Hi all,
Once I visited LCM some years ago I was allowed to visit their repair laboratory.
I was introduced to an approach to substitute DEC BA11 PSU modules by modern DC-DC converter modules.
They used a 3D printed plastic chassis to mount the converter, electrolytic as well as the connectors to be fitted into the psu chassis of a BA11 enclosure, quite nice.
See photo attached …
Does someone knows if this stl or design has been saved while or after LCMs closure?
Best
Andreas
> Oh, my, of course yes.
> This is sad news. I wonder if I can talk my editor into a belated
> obit? I feel too ignorant though...
I guess you could try
I'm a nobody but De Castro was important
First person (I think) to put a whole CPU on a single card, at least in a mass-produced machine
I was surprised to find out this morning that it seems Ed De Castro has passed on September 6 this year.
I can't see any reference to this in cctalk, so I'll try to give a short summary of Ed's accomplishments.
Many here would know that Ed worked for DEC and was project manager in charge of developing the PDP-8.
He left DEC to found DG in the late 60's and was the original designer of their Nova system, introduced to the marketplace when he was 29.
Ed was obviously a highly talented engineer, but it was the founding of DG that I would imagine was his most outstanding accomplishment.
DG wasn't the first disruptive new entrant in the computing marketplace in that period, or the largest for example with DEC and HP preceding them.
In order to stand out, DG used every trick in the marketing/advertising book that they could think of.
It seems that DG may have been the first disruptive tech startup to also display a very high level of cheeky confidence as being central to their brand.
I get the impression that DG staff took up this spirit and ran with it, at times even faster than management might have liked them to.
DG also sounds like a company that required high performance - everyone there knew what the expectations were.
Somehow a generally quiet, matter of fact engineer like Ed created a 'pirate ship' that people absolutely thrived in.
Perhaps it could even be said that DG were the template, in terms of culture, for what we imagine tech startups to be striving for even today.
There are numerous videos on YouTube that give a sense of this, including regarding the Talking Propeller Heads, the inhouse DG rock/comedy band.
Looking also at early Apple advertisements, for example, I was struck personally with the similarity in tone and style to DG's advertisements.
This quote from http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom sums up the company well:
"The company was a puzzle. It broke all the rules and yet was extremely successful. It had the reputation of being the "bad boy" of the computer industry -- heck, of any industry. And it enjoyed this reputation. DG became a public company less than two years after it was founded and shattered records in making it to the Fortune 500. Too bad Harvard never wrote a case study. It would have been groundbreaking! But if they did Harvard would have had to admit that EVERYTHING they taught about how to run a business could be wrong…"
Also this quote from https://www.ithistory.org/honor-roll/mr-edson-ed-de-castro:
"Steve Wozniak, Apple's future co-founder, (in high school at the time) was said to be enchanted with the Nova's elegantly designed architecture, and had photos of the machine taped on his bedroom wall."
And of course most of us know of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine.
These are just some short thoughts from someone who never worked at DG.
Hopefully some others here with deeper experience can comment also.
Vale Ed De Castro
I meant to reply-all for this.
paul
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> On Oct 9, 2024, at 5:27 PM, Zane Healy <healyzh(a)avanthar.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Oct 9, 2024, at 10:22 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Earlier there was a question about MSCP disk sizes. I did some checking.
>>>
>>> RSTS understands all the devices known by name in SIMH, including the "giant" RF73. As of the "big disk" support, which is in V10.1 and I think a few earlier versions, it can handle something that big. It draws the line at 4096 MB; bigger than that and it will tell you the disk is too big when you try to initialize it. I thought it might use only the part it can handle, but no, it simply refuses entirely.
>>>
>>> Paul
>>
>>
>> I hate to think what setting up a 4GB drive would look like. I have a 1GB SCSI HD for my PDP-11/73 (assuming the drive isn’t dead). I still remember just how long it took the RSTS/E 10.1 install to prepare that drive (so long I only did a single pass on the drive test).
>>
>> On a related note, Paul, do you have any idea if RSTS/E can be installed from a CD-ROM? I’ve done installs of RT-11 and RSX-11M+ from CD, but couldn’t figure out how to do a RSTS/E install from CD. I can’t remember if I was able to use 4mm DAT, or if I had to use a TK50 (it’s been a *LONG* time since I did any installs).
>
> I have never seen a RSTS kit on CD-ROM, but it should work just fine. At one time I worked with Fred Knight to help create a "combined kits" CDROM -- one that would hold RSTS plus all the layered products on a bootable CD, including at least a dummy standard CDROM file system so you could recognize it. That required placing two file systems on one device, which turns out to be possible because the starting points ("superblock") of the two are in different blocks. My RSTSFLX V2.x supports creating such a thing.
>
> While I knew of the plans, I don't think they were ever completed; I certainly never saw any actual delivery.
>
> So anyway, if you were to create a RSTS disk image file with kits on it and an MSCP bootstrap, and burn that to CDROM, I would think it would be bootable and useable. You might give it a try!
>
> paul
Earlier there was a question about MSCP disk sizes. I did some checking.
RSTS understands all the devices known by name in SIMH, including the "giant" RF73. As of the "big disk" support, which is in V10.1 and I think a few earlier versions, it can handle something that big. It draws the line at 4096 MB; bigger than that and it will tell you the disk is too big when you try to initialize it. I thought it might use only the part it can handle, but no, it simply refuses entirely.
paul
