test-drb April 2019

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

134 participants
129 discussions

Newest Batch of Items from Sellam's VWoCW Just Posted

by sellam.ismail＠gmail.com

Good Monday Evening (or Tuesday Morning if you are beyond the International Dateline)! Here is the latest batch of computers and boards and peripherals and things that I've carefully curated for your consideration and consumption from my collection: Homebrew Small Form Factor S-100 System Indus GT 5.25" Floppy Drive (Atari) ADPI Easi-Disk 5.25" External Serial Disk Drive Camwil Printwheel - Pica 10 Camwil Printwheel - Elite 12 Diablo Black Cloth Ribbon Diablo HiType-I FIlm Ribbon (6 pack) GP Technologies Printwheel - Titan Legal 10 Xerox Metal Printwheel - Titan Legal 10 Xerox Metal Printwheel - Vintage 12 Toshiba T1950CT Laptop Toshiba T4900CT Laptop Commodore 1311 Joystick (boxed) Microsoft InPort Mouse w/Mouse Interface Articulate Systems Voice Impact Pro Dysan 100 MD2HD 5.25" Floppy Diskettes (10-pack) Curtis Electro Devices PR5200B 32x8 Memory Programmer Asante FriendlyNet Adapter Perkin-Elmer PC AT Single T4 4 Meg Transputer CompuPro CPU 8085/88 CompuPro CPU 8085/88 (incomplete) CompuPro RAM16 CompuPro RAM21 Comrex The S100 TimePiece JVB Electronics Spool-Z-Q 100 MATCO Data Products EPROM Emulator/Programmer Morrow Designs MM256K CompuPro/Viasyn SPUZ 64K Viasyn Interfacer 3A (bare board) Viasyn Interfacer 4 (bare board) Atari XG-1 Light Gun Atari XE Keyboard IBM PCjr Internal Modem IBM PCjr RF Modulator MOS Technology KIM-1 (Rev. A) Commodore KIM-1 (Rev. G) Radio Shack TRS-80 64K Color Computer DEC Celebris FP 590 PC Links to information on these items and more can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I53wxarLHlNmlPVf_HJ5oMKuab4zrApI_hi… Photos are linked in the descriptions. I will be going back and adding photos for the last couple batches in the near future and will post an update when they are up. As ever, please contact me directly by e-mail via <sellam.ismail at gmail.com> to inquire or make an offer on a particular item. Thank you! Sellam

6 years

Anyone ever attempt repairs on CTI boards for DEC Professionals?

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

Hi, All, In preparing for my VCF-East exhibit, I went through my stack of DEC Pro gear. The good news is I had enough working hardware to get a Pro350 running Venix fully operational. The bad news is that I don't have enough working hardware to have even a second functional Pro. One of my RX50 controllers has a mechanically bunged up CTI ZIF socket. It doesn't look repairable so I'm probably going to have to replace it with a transplant from another board. One of my standard (mono) video cards displays bit garbage on power-up. I haven't found schematics for it yet (bitsavers has schematics for the Pro380 CPU, the RX50 controller, the RX50, the RD50). I could probably pull the RAM and test it outside the board, but beyond that, I'm stabbing at things. I did a lot of googling around and I haven't seen a lot of repair details on these. Not really surprised about that, but I figure it was worth asking if anyone has attempted component-level repair on DEC Professionals. I'm sure there's lots of experience with board swapping - that will definitely solve my problems. Oh... and I happen to be one video controller short anyway. I suppose a partial machine made its way to me at some point. I know my Pro380 used to be a console for our 8530. I was able to rescue the console at least. I probably got the Pro350s sometime in the mid-1990s when people were dumping them. I'm still a bit puzzled why I have *5* 256K memory cards. There's only 6 slots and once you put in the RX50 controller, the RD controller, the video card, and possibly the color bitplane extension card, you've got 2 slots left. One fun bit - I was able to break into the Venix box using the 'guest' account (I guessed there was one) and run John the Ripper on an i7 Linux laptop to crack all the hashes. 10/12 took literally seconds. One password was '82', another was 'Bob'. The root password took a few hours because it was two dictionary words. In the end, though, they all fell. The default root password for Venix is in the manuals ('gnomes'). They at least changed it on this box, but 1984 crypto is no match for 21st Century cracking. I don't see DEC Pro systems talked about much - they were kinda slow and definitely limited in their expansion. For a time, they were a cute packaged PDP-11 system but that CTI bus connector is a royal PITA. I am not shocked there weren't that many peripherals for it, but for a "desktop computer", how many different kinds of interfaces does the average office user need? If anyone happens to be coming to VCF East this weekend and has dead Pro gear, I could use a card to pull a CTI connector from. At least I should be able to get the one RX50 controller going. -ethan

6 years

What do to with an Internet-connected PDP-11?

by rich.cini＠verizon.net

All ? ??????????????? Over the last few months, I?ve built myself a nice little PDP-11/23 with a SCSI interface/drive, extra SLUs and Ethernet. With the help of a few people, I was able to get an Ethernet configuration running, which is kind of cool. It?s been a great learning process getting this up and running. It?s a Q18 system, so memory is limited and I don?t think able to run BSD (I?m running RT-11 right now). So, for playing around, what can I practically do with this? Is it even possible to access any Web sites (unconventional browsing for sure; I?ve read about telnetting to port 80)? I?m sure email is possible, as is FTP/Telnet (I?ve used that inside my lab setup), but I don?t really know where to start with that. ??????????????? If anyone has any pointers/suggestions, I?d appreciate it. ??????????????? Thanks! Rich -- Rich Cini http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32

6 years

What do to with an Internet-connected PDP-11?

by rich.cini＠gmail.com

Thanks. That?s how I was able to get on-line (with lots of help from JerryW). Great resource and highly recommended. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Brian Roth via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:51 AM To: Paul Koning via cctalk; Grant Taylor; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: What do to with an Internet-connected PDP-11? I apologize if this has been mentioned. http://shop-pdp.net/rthtml/tcpip.php Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 9:25 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > On Apr 29, 2019, at 9:05 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > > On 4/29/19 6:47 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: >> I want to say that the OSU webserver for VMS supports running over DECnet, but my memory could be faulty. I?ve only used WASD on VMS. > > I think this sounds like a neat ~> fun thing to do. > > But how does a web server run over DECnet? > > I guess conceptually you can serve web pages across any protocol that can carry HTTP. > > But I guess you could also have a client that ran over DECnet or need a gateway to TCP/IP. Yes. What I meant is that one could take an existing HTTP client and server, or create one, substituting DECnet sockets for the TCP sockets. The protocol would work just fine that way. You'd need to decide how to deal with DECnet packet boundaries, something TCP doesn't have (a major omission). The simplest is to pay no attention to them, which is what I understand Ultrix "streaming DECnet" sockets to do. An alternative would be to make use of them, for example by saying that the entire HTTP header is in one packet and the payload (if any) follows in separate packets. paul

6 years

Excessive amount of time in interrupt stack mode

by ce.murillosanchez＠gmail.com

Dear ccmp'ers: For a while now, I noticed that my vaxstation 4000/60 with OpenVMS 7.2 had become sluggish, but I had not had the time to investigate the problem.?? The system is mostly idle, RAM is mostly free (there's 32mb), there is almost no paging, but the CPU is spending upwards of 70% of the time in the interrupt stack mode.? Currently, I am running it headless because I have not had the time to fix the monitor (it still has the framebuffer inside, but this sluggishness issue was present before with the monitor attached).? I have read that this can be caused by "faulty i/o devices that interrupt the cpu continuously".? What else can be done to locate the source of the problem? Regards, Carlos.

6 years

Nat Semi 16032 info discovered

by elson＠pico-systems.com

Back in 1984 I had cloned a Logical Microcomputer Co. Genix system based on the Nat. Semi. 16032 chip set. I had a dd dump of the distribution on floppies, but that was unreadable. I just found a binder with about an inch of fanfold printouts of all the device drivers, low-level system routines, boot loaders, etc in c source format. These were printed on my Honeywell "big iron" drum printer with a funny character set, so many of the ASCII 96 characters are printed using overprints. Like, { shows as a < overprinted with (. So, it might be tricky to scan and OCR it without training the OCR. Not sure anybody would be interested in it, anyway. Jon

6 years

Sun SS2 SBus memory expansion parts

by cmhanson＠eschatologist.net

I have the 32MB memory expansion card for my SPARCstation 2 (P/N 501-1823) but not the accompanying cable (501-1814) or 32MB mezzanine card (501-1824). Does anyone have either the cable or mezzanine card that they?d be willing to part with for a reasonable price? I?ve only found sellers carrying them for hundreds of dollars recently; I managed to snag the ?1823 from someone who was selling it far more reasonably, probably because they didn?t know what they could get for it. -- Chris

6 years

Greetings

by raywjewhurst＠gmail.com

I am new to the list and would like to introduce myself. I am a computer history buff who especially likes DEC machines. I unfortunately don't own any hardware but I use Simh on a daily basis. I would like to start off with a question. I see that Bitsavers has a copy of VMS 1.5 and wanted to know if anyone got it working with the Vax 780 simulator? I hope to learn a lot from this group. Thanks Ray

6 years

Tandem 6526 information?

by cmhanson＠eschatologist.net

A friend not on the list obtained a Tandem 6526 terminal. In the process of trying to refurbish it, the first 80 bytes of its ROM got trashed. Does anyone happen to have one so she could recover from this? Also, she has no keyboard, and no information about Tandem?s block mode or other protocols (much less the keyboard interface), does anyone know where to find such details or have a manual handy? ? Chris Sent from my iPad

6 years

Modern Rack Rails in Classic Racks?

by healyzh＠avanthar.com

How safe is it to put modern rack rails (HP) in a classic DEC Rack? The DEC racks have small holes, while the new HP racks, IIRC, have big square holes. It looks like the rails will work, they just won?t clip flush. Zane

6 years

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test-drb April 2019