https://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=833
New TU56 Tape Images Available for simH use. I will post updates on this
thread, but if anyone is interested in messing around with the images
using simH, feel free to download and explore/use.
Bill
Hello! Our office represents the family of a gentleman (Mr. Marsh) who passed away from mesothelioma, a cancer caused from breathing asbestos. Mr. Marsh spent his career working for a contractor that provided third-party installation and maintenance of DEC computer equipment at various customer locations. We are curious if any DEC equipment ever contained asbestos, possibly asbestos lined brakes, gaskets etc. I am wondering if anyone in this forum has personal knowledge or documentation of asbestos use in DEC equipment OR if any of you have a tape drive with a braking mechanism that we can test for asbestos content? I can be reached via email or on my cell phone (925) 639-8593 with your thoughts. Thank you for your time!
Regards,
Jennifer Manibusan
Legal Investigator
Maune Raichle Hartley French & Mudd, LLC
1900 Powell Street, Suite 200
Emeryville, CA 94608
(925) 639-8593 Cell
(314) 241-2003 Office
This communication may be attorney-client privileged or otherwise confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete this message and notify the sender of this error.
Let's talk about QIC-24 (Quarter-Inch Cartridge) recording format tape
drives. I have an Archive Viper 2150S drive and a few Tandberg QIC 1000 /
TDC4120's. I have a collection of tapes that have had their elastic
repaired to my satisfaction. I can see the tapes advance using the rewind
command etc. Some of the tapes read fine and I can pull their data.
My question is - a few of the tapes are not readable, I am using standard
linux tape commands fed to the SCSI drive. I am wondering if Sun tapes are
formatted differently and must be read in Sun tape drives. Could there be
different types of physical BOT holes, or are they all the same? Is there
something that makes a tape un-readable unless it's in a
Sun/Windows/Linux/VMS environment? I am just trying to get the data, not
use the data. At least not yet.
My bench system is Linux Debian 7.
I realize the tapes I have that I can't read may just be bad. Or maybe
they're simply not formatted. I just don't want to give up until I am sure
I have tried everything and know as much as possible.
Any ideas?
thanks
Bill
Yes, I did early development on both. At least the interface to the OS was Pascal. I still have the early documentation buried in a box somewhere.
Sent from my iPhone
> On Jun 20, 2026, at 2:02 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 20 Jun 2026, ben via cctalk wrote:
>> PL/1 and C are the only two high level languages a operating system is written in, that I can think of that are well documented, and easily found on the WEB.
>
> I heard that all of the Lisa OS, and much of Macintosh, were written in Pascal. (obviously other than some low-level drivers and performance critical routines?)
> Is that correct?
>
> http://pascal.hansotten.com/apple-lisa-pascal/
>
> When did Macintosh development switch to C?
>
> --
> Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
Paul Terrell, Liza Loop, Daniel Kottke and Ronald Wayne as they recreate
history by presenting Liza with a replica Apple 1 and then discuss the
early days at Apple. Bring all your burning Apple questions as you may have
an opportunity to ask them of the panel. Rumor is that Woz will be there!
Jeff Brace
VCF Evangelist
VCF West Sat Aug 1 at 4:3PM At the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, CA.
Ronald Wayne discusses his time at Atari and Apple, how he authored the
original Apple partnership agreement, designed Apple's first logo and
worked on the Apple-1. Q&A session followed an autograph signing.
Jeff Brace
VCF Evangelist
Doesn’t time fly by? The Z80 processor could be bought in July 1976. It
along with Intel’s 8080 were the backbone of classic computing 50 years ago.
Happy computing,
Murray 😊
There have been a few versions of the utility imd2raw.c floating around
that will take Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk-created images (i.e. an .IMD file)
and make a linear binary image devoid of any metadata. This is similar to
the function of Dave's IMDU.COM program's /b switch.
I've corrected a problem with the assumption that all imd2raw.c descendants
to date have made: sectors that have a skew (i.e. not 1-1 interleaved)
weren't linearized correctly. The skewed sectors need to be written out in
"sorted" order, which is not necessarily captured/physical order. This is
easily verified by comparing output from "IMDU /b" to earlier imd2raw
outputs on any .IMD that has a sector skew that isn't 1, 2, 3 [...].
It's up on github here:
https://github.com/RetroFloppy/imd2raw
