>It seems that a lot of you blokes down under have Sorcerers. Were they
>marketed a lot more "down there" than they were in the US? They are not
>very common over here.
They aren't common here, but in Adelaide (South Australia) we still have
a Sorcerer's User Group running. I suspect that it is entirely social,
but it is there. Because Dick Smith imported them so early, it was one
of (if not the) first complete microcomputer systems available here, and
even then Dick Smith had a fairly large chain of stores. This gave it a
major advantage over its rivals (aside from the fact that it is a pretty
good system in teh first place). I also know someone who took one with
him when he went to the Antartic for 12 months. :)
Dick Smith, as I believe Andrew mentioned, sold a number of computers
here. The Sorcerer was sold as a Sorcerer, but they also sold the TRS-80
clone he mentioned (the System 80), two Laser computers (the Dick Smith
VZ-200 and VZ-300), the Creativision (the Dick Smith Wizzard), a kit
computer (the Super 80), and an Apple II clone (the Dick Smith Cat). I
was told the System 80 was a rebadged Laser, but I don't remember if they
made TRS-80 clones, and can't find any evidence to prove that the System
80 wasn't DSE's own system. The Super 80 I believe was actually theirs,
but I don't have one to check, and the Cat I assume was a rebadged clone
- I have a lead on one, but I have to go collect it. :) The VZs and
Wizzard were simply rebadged.
After a while they just started importing PC clones like everone else. I
do remember they had the one luggable, which I imagine was CP/M based,
but I'd have to do some research to find out who's it was.
Adam.
On Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 00:53:07 -0500 (EST), J. Maynard Gelinas"
<jmg(a)iac.net> wrote:
>>Yeah, I think you would be better off netbooting the thing via
>>bootp rather than building a bootable tape. I have a couple 3/80's
>>here at home, and there are bunches of old 3/50's lying around at work
>>(the government owns them, they'll be there till the sun explodes).
>>The 3/50 didn't support CDROM's from the PROM as I remember, so you're
>>going to have to either make a bootable tape or netboot it. Do you
>>have another UNIX or Linux box and a LAN nearby?
I have a small Windows LAN at home, but no Unix boxes setup. I guess
that this weekend I'll be setting one up...
Rich Cini/WUGNET
<nospam_rcini(a)msn.com> (remove nospam_ to use)
ClubWin! Charter Member (6)
MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
============================================
On Tue, 03 Mar 1998 01:56:54 +0000, David Wollmann <dwollmann(a)ibmhelp.com>
wrote:
>>I bet if I look in storage I still have a couple of parted-out S/23s
>>from which I could lift the ROM you need. Since I'm not much on the
>>electronics side of things (I'm just a poor board-swapper) give me the
>>numbers and a general idea of where it's located in the box and I'll see
>>if I have one. May take me a couple of weeks.
It is the "09" ROS. Here's the diagram that I got from Philip Belben:
** TOP VIEW OF PLANAR SEEN FROM THE REAR **
_______________________________________________
| ====== ====== <-- NOT FOUND ON |
| | 10 | | 11 | <-- SOME EARLY |
| =3=40= =3=60= <-- MACHINES |
| |
| ====== ====== |
| | 19 | | 0D | |
| =7=60= =1=60= |
| *********************** |
| =PATCH= ====== * PHYSICAL LOCATION * |
| | 18 | | 0C | * OF ROS MODULES * |
| =7=40== =1=40= * FOR EACH ERROR CODE * |
| *********************** |
| ====== ====== |
| | 17 | | 0B | -KEY- |
| =6=60= =0=60= ====== |
| | XX | |
| ====== ====== =Y=ZZ= |
| | 16 | | 0A | XX=POD ERROR CODE |
| =6=40= =0=40= Y=ROS PAGE VALUE |
| ZZ=HIGH ORDER BYTE OF |
| ====== ====== FIRST ADDRESS IN |
| | 15 | | 09 | ROS MODULE. |
| =5=60= =0=20= |
| ---(CABLE)-------------- |
| ====== ====== | ====== | |
| | 14 | | 02 | | | 09 | CO-PLANAR | |
| =5=40= =0=00= | =0=20= BOARD. | |
| | (FOUND ON | |
| ====== | ====== SOME EARLY | |
| | 13 | | | 10 | MACHINES.) | |
| =4=60= | =3=40= | |
| | | |
| ====== | ====== | |
| | 12 | | | 11 | | |
| =4=40= | =3=60= | |
| ------------------------ |
-----------------------------------------------
Rich Cini/WUGNET
<nospam_rcini(a)msn.com> (remove nospam_ to use)
ClubWin! Charter Member (6)
MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
============================================
On 1998-03-03 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk
:As Joe said, HP classed a lot of things as 'calculators' to get
:round daft export rules...
:IIRC, officially the HP71B is a computer (QWERTY keyboard, Basic),
:but the HP48 is a calculator (alphabetical keyboard, RPL). They use
:virtually the same processor (Saturn), although the HP48 has a few
:more machine instructions.
cx ( <- hello, from firstborn)
it's possible that marketing could have something to do with that too.
we'd rather, and we suspect most engineers would rather, use the hp48 -
but since rpl fits in well with hp's use of rpn in its calculator range,
it probably fit better into the calculator family, and would have been
more targeted at the engineers who cut their teeth on its predecessors.
:> (or do their design engineers just design things they can hack
:>between meetings? ;> )
:You mean _during_ meetings, surely...
well, we meant between design meetings, when one would assume they'd all
be focused on designing the next piece of kit they could hack during
meetings with the pointy-haired bosses... ;>
(now someone's going to turn round and tell us that the pointy-haired
bosses in hp hack on their hp48s during meetings, and wear their hair
that way because they don't know where to find a decent hairdresser.
we've heard about hp.)
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
On Mon, 02 Mar 1998 20:45:17 -0500, John Ruschmeyer <jruschme(a)exit109.com>
wrote:
>>suppose the first question is... what OS is on the PC? If you were
>>running some unix variant (Linux or *BSD), then you could just netboot the
>>Sun and go from there.
I think what I'll probably too is trash the HD on an "experimental" 486
that I have and install either NetBSD or SCO OpenServer. From there, I
should be able to create a boot tape and an install tape, and then start the
install from the 3/50
>>Just a thought, your might want to join the Suns-At-Home mailing list
Thanks for the SAH list. I already belong. No specific ideas from anyone
there yet.
Rich Cini/WUGNET
<nospam_rcini(a)msn.com> (remove nospam_ to use)
ClubWin! Charter Member (6)
MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
============================================
doug:
:Intel themselves produced non-pc-compatible 286 machines (and
:others, of course). Do we have any hypercube hackers here?
oh, yes, we'd forgotten them... does anyone know where we can *get* one,
more to the point? :> but we meant things that were more like the sirius
1 in conception - desktop machines, but not stuck with the cruddy pc
architecture.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
On 1998-03-02 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk
:I bought several and am toying with making a few "ultra miniature"
:computer accessories ("matchbox" computers?)
off-topic, but...
the computer we would really love to use has a main box that's the size
of 2 3.5" floppy drives one atop the other, and standing on that is a
little 6" mono crt with a resolution of 384x256. the keyboard is about
the size of the keyboard on the cambridge z88. the processor is a
hitachi 6309 running in native mode, and the software is forth. and you
have to hold the thing when you put a disk in. needless to say, there's
no hard drive, but the floppy can fit 1800 screens on it, so that's no
problem.
of course, it was never made... but we'd love to see it.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
zane healy on ge635...
:IIRC they ran either GECOS (General Electric Comprehinsive Operating
:System), or the better known Multics. I believe they are also an
they ran gecos. the ge645 would support multics, but the 635 didn't have
the paging hardware. the multics faqs make great reading, btw.
http://www.best.com/thvv/ (from memory, might be wrong, might be ~thvv)
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
tony duell:
:Another thing worth grabbing are old data books. There are standard
:chips that are used in old computers - things like the 8271 disk
:controller, the AM2900 bit-slice chips, 4004's and 4040's, etc that
:don't appear in recent data books. A data sheet will help you to
:determine if a chip has failed, and how to make a replacement if it
:has. I'm trying to obtain all that I can.
before we were seriously interested in this stuff - or rather, since we
were designing 68000-based computers at the age of 12, between interests
- we had a whole stack of data sheets donated by a teacher's boyfriend
who worked for the uk distributors of sage before they became stride.
(what happened to them, btw?) it's a damned shame that when we were
about 16 we threw the whole lot out to regain some space in our bedroom.
if only we knew then... :< we'd give anything to have them back.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
max eskin...
:I have heard enough on this topic without understanding what it
:meant! What is the difference between vector and bitmapped graphics,
:and who was first to use each? Why are vector graphics
:stereotypically used in mainframes and bitmapped used in cheap
:weenie "home computers"?
dunno about first - but in vector graphics, you have a crt under direct
control of the computer, and you tell it to go to a point, switch the
beam on, go to another point, maybe switch the beam off, etc. etc. very
high resolution, but refresh speed is inversely proportional to the
number of lines on the display. in bitmapped graphics, you use a
conventional rasterised display (the horizontal lines) and a map of
bits which correspond to each line of the display and say whether the
beam is on or off at that point. unless you count williams tubes, vector
graphics came first, because you could use any old oscilloscope and
memory was precious. now memory is cheap enough to make bitmaps viable
in even the smallest computers, and monitors are readily available. the
price paid is blocky lines.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
