As the excavation of Bob's junkpile continues I have finally hit the MFM
layer. Specifically about 10 5.25 hard disks that look to be old style
MFM drives.
Vertex V150
Miniscribe 6085
ST 4038M Seagate Franklin telecom AT-40
Miniscribe 3650 HH
Seagate ST4096
Priam ID45-H
Rodime RO203E
RD54
Real ST506
Pair of ST412's.
Anyone recognize what kinds of systems may have used these? The RD54 is
of course DEC, and I'm guessing the ST506 and 412's were from either a
Rainbow or a Professional/350. But the rest are weird. Maybe Convergent
miniframes? Probably not PC's as Bob had a lot of weird stuff.
Thoughts? I'll see if I can get a mfm reader and suck data into files I
can post for others to read/try/giggle at. But as there isn't much
labelling I have no idea what is on them.
Also did find Wordperfect and speller for what I think is Rainbow on
5.25 floppies. Let me know if you need a copy, or if a copy exists in
archives (also two DEC disks for Learning the Rainbow or something like
that)
Chris
1 Perq 1, one chassis without motherboards of another Perq1, sides,
lids, 1.5 sets of ends, pair of Perq2 endpanels, two keyboards (1 and 2
style) and a portrait monitor.
Pictures of all the stuff at https://www.crystel.com/bob/perq4
Not many pictures of this stuff from all angles, so feel free to copy
and put on real sites.
Anyone need more of these Sun3/4 VME boards? Need to make more space.
CZ
Does anyone know anything much about this early desktop computer and its OS?
Example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Perkin-Elmer-3600-PETOS-Like-Microsoft-BASIC-Compu…
Although it predated the PC, MS supplied the BASIC and apparently the
CLI resembles early DOS.
I ask because there is someone in the Free Pascal Compiler fora
looking for help getting data off one -- they're still using it for
data monitoring!
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,52458.0.html
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
If anyone goes to the Gateway sale, please, please tell Doug that Adam
Thornton is doing fine in Tucson but misses him and the store greatly.
Thanks,
Adam
Thought you folks might be interested in a quick update on my folly here.
At the beginning of November I drove down to the bay area to pick up the
two fire-damaged PDP-11 systems -- a PDP-11/70 and a PDP-11/45. (I also
made a few other stops and got a few other items, but that's not what I'm
here to talk about...)
Over the past few weeks I've gone over the two systems and my assessment is
that the 11/70, while completely filthy, is completely restorable. The
fire/heat damaged the front panel enough to discolor the plexi and start
melting a few switches (http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/1170/1170.jpg)
but that's the extent of the damage. My only fear is that the fingers on
the backplanes might possibly have some corrosion here and there, but I've
started going through and cleaning the boards and the backplane slots and
so far I haven't run into anything that looks troubling.
The 11/45 is considerably further gone. It took a serious amount of heat,
enough for the pig iron frame for the front panel to start melting (
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/1170/1145.jpg). The front panel is
completely destroyed, as is the wiring harness for the power distribution.
But... the metal of the chassis and the power supplies seems to have
protected the boards and the backplane. There are no melted or even
discolored wire-wrap wires on the backplane, and the boards look fine. As
an experiment I took the non-11/45-specific boards out of the backplane (a
Plessey memory board, an RL11 controller, and an M9301 bootstrap terminator
-- this one was right up front where things were the hottest and the
handles had started to melt) and tested them in my PDP-11/40. They all
work fine. So I think that, maybe, with a LOT of effort, the 11/45 could
live again.
I'm tackling the 11/70 first (Al kindly sold me a new front panel for a
very reasonable price so it already looks 100% better) and once I'm done
with that I hope to move on to the 11/45. In the meantime I'm hoping to
keep my eyes peeled for parts for the /45. I found a seller on eBay with
"restored" H7420a power supplies for $68, with free shipping so I grabbed a
pair. I realize this is unlikely, but I was curious if anyone has 1) any
parts of the 11/45 power wiring harness, or 2) (really unlikely) an 11/45
front panel in any condition. Well, any condition better than "melted into
slag," I suppose. I can build my own wiring harness, but if I can save
myself the trouble, that'd be nice.
- Josh
Hi everyone,
The Nostalgic Computing Center <http://www.nostalgiccomputing.org/> has a
virtual PDP-8 running TSS/8
<http://www.nostalgiccomputing.org:8080/aterm.html?m=pdp8&t=PDP-8&r=24&c=80>
in its collection. We use the SIMH PDP-8e emulator to support the machine,
and we recently updated the machine to run the TSS/8 distribution created
by LCM+L, found here on GitHub
<https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/cpus-pdp8>. The LCM+L distribution
is slightly different from other TSS/8 distributions available on the web
in that it provides some additional goodies such as ALGOL and LISP.
The NCC demonstrates how various classic computers worked by providing
automated scripts that interact with the machines in the collection.
For example, to demonstrate each of the programming languages supported by
a machine, scripts are provided to create, compile, and run a simple
Fibonacci sequence generator. We've done this for the TSS/8 system, but the
scripts aren't working for FORTRAN or ALGOL, and we're wondering if anyone
on this list might know why.
Specifically, in the case of FORTRAN, the compiler exits with an error code
6204. This occurs even when trying to compile trivial "hello world"
programs, and it appears to occur in all other TSS/8 distributions we've
tried as well (i.e., this particular problem is not unique to the LCM+L
distribution). We haven't found error code 6204 specifically documented in
the TSS/8 user/admin manuals, but the manuals do document other error codes
in the 62xx range. Documented error codes in the 62xx range appear to
reflect file I/O errors, so we're wondering if perhaps one of the files
supporting the FORTRAN compiler is corrupt in all of these distributions.
For example, here is a transcription of a simple session demonstrating the
problem:
.R EDIT
INPUT:
OUTPUT:FTEST
A
WRITE(1,10)
10 FORMAT(5HHELLO,/)
END
E
^BS
.R FORT
INPUT:FTEST
OUTPUT:
6204^BS
.
We tried enabling the floating point processor to see if lack of FPP might
cause FORT to abort, but enabling the FPP did not solve the problem. The
SIMH configuration file for the machine currently looks like:
set throttle 800K
set df disabled
set rf disabled
set rk enabled
set dt enabled
att rk0 tss8_rk_lcm.dsk
set cpu 32k
attach ttix 4000
load boot.bin
run 200
Note that BASIC, FOCAL, and LISP all seem to run very nicely on the machine.
The problem we're experiencing with ALGOL appears to be a glaring compiler
bug, but the compiler was distributed widely through DECUS, and it is
difficult to imagine that it would have been released with an obvious bug,
so we are wondering if perhaps we're not interpreting the user manual
<http://svn.so-much-stuff.com/svn/trunk/pdp8/src/decus/8-213/decus-8-213.pdf>
correctly. Here is a transcription of a session that exhibits the problem:
.R EDIT
INPUT:
OUTPUT:ATEST
A
'BEGIN'
'INTEGER' I;
I := 1;
WRITE(1, I); SKIP
'END'
$
E
^BS
.R ALGOL
INPUT:ATEST
OUTPUT:
*TOO MANY UNDEFINED [UEXPRESSION*
^BS
.
The compiler seems to be complaining that the simple assignment statement
on line 3 of the program is somehow incorrect. If we change the statement
to "I := 1 + 0;", the error message goes away, and the program runs, but
it prints "0" instead of the expected "1". Also, if we change the program
to:
'BEGIN'
'INTEGER' I;
'FOR' I := 1 'STEP' 1 'UNTIL' 10 'DO'
'BEGIN'
WRITE(1, I); SKIP
'END'
'END'
$
it compiles successfully and it prints what is expected, the numbers 1
through 10.
Does anyone have experience with the ALGOL/8 compiler? If so, does this
behavior make sense, and can you let us know what we're doing wrong?
Note that the same ALGOL60 program compiles and runs as expected on the CDC
mainframes and the TOPS-20 system at the NCC.
thanks!
Kevin
I found a box of 45 Atari ST diskettes in my basement, from my 1980's
520 ST (or maybe my brother's 1040 ST).
I don't have a floppy drive, so I can't tell whether they're readable.
Some are originals, for example for 1St Word, the word processor, and
Regent Base, a relational database program.
Others are copies.
If you send a PDF of a USPS media rate shipping label, 4"x5"x6", 3lb,
they're yours. Coordinate with me so you don't send a label after
somebody else has already sent one.
Van Snyder
