VCFMW in Chicago was this past weekend!
Flew up with 2 bags, came back with 4 ! Funny thing is, my wife said she
was surprised I didn't come back with anything extra - well, I shipped
those extra 2 bags and they haven't shown up yet. Gives me one day to come
up with a cover story! :)
There is so much going on at the Chicago VCF - I don't think any
individual can cover the whole thing. Instead of a blog, this time I'm
trying a "video photo album" to cover some of the highlights that I was
able to see.
Search
Xiphod's Photo Album of Vintage Computer Fest (no commentary) - VCF Chicago
2025
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld1CXUTusDI
or
https://rumble.com/v6z4aia-xiphods-photo-album-of-vintage-computer-fest-no-…
Mainly my goal was to pick up a POLY-88 that folks have been helping to
restore off-and-on over the past 18 months. They got it going, so that was
one of the shipments back. The other was an Apple TAM at too good a price
to pass up. (and yes, wife already knows they are coming)
If it's any indicator: come Sunday afternoon, merchants were fairly eager
to sell at any offer (some announcing that anything unsold would go
straight to scrap - maybe that's a ploy, but there were some under $10
bargains to be had, a kind of "everything must go" vibe).
- Steve
Well, just yesterday I tested a set of RWS (RAM) replacement cards for the
IBM 5110 from Patrick Lebbard from Canada - and I'm very impressed. They
work well, I had them running for a few hours.
Details are described here:
https://voidstar.blog/ibm-5110-rws-ram-modern-make-replacements/
or VCF thread
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/ibm-5110-ram-timings.1253087/
I don't think he plans on becoming a retailer, they've offered up the
schematic and such. But he did make these boards for me after I shipped
him a set of the base connectors that you need (to adapt them to the 5110's
A1 board) that I pulled from a known-broken board.
His motivation is that he does have a 5100 also that he's trying to
resurrect, so he plans to carry on and make an IBM 5100 version of these
modules also (still resolving a few technical differences between them, so
it's not working out just yet - but the 5110 version of these I can say
seem flawless).
Anyway, exciting stuff to see someone technically savvy enough to probe
signals and reverse engineer 50+ year old tech!
-Steve
I just love the PDP11's assembly language. I needed a super-tight
subroutine to print a 16-bit value as 6 octal digits. This is as tight as I
could make it, 16 words (including writing to the serial port, which takes
5 words). Can you beat it?
;*** Subroutine *************************
;Print a 16-bit value as 6 octal digits
;Calling Sequence:
; jsr PC,PROCT6
;On Entry:
; R2 = value to print
;Trashes R1,R2
;****************************************
PROCT6: mov #100030,R1 ;Digit loop ends when '1' lands in C
;..'30' makes it ASCII
sec ;All done when this is in C again
;Extract a digit and convert it to ASCII. Check for done.
1$: rol R2 ;Shift digit out of R2 & into R1
beq 3$ ;Return when done
rol r1 ;Build next octal digit
bcc 1$ ;Done when c = shift pattern bit
;Write digit to the serial port
2$: tstb @#CTXSTA ;Wait for transmitter (clears C)
bpl 2$
movb R1,@#CTXDAT ;Transmit now
;Next digit
mov #020006,R1 ;Digit ends when "2" lands in C.
;Printing ends when "sec" bit
;..leaves R2. '6' makes ASCII
br 1$
3$: rts PC
Martin E.
Crazy long shot.
I just picked up a HMI-200-64180 for $75 shipped. Curious if anyone has
the manual and software for it?
There is some very limited info on bit savers but nothing for the 64180.
I'd also possibly be interested in picking up the 6809 version if anyone
has one they no longer need and the price is fair.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980206071507/http://www.hmi.com/200.html
Thanks
For those of you who run vintage computing-related info sites, have you
noticed all of the LLM scraper activity? AI services are using the LLM
scrapers to populate their knowledge bases.
At any given moment 5-10 of them are active on vintagecomputer.net. It’s
funny, when I ask an AI about something vintage computing-related,
something obscure, I can trick into giving me an answer from my own site.
I have actually had to modify the site code to manage the traffic, to
improve efficiency.
But they’re not going after just my site, these scrapers are absorbing
copies of the entire WWW.
I wonder how long the WWW will remain open, it would be a bummer if I found
copies of my site elsewhere.
Bill
I have a Connectix quick cam. The on ly label says FCC ID LKD1. The
connector is a mini-DIN that looks like a PS-2 mouse or keyboard plug.
Do you need it?
The driver package (B25-PDL_CTOS_Ethernet_Packet_Driver_3.7.0) also has drivers for ACCTON 1660 and 3COM 3C509 - you need to uncomment them in JCL file. I have the Accton card installed and detected in dos (and confirmed IRQ and base address) on SG3000 platform but activating the driver always crashes CTOS to core dump. The only suspect bit “Shared memory” which appears to be boot room address and this is not installed on my card (socket missing). Wonder if anyone had success with the driver?
