I was searching for a 480z game on google when I got a result from
Whsmith (A book shop/Stationers over here in England). It still has a
couple of books for sale from 1985. So I started looking further it's
got a few C64 books, I then tried Vax. I hit the jackpot they have
quite a few books, they are a bit pricy and I wonder if they are still
in stock. When did WHSmith ever sell books like :
User Guide to Stepper Motor Control on the Hvl Vax 11/730 priced at
only 5 pounds
Vax/Vms Internals and Data Structures Version 5.2 priced at only 155 pounds
Have a look for yourself there might be some more gems on there.
http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/SearchWithinCategory.aspx?gq=vax&…
Dan
From: Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org>
> Roger Holmes wrote:
>
>> point, such as storing angles as a fraction of a circle, so that
>> if you
>> add/subtract two angles together you don't have to do mod 360 or
>> 2Pi as
>> it automatically overflows and gives you the correct answer. Not so
>>
>
> Wouldn't that imply that your system works off of a basis of 256
> degrees
> instead of 360?
>
In this case, 1/262144 of a circle as it was on an 18 bit computer,
but today you would probably use 32 bits. There's nothing special
about dividing a circle into 360 parts anyway, 420 would have allowed
division by all numbers up to 7, 840 up to 8, 2520 up to 10, 27720 up
to 12 etc but 360 has no great benefit until we started dividing the
day into 24 hours, which is also arbitrary.
Roger Holmes.
I have one of these things in the basement. It looks like it has a
parallel port (Centronics) and a serial port on it. It also has 'COPY'
and 'SEL' membrane style buttons on front, and a what looks like a
really weird connector with 10 pins arranged in a 'star like'
configuration on the end of a cable that is directly attached.
From my searching I'm guessing this is a parallel to serial (or
vice-versa) converter marketed by Brother for it's printers. Does
anybody have more details?
Pictures are up on eBay at the moment - there is a recent auction. Item
number is 360028045061 .
Thanks,
Mike
The Brother IF-50 is a parallel interface and buffer,
designed to turn certain Brother daisywheel typewriters
such as the Correctronic 60 (CE-60) into printers.
The interface draws power from the typewriter
via the round, right-angle connector. The connector
on the typewriter is typically found inside the cord-storage
compartment on the back of the typewriter.
The "Copy" button could be used to repeatedly print
data that was sent to the typewriter. So, if you were
using the typewriter to print return addresses on an
envelope for example, you would hit the copy button,
and print your information from the computer.
Then you would press the Copy button again,
and the information would be held in the buffer.
Then, every time you hit the Copy button after that,
it would send whatever was in the buffer to the typewriter.
It's was a cool gadget to have, since it was fairly inexpensive,
and you didn't have to have another bulky device sitting on
your desk.
Brother worked the idea from both angles;
for example, the HR15 daisywheel printer also had
a connector on it for an external (proprietary) keyboard.
I couldn't tell you if Brother had subsequently released
any typewriters that already had the printer port built in.
I hope this helped. . .
T
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:22:31 +0000
> Does anyone know of a source for these kinds of round CRT tubes?
I seem to remember that CDC got theirs from a German supplier.
Cheers,
Chuck
> From: "Rick Bensene" <rickb at bensene.com>
> There was dedicated hardware in the display console that did CDC
> character set (a 6-bit code) conversion to vector characters. Vector
> graphics were possible, within the limitations of the speed of the PPU.
> On later 6x00-series systems, such as the CYBER-73, the PPUs ran fast
> enough to generate a nice looking all-vector chessboard on the left
> screen, and a text-based transcript of the moves on the right screen.
> There were also a number of other cute programs, one being a pair of eyes
> (one on each screen) which would look around and blink.
I think you probably mean the CYBER 173 PPU--the CYBER 7x PPUs were
essentially unchanged from the 6x00 series. 1 usec. cycle time. The
character generator, IIRC, was an interesting array of LRC circuits,
with the character size varied by simply increasing the amplitude of
the drive waveform. This led to odd-shaped large characters.
Chess was an oddball program. It was possible for a user program to
request control of the display from the operator. There were two
ways to do this. The first was to write your own display driver and
request the display channel from DSD (DSD monitored R.RCH and R.DCH
requests). An early version of chess I saw used a driver called (I
think) CHD for this.
There was also what was called the "T" display in DSD. This was a
display mode that allowed a user-mode CP program provide a list of
display directions in CM to be read by DSD. One of the directions
was "jump", so the user program could allow DSD to regenerate the
display without having to made additional system requests (which
would have been too slow). I saw a later version of CHESS that used
this method. The restriction on the T display was that it could
generate a display for one screen or the other, but not both
simultaneously.
There was a very popular "programmer's display" driver called DIS
that could attach to a control point and allow for job control entry,
exchange package display, and numerous dump formats as well as a
disassembler and CP breakpoint.
There was a keypunch simulator called O26 (note the alpha "o") to
allow the enterprising operator or programmer to generate a file of
card images. A very expensive keypunch, indeed.
> The operating > system was called KRONOS, and I clearly remember that
> the console command > to run the "eye" program was "X.EYES". > Some
> privileged users could > remotely fire off this EYES program from a
> terminal, and it'd make for a bit of a surprise, especially when we
> gave tours of the computer center to schoolchildren.
KRONOS was a direct descendent of MACE, an alternative OS for the
6x00 written largely by Dave Callender and Greg Mansfield as a
bootleg project at Arden Hills. Greg and Dave would visit the QA
floor and cable together a system to do development on late at night,
after the daytime shift had gone home. (MACE, if I remember
correctly, stood for "Mansfield's answer to Customer Engineering".
The "eye" display was part of every CE's deadstart (not "coldstart")
tape.
The "official" OS for the 6000 series was SCOPE--a system that was
located largely in the PPUs, and pretty much oriented toward batch
processing.
Pat might want to investigate Dave and Greg's contribution to the OS
that Purdue ran on their 6500 in the late 60's. I seem to recall
that it was largely MACE with a lot of OS functionality moved into
the CPMTR portion.
A cultural war broke out in CDC over the two systems. SCOPE was
pretty much a west coast Sunnyvale operation and KRONOS (i.e.
enhanced MACE) an Arden Hills affair. Things really got pitched when
PLATO elected to use KRONOS instead of SCOPE. The solution was to
offer both as renamed entities. SCOPE 3.4 was followed by NOS/BE 1.0
(BE for batch environment) and KRONOS became NOS 1.0. A lousy move
on the part of management, in my opinion and a huge duplication of
resources. I have no particular ax to grind here, as I was Sunnyvale
Ops, but Greg was a good friend, too.
This doesn't include the "special" operating systems such as TCM,
Zodiac, Rover, etc.
One very positive thing that I can say about MACE was that Dave
authored a set of fairly straightforward coding standards and adhered
to them. So MACE systems code was easy to read; SCOPE was an
agglutinative affiar with no particular coding standard being used
anywhere.
> I had the distinct privilege of being a systems operator on a Tektronix
> Cyber 73 (which was a derivative of the 6600).
The 73 was basically a 6400 with added goo, such as the Compare/Move
Unit; the 74 was basically a 6600 (wherein a CMU was not possible).
There was a Cyber 72, which was a slowed-down (via jumper) 6400. The
Cyber 76 was the follow-on to the 7600. This is from recollection,
but I'm pretty sure that I'm very close. The Cyber 7x's had the fake
wood-and-blue-glass look, while the 6000 series was dark grey and
beige-ish.
> The machine had an array of toggle switches called the "Coldstart Panel"
> in one of the CPU bays into which a small (I think it was something like
> twelve twelve-bit words) PPU bootstrap program could be toggled in. The
> system could be booted from one of the "washing machine" drives, which was
> the usual mode of startup, or from magtape.
You had an unusual shop. At Sunnyvale, deadstart was almost always
>from tape. The disk drives could be anything from the old 6603
Bryant disk, to a big 808 (4-spindle hydraulic positioner, bit-
parallel drive) to one of the "little" 844 removable pack drives.
I know--more than anyone asked for. But questions about old iron are
getting less frequent.
Cheers,
Chuck
> Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:50:10 -0800
> From: davis
> An apocryphal story I heard was that the graphics on the display are
> disk/?drum refreshed. If true, I assume you would need the better part of
> a CDC 6x00 to get anything out of it.
Aprocryphal, indeed--and completely without basis in reality. The
6602/6612 display was directly driven by a single 4Kword PPU with no
automatic refresh. If you generated a complex display, it tended to
flicker, as the PPU couldn't refresh in time. This also explains why
the graphics mode wasn't used more--it simply took too much time to
generate anything other than a simple display.
I speak as a writer of a DSD overlay or two.
Cheers,
Chuck
-------Original Message:
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 14:09:17 -0800 (PST)
From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
Subject: Re: 6502 CPU schematics
> Which reminds me, does anybody else remember those machines that had
> multiple CPUs in them? Or the option of plugging different ones in?
Dimension 68000 was deliberately a multi-processor machine: 68000, 8088,
6502, Z80?
and, of course, we hafta mention Dec Rainbow and Eagle machines with 8088
and Z80
Basis? (Apple ][ copy) had Z80 +6502
at one point, somebody at Apple estimated that 20% of all Apple]['s had
Z80 softcards
There were alternate processor cards for PC, including Z80, 6502, 68000,
80386, . . .
---------Reply:
Don't forget Cromemco's DPU (68K & Z80), XPU (68010 & Z80) and
XXU (68020 & Z80 on I/O proc.)
m
Trying to re-create, at least on paper, a system I used in the early '90s.
Looking for docs for Chipcom ONline concentrator and NCS.
Anyone got?
Thanks,
Steve
>
>Subject: Re: 6502 CPU schematics
> From: Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca>
> Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:49:25 -0800
> To: General at priv-edtnaa06.telusplanet.net,
> "Discussion at priv-edtnaa06.telusplanet.net":On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>"Roy J. Tellason" wrote:
>>
>> There was one other company, though, and I still can't recall the name,
>> that tried unsuccessfully to market some system that would let you plug in
>> different CPU boards to run different software. I'm vaguely thinking of toy
>> company names, but somehow that doesn't quite seem right.
>
>Thinker Toys?
Digital Group.
Cromemco
Compupro (8085/8088, Z80, 68000, and x86 later versions).
There were more than a few that were not exclusively one cpu.
If anything S100 was the most diverse for CPUs other than
8080/8085/z80/8088/86/68000!
Allison
>(.. 30 years later I finally clue in the name was a play on 'tinker toys'.)
>
>> Time frame
>> would've been a little later than a bunch of this other stuff, maybe early
>> 1980s or so?
