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101090 discussions

Care and feeding of some Lisp machines (TI Explorer and Xerox Star)

by engel＠multicores.org

Hi, for a planned exhibition, I am thinking of restoring two of the machines to working state again that are in storage here for decades: - A TI Explorer ("Sperry" labeled) and - A Xerox Star (no idea if ours actually ran Interlisp or one of the other OSes for the Star/Dandelion) There is "sen?s dandelion restoration blog" at http://dandelion.sen.cx/ (which seems to be very helpful to test the power supply) and, of course, lots of documents and software on bitsavers. I have quite a bit of experience with TI1500 machines, so the Explorer feels rather familiar, but I have never worked with Xerox machines before. Before I start to disassemble and test the machines, I would be interested to hear about specific problems you might have experienced bringing up one of these two machines, preferably those on the unexpected side. Some things I could not find so far are the mouse and the console cable for the Explorer. It seems that the mouse is related to MouseSystems optical mice used on older Sun/SGI systems (but the interface might be different?). The fiber optics cable for the display (TI part number 2233200 according to the field service manual) might be another problem - if you know any details about this, I would be very interested... Another thing that is also missing is the mouse pad for the three button optical Xerox mouse. Is it possible that an optical mouse pad for Sun/SGI machines is compatible? Best wishes, ??? Michael

5 years, 4 months

SPARCstation ELC Installation and repair guide

by rp＠servium.ch

Does anyone have the Sun SPARCstation ELC Installation and repair guide? I have a few naked ELC boards and I'd like to know what that edge connector does (presumably power and video) and if feasible build something from it (1U rackmount Sun4c server? Slim client built into the back of an LCD? SPARC Laptop? Endless possibilities....)

5 years, 4 months

Sun SPARCstation LX boot from CDROM?

by ccth6600＠gmail.com

About 20 years ago I rescued a fully working Sun SPARCstation LX with CDROM and QIC-150 tape drive - all 3 in lunchbox format - plus monitor when we moved office and management decided they no longer wanted/needed it. Shortly after I have installed an early version of NetBSD (1.3.3) from the CDROM drive. I played with it for a few days and then stored the entire system in a museum grade glass display cabinet. This is indoors with minimal dust and benign temperatures between 18 degrees C to about 28 degrees C (typical room temperatures here in Perth in Western Australia unless you run the air conditioner). Now retired I took the stack of "lunch-boxes" and the CRT monitor out of the display cabinet and powered it up. After 20 years no smoke came out but the system didn't boot but reported trouble with the NVRAM setting. I still could start NetBSD using a "boot disk" command. I googled the problem and bought and installed a replacement TIMEKEEPER chip (M48T08-100). After defaulting the settings and setting the MAC address and machine ID it was happy and booted from disk without intervention. In NetBSD I then set the date and time and all was good. Then I decided to upgrade to the latest version of the SPARC version of NetBSD 9.0. I downloaded and burned the ISO image to CD. Dropped it into a CD caddy and inserted it into the CDROM drive (SUN Model 411 - really a Sony CDU-8012 3.1e). I did a "probe-scsi-all" and it found both the hard drive and the CDROM (target 6 unit 0). Now comes the problem - if it try to run from it via "boot cdrom" it doesn't even access the CDROM drive - the LED doesn't turn on unlike when you do the "probe-scsi-all". The "cdrom" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4 ,8800000/sd at 6,0:d". The "disk" alias is really: "/iommu/sbus/espdma at 4,8400000/esp at 4,8800000/sd at 3,0" The "@3" versus the "@6" are the SCSI IDs of the disk drive versus the CDROM. I don't know what the trailing bits mean. I tried cdrom aliases from "sd at 6,0:0" to "sd at 6,0:f" and all report: Can't read disk label Can't open disk label package Can't open boot device The LED doesn't blink even once unless I remove and re-insert the caddy with the CDROM media or if I do a "probe-scsi" or "probe-scsi-all". I tried original Sun Solaris 2.4 installation media with the exact same result/symptoms. I also tried to access the CDROM from NetBSD using "cat /dev/cd0a" but the drive's LED didn't blink and I got an obscure error message. The Boot ROM revision is reported as 2.9. The system was bought about 1985 or 1986 and has seen very little use. I searched google without success. Maybe I used the wrong search terms or the equipment is just getting too old and FAQs have disappeared. What would cause the CDROM boot problem? There is a chance that the actual Sony drive died. I partially disassembled it hoping to find dust stuck on the LASER optics but it was nice and clean. The positioning and ejection mechanisms work just fine. The whole system was working before I put it into my relatively dust proof glass display cabinet. Thanks and best regards Tom Hunter

5 years, 4 months

Sgi gear

by antoniob＠bell.net

Do you have any challenge L deskisde or onyx available?

5 years, 4 months

Old tape files needing review

by cclist＠sydex.com

Folks, I've got a fair amount of what would be classified as public domain tape data from old customer jobs wandering around. I don't have the time to peruse it in detail and was wondering if someone would like to take a stab at a sample and perhaps volunteer for the rest. Much of this is from university archivists whose job it was to archive all of the unlabeled or private tapes that they found. I doubt that said folks know what to make of the data. At any rate, here's a sample from a Unix (probably V7) tar-ed up: https://app.box.com/s/htvxd534gvbccoajugfp01ndmfeevxt4 The original appears to be cpio-ed. I'll leave it up for a week. --Chuck

5 years, 4 months

RSTS/E patches

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

I previously created a Github repository for various DEC things, including updated DECnet/E utilities. I thought that the RSTS patches I had posted in the past were there also, but that wasn't the case. I've added a "patches" subdirectory, which contains the patches I have collected. I just added a new one, which fixes a bug encountered when running SIMH set to be an 11/94. In that case (and possibly some other similar variations) RSTS tries to figure out the line frequency and gets it wrong because SIMH executes much faster. https://github.com/pkoning2/decstuff is the repository. paul

5 years, 4 months

Looking for a TI technical report on Explorer virtual memory

by engel＠multicores.org

Hi, first, a big "thank you" to all of you who support me with my attempt to get our Explorers and Xerox Stars to run again. I?ll head down to the basement in the afternoon to see if I can build a system that is able to image the Explorer not-quite-SCSI disks (according to the documentation, these have in fact 256 byte sectors). Btw., this Raspberry Pi SCSI device emulator supposedly also supports emulating SASI drives: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-raspberry-pi-becomes-a-scsi-device/ The original Japanese web page linked in the article is no longer online, but there are several versions of the code (and a translated webpage in English) mirrored on github. This might be useful to build a working SCSI device emulation for the Explorer. So I have another favor related to TI Explorers to ask... One of the reasons (apart from the planned exhibition) I am interested in Lisp and Smalltalk machines is that I?m collecting information on systems using persistent memory, which could also help my students who work on persistent memory research topics to obtain a better insight into the topic and its history. There was a research prototype of a persistent virtual memory system for the TI Explorer by Satish M. Tatte (TI Artificial Intelligence Labs) metioned in these papers: Satish M. Thatte. 1986. Persistent memory: a storage architecture for object-oriented database systems. In Proceedings on the 1986 international workshop on Object-oriented database systems (OODS '86). IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, DC, USA, 148?159. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/318826.318848) and Thatte S.M. (1991) Persistent Memory: A Storage System for Object-Oriented Databases. In: Dittrich K.R., Dayal U., Buchmann A.P. (eds) On Object-Oriented Database Systems. Topics in Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84374-7_16 The second paper cites a more detailed TI Tech Report which I have been unable to find: Thatte, S.M.: "Persistent Memory for Symbolic Computers", Technical Report TR-08-85-21, Central Research Laboratories, Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, TX, July 1985. Does one of you maybe have a copy of this? Best wishes, ??? Michael

5 years, 4 months

VAX 4000/300 start up / KA670 issues

by Aaron.Jackson＠nottingham.ac.uk

Hi I've had a VAX 4000/300 sitting around for the past couple of years. The second time I tried to switch it on there was a bit pop from the power supply. The 12v module of the H7874 PSU is completely dead and despite my best efforts I have not been able to fix it. Tonight I decided to remove that module and just use the PSU to provide the 5v, with -12 and 12v supplied from external supplies. Surprisingly this worked, as long as the 12v rails are up before you turn on the H7874 (so if you have a dead H7874 you might want to try this...). After some messing around with MMJ cables and various serial adapters, I finally got some stuff printing to a terminal (I have abbreviated this slightly because I don't want to type it out. ]] KA670-A V3.4, VMB 2.12 ]] Performing normal system tests. ]] 66..65.. ... 51.. ]] 50..49.. ... 35.. ]] 34..33.. ... 19.. ]] 18..17.. ... 11.. ]] ]] ?5F 2 0F 44 0000 0000 07 ; SUBTEST_5F_0D, DE_SGEC.LIS ]] P1=00000000 P2=00000000 P3=00000000 P4=00000000 P5=00000000 ]] P6=00000000 P7=00000000 P8=00000000 P9=0000080A P10=00000003 ]] r0=00000054 r1=20084001 r2=00000000 r3=00000000 r4=00000000 ]] r5=1FFFFFFC r6=C0000001 r7=00000000 r8=00004000 EPC=00000000 ]] 10.. ]] ]] ?5C 2 06 FF 0000 0001 00 ; SUBTEST_5C_06, DE_SHAC.LIS ]] P1=00000001 P2=00000000 P3=00000000 P4=00000000 P5=00000000 ]] P6=00000000 P7=00000000 P8=00000000 P9=0000080A P10=00000003 ]] r0=00000054 r1=0000002E r2=0000005C r3=20140784 r4=2005FFF8 ]] r5=20060028 r6=20065224 r7=20004000 r8=00000000 EPC=00000000 ]] 09..08..07..05..04..03.. ]] Normal operation not possible. ]] ]] >>> It allows me to type at this point but does not appear to do anything with the input. I've looked through the KA670 manual and found a listing of the error codes. 5F = SGEC (Second Generation Ethernet Controller) "loopback_type no_ram_tests" 5C = SHAC (Single Host Adapter Chip) "shac_number" I'm not sure if it is relevant but I removed the TOY battery when I got it to prevent it eating everything. I've not taken apart the console door thing but perhaps it was too late. The SGEC might refer to the ethernet controller installed on that door? If anyone is better at understanding these error messages I'd greatly appreciate any info you could give. Cheers, Aaron P.S. Apologies for the absurd footer appended by my university. You can probably ignore it... The list does not accept mail from my personal mail server for some reason. This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender and delete the email and attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored where permitted by law.

5 years, 4 months

Kennett Classic Anniversary Event and Outdoor Swap 9/26/2020

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

If you're in the Philadelphia / Baltimore area September 26th, please consider visiting us for our 1 year anniversary / outdoor swap day. We are debuting two new exhibit rooms that day. Because we can admit a limited number of persons inside at a time, we will also run an outdoor swap meet spanning from the outside front door, down the side of the building and into the back parking lot so people can congregate outside. There are a number of outdoor restaurants nearby and we're going to attempt a covid-friendly group dinner afterwards. Swap spaces remain, let me know privately to reserve your place. Kennett Classic is located in Kennett Square, PA. We're fostering a growing local interest in vintage computing. There might be "new stuff" for sale just because there are new-to-the-hobby persons in attendance and we have been publicizing the event locally. For more directions/details see https://www.kennettclassic.com/kennett-classic-in-two-weeks-sept-26-2020/ Thanks Bill 484 732 7041 (shop number) kennettclasic.com

5 years, 4 months

Flyback transformer for Televideo TVI-9xx terminal

by ccth6600＠gmail.com

I am looking for replacement flyback transformers for Televideo TVI-912B terminals. The flyback transformer is labelled "KFS-00093" on the actual part and also in the schematic. This same flyback was used in a range of Televideo terminals (TVI-912B, TVI-920, etc). Does anyone know of a source for these? Google found the link below, but the photo looks very different from the actual flyback in the terminal: https://www.tedss.com/2023000453 I confirmed with the supplier that the photo on their website is from the actual part they sell. Unfortunately they don't have a datasheet for the flyback or even a specification sheet. The part is cheap, but they have a US$25 minimum order and then the shipping to Australia is just silly expensive at US$59.10. I could spend US$84.10 just to find out it is the wrong part. Any ideas? Thanks and regards Tom Hunter

5 years, 4 months

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