive and am >> attempting to recondition it. >> >> Although it does have direct drive motors on both reels (no rubber >> bands), the design is still plagued by having a rubber roller "tire" >> on its encoder roller which has turned to a very sticky goo for half >> its length on my unit. > Instead of fooling around with a baling-wire-and-bubblegum solution, > you're probably best off sending the roller for rebuilding by Terry: > > http://www.terrysrubberrollers.com/ > > He does a bang-up job and he's not frighteningly expensive. You'll get > something back that will last for many years. > > --Chuck Thank you, Chuck. I'll give my idea a try first, and then Terry's as a last resort. I'll report back here with results as they occur. - John From classiccmp at crash.com Sat Jul 30 20:25:47 2016 From: classiccmp at crash.com (Steven M Jones) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 18:25:47 -0700 Subject: DEQNA and VMS 5, was Re: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> Message-ID: <475e2449-801c-d99a-dc49-82ed4c69a2eb@crash.com> On 07/29/2016 19:30, Jerry Weiss wrote: > > Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. > You?ll need a DELQA. On 07/30/2016 08:50, Paul Koning wrote: > > Yes, VMS stopped supporting the QNA at some point because, even > after 12 ECOs, it could not be made to work properly. If I > remember right, the issues showed up mostly in clusters; DECnet > didn't mind so much. The DEQNA was deprecated and for good reason, though you could still use it with many if not most versions of VMS 5.x. And as Paul points out if you're using it for lighter duty, or if it's all you've got, you might as well give it a shot. I was working at MIT in '90-91 and one of the labs (LIDS, I believe) had a cluster of VAXstation 2000s being served by a MicroVAX II. The VAXstations may have had a small local disk, but they were all clustered with if not booting from the MVII. The MVII had a DEQNA, which I discovered meant that when I was doing I-forget-what for them and brought the cluster back up, I had to sequence the booting of the VAXstations. If I booted two of them too close together, the MVII would crash. But it did work, if you'll accept that caveat as "working," and by that time if they were still running (Micro)VMS 4.x it would have stood out. I'm sure I did tell them to get a DELQA, preferably a DELQA-YM, but many of the labs I supported were running on a shoestring, and indentured graduate students to reboot as needed were often cheaper than new hardware... --S. From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sat Jul 30 20:34:33 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 21:34:33 -0400 Subject: DEQNA and VMS 5, was Re: MicroVax II In-Reply-To: <475e2449-801c-d99a-dc49-82ed4c69a2eb@crash.com> References: <86A97F97-705D-4AEB-B16B-96AC15DC8777@ieee.org> <769191CA-7A23-4B17-A222-36421E87CFD5@comcast.net> <475e2449-801c-d99a-dc49-82ed4c69a2eb@crash.com> Message-ID: <234f183a-02d7-c3d5-5f72-4e8fe9c37ad5@comcast.net> On 7/30/2016 9:25 PM, Steven M Jones wrote: > On 07/29/2016 19:30, Jerry Weiss wrote: >> Note that DEQNA will not work (at all) on either version. >> You?ll need a DELQA. > On 07/30/2016 08:50, Paul Koning wrote: >> Yes, VMS stopped supporting the QNA at some point because, even >> after 12 ECOs, it could not be made to work properly. If I >> remember right, the issues showed up mostly in clusters; DECnet >> didn't mind so much. > > The DEQNA was deprecated and for good reason, though you could still use > it with many if not most versions of VMS 5.x. And as Paul points out if > you're using it for lighter duty, or if it's all you've got, you might > as well give it a shot. > > I was working at MIT in '90-91 and one of the labs (LIDS, I believe) had > a cluster of VAXstation 2000s being served by a MicroVAX II. The > VAXstations may have had a small local disk, but they were all clustered > with if not booting from the MVII. > > The MVII had a DEQNA, which I discovered meant that when I was doing > I-forget-what for them and brought the cluster back up, I had to > sequence the booting of the VAXstations. If I booted two of them too > close together, the MVII would crash. > > But it did work, if you'll accept that caveat as "working," and by that > time if they were still running (Micro)VMS 4.x it would have stood out. > > I'm sure I did tell them to get a DELQA, preferably a DELQA-YM, but many > of the labs I supported were running on a shoestring, and indentured > graduate students to reboot as needed were often cheaper than new > hardware... > > --S. > I remember purchasing a DELQA in the late 1980's or early 90's and it was $2,500. Wow! I understand why you group didn't get one. When it was delivered I took it out of the box and looked at it and thought that DEC was really gouging us. Doug From macro at linux-mips.org Sat Jul 30 21:24:07 2016 From: macro at linux-mips.org (Maciej W. Rozycki) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 03:24:07 +0100 (BST) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: > > I highly recommend it if you're still into the floppy business > > and don't use Linux. The plain `format' command supplied with DOS gives > > you little control really and produces poor performance floppies. > > My PCs (original 5150 and IBM 5160 being exceptions) can handle 1:1 , reading > 9 sectors per revolution, making no need for interleave. > IBM and Microsoft were not UNAWARE of the concept of interleave. > But, many machines did need it, and most early hard disks, particularly on > 5160, called for a a little experimenting based on how YOU used it, to > determine YOUR optimum interleave. (Programs that changed interleave for > performance were sometimes unaware that the optimum one could be different > based on what you were doing with the data) > WRONG interleave could result in needing more revolutions to read a track. From my experience with floppy formats and reasonably fast computers (i.e. where CPU processing latency doesn't really matter) the best results are obtained with no interleaving, no sector staggering on head switching, and single-sector staggering on cylinder incrementing. I.e. taking the the 1.44MB 3.5" format (18 sectors, 2 sides, 80 cylinders) as an example you start track #0, #1, #2, etc. on both sides with logical sector #1, #18, #17, etc. Logical sector numbers then increment modulo 18, plus 1 (as sector IDs start counting from 1), i.e.: s[n+1] = (s[n] % 18) + 1. This is because with a fast host CPU it takes negligible time to issue commands to the FDC as results from preceding commands become available and therefore the FDC will receive a subsequent sector or track read (or write) command soon enough for data requested not to have passed under the head in rotary movement yet. And head selection is instantaneous, made along a read (or write) request. A seek command requesting the next cylinder however requires the step motor to physically move the head assembly and it takes enough time to complete for medium to have already rotated past the next physical sector. So if that happened to be the logical sector requested with the next read (or write) command as well, then almost a full rotation would be required to even start executing the data transfer. So to avoid that missed sector you need to stagger sectors back by one on cylinder increments, so that the physical sector lost due to the head movement is actually one you may need last and the subsequent one is the logically next one. Empirical data showed that a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy formatted as I described above took IIRC ~35s to read (or write) it whole whereas one formatted with the regular DOS utility required noticeably more. Given the figures I quoted above we have 2+1/18 vs 3 revolutions per two-sided cylinder read (or written) for the staggered vs unstaggered sector layout, giving ~51s required for a whole floppy formatted with physical and logical sector IDs identity mapped. This makes the staggered format only ~1.5 times rather than twice as good, contrary to what I quoted from my faded memory in my original statement. Still this was not to be underrated at the time of regular floppy use. Maciej From cclist at sydex.com Sat Jul 30 21:25:33 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:25:33 -0700 Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: When I have to go through piles of floppies (and I do this more often than I care to) I make a master iamge of a good floppy and then copy with format+verify, aborting on the first error. The reason is quite simple--floppies with bad spots never get better, they only get worse. So you might as well bin the ones that don't pass the test. I have a special machine set up with 3 floppy controllers that can write 3 disks simultaneously--disk changes are triggered by simply removing and inserting floppies from the drives. There are 6 drives on this machine, so the work progresses pretty well. My take, anyway. --Chuck From cisin at xenosoft.com Sat Jul 30 21:56:18 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:56:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, 31 Jul 2016, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > From my experience with floppy formats and reasonably fast computers > (i.e. where CPU processing latency doesn't really matter) the best results > are obtained with no interleaving, no sector staggering on head switching, > and single-sector staggering on cylinder incrementing. > . . . > A seek command requesting the next cylinder however requires the step > motor to physically move the head assembly and it takes enough time to > complete for medium to have already rotated past the next physical sector. > So if that happened to be the logical sector requested with the next read > (or write) command as well, then almost a full rotation would be required > to even start executing the data transfer. So to avoid that missed sector > you need to stagger sectors back by one on cylinder increments, so that > the physical sector lost due to the head movement is actually one you may > need last and the subsequent one is the logically next one. There is also an issue of drive. The Qumetrak 142 (360K), which IBM used briefly, was so slow stepping that IBM lengthened the default track to track time in PC-DOS 2.10 (V 2.00). With that drive, you would want TWO sectors staggered for optimum. Similarly, an SA400 with 256 (or 128) byte sectors. BUT, there are also issues of application software. Consider the case of a machine, or group of machines, that are used consistently with one particular program. If that program reads a record, processes it, then reads the next one, then the length of time for that processing could result in a different interleave being more effective, FOR THAT SPECIFIC application. Surely, you have seen specific machines and their floppies that are always used for one particular program, particularly a visi-clone, a word processor, a database program, or some "vertical" program for that business. Not all programs read the entire file into RAM. With 16K - 64K of RAM, handling non-trivial file sizes required reading part of the file at a time. Remember when maximum datafile size changed, for the most part, from disk size to RAM size? So, what is optimum for you, might not be what is optimum for somebody with a weirder use. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com From brain at jbrain.com Sun Jul 31 00:24:51 2016 From: brain at jbrain.com (Jim Brain) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:24:51 -0500 Subject: "non-polar" capacitor? Message-ID: Since I acquired a Coco Orchestra 90 unit awhile back, and I am trying to find the source of some humming in my system when the Orch 90 unit is operational, I looked at the schematic: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/Orchestra-90%20CC%20Stereo%20Music%20Synthesizer%20(Tandy).pdf (page 109 of the PDF) I understand the ROM, the resistor ladders, and the latches, but analog is not my strong suit. I made my way through the op-amp design, but I am stumped on one component (actually three)? C7,C9, and C10 They look like electrolytic polarized caps, but are NP (non polarized), with no '+' on the schematic. Can someone shed light on what these are and where you would find them (or if they can safely be replaced with another kind of capacitor)? I will admit I've never seen mention of these before now. Are they "bipolar"? http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nichicon/UVP1H010MDD/UVP1H010MDD-ND/242804 Or, are they called something else now? Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com From ian at platinum.net Sun Jul 31 00:37:33 2016 From: ian at platinum.net (Ian McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 22:37:33 -0700 Subject: "non-polar" capacitor? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0891A682-7A0C-4591-BB7F-1B1FB5FD6D92@platinum.net> Jim, These are non-polarized (or bi-polar) electrolytics. An example is the following digikey part number: 493-12697-3-ND You can always whip one up out of your junk box - just put 2 normal (polarized) electrolytic in series with the polarities alternating (for example, connect the two positives together). Each capacitor has to be twice the value of the result - so for example, to replace a 1uF 50v non-polarized, you can put two 2uF in series. Hope this helps. Ian > On Jul 30, 2016, at 10:24 PM, Jim Brain wrote: > > Since I acquired a Coco Orchestra 90 unit awhile back, and I am trying to find the source of some humming in my system when the Orch 90 unit is operational, I looked at the schematic: > > > http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/Orchestra-90%20CC%20Stereo%20Music%20Synthesizer%20(Tandy).pdf > > > (page 109 of the PDF) > > I understand the ROM, the resistor ladders, and the latches, but analog is not my strong suit. I made my way through the op-amp design, but I am stumped on one component (actually three)? > > > C7,C9, and C10 > > They look like electrolytic polarized caps, but are NP (non polarized), with no '+' on the schematic. > > > Can someone shed light on what these are and where you would find them (or if they can safely be replaced with another kind of capacitor)? I will admit I've never seen mention of these before now. > > Are they "bipolar"? > > http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nichicon/UVP1H010MDD/UVP1H010MDD-ND/242804 > > > Or, are they called something else now? > > Jim > > > > > > -- > Jim Brain > brain at jbrain.com > www.jbrain.com > > > > --- > Filter service subscribers can train this email as spam or not-spam here: http://my.email-as.net/spamham/cgi-bin/learn.pl?messageid=3CDFF5C056DF11E6946E026893ED0201 From cclist at sydex.com Sun Jul 31 00:55:02 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 22:55:02 -0700 Subject: "non-polar" capacitor? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2dfb72cf-31b6-1bed-dcf7-99553a65cbb2@sydex.com> On 07/30/2016 10:24 PM, Jim Brain wrote: > Since I acquired a Coco Orchestra 90 unit awhile back, and I am > trying to find the source of some humming in my system when the Orch > 90 unit is operational, I looked at the schematic: > > > http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/Orchestra-90%20CC%20Stereo%20Music%20Synthesizer%20(Tandy).pdf > > > > Can someone shed light on what these are and where you would find > them (or if they can safely be replaced with another kind of > capacitor)? I will admit I've never seen mention of these before > now. > Electrolytic caps have different characteristics (they actually act somewhat akin to diodes) in the reverse direction. Often, what's done is to construct a non-polar cap by taking two capacitors of double the capacitance in series with like poles forming the connection. You can also run into nonpolar caps used in AC power circuits as PF adjustment, motor starting/run etc. with special construction (i.e. oil dielectric). However, the small values that I see in the schematic would seem to suggest that plain old film caps (polyester/polypropylene) will do the job just fine. FWIW, --Chuck From grahamcreid at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 01:44:43 2016 From: grahamcreid at gmail.com (Graham Reid) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 07:44:43 +0100 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) Message-ID: The company I worked for in 1989 had three hand-me-down MicroVax II from the US parent. They were originally a PDP11/73 box, which had been converted. They ran VMS 5.5-2, all had DEQNA, with no problems that I remember. They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. The DEQNA may have been *unsupported* on 5.5, but it seeded to work OK. I still have one system, and bits of the others. Failing ESDI drives put them to the back of the garage. I do have a replacement ESDI drive, and a Q-bus SCSI controller, so when i get time (ha!), I'll resurrect it. Regards, Graham From trash80 at internode.on.net Sun Jul 31 02:12:55 2016 From: trash80 at internode.on.net (Kevin Parker) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 17:12:55 +1000 Subject: Mall directory computers In-Reply-To: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> References: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> Message-ID: <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> Just spotted this Brad clearing up email after a 4 week break. I can't answer your question but it reminded me of something that other list users may be able to help with or it might just be of interest. Quite some time ago a friend of mine bought a travel agent in a shopping mall, did a refit of the shop and then later went bust. Fortunately before the refit and going bust he gave me his old shop display which was run on a modified Commodore. I haven't opened it up or powered it up but if anyone knows what this is I'd be grateful. I've posted some photos: http://koken.advancedimaging.com.au/index.php?/albums/shop-mall-commodore-64/ Kevin Parker -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Brad H Sent: Thursday, 14 July 2016 12:25 To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: Mall directory computers Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood memories. When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville Mall getting one of those very early mall directory computers. This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what I remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet 'keyboard' you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they just PCs, most likely? Or some kind of custom job? From ian.finder at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 02:28:22 2016 From: ian.finder at gmail.com (Ian Finder) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:28:22 -0700 Subject: Mall directory computers In-Reply-To: <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> References: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> Message-ID: That is certainly not a C= 64 as the title in your link suggests but rather an Amiga 500. These were quite popular for "video billboard" sort of purposes- I imagine they had it running SCALAMultimedia or a similar authoring environment. My local high school district channel ran on a similar setup for many years. I recall seeing it stuck on the Amiga Workbench one day... On Sunday, July 31, 2016, Kevin Parker wrote: > Just spotted this Brad clearing up email after a 4 week break. I can't > answer your question but it reminded me of something that > other list users may be able to help with or it might just be of interest. > > Quite some time ago a friend of mine bought a travel agent in a shopping > mall, did a refit of the shop and then later went bust. > Fortunately before the refit and going bust he gave me his old shop > display which was run on a modified Commodore. > > I haven't opened it up or powered it up but if anyone knows what this is > I'd be grateful. I've posted some photos: > > > http://koken.advancedimaging.com.au/index.php?/albums/shop-mall-commodore-64/ > > > > Kevin Parker > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org ] On > Behalf Of Brad H > Sent: Thursday, 14 July 2016 12:25 > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' < > cctalk at classiccmp.org > > Subject: Mall directory computers > > Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood > memories. > > > > When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville Mall > getting one of those very early mall directory computers. > This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what I > remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet > 'keyboard' you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they > just PCs, most likely? Or some kind of custom job? > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From trash80 at internode.on.net Sun Jul 31 02:43:48 2016 From: trash80 at internode.on.net (Kevin Parker) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 17:43:48 +1000 Subject: Mall directory computers In-Reply-To: References: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> Message-ID: <000001d1eaff$467a5f40$d36f1dc0$@internode.on.net> Thanks for the clarity and the extra info - as I said I haven?t opened it or fired it up much less had a good look at it. Kevin Parker -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ian Finder Sent: Sunday, 31 July 2016 17:28 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Mall directory computers That is certainly not a C= 64 as the title in your link suggests but rather an Amiga 500. These were quite popular for "video billboard" sort of purposes- I imagine they had it running SCALAMultimedia or a similar authoring environment. My local high school district channel ran on a similar setup for many years. I recall seeing it stuck on the Amiga Workbench one day... On Sunday, July 31, 2016, Kevin Parker wrote: > Just spotted this Brad clearing up email after a 4 week break. I can't > answer your question but it reminded me of something that other list > users may be able to help with or it might just be of interest. > > Quite some time ago a friend of mine bought a travel agent in a > shopping mall, did a refit of the shop and then later went bust. > Fortunately before the refit and going bust he gave me his old shop > display which was run on a modified Commodore. > > I haven't opened it up or powered it up but if anyone knows what this > is I'd be grateful. I've posted some photos: > > > http://koken.advancedimaging.com.au/index.php?/albums/shop-mall-commod > ore-64/ > > > > Kevin Parker > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org ] On > Behalf Of Brad H > Sent: Thursday, 14 July 2016 12:25 > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' < > cctalk at classiccmp.org > > Subject: Mall directory computers > > Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood > memories. > > > > When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville > Mall getting one of those very early mall directory computers. > This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what > I remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet 'keyboard' > you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they just PCs, > most likely? Or some kind of custom job? > > -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sun Jul 31 05:55:34 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:55:34 +0200 Subject: Concurrent Computer Corporation In-Reply-To: References: <20160730175147.GO17920@Update.UU.SE> <2c307cfc9553a91622a7a238cc9448a9@triadic.us> <20160730183533.GP17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: <20160731105533.GS17920@Update.UU.SE> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 11:10:43PM +0100, Greg Stark wrote: > Is there a part number on the nvram? The chips Sun used with the enbedded > battery were a standard part available from Mouser. Or is there a visible > battery on the board anywhere? The alotted time for the hobby is up for this weekend. The CPU card was very hard to get out on my initial try. I'll have another go next time. Hopefully it is a standard part (and I can figure out to reprogram it) /P From macro at linux-mips.org Sun Jul 31 07:13:01 2016 From: macro at linux-mips.org (Maciej W. Rozycki) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 13:13:01 +0100 (BST) Subject: formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote: > So, what is optimum for you, might not be what is optimum for somebody with a > weirder use. Sure, there'll always be outliers, no argument about that. I described what has been solely my personal experience (which I hope nobody is going to question), which just happens to coincide with a common use case (cf. the elevator algorithm used by some OSes for block device accesses), and I gave a reference to a tool which lets one adjust their floppy disk format to suit their needs and which some may find useful. I'm leaving it up to individual people then to make use of this tool or not, and if the former, then how. I'm surely not going to interfere with that in any way. FWIW, Maciej From shadoooo at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 08:59:34 2016 From: shadoooo at gmail.com (shadoooo) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 15:59:34 +0200 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <115db835-f341-9833-5279-af62c0e30a00@gmail.com> Hello Paul, I have a Pro380, including box, PSU, motherboard, RX50 interface and RX50. Unfortunately no other interface, so any missing part could be interesting, specially HD / graphics / network. Please let me know if you find something. I tried to forward the sent emails from two different email accounts, I hope at least one of the two will come at destination. I double checked for answers in the last month, including in spam, but unfortunately no luck. It seems there's something wrong with email somewhere... Thanks Andrea From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 09:36:23 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 10:36:23 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote: > Pre-order ticket sales for VCF West end tomorrow at midnight ET. More >>> available at the gate. https://t.co/kHKFAAn0TB >>> >> >> $20 one day >> $30 both days >> >> But, what is the price to buy a ticket at the door? >> > > Same price. > > Pre-ordering saves time. > Given a sizable portion of VCF attendees will also buy a museum ticket, unless you offer a 1/2 price advance ticket or combo vcf / museum ticket, not sure who would want to buy a ticket in advance. Those who buy a ticket now will not be able to take advantage of the 1/2 price VCF ticket that comes with the purchase of their museum admission. >From vcfed.org: "*Note:* Tickets are half-price for Computer History Museum members and those who purchase CHM admission the day of the event." -- @ BillDeg: From hilpert at cs.ubc.ca Sun Jul 31 10:11:33 2016 From: hilpert at cs.ubc.ca (Brent Hilpert) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 08:11:33 -0700 Subject: embedded 80's computers / was Re: Mall directory computers In-Reply-To: <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> References: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> Message-ID: <8654572B-9FC1-4133-8FBA-B7571CA72917@cs.ubc.ca> On 2016-Jul-31, at 12:12 AM, Kevin Parker wrote: > Just spotted this Brad clearing up email after a 4 week break. I can't answer your question but it reminded me of something that > other list users may be able to help with or it might just be of interest. > > Quite some time ago a friend of mine bought a travel agent in a shopping mall, did a refit of the shop and then later went bust. > Fortunately before the refit and going bust he gave me his old shop display which was run on a modified Commodore. > > I haven't opened it up or powered it up but if anyone knows what this is I'd be grateful. I've posted some photos: > > http://koken.advancedimaging.com.au/index.php?/albums/shop-mall-commodore-64/ > > Kevin Parker > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Brad H > Sent: Thursday, 14 July 2016 12:25 > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' > Subject: Mall directory computers > > Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood > memories. > > When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville Mall getting one of those very early mall directory computers. > This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what I remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet > 'keyboard' you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they just PCs, most likely? Or some kind of custom job? A local town here has a large mechanical horse out front of city hall, built in the 80's and (originally) controlled by a C64. http://roadsideattractions.ca/beast.html http://wikimapia.org/872100/The-Beast Somewhere around 15 years ago it had problems and 'no one' could be found to maintain the C64 (as I recall the newspaper article). The C64 has apparently been replaced. From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sun Jul 31 11:03:48 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 09:03:48 -0700 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> Message-ID: <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> > Given a sizable portion of VCF attendees will also buy a museum ticket, > unless you offer a 1/2 price advance ticket or combo vcf / museum > ticket, not sure who would want to buy a ticket in advance. Those who > buy a ticket now will not be able to take advantage of the 1/2 price > VCF ticket that comes with the purchase of their museum admission. > > From vcfed.org: > > "*Note:* Tickets are half-price for Computer History Museum members and > those who purchase CHM admission the day of the event." Hold on a second I thought CHM admission was included in the price of the ticket. Also, is it saying that you have to be a CHM member and buy CHM tickets to get half off (i.e. just buying on the day of admission is not enough) otherwise I agree with Bill those of us who bought our tickets early you are being screwed. -Ali From paulkoning at comcast.net Sun Jul 31 11:10:09 2016 From: paulkoning at comcast.net (Paul Koning) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:10:09 -0400 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: <115db835-f341-9833-5279-af62c0e30a00@gmail.com> References: <115db835-f341-9833-5279-af62c0e30a00@gmail.com> Message-ID: <9719FFA7-4F6D-406B-9053-1FB32EA6582B@comcast.net> > On Jul 31, 2016, at 9:59 AM, shadoooo wrote: > > Hello Paul, > I have a Pro380, including box, PSU, motherboard, RX50 interface and RX50. > Unfortunately no other interface, so any missing part could be interesting, specially HD / graphics / network. > Please let me know if you find something. The Pro 380 (unlike the Pro 350) has standard graphics built into the motherboard. There's a 380-specific daughtercard that adds color (two more bit planes), similar to the EBO option on the 350 but slightly different in details. Hard drive interface and Ethernet require an option card, just as the Pro 350. the model numbers are the same for both: 401 for the hard drive interface, 42 for the DECNA Ethernet card. paul From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Jul 31 11:23:57 2016 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 18:23:57 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 08:57:08PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > I'm experimenting with some old DOS versions, notably PC DOS, in VirtualBox. > > I have a PC-DOS 2000 system with DesqView and DesqView/X working > fairly well -- no networking yet but I'm working on it. Out of curiosity, because I am from time to time wet dreaming about having some kind of graphical frontend to the DOS, but with ability to run multiple DOS programs in parallel. Like one could run them in Windows 3.x (and this sucked a bit, but otherwise made it possible to run editor and something else and switch between them without quitting and starting like mad). So, could DesqView give me something like this? From all descriptions I have read so far, it could not. But I am not sure. Yes, I should have tried to check it by myself, but there is no time to follow every dream. > I am also trying to get a DR-DOS 8 VM up and running. DR-DOS 7.03 is > no problem, but I've had no joy getting DR-DOS 8.1 to install to hard > disk. It's reluctant to SYS a hard disk, and when it did, it > mis-diagnosed it as FAT-12 and wouldn't boot. Using Norton DiskTools, > I've managed to transfer the system files, but they display the > message > > DR-DOS 8.1 > > ... and then it freezes. > > Can this late version, mainly used for utility floppies, actually boot > from HD & be used like a normal DOS? I would not be surprised if they decided to cut every extra byte and maximise space available on the floppy. Or, given it recognises HD in some way, could you try with different HD size? Even very small one, like 20-32MB? Perhaps they were ok with running it from a pendrive, but decided it was not worth it to make it hd-installable, because nobody would want it anyway? Other possibility is, can it work better in some other virtual machine? Qemu/KVM, VMWare? Those are just my wild guesses. I answer mostly because nobody else did. I do not really have that much to say about DOS, other than it was not as bad as some of its graphical cousins. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From cctalk at snarc.net Sun Jul 31 15:04:13 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:04:13 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> Message-ID: <3a664693-3a44-9dfa-29cf-89874f2cdd88@snarc.net> > THAT should be mentioned on the ticket page of the website. You're right. It is updated now. > howzbout, on the ticket page, have a deal to buy both CHM and VCF > admission as a package deal? We weren't able to arrange that. It is definitely on our radar for next year. >> We hope the success of this year's show allows us to have a deeper >> partner with CHM in the future, vs. this year we're simply an event >> group renting the space. > > But, a good fit! Definitely! I can't think of any better place to have the show. From mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG Sun Jul 31 15:23:04 2016 From: mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG (Mouse) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:23:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: more vintage computer stuff In-Reply-To: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20160729180821.CDB7618C07B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <201607312023.QAA29106@Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG> >> [keyboard fora] require that I subject myself to the Web. >> I recognize that few people share this attitude. > Well, I sorta understand; the modern 'active content' mania causes me > to grind my teeth, too. Oh, it doesn't make me grind my teeth. I just ignore it. I have no interest in running software completely untrusted third parties would like me to run. > But the non-active Web has major benefits. For you, I daresay it does. It might for me too, if I could stand it. (There are a very few websites I actually find to be worth subjecting myself to - tvtropes.org and cracked.com are the only ones that come to mind offhand.) It is, of course, not entirely irrelevant that on the few occasions when I do try to something with the Web, I do it from a classic machine, usually a SPARCstation-20. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 16:40:55 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 17:40:55 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Steven M Jones wrote: > On 07/31/2016 11:27, Douglas Taylor wrote: > > On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: > >> > >> They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. > > > > Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it > > a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, > > Multiware, etc. > > If he meant they just used DECNET, then it basically came with the OS. > You might have actually paid extra for it in a commercial setting - I > only dealt with educational or hobbyist licensing, and it was included > in those instances. > > By this time I think DEC had released their Ultrix Connection (UCX) > TCP/IP and utilities product. It combined the protocol stack, some > services and network utilities, and things like a ported Berkeley-style > C shell (/bin/csh). Using that last was a mildly odd experience... They > later replaced that with TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. > > As Bill Degnan pointed out, the "hot ticket" commercial TCP/IP stack in > the VMS 5.x era was MultiNet. > > There was the older CMU/IP package that everybody seemed to want to get > off of as soon as something else was available. Process Software had > TCPware, which I never encountered in the wild. And of course The > Wollongong Group offered a TCP/IP stack along with Eunice (Unix emulator). > > --S. > If you can get the machine to my house some how I might be able to get MULTINET on your VAX,or at a workshop in the MidAtlantic area. I live near Philadelphia Bill -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From cclist at sydex.com Sun Jul 31 17:05:45 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 15:05:45 -0700 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: <0fa85e07-2689-cdce-4b6a-1866e0ca898a@jwsss.com> References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> <2d6c8224-7fd7-0fa7-9668-0085160dc6fc@sydex.com> <0fa85e07-2689-cdce-4b6a-1866e0ca898a@jwsss.com> Message-ID: <9e51b8e4-70d4-03b6-32ec-756d9567f47c@sydex.com> On 07/31/2016 12:59 PM, jim stephens wrote: > > The booted system on Windows 95 is real mode dos, and that allows all > of the dos boxes you spawn to share the same virtual to physical > address space. > > Windows 98 still did the same trick, but would only map a single > physical address space to the physical space. There was a collision > because of the fact that they never booted and ran a base dos box, > but actually booted to PE big real and ran from there. That's why Redmond gave us VxDs ;) Seriously, I think that this was inevitable. MS was starting to get the hint that there was a demand for security and isolating applications was a good start. The DOS that boots Win98 is still a fine version of MS-DOS. The GUI, not so much. --Chuck From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sun Jul 31 18:04:44 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 16:04:44 -0700 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> Message-ID: <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> > THAT should be mentioned on the ticket page of the website. (along > with full details of how much, a link to the CHM ticket page, AND > howzbout, on the ticket page, have a deal to buy both CHM and VCF > admission as a package deal? I agree with Fred on this. My second day purchase (and a ticket for a second person) was based on the thinking that CHM was included. That by itself is not such a big deal, a little bit of money lost, the bigger issue is timing. It seems as if the cool exhibits (IBM 1401 and PDP 1 Space War) at CHM are all on Saturday. If the festival continues on in the future you guys may seriously want to consider better coordination (e.g. CHM has exhibits open on both Saturday and Sunday). As it has already been pointed out a large group of people attending one will probably want to attend the other. -Ali From drlegendre at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 18:41:05 2016 From: drlegendre at gmail.com (drlegendre .) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 18:41:05 -0500 Subject: Mall directory computers In-Reply-To: <000001d1eaff$467a5f40$d36f1dc0$@internode.on.net> References: <0f8a01d1dd76$dba4dff0$92ee9fd0$@bettercomputing.net> <000001d1eafa$f67c7450$e3755cf0$@internode.on.net> <000001d1eaff$467a5f40$d36f1dc0$@internode.on.net> Message-ID: It's not +just+ an A500. What's the extra hardware piggybacked on the A500 case? Looks to have a set of six RCA (F) type jacks on it. Is this for connection of a touchscreen display? On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 2:43 AM, Kevin Parker wrote: > Thanks for the clarity and the extra info - as I said I haven?t opened it > or fired it up much less had a good look at it. > > > > Kevin Parker > > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ian > Finder > Sent: Sunday, 31 July 2016 17:28 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts < > cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: Re: Mall directory computers > > That is certainly not a C= 64 as the title in your link suggests but > rather an Amiga 500. > > These were quite popular for "video billboard" sort of purposes- I imagine > they had it running SCALAMultimedia or a similar authoring environment. > > My local high school district channel ran on a similar setup for many > years. I recall seeing it stuck on the Amiga Workbench one day... > > On Sunday, July 31, 2016, Kevin Parker wrote: > > > Just spotted this Brad clearing up email after a 4 week break. I can't > > answer your question but it reminded me of something that other list > > users may be able to help with or it might just be of interest. > > > > Quite some time ago a friend of mine bought a travel agent in a > > shopping mall, did a refit of the shop and then later went bust. > > Fortunately before the refit and going bust he gave me his old shop > > display which was run on a modified Commodore. > > > > I haven't opened it up or powered it up but if anyone knows what this > > is I'd be grateful. I've posted some photos: > > > > > > http://koken.advancedimaging.com.au/index.php?/albums/shop-mall-commod > > ore-64/ > > > > > > > > Kevin Parker > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org ] On > > Behalf Of Brad H > > Sent: Thursday, 14 July 2016 12:25 > > To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' < > > cctalk at classiccmp.org > > > Subject: Mall directory computers > > > > Been wondering about this for a while. Just one of those odd childhood > > memories. > > > > > > > > When I was a kid growing up in Oakville, Ontario, I remember Oakville > > Mall getting one of those very early mall directory computers. > > This would have been like, 1982-84, somewhere thereabouts. From what > > I remember, they had kind of CGA-sh graphics and a chiclet 'keyboard' > > you used to browse the directory. I'm wondering, were they just PCs, > > most likely? Or some kind of custom job? > > > > > > -- > Ian Finder > (206) 395-MIPS > ian.finder at gmail.com > > From lproven at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 18:48:54 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2016 01:48:54 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: On 31 July 2016 at 20:21, jim stephens wrote: > I used Windows 95 for dos multitasking. Windows 95 booted the processors > into real mode dos, then ran the windows system out of that base dos much > like Windows 3.1 had. As such, the dos boxes all shared actual access to > the real mode assets of the processor. > > Windows 98 switched to protected mode almost immediately on boot, and all > the dos boxes were synthesized in virtual 8086 mapped mode, and had no > underlying booted dos environment. Are you sure about this? Got any references? Because I did a _lot_ of support and research work with 95, 95A, 95B, 98, 98SE & ME, and also of course with NT 3, 4, 2000, XP etc. I am not aware of any differences such as you describe between 95 and 98. Both boot from actual MS-DOS; the GUI can be totally disabled. In both, you can load drivers into DOS before the GUI boots and have all the OS & apps access them. Or, using an undocumented batch file called WINSTART.BAT, in everything from WfWg 3.11 up to 98SE, you could load some things into the Windows "system VM" and it would be accessible to Windows, but not to DOS boxes started under Windows. I did this occasionally for memory-management reasons. But both 95 & 98 are DOS based and function near-identically. WinME removed the ability to boot to a command prompt, it didn't execute AUTOEXEC.BAT any more, nor much of CONFIG.SYS -- the DOS "kernel" loaded Windows directly. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu Sun Jul 31 19:41:31 2016 From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 20:41:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: more vintage computer stuff Message-ID: <20160801004131.8784518C0BC@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> > From: Mouse >> the modern 'active content' mania causes me to grind my teeth, too. > Oh, it doesn't make me grind my teeth. I just ignore it. Well... part of the problem is that some sites that _I_ find useful really depend of active content, and are completely unusable unless you use it. But, above and beyond that, my anger (not too extreme a word, I think) at active content is about more than me. There's a quotation from a novel I once read that made an impression on me; about how a professional marine civil engineer was ticked off at some shoddy work, saying that if offended him because people might think that the professionals in the field couldn't do any better; and they could, but not all of them did. Here it is: "I'm in the business of building things. And I am a specialist in the ways of protecting structures from the sea. I guess it would be personally offensive to me to have the public at large think my profession is so inept and unaware that we would build a few hundred million dollars' worth of high-rise living units on a fragile sandspit without knowing what will happen." (It's from "Condominium", a so-so book by John D. MacDonald. Fine - in fact, very good - for an airplane flight or the beach, but not serious literature.) But that's a big part of it, for me - the notion that as a field, we know full well how to do better - but instead, for complex reasons I don't want to get diverted into now, we have inflicted this abomination on all the innocent users, who are nowhere as well able to protect themselves as you and I are. Noel From curiousmarc3 at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 20:12:49 2016 From: curiousmarc3 at gmail.com (CuriousMarc) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 18:12:49 -0700 Subject: Y Combinator is restoring one of Alan Kay's Xerox Alto machines In-Reply-To: <25A4E234-D4BF-4E5D-BD0B-6AD2F08E0596@gmail.com> References: <116225ef-4848-540b-f734-4670a0471790@bitsavers.org> <297f0d2c-ed44-e9f6-3521-963b2851f740@bitsavers.org> <002901d1cc4b$3e223de0$ba66b9a0$@gmail.com> <198FBBD6-796A-4C88-B9CE-C7BD13AA5723@gmail.com> <1219DEB2-6144-44EF-9AC1-3054AD0D52FD@gmail.com> <25A4E234-D4BF-4E5D-BD0B-6AD2F08E0596@gmail.com> Message-ID: <012d01d1eb91$d297bd00$77c73700$@gmail.com> Next Episode: https://youtu.be/EDw8U1a6s78 http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day_31.html Marc From: Curious Marc [mailto:curiousmarc3 at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 2:01 AM To: Curious Marc; cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Y Combinator is restoring one of Alan Kay's Xerox Alto machines Ken's in-depth blog post to go with the previous video http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day_11.html On Jul 5, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Curious Marc wrote: Video from yesterday?s work on the Diablo cartridge disc: https://youtu.be/PR5LkQugBE0 Should be up in a few minutes. We were tickled pink to have official representation from PARC (former Xerox Parc) at the session. Marc Ken?s new post on the monitor repair to go with my previous video. http://www.righto.com/2016/07/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day.html Al Kossow got us a new CRT tube, so we are probably going to try that this week-end. Marc Latest entry from Ken Shirriff, trying out BCPL (ancestor of C). On the emulator, not yet on the real machine: http://www.righto.com/2016/06/hello-world-in-bcpl-language-on-xerox.html Marc There are only two entries right now: http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.html http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto-day.html Marc From cctalk at snarc.net Sun Jul 31 20:21:40 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:21:40 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> Message-ID: > If the festival continues on in the future you guys may > seriously want to consider better coordination (e.g. CHM has exhibits open > on both Saturday and Sunday). VCF West is definitely back to stay. You're right, we need to improve some things for next year. We already had a long list before this ticket confusion arose. I promise this year's show will be awesome, and next year's will be awesome-r. From classiccmp at vintage-computer.com Sun Jul 31 20:38:05 2016 From: classiccmp at vintage-computer.com (Erik Klein) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 18:38:05 -0700 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 4:04 PM, Ali wrote: > I agree with Fred on this. My second day purchase (and a ticket for a > second > person) was based on the thinking that CHM was included. That by itself is > not such a big deal, a little bit of money lost, the bigger issue is > timing. > It seems as if the cool exhibits (IBM 1401 and PDP 1 Space War) at CHM are > all on Saturday. If the festival continues on in the future you guys may > seriously want to consider better coordination (e.g. CHM has exhibits open > on both Saturday and Sunday). As it has already been pointed out a large > group of people attending one will probably want to attend the other. > > -Ali > > There will be PDP-1 and 1401 demos on Sunday as well. I arranged for this relatively early in VCF planning. -- ----- Erik Klein www.vintage-computer.com - My personal collection www.vcfed.org - The Vintage Computer Federation www.vcfed.org/forum - The Vintage Computer Forums marketplace.vintage-computer.com - The Vintage Computer and Gaming Marketplace From alan at alanlee.org Sun Jul 31 11:41:48 2016 From: alan at alanlee.org (Alan Hightower) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:41:48 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> Message-ID: <1405a7be532414c643a3318bd8597d80@alanlee.org> Yes, please clarify both the CHM admission and how my Paypal receipt email will translate into admission in various places. On 2016-07-31 12:03, Ali wrote: > Hold on a second I thought CHM admission was included in the price of the ticket. Also, is it saying that you have to be a CHM member and buy CHM tickets to get half off (i.e. just buying on the day of admission is not enough) otherwise I agree with Bill those of us who bought our tickets early you are being screwed. > > -Ali From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Jul 31 12:05:18 2016 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 19:05:18 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: <20160731170518.GA28751@tau1.ceti.pl> On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 06:23:57PM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 08:57:08PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > > I'm experimenting with some old DOS versions, notably PC DOS, in VirtualBox. > > > > I have a PC-DOS 2000 system with DesqView and DesqView/X working > > fairly well -- no networking yet but I'm working on it. > > Out of curiosity, because I am from time to time wet dreaming about > having some kind of graphical frontend to the DOS, but with ability to > run multiple DOS programs in parallel. Like one could run them in > Windows 3.x (and this sucked a bit, but otherwise made it possible to > run editor and something else and switch between them without quitting > and starting like mad). > > So, could DesqView give me something like this? From all descriptions > I have read so far, it could not. But I am not sure. Yes, I should > have tried to check it by myself, but there is no time to follow every > dream. Uh. Never mind. I looked up again and now it says "multitasking for DOS". Funny. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From lproven at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 12:18:19 2016 From: lproven at gmail.com (Liam Proven) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 19:18:19 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: On 31 July 2016 at 18:23, Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 08:57:08PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: >> I'm experimenting with some old DOS versions, notably PC DOS, in VirtualBox. >> >> I have a PC-DOS 2000 system with DesqView and DesqView/X working >> fairly well -- no networking yet but I'm working on it. > > Out of curiosity, because I am from time to time wet dreaming about > having some kind of graphical frontend to the DOS, but with ability to > run multiple DOS programs in parallel. Like one could run them in > Windows 3.x (and this sucked a bit, but otherwise made it possible to > run editor and something else and switch between them without quitting > and starting like mad). > > So, could DesqView give me something like this? From all descriptions > I have read so far, it could not. But I am not sure. Yes, I should > have tried to check it by myself, but there is no time to follow every > dream. DesqView: yes to multitasking, no to graphics. The only snag is that it is itself DOS based, so you don't get a lot of free RAM in your sessions. But it works, and it's much lighter and faster than even v3 of Windows. If you want an actual graphical GUI, DV/X can do that. > >> I am also trying to get a DR-DOS 8 VM up and running. DR-DOS 7.03 is >> no problem, but I've had no joy getting DR-DOS 8.1 to install to hard >> disk. It's reluctant to SYS a hard disk, and when it did, it >> mis-diagnosed it as FAT-12 and wouldn't boot. Using Norton DiskTools, >> I've managed to transfer the system files, but they display the >> message >> >> DR-DOS 8.1 >> >> ... and then it freezes. >> >> Can this late version, mainly used for utility floppies, actually boot >> from HD & be used like a normal DOS? > > I would not be surprised if they decided to cut every extra byte and > maximise space available on the floppy. Or, given it recognises HD in > some way, could you try with different HD size? Even very small one, > like 20-32MB? Perhaps they were ok with running it from a pendrive, > but decided it was not worth it to make it hd-installable, because > nobody would want it anyway? I suppose it's possible but it would be a bit odd. I'll try with PC-DOS and report back. > Other possibility is, can it work better in some other virtual > machine? Qemu/KVM, VMWare? I am running on OS X here, and I prefer VBox to VMware, but I could try... > Those are just my wild guesses. I answer mostly because nobody else > did. I do not really have that much to say about DOS, other than it > was not as bad as some of its graphical cousins. :-) Thank you! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) From j at ckrubin.us Sun Jul 31 12:34:39 2016 From: j at ckrubin.us (Jack Rubin) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 17:34:39 +0000 Subject: Not a keyboard collector! but looking for a broken vT-100 keyboard Message-ID: I have a couple of VT-52 keyboards that need repair and I'm looking for a _broken_ VT-100 keyboard to serve as a donor for switch bodies. Anybody have a junk keyboard with a few working keys lying around? Please contact me off list. Thanks, Jack j at ckrubin.us PS I'll be at VCF next week if that makes delivery any easier. From pontus at Update.UU.SE Sun Jul 31 12:39:06 2016 From: pontus at Update.UU.SE (Pontus Pihlgren) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 19:39:06 +0200 Subject: DECmate, Rainbow, and Pro 350/380 parts In-Reply-To: References: <20160729072542.GK17920@Update.UU.SE> Message-ID: <20160731173906.GU17920@Update.UU.SE> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 05:05:17AM -0500, Paul Anderson wrote: > Only too late if it's gone. > > I have a complete spare 380 board with ( I think) 3 daughter boards on it, > or maybe that was a Rainbow. I haven't found the boards that plug in on the > side yet. > > Any part numbers? Unfortunately I can't find any. I _think_ that the board is rather big and covers at least two connectors on the motherboard (not sure if it uses both, but it covers two). /P > > > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 2:25 AM, Pontus Pihlgren > wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:03:45PM -0500, Paul Anderson wrote: > > > I just dug out what might be my last extra DECmate II CPU for a list > > > member, and now have access to several Pro and Rainbow CPUs and other > > parts. > > > > > > If you have any interest, please contact me off list. Shipping from > > > Illinois. > > > > Hi Paul > > > > I might be a little late to the party. But do you have a color graphics > > board for a 380? It is distinct from the 350 graphics. > > > > Also, a Telephone Management System (TMS) would be interresting. > > > > Kind Regards, > > Pontus. > > From dfields-cctalk at dpf.cc Sun Jul 31 12:43:34 2016 From: dfields-cctalk at dpf.cc (Doug Fields) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:43:34 -0500 Subject: AT&T 3b2, IBM RT, others Message-ID: <55AA1A08-896F-4C8D-9674-37E9969D8EEC@dpf.cc> I'm here in Austin picking up that Multiflow and they have a bunch of other computers. The most intact looking is an AT&T 3b2-1000-70. There are also two rude looking IBM RTs plus an Evans and Sutherland Freedom 1000 with Sun Graphics tower, a Sparc Printer, lots of old Apple printers, and other stuff. I'm trying to put it all on Imgur but having problems since I never used it before so if you want pics email me your iMessage account and I can share it somehow that way. Cheers, Doug -- Sent from my iPhone From dfields-cctalk at dpf.cc Sun Jul 31 12:46:45 2016 From: dfields-cctalk at dpf.cc (Doug Fields) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:46:45 -0500 Subject: Pictures per previous post Message-ID: <1DF03BE6-9C4B-4F2A-971F-4B8C17240FB3@dpf.cc> You can view my shared album on the web: Classic Computers Apparently I can do this easily through iCloud. The joy of modern computers. :) Cheers, Doug -- Sent from my iPhone From jwsmail at jwsss.com Sun Jul 31 13:21:34 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 11:21:34 -0700 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: On 7/31/2016 10:18 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > DesqView: yes to multitasking, no to graphics. > > The only snag is that it is itself DOS based, so you don't get a lot > of free RAM in your sessions. But it works, and it's much lighter and > faster than even v3 of Windows. > > If you want an actual graphical GUI, DV/X can do that. I used Windows 95 for dos multitasking. Windows 95 booted the processors into real mode dos, then ran the windows system out of that base dos much like Windows 3.1 had. As such, the dos boxes all shared actual access to the real mode assets of the processor. Windows 98 switched to protected mode almost immediately on boot, and all the dos boxes were synthesized in virtual 8086 mapped mode, and had no underlying booted dos environment. I never used any of the dos extender products because none were open source and what I considered to be long term sustainable, though most have survived. Just waited around till the windows protected mode tools did what I wanted, then later linux. I'm not a fan of the mess that has been made of windows programming from the outset, just used basic c environment and some windows things such as dialog boxes. As an example of what we were able to pull off, we had a product which was memory mapped, a SCSI development board. In the original way it was deployed, we had a pc for one unit, and supporting software written in doc C running in a dos box. It also could be run on dos w/o windows on dos 6 if you configured the system correctly. One of these PC's would run the board set configured to be an initiator, and another system with a board set would run as device. We used a commercial debugger which connected via a com port to debug the thing, so a second PC ran that with a serial line between the two. With Windows 95 coming out with it booting more or less like Windows 3.1 / dos, it occurred to me that if we had some way of faking a com port, we could run a second dos box with the debugger on a box. So I stole a 16 byte chunk of our mapped memory (which was in the are where the disk controllers mapped their shared memory), and wrote a com port driver which used that space as a mailbox to emulate a com port on each dos machine. So one could now run the debugger on the same machine as the hosted adapter. By reconfiguring the shared memory (which was 1k) window, one could run a second adapter set on a single machine as well. By loading up a second shared com port, we could then run our setup with both adapters on one machine, with the scsi bus looped between both, and debug both software sets at once, with one machine. Also for trade shows and demos the traveling setup went to one Toshiba 3100sx and an external backplane box with two of our adapters. Windows 98 would run one board, but not two because only one dos box got the "real" space, and that was the first one opened. The subsequent ones couldn't map the I/O memory real space and our shared memory would not be visible, only synthesized space pointing at adapters with drivers, etc. Since we never had or used device drivers, but directly addressed the space with our support programs, our adapters couldn't share access on one machine, sad to say, so we were limited to a single instance with windows 98. I don't think NT supported us at all, but the product petered out around when NT came out, and we never wrote a driver for that environment either. thanks Jim From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sun Jul 31 13:27:47 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 14:27:47 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: > The company I worked for in 1989 had three hand-me-down MicroVax II from > the US parent. > > They were originally a PDP11/73 box, which had been converted. > > They ran VMS 5.5-2, all had DEQNA, with no problems that I remember. They > were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. > The DEQNA may have been *unsupported* on 5.5, but it seeded to work OK. > > I still have one system, and bits of the others. Failing ESDI drives put > them to the back of the garage. > > I do have a replacement ESDI drive, and a Q-bus SCSI controller, so when i > get time (ha!), I'll resurrect it. > > > Regards, Graham Graham; Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, Multiware, etc. Doug From cclist at sydex.com Sun Jul 31 13:49:58 2016 From: cclist at sydex.com (Chuck Guzis) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 11:49:58 -0700 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: <2d6c8224-7fd7-0fa7-9668-0085160dc6fc@sydex.com> On 07/31/2016 11:21 AM, jim stephens wrote: > Windows 98 switched to protected mode almost immediately on boot, > and all the dos boxes were synthesized in virtual 8086 mapped mode, > and had no underlying booted dos environment. I'm not sure that I follow here. I routinely use Win98SE for my DOS tasks--it boots into DOS quite nicely if you edit the MSDOS.SYS file to say BootGUI=0. You get MS-DOS 7.1 at boot. Add DOSLFN to your CONFIG.SYS and you even get long filename support. That's DOS in its unvarnished form, isn't it? What am I missing? --Chuck From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 14:27:31 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 15:27:31 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > > Graham; > > Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, Multiware, etc. > > Doug > MULTINET is what I think you mean. B From cctalk at snarc.net Sun Jul 31 14:35:00 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 15:35:00 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> Message-ID: <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> > Hold on a second I thought CHM admission was included in the price of the ticket. Also, is it saying that you have to be a CHM member and buy CHM tickets to get half off (i.e. just buying on the day of admission is not enough) otherwise I agree with Bill those of us who bought our tickets early you are being screwed. CHM admission is not part of VCF admission. Sorry if we caused confusion about that. CHM gives half off admission if you have a VCF ticket, and vice-versa. We hope the success of this year's show allows us to have a deeper partner with CHM in the future, vs. this year we're simply an event group renting the space. From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Jul 31 14:41:22 2016 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:41:22 +0200 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: <20160731194122.GB28751@tau1.ceti.pl> On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 07:18:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: > On 31 July 2016 at 18:23, Tomasz Rola wrote: [...] > > > Other possibility is, can it work better in some other virtual > > machine? Qemu/KVM, VMWare? > > I am running on OS X here, and I prefer VBox to VMware, but I could try... Ah, ok then. I have just recalled that some of those programs have a debugger built in: http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/internal-debugger.html http://wiki.osdev.org/Bochs#Bochs_debugging_facilities http://wiki.osdev.org/QEMU#The_QEMU_monitor Caveat: I have no idea how useful it might be in you situation and I guess you would need a good command of x86 assembly (and perhaps DOS interrupts, too). Alas, twenty years ago was last time I could claim to know anything about it... On OSX you should be able to get both programs using... fink? -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From cisin at xenosoft.com Sun Jul 31 14:42:14 2016 From: cisin at xenosoft.com (Fred Cisin) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:42:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> Message-ID: >> Hold on a second I thought CHM admission was included in the price of the >> ticket. Also, is it saying that you have to be a CHM member and buy CHM >> tickets to get half off (i.e. just buying on the day of admission is not >> enough) otherwise I agree with Bill those of us who bought our tickets >> early you are being screwed. On Sun, 31 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote: > CHM admission is not part of VCF admission. Sorry if we caused confusion > about that. > CHM gives half off admission if you have a VCF ticket, and vice-versa. THAT should be mentioned on the ticket page of the website. (along with full details of how much, a link to the CHM ticket page, AND howzbout, on the ticket page, have a deal to buy both CHM and VCF admission as a package deal? > We hope the success of this year's show allows us to have a deeper partner > with CHM in the future, vs. this year we're simply an event group renting the > space. But, a good fit! From jwsmail at jwsss.com Sun Jul 31 14:59:11 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:59:11 -0700 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: <2d6c8224-7fd7-0fa7-9668-0085160dc6fc@sydex.com> References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> <2d6c8224-7fd7-0fa7-9668-0085160dc6fc@sydex.com> Message-ID: <0fa85e07-2689-cdce-4b6a-1866e0ca898a@jwsss.com> On 7/31/2016 11:49 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: > On 07/31/2016 11:21 AM, jim stephens wrote: > >> Windows 98 switched to protected mode almost immediately on boot, >> and all the dos boxes were synthesized in virtual 8086 mapped mode, >> and had no underlying booted dos environment. > I'm not sure that I follow here. I routinely use Win98SE for my DOS > tasks--it boots into DOS quite nicely if you edit the MSDOS.SYS file to > say BootGUI=0. You get MS-DOS 7.1 at boot. Add DOSLFN to your > CONFIG.SYS and you even get long filename support. > > That's DOS in its unvarnished form, isn't it? > > What am I missing? The booted system on Windows 95 is real mode dos, and that allows all of the dos boxes you spawn to share the same virtual to physical address space. Windows 98 still did the same trick, but would only map a single physical address space to the physical space. There was a collision because of the fact that they never booted and ran a base dos box, but actually booted to PE big real and ran from there. Of course you can get a real physical dos if you specify it, but windows didn't launch on top of that in windows 98. > --Chuck > > From classiccmp at crash.com Sun Jul 31 14:58:33 2016 From: classiccmp at crash.com (Steven M Jones) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:58:33 -0700 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> On 07/31/2016 11:27, Douglas Taylor wrote: > On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: >> >> They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. > > Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it > a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, > Multiware, etc. If he meant they just used DECNET, then it basically came with the OS. You might have actually paid extra for it in a commercial setting - I only dealt with educational or hobbyist licensing, and it was included in those instances. By this time I think DEC had released their Ultrix Connection (UCX) TCP/IP and utilities product. It combined the protocol stack, some services and network utilities, and things like a ported Berkeley-style C shell (/bin/csh). Using that last was a mildly odd experience... They later replaced that with TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. As Bill Degnan pointed out, the "hot ticket" commercial TCP/IP stack in the VMS 5.x era was MultiNet. There was the older CMU/IP package that everybody seemed to want to get off of as soon as something else was available. Process Software had TCPware, which I never encountered in the wild. And of course The Wollongong Group offered a TCP/IP stack along with Eunice (Unix emulator). --S. From jwsmail at jwsss.com Sun Jul 31 15:02:43 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 13:02:43 -0700 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> Message-ID: <7466ff39-8991-f381-55ec-d006894971bf@jwsss.com> On 7/31/2016 12:42 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: > > THAT should be mentioned on the ticket page of the website. (along > with full details of how much, a link to the CHM ticket page, AND > howzbout, on the ticket page, have a deal to buy both CHM and VCF > admission as a package deal? Since he stated they are only a renter, sounds like they are only getting what a renting event gets as a courtesy. They may not have the means to collect funds for the CHM admission and guarantee that. That sounds a bit complicated if there isn't a pre existing agreement to do that, and from what Evan said there isn't. Just show your ticket and buy a CHM ticket isn't that hard to do. I doubt they will run out of tickets to be admitted to the CHM. thanks Jim From cctalk at snarc.net Sun Jul 31 20:45:10 2016 From: cctalk at snarc.net (Evan Koblentz) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:45:10 -0400 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> Message-ID: > There will be PDP-1 and 1401 demos on Sunday as well. I ought to read our own schedule. :) http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west-xi/vcf-west-speakers/ From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sun Jul 31 21:00:44 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 22:00:44 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> Message-ID: <1cec67d5-01df-3354-f92f-1feb37bd9d73@comcast.net> On 7/31/2016 5:40 PM, william degnan wrote: > On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Steven M Jones > wrote: > >> On 07/31/2016 11:27, Douglas Taylor wrote: >>> On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: >>>> They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. >>> Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it >>> a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, >>> Multiware, etc. >> If he meant they just used DECNET, then it basically came with the OS. >> You might have actually paid extra for it in a commercial setting - I >> only dealt with educational or hobbyist licensing, and it was included >> in those instances. >> >> By this time I think DEC had released their Ultrix Connection (UCX) >> TCP/IP and utilities product. It combined the protocol stack, some >> services and network utilities, and things like a ported Berkeley-style >> C shell (/bin/csh). Using that last was a mildly odd experience... They >> later replaced that with TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. >> >> As Bill Degnan pointed out, the "hot ticket" commercial TCP/IP stack in >> the VMS 5.x era was MultiNet. >> >> There was the older CMU/IP package that everybody seemed to want to get >> off of as soon as something else was available. Process Software had >> TCPware, which I never encountered in the wild. And of course The >> Wollongong Group offered a TCP/IP stack along with Eunice (Unix emulator). >> >> --S. >> > > If you can get the machine to my house some how I might be able to get > MULTINET on your VAX,or at a workshop in the MidAtlantic area. I live near > Philadelphia > Bill Bill; I am planning on bringing the MVII to VCF East next spring (assuming I get it up and running) . I don't know of any other workshops, what were you thinking? Doug From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sun Jul 31 21:03:52 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 22:03:52 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> Message-ID: <86958d5a-86df-7903-fa5e-321479b6a187@comcast.net> On 7/31/2016 3:58 PM, Steven M Jones wrote: > On 07/31/2016 11:27, Douglas Taylor wrote: >> On 7/31/2016 2:44 AM, Graham Reid wrote: >>> They were just networked, it wasn't a cluster. >> Do you remember if the networking software was part of VMS 5.5 or was it >> a third party? I seem to remember third party TCPIP software, >> Multiware, etc. > If he meant they just used DECNET, then it basically came with the OS. > You might have actually paid extra for it in a commercial setting - I > only dealt with educational or hobbyist licensing, and it was included > in those instances. > > By this time I think DEC had released their Ultrix Connection (UCX) > TCP/IP and utilities product. It combined the protocol stack, some > services and network utilities, and things like a ported Berkeley-style > C shell (/bin/csh). Using that last was a mildly odd experience... They > later replaced that with TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. > > As Bill Degnan pointed out, the "hot ticket" commercial TCP/IP stack in > the VMS 5.x era was MultiNet. > > There was the older CMU/IP package that everybody seemed to want to get > off of as soon as something else was available. Process Software had > TCPware, which I never encountered in the wild. And of course The > Wollongong Group offered a TCP/IP stack along with Eunice (Unix emulator). > > --S. I got it half right.... UCX rings a bell since I had the OpenVMS 7.2 on a newer VAX and the networking portion had that name. It's been awhile and I have forgotten many of the details. From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 21:35:24 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 22:35:24 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: <86958d5a-86df-7903-fa5e-321479b6a187@comcast.net> References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> <86958d5a-86df-7903-fa5e-321479b6a187@comcast.net> Message-ID: I have the multinet install on a SCSI vax expansion hard drive on my 3100, I have a way to use this on someone's main system, to install it. Clunky but it works. I also have the process documented. Bill From dj.taylor4 at comcast.net Sun Jul 31 21:38:56 2016 From: dj.taylor4 at comcast.net (Douglas Taylor) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 22:38:56 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> <86958d5a-86df-7903-fa5e-321479b6a187@comcast.net> Message-ID: <816ae872-fb56-1fae-78ab-bf75421480b9@comcast.net> On 7/31/2016 10:35 PM, william degnan wrote: > I have the multinet install on a SCSI vax expansion hard drive on my 3100, > I have a way to use this on someone's main system, to install it. Clunky > but it works. I also have the process documented. > Bill That sounds good. BTW, where do I go to get the VMS hobbyist license PAKS and downloads? I'm running into dead links. Doug From billdegnan at gmail.com Sun Jul 31 21:50:56 2016 From: billdegnan at gmail.com (william degnan) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 22:50:56 -0400 Subject: MicroVax II (Doug) In-Reply-To: <816ae872-fb56-1fae-78ab-bf75421480b9@comcast.net> References: <8ba5eae4-5af0-4016-544b-a9c7bfd0ad41@crash.com> <86958d5a-86df-7903-fa5e-321479b6a187@comcast.net> <816ae872-fb56-1fae-78ab-bf75421480b9@comcast.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 10:38 PM, Douglas Taylor wrote: > On 7/31/2016 10:35 PM, william degnan wrote: > >> I have the multinet install on a SCSI vax expansion hard drive on my 3100, >> I have a way to use this on someone's main system, to install it. Clunky >> but it works. I also have the process documented. >> Bill >> > > That sounds good. BTW, where do I go to get the VMS hobbyist license PAKS > and downloads? I'm running into dead links. > > Doug > > > When we come to that point.... -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg Youtube: @billdeg Unauthorized Bio From jwsmail at jwsss.com Sun Jul 31 23:30:56 2016 From: jwsmail at jwsss.com (jim stephens) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:30:56 -0700 Subject: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count? In-Reply-To: References: <20160731162357.GA11329@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: On 7/31/2016 4:48 PM, Liam Proven wrote: > On 31 July 2016 at 20:21, jim stephens wrote: >> I used Windows 95 for dos multitasking. Windows 95 booted the processors >> into real mode dos, then ran the windows system out of that base dos much >> like Windows 3.1 had. As such, the dos boxes all shared actual access to >> the real mode assets of the processor. >> >> Windows 98 switched to protected mode almost immediately on boot, and all >> the dos boxes were synthesized in virtual 8086 mapped mode, and had no >> underlying booted dos environment. > > Are you sure about this? Got any references? > > Because I did a _lot_ of support and research work with 95, 95A, 95B, > 98, 98SE & ME, and also of course with NT 3, 4, 2000, XP etc. > > I am not aware of any differences such as you describe between 95 and > 98. Both boot from actual MS-DOS; the GUI can be totally disabled. In > both, you can load drivers into DOS before the GUI boots and have all > the OS & apps access them. The configuring of the system to boot differently does precisely that. I have only what I found with 95 vs. 98, plus a description in antiquity that I'm sure I'll never find now that suggested this behavior. I did verify it when I had a machine with our controller. Only one of the dos boxes (windowed) could get there. None of the alternate boot modes, no gui, or anything else has anything to do with what I'm describing. And the flip of the boot as far as the processor mode is something that was objected to as it was a move off of the original similarity of 3.1 and 95. 95 was sold as being just a bit different from the 3.1 since it booted a real mode dos mode system then launched the windows stuff. Win 98 had different drivers (had to run in protected mode more IIRC), etc, and though it was not hostile initially to old dos drivers it had a lot of caveats related to the boot difference I'm talking about at the core of the differences. Again, of course you could boot to dos, and do all that. This is just related to what type of behavior you had with the windows dos sessions under windows. I essentially had 5 separate dos machines with my mashup on Win 95. I'll try to find more info, but not promising anything, since its been 20+ years since I had any reference to it. If anyone on the list has it, I think there was a very detailed walkthru about how this worked published as well, again I think it was in a book, and may be hard to find. One of the "inside" or "beneath" type books. Maybe someone has such with the info. I also went on to work on ICE for the intel processors, and saw this from that angle as well. > Or, using an undocumented batch file called WINSTART.BAT, in > everything from WfWg 3.11 up to 98SE, you could load some things into > the Windows "system VM" and it would be accessible to Windows, but not > to DOS boxes started under Windows. I did this occasionally for > memory-management reasons. > > But both 95 & 98 are DOS based and function near-identically. > > WinME removed the ability to boot to a command prompt, it didn't > execute AUTOEXEC.BAT any more, nor much of CONFIG.SYS -- the DOS > "kernel" loaded Windows directly. > From cctalk at ibm51xx.net Sun Jul 31 23:42:34 2016 From: cctalk at ibm51xx.net (Ali) Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:42:34 -0700 Subject: VCF West tickets In-Reply-To: References: <7f0c771e-0d29-542e-cbed-4fa08127313c@snarc.net> <801d7d0c-5dc8-9402-14e0-49ed16f928e8@snarc.net> <000001d1eb45$20a351a0$61e9f4e0$@net> <565b5378-421b-00f9-97a8-ee85b4605ca4@snarc.net> <001301d1eb7f$ee41f910$cac5eb30$@net> Message-ID: <000a01d1ebaf$2080a140$6181e3c0$@net> > There will be PDP-1 and 1401 demos on Sunday as well. > > I arranged for this relatively early in VCF planning. > Nice! Thanks! -Ali