I talked to the owner maybe 6 months ago. It was a bizarre and difficult
interaction. He refused to let me see the units, and insisted I give him an
offer first. He would not even give me the list of the items he had. We went
into a circular discussion: that I couldn't give him an offer if I didn't
know nor see what the items were, to which he replied that if I were a
serious buyer I would make him an offer beforehand, therefore I was not
serious and he would not show me the items nor give me the list. So that was
not very helpful. Then later on he sent me 3 or 4 close up pictures of only
the name badges of some of the machines (one badge from HP, maybe two of
IBM). I got the distinct impression that either something was fishy or that
the guy had unreasonable expectations. Or maybe both. I just gave up. Looks
like you are faring much better than me, so that's positive. I am interested
in the IBM system, the tapes and tape controller units mainly, if you don't
want them.
Marc
On 1/9/15 6:38 PM, Lyle Bickley wrote:
> When Bob and I initially talked to the owner, he told us that what he
> had was a major find for a collector. He spoke in glowing terms as to
> the condition of the 4341 and the HP mini (de-installed from a running
> environment and then stored for many years). So as you would expect,
> Bob and I were very anxious to see both systems. What we found was a
> serious disappointment. As Bob said, the 4341 and the HP mini were
> crammed into a storage unit with lots of other junk. It was impossible
> to see/determine what system components were actually there. There was
> no way to know how complete or what features either system had.
> Repeating what Bob said, everything was water damaged, rusty and in
> poor condition - and I do mean everything. We told him that his asking
> price was too high - and that the condition of the systems was so bad
> we wouldn't even make him an offer. Lyle
Well that's a disappointment. I'm still going to take a look at it
tomorrow...but I'm going to be prepared to walk away from it.
TTFN - Guy
hello all
i just joined and am based in Carlsbad CA. I have several servers from the 1991 (yes they include fully functional CRTs and keyboard/mouse).
After several conversions with JJ owner and curator for the San Diego Museum in Australia he suggested i contact this forum. Is anybody interested in these? I can also be reached at 760703096
I have been given a tiny piece of core memory, about 1cmx1cm. It has
obviously been cut from a larger piece and is almost certainly unusable. I
would therefore like to frame it for display and to show to young people. Is
there a recommended good way to mount the core for framing with the smallest
amount of possible damage?
Thanks
Rob
Hello everyone (new to this list),
I have in a place I need to clear an IBM System/36 class mini-computer
collecting dust. Before it ends up in scrap, I would like to make sure
is not of any value for collector/hobbyist or a computer museum for
parts or as a whole.
Any lead will help.
Thanks.
IBM's System/36 page:
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_4018.html
Hector
Good things, bad things.
I got in love with Hostinger, and uploaded my site (www.tabalabs.com.br)
there. But seems that in the time I needed them most (my site was advertised
into a famous brazilian site) they fell down...I have a (fairly) limitted
number of pageviews in the free plan.
Anyone that could (free!) host a retrocomputing site? Less than a GB.
Thanks!
---
Enviado do meu Apple IIGS (pq eu sou chique)
Meu site: http://www.tabalabs.com.br
Meu blog: http://tabajara-labs.blogspot.com
For people in the SF Bay area
Excess Solutions moved to 1555 7th, across from Spartan Stadium and I
went down to see the new place. Mike told me he's having a grand opening
BBQ tomorrow.
This weeks question comes from Warren Stearns. It is a little obscure and
specific to the PDP-8 family of computers.
What is the source of the greatest latency in the interrupt system on a
PDP-8.
I have three answers, two of the answers depends on the options fitted to
an 8.
Why would this have been an important question? Interrupt latency would be
extremely important in the field of data collection which was one of the
principal early uses of these machines. My particular 8 was used for
exactly this purpose in the Summer when it was hauled to a radar site and
collected weather research data for the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences.
I believe it was used for this from 1969 through 1972. I have several
hundred DECTapes with some of this data. The surprising thing is we don't
see any problems reading DECTapes that haven't been out of their box since
the early 70's.
Doug Ingraham
PDP-8 S/N 1175
While this post is specifically for Tim Shoppa (as the only
person that I can think of who can answer), if anyone else
has the background, please reply.
I believe that I have found a rather inconvenient bug in
SDHX.SYS from version Y01.16 (from V05.06 of
RT-11) that can cause RT-11 to crash. If I am not
mistaken, the same bug is also present in the previous
version V01.00 of SDHX.SYS from V05.05 of
RT-11. Unfortunately, the bug can cause RT-11
to crash
There also seems to be another bug which results in the
extended memory status being displayed incorrectly,
but otherwise does not cause an actual problem.
I realize that RT-11 is rarely used these days and that
SDHX.SYS is used even less frequently, but I suggest
that these errors really need to be fixed. I would
appreciate any suggestions as to how to proceed.
Jerome Fine
So it turns out the NatSemi NS23C QBUS memory card can really, really easily
be upgraded from 256KB to 1MB, as it has all the necessary traces, jumpers,
etc for this capability built into the card - even though the NS23C
documentation says nothing about this capability!
I found out about this capability when I bought a group of QBUS cards which
included two NS23C cards. Looking at the chips, trying to figure out how big
the cards were (I didn't at that point know the card model), I saw one had
64Kx1 chips, the other had 256Kx1 - one was 256KB, the other 1MB!
Later, looking at the prints, I noticed that the memory chips had all 9
address lines wired (unlike the very similar NS23M card), and there were a
couple of jumpers that appeared to adapt the card to 1MB operation.
So I tried upgrading the second card, and it worked!
The chips are all in sockets, so pulling the 64Kx1's and replacing them with
256Kx1's was easy. There are three jumpers one has to remove/move; alas, they
are in the PCB on the top surface, although there are jumper pins there -
there's a trace running between the two pins - so you have to cut the traces.
The first two jumpers one has to remove are W23 and W24 (right next to the
other memory size jumpers), which allow one to increase the maximum memory
size to 1MB.
The other jumper one has to move, is to move the 'jumper' from W40 to W41;
this moves the pickup point for the 'RS0' signal, which indicates which bank
of chips (there are 2x18 banks, i.e. 16 data, and separate byte parity) to
activate, from address line 17 to 19.
(Parenthetically, the way the address logic works on the card is slightly
odd; if the card is not on a 'natural' boundary [e.g. a 256KB boundary, if
it's a 256KB card], the memory contents are scrambled; the low memory, in bus
address terms, is at the top of the card, in chip terms, and the high memory,
in bus terms, is at the bottom of the card. I understand why they did it that
way, it's the most economical in logic/traces, etc but it's something one
would have to remember when looking for a bad memory chip, if the card is set
to an address which is not a multiple of its size.)
Not sure if anyone else out there has any of these cards, but if so, I'd be
interested to hear if anyone does this.
Noel
I have scanned and uploaded 12 issues of "Kugram," the official
newsletter of the Kaypro Users' Group:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=kugram&sort=-publicdate
It's really "K?gram," which I'd say as "K-microgram" but the limits of
character sets and convenience probably turned it into "koo-gram."
And they refer to themselves as "kuggers," not "K-microgrammers." :)
One odd thing about these: there's no date on the covers, just Volume
and Issue numbers. However, it looks like they started publishing in
January 1983.
Anyone got any more issues laying around that I can add to this
collection? I will pay for postage to get them to me. You can have
them back, but I will have chopped their spines for easy scanning.
Also, anyone want the physical copies of the ones I've scanned? Pay
the postage and I'll send them out (there are two copies of a few of
them.) They are chopped as well.
Enjoy!
-j
