test-drb

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101090 discussions

by aperry＠snowmoose.com

Hey, A few years ago I did a rescue of a couple Creo Brisque RS/6000s. They didn?t seem to have any Creo software on them, so I removed the Creo badges from them, reinstalled AIX on them, and passed them on. Anyone here want the badges? If so, send an address and I will drop them in the mail and send them your way. alan

4 years, 1 month

PDT11/150 supported in RT11 5.7?

by cz＠alembic.crystel.com

I spent the other day adjusting and getting my RX02's and the PDT11/150 working in tip top shape. They run fine, but I was wondering: I didn't see the PD.SYS driver on my RT11 5.5 and 5.7 releases. Does anyone know if Dec dropped support sometime after 5.1? C Next project: Put the pdp8/L back together. Or maybe the 11/05. Current working systems: 11/83 with RL02,RX02,TK70, 380mb CDC Esdi,DELQA 11/24 with RL02,RX02 controllers PDT11/150 with both drives running VT52 with repaired power supplies Stuff to work on: Decsystem20/20 LS120 (not an LA/120) pdp11/05 Pair of Pdp8/L's 11/23 system in a BA11-S Plessey/Diablo drives 2 Perq 1's 2 Perq2's Big assed Microvax

4 years, 1 month

Pictures: Early IC Package with Rolled Legs

by lists＠glitchwrks.com

I figured this would probably be of interest to some people here, too: https://imgur.com/a/TCrIxEH I've had this NS DM8200D 4-bit comparator for a while, after posting some pictures of it to Twitter, Evil Mad Scientist Labs offered to take super macro photos of it for me. It's just a comparator, but the DIP package is a very early "gold sandwich" style carrier. What really makes the packaging unique is that the legs are rolled into a tubular shape, rather than being the usual stamped/coined construction modern ICs use! Thanks, Jonathan

4 years, 1 month

Passing of Jay Last

by c.murray.mccullough＠gmail.com

I read with sadness an obituary in the New York Times of the passing of *Jay Last*, he being one of the ?traitorous eight? infamy, if you wish to look at it that way. We in CCTalk owe him and others a great deal as they helped create the Silicon Valley from which early small computers evolved. Happy computing, well sort of! Murray ?

4 years, 1 month

Siemens RM200 little endian firmware

by plamenspam＠afterpeople.com

Hello, Does anyone have a copy of Siemens RM200 ARC firmware? It has been used to switch from SINIX(big endian) to Linux or Windows (little endian). Best regards, Plamen

4 years, 1 month

The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

by athornton＠gmail.com

> On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: > > And what happens when you wake up one morning to find archive.org is > gone, too? > > Fundamentally, eventually we're all going to be indistinguishable mass-components inside the supermassive black hole that used to be the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies anyway. Smoke 'em while you got 'em. Adam

4 years, 1 month

HP 2000 TSB and FORTRAN

by dlwfanservice＠sbcglobal.net

Like many, I used an HP 2000 TSB system in high school to first learn about programming. Wanting to learn more than just BASIC, I soon discovered there was a program on the system that let you write and run FORTRAN programs. All these years later I can't remember anything more than that and haven't seen anything more on it since then until recently. While clearing out my storage space I came across an old binder with a photocopy of a manual. Looking though it I soon realized it was from my high school computer class and described the system for running FORTRAN. So now I have a name at least and a copy of a manual, but haven't yet found anything more and hope that someone here might be able to shine some light and supply more about it. The manual says it was known as OSMI 2000 FORTRAN and was a "series of programs written in the BASIC language which run short FORTRAN programs" on an HP 2000 BASIC system. Anyone heard of this before? Thanks. David Williams www.trailingedge.com

4 years, 1 month

PDP-11 Diagnostic Program Listings Micro Fiche Scans

by ioerg.hoppe＠gmail.com

Hi Friends, Micro fiche scans of the PDP-11 XXDP listings are online now: http://files.retrocmp.com/fichescanner/bitsavers/pdf/dec/pdp11/microfiche/D… You can insert this into your bitsaver mirror tree with $ cd <your-bitsavers-mirror-root> $ wget --recursive --level 0 --no-host-directories --cut-dirs 2 --no-parent -R index.htm?* http://files.retrocmp.com/fichescanner/bitsavers/ You need about 130 GB space for 1600+ listings. A Win10 version of wget is at http://files.retrocmp.com/wget-1.21.2-win32.zip In 2016 I posted a batch of listings, which was archived at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/microfiche/ftp.j-hoppe.de/... These were repacked and included in the above distribution. So despite I'm very pleased to see my name on bitsavers: Please discard the "ftp.j-hoppe.de" directory now ! For each listing there are 3 files: - a "gray" pdf in archive quality. - a highly compressed "bw" pdf, about 10x smaller. - an ASCII *.dat with context and title strip data, prepared for database import. The pdfs contain pictures of their fiches as title pages. The quality of the fiches is everything between "brilliant" and "awful" DEC made every possible error while preparating them, the list is endless. My favorite bug: Title strips glued to the wrong fiche (corrected here). I even tried OCR but the results where poor. "ocrmypdf" (= "tesseract + pdf") seems a good tool, but the fiches are too problematic for a fully automatic run. You have to dive into tesseracts training procedures. See https://hub.docker.com/r/jbarlow83/ocrmypdf/ Some project links: http://www.retrocmp.com/projects/scanning-micro-fiches https://youtu.be/X22gr5THBRA https://hackaday.com/2021/09/17/automatic-microfiche-scanner-digitizes-docs/ By the way: This project ate up lots of (physical and personal) resources. I'll will scan other document sets in the future, maybe begging for a donation then. Enjoy! Joerg

4 years, 1 month

The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adrian Stoness > [M?]iror everything guys make copies and stash > From: Paul Koning > The web can make things perpetual if they are stored redundantly ... > But anything centralized is just as vulnerable as any centralized copy > ever was, whether from risk of fire or flood, or abandonment. I've been thinking about this issue for a while (although I tend to have a long scope, e.g. looking forward to a time when everyone currently on this list is dead; so I think things like 'failed states' need to be a concern too), and I think history has a key lesson for us. I've been reading up on the history of the Greek cities after the Pelponnesian War, down through the War of the Successors (the Diadochi) after Alexander the Great died. One book I read said that the only surviving source for many major periods in this stretch was Diodorus (a Greek historian from Syracuse in the first century BC); he wrote a history of the world in 40 volumes, only 15 of which survive today complete. The sad thing is that there _was_ a complete set in the library at Constantinope, as late as 1453 (and we know what happened then). So it survived the best part of 2K years, and was then lost; the parts that _did_ survive, did so because there were copies in other libraries. So the lesson is clear: we need to _replicate_ stuff, in a geographically and nationally distributed way. The mirroring of Bitsavers is _very_ good news. However, even in the class of stuff that it focuses on, e.g. old manufacturer documentation, some things don't make it in there, but do exist in other online repositories (e.g. Manx's collections). So one thing we need to do is come up with something like Bitsavers, but with more curatorial work-sharing. Al has done an _incredible_ job, for which we are all deeply in his debt - but it would be good to come up with some way to help him. (E.g. I've been adding links to online versions of manuals, in articles on older DEC stuff I'm doing the CHWiki, and I often find things which aren't in Bitsavers. But sending Al an email saying 'hey, xxx is {here}, you might want to upload it' is just putting all the load on him.) Getting all this stuff into the replicated, mirrored system is a key priority. > And in the case of digital data the added complication is the loss of > the necessary technology. Multiple independent copies will of course help with this (very real) problem. The mirrors will likely be using different hardware, and will turn it over at different times. We could definitely use more mirrors, though - and geographically distributed: it looks like there are current (non-US) ones in the UK, and in Germany - more would be good. New Zealand? Australia? Maybe Japan and India? Individual volunteers aren't really what we need ('when everyone currently on this list is dead'); it needs to be institutions. > The Long Now Foundation has done some good thinking about this; some > others have as well. Jerry Saltzer thought about this, especially the 'generations of hardware', and 'software formats' (e.g old Word docuents) issues. See: "Technology, Networks, and the Library of the Year 2000" http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/inria/inria.pdf (particularly Section 4.3 "Persistence"), and also: "Fault-Tolerance in Very Large Archival Systems" http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/fault-tol/fault-tolerance.pdf > I'd say more of us need to be more paranoid about mirroring stuff. Yes. Don't just use a link, copy stuff down to a place _you_ control. (I.e. not Google Drive. Nothing against Google, but their business might go somewhere different, like Geocities, etc.) I have a large collection of down-loaded stuff. Already I've run into cases where stuff has gone offline, and without my local copy... Noel

4 years, 1 month

FTGH: FH disk drives (and one HH) - Toronto

by toby＠telegraphics.com.au

Hi, Located in Toronto Canada, for shipping cost only: - 3 x Hitachi DK516-15 - 2 x Computer Memories Inc (CMI) 6426-S - Microscience HH-1060 (half height; marked bad) - Tandon TM-502 Unknown working condition, but have been stored well. First come, first served, etc. --Toby

4 years, 1 month

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