Hi folks!
Is there anyone out there, who can help me with my Beehive Topper
CP/M machine?
The machine starts up with his self-test going o.k.
Then it requests for the boot disk or pressing RETURN to start
the Monitor V2.0 program.
The Monitor program seems to work o.k.
Booting a disk (written from the images out of the Maslin archive)
puts some cryptic characters of the screen and hangs the machine.
The images are for a Topper II, mine is a model Topper.
Is this the problem?
I have found very very little about the Topper machines,
no manuals, no software, no schematics.
R. Harten
--
Liam,
i'm sorry, but Chuck is right.
Your link directs to a photo showing a terminal.
The Topper was put into market as a intelligent terminal for
stand alone use as a CP/M machine and for remote issues as a
IBM compatible terminal.
In fact the Topper has a 8085 CPU for the terminal part and a Z80
for the CP/M part.
On booting the system disk you should be asked which functionalilty
you want.
There is a marketing brochure i have found in the www, where the
Topper is mentioned beside some other Beehive terminals.
Rolf
This is a twin/duplex cable of varying length with 100/140 um "multimode"
cores and SMA-906 connectors. SMA-906 connectors have the stepped
center-pin, compared to the SMA-905 which is a simpler straight pin. It's
used, for example, by the LAN Bridge 100.
For additional information see pages 169 through 335 (of 452) in
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/comm/EK-CMIV7-RM-005_Communications_Options
_Minireference_Manual_Vol7_Aug88.pdf
Probably it has an orange sheath so it would be somewhat distinctive in your
tangled pile of cables :-}.
Thank you for looking,
paul
I attended Queen Mary College from 86-89. They had just received several
dozen MG1s. I believe the WCW founders came from QMC.
By the final year a good 1/4 we're non-functional as the keyboards has
failed and by then WCW has gone bankrupt a second time (for good). I
remember one the programmers trying to encourage the more enterprising 3rd
year students to take on building a IBM keyboard adapter as their final
year project :-)
I'd love one for nostalgias sake but I live in the US now though shipping
to my mum's may be possible though no clue if they can handle 120v.
Lots of good memories. Eliot Miranda worked at QMC and had ported his
BrouHaHa smalltalk to the MG1. I remember using Occam (emulator), Lisp,
ML, Modula2 and C plus of course Smalltalk 80 all on the MG1.
Tony
Hi everyone!
I'm curious; other than Wikipedia what do we know about Whitechapel
workstations? Do any of us have some working in our collections, with
software, disk dumps, etc?
Cheers!
Hi,
n00b alert
Does anyone have a 101 level boot strap guide for someone wanting to get
into creating better-than-dd disk images?
I'm finding myself back in a position where I want to image / preserve
multiple 5¼ & 3½ inch disks. I think all of them are PC compatible
disks. Probably standard FAT-12 and a handful of super capacity disk
formats from the likes of IBM / Microsoft where they tried to squeeze
1.6 (?) MB on a 3½ inch disk.
I have an internal 5¼ inch floppy drive that is in unknown condition
(I've never used / tested it since I got it).
I also have (at least one) 5¼ disk that I acquired as a scratch monkey
disk to test on before working on disks that I care more about.
I was thinking about acquiring a Kryoflux in the next few months and
starting to collect better quality images of disks. I recently saw
someone on Twitter suggest that Kryoflux wasn't the best route to go and
suggested a SuperCard Pro instead.
I had been using the dd command under Linux against a USB connected 3½
inch floppy drive for most things. But I've come to learn that's not as
good as some people would like to see preserved.
So, does anyone have a 101 level boot strap guide for someone wanting to
get into creating better-than-dd disk images?
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
On Fri, 4 Nov 2022 17:53:10 PM Tony Duell <ard.p850ug1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> More seriously I have a working (last time I turned it on) MG1 with
> monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Also have the technical notes manual and
> an installation disk kit. Another chap I know (I think he's here but
> I'll let him speak up) scanned the manual and coppied the disks last
> year, so there is a backup.This is a 32016-based machine of course. It
>
Yes hello, this is me. In fact, if you would like to see the Whitechapel
MG-1 in my possession in operation, come up tomorrow (Sunday) to the Centre
for Computing History in Cambridge, where the system is on public display
alongside an AT with a busy bunch of Transputers in it. It's all part of
the Retro Computing Festival that's underway this weekend:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/69485/Retro-Computer-Festival-2022-S…
If you can't make it to Cambridge, then when the machine is running (which
it isn't at the moment --- wait for between 10 AM and 5 PM GMT Sunday), you
can visit the machine over HTTP at http://mg-1.uk . (Note no https.)
Working MG-1s and related machines (like the colour CG-1) are rare owing to
leaky batteries (what else).
I'm very grateful to Tony for his generous sharing of MG-1 materials --- it
helps make it possible to show off the MG-1 in this way! I've got
everything on Google Drive, with links available on the website just
mentioned. Since it's liable to be down when you're reading this, here's an
archive.org link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210625124716/http://mg-1.uk/
Note also this page with links to 42nix 2.6 OS media, also owing to Tony:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210625124758/http://mg-1.uk/42nix/42nix.html
You will probably have to edit archive.org's links out to Google Drive in
order for them to work, but I think it should be pretty easy to do this.
I have been meaning to make disk images of my best-effort reconstruction of
a clean 42nix 2.5 installation (a predecessor to the version linked above),
which I derived from a disk image taken from one of Jim Austin's MG-1s.
There is not a vast difference for the user at the console between 2.5 and
2.6, although they did fix a bug in the TCP/IP implementation that allows a
forking HTTP server running on 2.5 to cause a kernel panic. I suspect
revisions to TCP/IP were required to get NFS working, which, I remember
concluding, had been a new feature for 2.6.
I've never been able to get my hands on GENIX.
All sorts of spare boards, including things like never-populated bare
> RAM boards for the Hitech,.
>
It took me a lot longer than I like to admit to realise that HITECH was
derived from wHITECHapel...
Speaking of discoveries, I found out today that the Centre for Computing
History is in possession of a couple Hitech MIPS machines (sans cases).
Apparently they might have some media on QIC tapes as well. Tony, I'll try
to get you in touch with the person I was speaking with about this.
Meanwhile TNMOC at Bletchley are in possession of three MG-1s.
--Tom
My apologies if this topic is a sore point for some of you. Their abrupt
closing wasn't that long ago.
Does anybody have any insight on what is going on there? The web site has
not been updated in about 2.5 years. The world seems to be moving on; it
would be nice to know if we're ever going to see the museum re-open, and in
what capacity.
I realize the people are gone and scattered and it's never going to be the
same experience if it re-opens. But there are plenty of us who still
believe in the need for such a place, and starting from scratch would be
difficult.
-Mike
(Off-list replies are welcomed if that makes the discussion easier ...)
>Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2022 20:44:34 -0700
>From: Stan Sieler <sieler(a)allegrosupport.com>
>Subject: [cctalk] list problem with digestmode
>
>Hi,
>
>Is anyone else getting 4 to 10 digest emails a day, each with 4 to 8
>messages?
>(cctalk) (Instead of one a day)
<snip>
>Stan Sieler
Same here. I have not changed my email service, so that is not the cause. The change began when the new list server went online.
Bob
Hi,
Is anyone else getting 4 to 10 digest emails a day, each with 4 to 8
messages?
(cctalk) (Instead of one a day)
I have received four digest emails since noon: 2:57PM (8 msgs), 3:47 PM (7
msgs), 5:44 PM (7 msgs), and 8:24 PM (6 msgs). (Yes, all embedded messages
are different.)
I tried emailing the list owner, but the only response I got was from a
moderator (Lawrence W, who specifically said he wasn't the owner), who
wasn't able to help me. (He did suggest checking my mode...see below.)
I tried going to the website to "login" and check my status...it said my
email address wasn't known (which, of course, was patently false...since
I'm receiving emails :)
So, I tried: subscribe with sieler(a)allegro.com, ensure I have 'digest' mode
on.
And.....still get multiple messages per day ... *not* what a digest is!
This started happening on the order of 3 to 6 months ago. I used to get a
single digest a day, with 20 to 50 messages in it.
The multiple messages (even though they're smaller) are really annoying.
As a possible clue...somewhere around March we (my business partner and I)
sold our domain, allegro.com, in the process of retiring. The new owner is
providing two years of email forwarding of sieler(a)allegro.com to
sieler(a)allegrosupport.com (the latter is a gmail corporate managed account,
as allegro.com had been prior to March). (Oh, I tried "logging" in via
both domains with no luck.)
If the forwarding is a factor, I could try to get allegro/allegrosupport
unsubscribed and use a third account :)
thanks!
Stan Sieler
sieler(a)allegro.com
sieler(a)allegrosupport.com
sieler(a)gmail.com
