- cctalk - classiccmp.org

by Adam Thornton

I finally got an Emacs running on v7--it's on misspiggy at LCML now as "ue". It's Microemacs 3.6; what I did was to clone https://github.com/troglobit/MicroEMACS and check out the first commit. Some experimentation later, it had the usual problem with v7 and DEC linkers that not all the function names (er, more generally exported symbols, but in this case, function names) were unique in the first 7 characters (which is 6 if you're working with DEC OSes). So a bit of sed later and I had something that built, linked, and appears to run with TERM=vt100 set. Arrow keys, naturally, don't work, but C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n do. I think I'm going to just make a GH repo of it, but I'm happy to send the tarball, or tar.uue, upon request. I find UUCP kinda fragile on my simh installation, and I don't know how to get to Miss Piggy's (although the uucp commands are there), so, well, uuencoding, a pasteboard buffer, iTerm2's "Paste Slowly", and cat will work as a file transfer mechanism. Now I'm going to run over to TUHS and announce the same. Adam

2 years, 8 months

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Re: Apple 1

by Bill Gunshannon

On 8/3/2023 3:45 AM, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote: > > I’d still prefer the IMSAI 8080 or SWTPC 6800 though. > While I have a couple Apple ]['s I really don't do much with them. Haven't even turned one on since I retired from the University in 2015 and they came home . Wouldn't take an Apple 1 as a gift but I, too, would love to have an IMSAI and a SWTPC 6800. bill

2 years, 8 months

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fredmacs?

by Adam Thornton

I have heard rumors of one "fredmacs" which is a more-or-less emacs that will run on PDP-11 v7 Unix. Since I've gotten "s" onto v7 and behaving mostly happily, now I'd like an editor I actually _like_ rather than _tolerate_. Does anyone know where to find the fredmacs sources? Adam

2 years, 8 months

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Disk-pack-based drives at LCM

by P Gebhardt

Hi all, I just came across pictures on the LCM website about their SDS Sigma installation there. On the pictures, one can see 10-platter disk packs in the corner and stored on the disk drives. Did the LCM ever had these in operation, either for data retrieval or even demo purposes? I know of the Jim Austin Computer museum where they fixed a CDC 9766 drive but it suffered a head crash after a few hours according to their description which led to giving up the operation of these drives. Greetings, Pierre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.digitalheritage.de

2 years, 8 months

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NGPL TCS - 1969 Industrial Control

by Eric Moore

https://youtu.be/-CaUafVqnbw Super stoked to be able to share my latest video, I hope yall like it. -Eric

2 years, 8 months

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SunPC

by silcreval

Hi there I recently had a mad hankering to add a SunPC card to my Sparcstation. A lot of you will be familiar with the SBUS cards with a 486 or '586' processor. Does anyone have one spare they would like to part with? Please PM me if you do. Anything really not at all fussed. This sort of re-creates a setup I had as a post graduate when I had a new 486DX2 alongside a Sparcstation 2, or at least had access to them. Both were pretty amazing machines at the time. I do remember benchmarking these two machines running similar C software I'd compiled up (a simple electromagnetic simulator), and it was noticeable that the sparcstation was at least twice as fast.

2 years, 8 months

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Logic Analyzers - HP/Agilent 16700B or 1670G?

by John H. Reinhardt

Hello all. I looking around for a Logic Analyzer for doing (mostly) DEC QBus/UniBus stuff. Being the way I am I want something with enough lines to handle the most of the signals so I'm guessing something with roughly 80-ish channels. I think that lets out all/most of the USB based LA. I've looked around and it seems the the HP/Agilent 16700 series (16700B/16702B) are probably what I want. I've also seen the 1670G which also seems quite doable. I've seen a lot of posts at the EEVblog and it seems I missed possibly the golden age of 16700 LA by a few years price-wise. What I'm wondering is if there is something specific I should be looking for, or opinions on which LA is more suitable. Or even if there is a different make of LA to look for. Thanks in advance for your help John H. Reinhardt

2 years, 8 months

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Dec Vax in Simh - VMS Operating system

by devin davison

Hello All, I am working to get my two microvax systems working, I have a couple of microvax 3800 systems. While I am waiting to get the real hardware going, I would like to set up simh with vms to use for testing. I don't really need the latest version of vms, any old version with tcp/ip would work. I do have about 16 dumb terminals i want to run as a lab and connect to the vax. Can anyone provide guidance on this matter for setting up and install of VMS in sinh? I realize that there was the openvms hobbyist program, but i may want to grab an older version of the os if it will run smoother on the older hardware. Open to suggestions, I hope to post back with some pictures once the real vax 3800 hardware is running. Thanks, Devin D.

2 years, 8 months

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Divestiture and sqlite3

by Adam Thornton

To clarify a couple of things in response to queries: my time for divestment is "not yet"--but rest assured, when it arrives, I will certainly see who wants things from my assortment (don't get too excited; there's nothing super-rare or valuable in it, and I've always been more concerned with restoring functionality than maintaining period-correctness; I am one of those collectors who restores stuff to play with it, not to then put it in shrinkwrap and preserve it for some uncertain future). And should that time arrive suddenly, well, argh, I've been putting off making a will too long, but I know who I'm going to put in charge of "everything computery," and I trust her to make good decisions about the things she doesn't want. My understanding of sqlite (and it could be wrong) is that concurrent writes aren't supported, and reads should block if a write is in progress until the write completes. In practice it seems like most things are one-sqlite-file-per-process and if that process is threaded, one would hope the programmer understands what they're doing well enough to make it work. There are fairly few cases I've seen where a single sqlite file is shared between unrelated processes, which would take filesystem locking working correctly to ensure correctness. Which is generally OK for local filesystems, but NFS is still a bucket of worms when it comes to locking behavior, and the number of people running systems that genuinely understand NFS has been declining for decades. (I do not count myself among those people.)

2 years, 8 months

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Connecting MFM emulator as both 1st and 2nd drive in Microvax 2000?

by Jonathan Stone

I have a Gesswein MFM emulator from decromancer.ca; who offer an adaptor that yields a 2nd MFM data connector. I'll use mine in a Microvax 2000. Does anyone know how to hook it up as two MFM drives in a Microvax 2000? The vendor sold a 1in high adaptor box, BA40A, with DD50 connectors to a second cabinet (same as CPU box) for a second drive. DEC configured both primary and secondary drives identically (drive 3, IIRC). The Microvax 2000 Technical Manual gives the pinout from the mother board to the MFM/floppy daughterboard, but I can't find the pinout from that daughterboard to the cables anywhere. I've been looking for a BA40A, for some years now, to trace the pin layout for a 2nd drive. Does anyone know it? Has anyone successfully configured a single MFM emulator as two MFM drives in a Microvax 2000? Or to an RQDX3?

2 years, 8 months

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