I forgot to add that some gradual but real progress on adding the MG-1 to
MAME is taking place as well. --Tom
On Sat, Nov 5, 2022 at 7:01 PM Tom Stepleton <stepleton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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