-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)freegate.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Tuesday, 1 December 1998 10:17
Subject: VAX collectors attention
> (Oh and an HSC50 whatever the heck that is!)
Hierarchical Storage Controller.
Waist high filing cabinet sized box, HEAVY too.
Basically, it's a PDP8 I think, running a little o/s called CRONIC
(Colorado Rudimentary Operating Nucleus for Intelligent Controllers)
Bots off a pair of TU58 mini tape cassette drives.
It's a controller/manager for SDI and STI (+ optional 3rd party SCSI tape)
drives.
You can do backups, and a few other things, just using the HSC without the
host Vax.
Talk to it with a VT100 or whatever terminal, or over the CI with the SET
HOST /HSC command
>from VMS, assuming the Vax has the CI hardware installed.
Normally part of a VAXcluster, it serves drives to several machines over a
proprietary
70mbs (I think) thick cable network called the CI (Computer Interconnect).
Needs another box called a Star Coupler (strange transformer gizmo, acts
much like
a hub, but passive) as well. Works with RAxx and TAxx series tape drives.
Though ours had
an Emulex SCSI adapter that drove two HP 4mm 5Gb DAT drives through a
special interface, emulating
a TA78 tape system to the HSC/VAX. (The card's still in the HSC, but the
interface box with the drives
in it died, and is no longer supported by Emulex.) I've now got a VS4000-90
hosting one of the HP DAT
drives, clustered to the 6320, so I can at least access stuff I had saved on
it. It's currently feeding our
Vax 6320, plus I have another complete one for spares.
Uses about 600w IIRC.
BI and XMI adapters were/are available for various Vaxen to allow them to
connect
over the CI bus. Decnet will also run across it, so it made for fairly high
cluster performance.
Pretty much obsolete now. There was a slightly more sophisticated version
called a HSC70
that used RX floppys instead of the tapes, and could handle more drives,
etc.
I think there were a couple of models after that too. I've seen a HSC70 at
a scrap dealer recently.
Not a lot of use unless you have a big (82xx 83xx 85xx 86xx 6000-xxx etc)
Vax that needs one to
talk to it's drives.
Allison or one of the other Master Decologists will doubtless correct any
mistakes in the above. :^)
Cheers
Geoff Roberts
Computer Systems Manager
Saint Marks College
Port Pirie South Australia.
My ICQ# is 1970476
Ph. 61-411-623-978 (Mobile)
61-8-8633-0619 (Home)
61-8-8633-8834 (Work-Direct)
61-8-8633-0104 (Fax)
Argh,
>Hierarchical Storage Controller. Waist high filing cabinet sized box,
HEAVY too.
>Basically, it's a PDP8 I think ...
You mean I missed a chance to pick up another PDP-8? Probably an 8a though.
--Chuck
>Hierarchical Storage Controller.
>Waist high filing cabinet sized box, HEAVY too.
>Basically, it's a PDP8 I think, running a little o/s called CRONIC
It's an -11, actually, supplemented with a largish chunk of dedicated
logic for moving data around.
Tim.
Hi.
I've picked up a Data General Aviion 310CD and was informed it can use a
straight AT keyboard. I am skeptical, as the keyboard port is a DIN8.
Also, the colour video output is on 3 BNC connectors. Can I use 3 segments
of ethernet coax to carry the video signal or is the impedance wrong?
I'm sure I'll have more questions later, but this'll do for now.
Actually, I've had a hard time locating info on this machine. I understand
it uses a Motorola 88k processor at 20 MHz, but I don't know which one. I
looked inside and found three chips it could be.. an 88100 (88010?) and
two 88200 (88020?)s. I assume the single chip is the CPU but then what
are the other two?
I would be really surprised if this were a multiprocessing box.
ok
r.
>> Someone mentioned that there are copy protection schemes for cassette
tape,
>> and I was curious what these might be and how they might interfere with
>> recording the tape onto my HD.
>
> Some machines (the BBC micro is one IIRC) have a bit in the cassette
> block header that when set prevents you listing or saving the BASIC
> program. That's one trivial form of copy protection.
I don't recall that one on the BBC. You could do that on the ZX81 due to
very strange operating system features.
The BBC had a header on each tape _block_ that said where the file would be
stored in memory, how long it was and an execution address. One simple
scheme rested on the fact that the parameters the machine used were taken
>from the first block of the file and those it told the user were taken from
the last block...
I also saw a program which, when listed or saved, gave "bad program", but
would run OK. Don't know how that was done...
Philip.
On Nov 30, 10:03, Christian Fandt wrote:
> Now I have got to hunt for a decent reader of .ps files which works under
> windoze95 . . .
You can get Ghostview/Ghostscript for Windows -- I don't know *where* we
got it, but we have it on the NT machines at work.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
I viewed perhaps 45 minutes from the middle of one episode. I found
myself playing "Mystery Science Theater", that is, yelling and heckling
at the screen. What always strikes me about these sorts of shows is
that they're not useful as history. Cringely drives around in micro-bus,
talks with talking head, TH gives his sugar-coated personal view of
history from his particular corner office, and Cringely rarely
fact-checks or points out the blatant lies or evidence of sugar-coating.
Cringely's retrospective documentary in the year 2025 will be much
more interesting, after most of these companies or TH's are dead
and won't be offended by sharper analysis.
- John
not knowing the model number, it's hard to say what you saw. it's probably an
early 1990 model ps1 type 2011 or 2121. could be either a 286 or 386. the
machine requires the matching monitor as it actually contains the computer's
power supply. machine also has dos in rom.
david
In a message dated 98-11-30 18:06:20 EST, you write:
<< I saw an odd machine in a thrift store today, a machine labelled a PS/1,
but it
looked nothing like the PS/1 valuepoints, or any other PC I've ever seen. It
looked like a cross between a PCjr and a soap dish. One 3.5" floppy drive,
huge
ugly vents and IBM logo on the front, on the back are ports for mouse,
keyboard, VGA, 2400 bps modem, and parallel printer. It also has a little fan
and some sort of slot cover that fell out. Where is the power switch? Where
does the power connect to? >>
>> I can't imagine why 8 bits wouldn't be sufficient, given the
>> frequency range of a cheap cassette player. I recently acquired
>Considering that most (all?) home computers feed the cassette input into
>a schmitt trigger (essentially 1-bit sampling), and that the level of the
>input signal is set by twidding the recorder's volume control until it
>loads, so it's not that critical, I would think 8-bit sampling was easily
>good enough.
8-bits ought to work just fine. One fine point, which won't hit you
until you try to do some decoding: some tape formats are polarity
sensitive (they use a variant of Manchester encoding). If at all
possible, you should try to figure out whether your tape player/digitizer/
recorder/player chain inverts are not.
Tarbell-format tapes are (speaking from experience!) polarity-sensitive.
Apple ][ tapes aren't. Kansas-City format tapes aren't.
Tim. (shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com)
