>< I believe the first microcomputer to run Unix was the DEC PDP11/03 and
>< 11/23 at At&T's Bell Labs (see the papers on mini-unix).
>
>I believe that is wrong. Unix was running on PDP-11s long before the
>LSI-11 or the 11/23 by many years. I think the 34, and 44s were teh
>popular hosts.
In fact, when I was a student at WPI in the mid-70's, we had a version
of Unix running on an 11/10 in the CS department (off RK05s)...
Megan Gentry
Former RT-11 Developer
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL | Internet (work): gentry!zk3.dec.com |
| Unix Support Engineering Group | (home): mbg!world.std.com |
| Compaq Computer Corporation | addresses need '@' in place of '!' |
| 110 Spitbrook Rd. ZK03-2/T43 | URL: http://world.std.com/~mbg/ |
| Nashua, NH 03062 | "pdp-11 programmer - some assembler |
| (603) 884 1055 | required." - mbg |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
On Oct 4, 22:05, Tony Duell wrote:
> Subject: Gemini Galaxy 2
> I am sure this thing is over 10 years old... I am also almost certain
> that only UK people will have heard of this machine.
>
> I am currently repairing a UK Z-80 machine called a Gemini Galaxy 2. It's
> basically a much-enhanced NASCOM, and uses the same bus pinout but with 3
> more address lines (there's some RAM on the CPU board to handle memory
> mapping).
>
> I have 3 boards in the cardcage - the CPU (Z80 + 64K RAM + boot ROM), an
> IVT (a video card with a Z80 on it) and a floppy controller/SASI
> interface. The latter is linked to a single floppy drive and to a Xebec
> SASI->MFM interface. And that, in turn is linked to a Rodime hard disk.
>
> At the moment, those boards seem to be working. It powers up and asks for
> a boot disk. Which I don't have. Alas the hard disk is not working - it
> starts to spin up and then spins down, and stops with the LED flashing (I
> can get the exact sequence of flashes if anyone has the error code
table).
A common fault on Rodime drives was losing the index sensor output, which
it uses to check the speed as it spins up. I've never found a way of
fixing that completely, since it's a Hall Effect sensor inside the spindle
motor. It generates two pulses per revolution, and the micro uses a
special data pattern on track -2 to decide which is the real index pulse
(it only needs it for formatting, really).
At power-up, the micro checks the RAM and ROM, and then starts the motor
and looks for index pulses. If it sees some, it then checks the speed --
there's a PLL that compares the sensor output to the reference clock
(11MHz, divided down to 120Hz). If the micro doesn't see the index pulses,
it generates "Fault 10" and shuts the system down.
The manual for my RO350 notes that there is one jumper near the
microprocessor which can be removed to circumvent the problem caused by
loss of the special index info on track -2. You could try removing it, if
you have an RO350 or similar.
The two LEDs are for Power and Select; the Power LED flashes for fault
codes. A long flash = 1, short flash = 0.
1 no index track data pattern
2 no flag 0,0 (didn't find Trk0 after 350 steps)
3 motor speed outside 1% (one!) tolerance at end of power-up sequence
4 motor speed outside 10% (ten!) tolerance in normal operation
5 flag zero stays true
6 not used
7 static Write Fault
8 RAM self test failed
9 ROM self test failed
10 no index
11 motor not up to speed
I don't know if these codes are the same on other Rodime drives.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
[LINK]
______________________________________________________________________
Sunday October 4
Gates pushes hometown to Linux
Linux-based document system costs 10% of Windows NT solution
By Christine Burns - FRAMINGHAM
It's ironic that in his zeal to equip his new $US53 million home with
the latest and greatest technology - not to mention every modern
convenience known to man, woman and child - Microsoft mogul Bill Gates
drove his hometown into the arms of another operating system.
The official paperwork filed with the city clerk in Medina,
Washington, (pop. 3,082) concerning the Gates homestead had the city's
file cabinets bursting at the seams. Of the 10 file cabinets housed in
the old ferry terminal-turned-town hall set on the shores of Lake
Washington, four were completely filled with upward of 40,000 pages of
building permits, blueprints and change work orders all pertaining to
the Gates estate.
Factoring in future growth and recognising that they physically had no
more room for storing municipal paperwork, the town fathers had to
decide on whether to spring for a new town hall or a document
management system. The latter being the more prudent choice, the town
looked into NT document management systems that might fit in nicely
with the town's Microsoft LAN. But what the town came up with was a
product that runs on Caldera's version of Linux. This product rang in
at less than 10% of the price of its NT counterparts, says Ray Jones,
president of Archive Retrieval, a Kirkland, Washington, systems
integrator. Archive Retrieval last month built and installed the
city's new document management system, called The Archive.
"When I asked the guys at town hall if they minded that the idle
screen would display a big Caldera logo, they told me I could point it
toward the window so everybody walking by could see it," Jones says.
Sorry, Bill. No hometown advantage here.
Back for more News
_________________________________________________________________
@IDG Home | News Wire | @PC World | Industry Directory | Industry
Events | PR Wire | About IDG | About Our Site | Help |
(c) Copyright, IDG Communications Ltd, 1998. All rights reserved.
>
>>
In the 1950's, this stuff was new. Now, it's all for fun. I agree it
must be a lot of fun, but there's no scientific/practical value.
>Yes, but was there a 'point' to building a CPU from relays in the
1950's
>? Other than the fun of doing it, of course.
>
Companies can make more money otherwise. If a kid buys $300 worth of
parts and shares all of his homebrew apps with friends ala GPL, no
one makes any money. If a kid buys $2000 worth of plastic and then
keeps on buying $50 apps, it's a lot of money! It didn't happen like
this on purpose, by the way. When stuff started to get bundled and
kids started to play around with the computers their parent bought
them...
>Yes, but why not? Some of us would like to reverse that trend.
>
No, I'm not. How many people are there in Boston who do this stuff?
5? That's not much information. And a web site inspires no one.
>Are you kidding? The web is full of sites with data sheets and
>application notes. Just about every major (and many not-so-major) IC
>manufacturer is there. When I started out you had to phone the
>distributors and convince them to send you a data sheet. This wasn't
>always easy if they realised you were a hobbyist who would probably buy
a
>couple of chips at most.
>
>>
>> I'm curious why the HPCC would be interested in homebrew? Or is HPCC
>
>Well, it used a calculator, right..... Why should any computer club be
>interested in homebrew. This project started as a replacement for the
>much-missed HP-IL interface on the HP71 and sort of grew...
>
>-tony
>
>
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Heads up all you homebrew hackers!
Next year we'd like to help revive the homebrew ethic by featuring YOUR
homebrew projects in the exhibit section of the VCF. There will be awards
presented for best homebrew project in different categories. Get out
those soldering irons!
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ever onward.
Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0
See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details!
[Last web site update: 09/21/98]
>< Take a look at the PICs as well. The programmer for those is very simple
>< and Microchip do document the programming algorithms. A 16C84 programmer
>< is 2 cheap TTL chips, a few discretes and a PC printer port.
>I've looked at them and like most single chips MCUs they are bizzare.
>They also offer a windows emulator that pretty neat.
>Allison
What you find "bizarre" is almost certainly what I like about them. 12-,
13-, and 14-bit wide instruction words, Harvard architecture so that
I-space and D-space are completely different concepts, remarkabably
efficient interrupt handling, remarkably low-power quiet modes,
etc. A refreshing change from the bland uniformity of the
8080/8086/6800-derived microcomputers that dominate much of the world.
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology Voice: 301-767-5917
7328 Bradley Blvd Fax: 301-767-5927
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817
Eric:
This is just the kind of restoration that interests me. Also, I noted that
in another
message, you refered to a PDP-10 simulator, the kx10. Where can I get a
copy
of the simulator? If you have information about the availability of
hardware, I
would very much like to receive same.
William R. Buckley
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, September 21, 1998 10:38 PM
Subject: PDP-10 (was Re: EDSAC on your desk.)
>Huw Davies <H.Davies(a)latrobe.edu.au> wrote:
>> It's just that there are so many circuits in a -10 that getting one to
run
>> (even when new) required a full time field service engineer
>
>As I recall, the 2060 I used to use ran for months at a time without
needing
>repair (i.e., just scheduled PM).
>
>> (our -10 was delivered in 1973 so if it were still here it'd be 25 years
>> old)
>
>Must have been a KI, then. I'm told that those were relatively easy to
keep
>running (at least compared to the KL).
>
>> I'd expect the probability of it running would be close to zero. The
>> maintenance fiche is about a foot deep....
>
>A former DEC field service engineer has told me that I'm a madman for
wanting
>to try, but he didn't put the probability anywhere near that low. The
>system was in perfect working order when it was decommissioned, and not
>much has happened to it since. Aside from testing the power supplies and
>checking for oxidation on the connectors, I'm not really expecting that
>much to be wrong with it. And I think I know where to find spare modules
>if it is necessary.
>
>Cheers,
>Eric
>
On Sat, 3 Oct 1998 Zane H. Healy wrote:
>>Anyway, the URL given was http://www.jshoenfeld.com/eindex.html
>
>I just tried and got told there was no DNS entry.
Hmmm, looks like there was a misprint in the magazine I copied that URL from.
On Sat, 3 Oct 1998 Lawrence Walker wrote:
> beyond 720k. Many of the old ST Format 'zine's free disks used to be
> formatted with extra sectors so that they could cram more PD on disks. There
Same applies to some Amiga coverdisks from the Amiga User International mag;
these used the diskspare.device 12-sectors-per-track format.
> When I get a Workbench disk for my newly acquired Amiga 2000 I'm going to
> see if FCpro will copy the Amiga 880k format. Would be a solution to transfer
> problems from the net. Now if I could only find an easy way around the
If you have an Amiga with a workable amount of RAM or a hard disk, it is quite
easy to transfer files using PC-formatted (720K) floppy disks.
Contact me privately if you want a copy of the Workbench disk etc., or more
info on 1541-to-Amiga connection.
>> You can make a cable to hook up a 1541 disk drive to a PC or Amiga and read
>> files or disk images using this.
>
> I take it you're referring to the X1541 cable. I wasn't aware that it could
> be used with Amigas. That looks promising.
I wasn't. Perhaps I should have written "you can make cables..." instead.
I only have experience with this on an Amiga, but there are at least two types
of cable you can make, one extremely simple the other using a 7406 IC.
There are several Amiga programs for reading C64 disks, the Easy1541 package
being the nicest. You can read and write 1541 files and disk images, send
commands (e.g. to format a disk) and using the supplied iec.library control any
IEC bus device.
-- Mark
< What you find "bizarre" is almost certainly what I like about them. 12-
< 13-, and 14-bit wide instruction words, Harvard architecture so that
< I-space and D-space are completely different concepts, remarkabably
Check some of the 4bitters done over 18 years ago... nothing new to me.
< etc. A refreshing change from the bland uniformity of the
< 8080/8086/6800-derived microcomputers that dominate much of the world.
Everything is a refreshing change from wintel. ;)
Allison
