John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
> Here's an excerpt of a posting that triggered my IMSAI smart agent.
> Does anyone recognize his name, or the company he's describing?
> From: Wirt Atmar <WirtAtmar(a)AOL.COM>
Yes. Your next step on the road to enlightenment is to webulate to
http://www.aics-research.com/history.html and follow the next-page
links through to the end.
-Frank McConnell
Found this on usenet, don't know if any of you like that CoCO stuff.
just thought i'd pass it along. please reply to him directly.
-Eric
><osc1(a)isd.net>
> Tandy CoCo sets. One is a box of rare CoCo stuff: books (fiction books
> CoCo based, how-to program books, manuals, catalogs etc), connectors (I
> don't even recall what half of them are), lots of cartridges (games,
> etc), all fairly rare and cool. The other set is a CoCo III, with a
> couple of joysticks, and five could game carts... a mini TV included!
> Each set is $20.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Carty Fox
> St. Paul, MN
<osc1(a)isd.net>
>> And anyway, a number of S100 cards included boot ROMs, etc. Those need to
>> be backed up.
>
> Shure, but where ? Just on a disk ? I already have the problem
> that I can't read some fd's of the early 80s. Even APPLE II disks,
> althrough I always said that a DISK ][ drive could read and write
> anything including Bierdeckl (beer mats/coasters).
>
> So, what to use ? Writable CDs ? They have only a guaranteed
> lifetime of less than 15 years. Tapes ? Maybe - I have some
> PBS Tapes from 1976 and they are still readable, but they are
> 900 and 1600 BpI tapes. Any modern optical and magnetical
> medium is less reliable. So printing the hex dump and then try
> to scan it back (ocr) when a replacement is needed ?
> This sould be reliable, since it is human readable
> (Like old magnetic tapes).
Paper tape, of course!
There is an action on me from this list last year (I think) to
investigate the possibility of Tyvek tapes. I still intend to do it,
but I don't know when!
Philip.
This past weekend, I picked up a few cases for SCSI disks... they have
a device on the back panel which allows one to select the SCSI id by
just pushing one of two buttons until the proper ID shows... I've
used a VOM to figure out which wires from this thing are what, but the
connector it same with is not compatible with the (as far as I can tell)
standard of three sets of jumper-width pins.
I'd like to button this thing up so I don't have to open it again (except
to replace a bad disk) but can't find anything which fits the spacing of
these pins...
For those for whom this info would be useful in telling the spacing, the
disks are RZ35s (from DEC). I don't know who actually produces them.
Any help appreciated...
My next plan is to try one of the inter-board connectors (one board has a
socket and one has pins)... the socket connector seems to have proper
spacing, but I've yet to actualy try it...
Megan Gentry
Former RT-11 Developer
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL | Internet (work): gentry(a)zk3.dec.com |
| Unix Support Engineering Group | (home): mbg(a)world.std.com |
| Digital Equipment Corporation | |
| 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 |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
Here's an excerpt of an e-mail I received recently from
an admin at the UCSD computing center, where the UCSD P-System
was developed. Ken Bowles was one of the primary forces
behind the P-System, and wrote an early popular Pascal text.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
>Subject: UCSD Pascal
>
>Damn! I wish I'd known about your museum - last summer I helped clean
>out the lab that had been Ken Bowles and we found a bunch of 8-inch stuff,
>old tapes, etc. which were trashed because no one wanted them. I'll look
>around here and see if there's anything left.
Here's an excerpt of a posting that triggered my IMSAI smart agent.
Does anyone recognize his name, or the company he's describing?
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
Subject: Re: WRQ's @Guard
From: Wirt Atmar <WirtAtmar(a)AOL.COM>
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 15:07:56 EDT
Message-ID: <3dda660e.358c088e(a)aol.com>
Mailing List: HP3000-L(a)utcvm.utc.edu
....
Just because something is possible doesn't mean that anybody's gonna want
it.
The very first business that AICS was involved in was computer-based speech
synthesis. Indeed, that's where our name comes from (AICS = artificially
intelligent cybernetic systems). The company grew out of something that had
previously been just a hobby of mine -- and a potential dissertation project
for graduate school: completely host-based speed synthesis, de novo,
where an
electrical analog of the human vocal tract was commanded to truly synthesize
new speech rather than simply play back digitized human speech.
In 1976, when I finished school and the company was formed, we actually
made a
lot of money surprisingly easily and surprising quickly selling speech
synthesizers as drop-in boards for Altair and IMSAI microcomputers. That
was a
time you could sell anybody anything. Every conference was a feeding
frenzy of
buying. You threw something up in the air and ten people wanted it.
In 1976 also, when I became a professor at our local university, several
students also continued on with the speech synthesis work. Vickie Kurtz, a
person who you actually sort of know because she is more or less single-
handedly putting together QCTerm now, did her master's work with me then.
For
her thesis, Vickie put together the best vowel synthesizer that I ever
heard,
using voltage-controlled oscillators, controlled by a simple rom-based
finite
state automaton so as to simulate the mechanical inertias found in the vocal
tract. Although her synthesizer didn't have any sort of noise generator
in it,
so it couldn't form the fricatives (hiss-like sounds) necessary for full
speech synthesis, its vowels were the most human-like I've ever heard and
were
essentially indistinguishable from a baby's babbling or cat-like animal.
Vickie finished in 1982.
A year or two earlier, Texas Instruments got into speech synthesis in a big
way using a technique halfway between digitized speech and speech
synthesis, a
process that might now be called "smoothed sampling". It worked much better
than true synthesis in that its intelligiblity was quite good. Because of
that, TI was able to sell a variety of manufacturers on the idea of having
talking washing machines, microwave ovens, vaccuum cleaners, etc. The most
expensive of these talking machines was the Chrysler LeBaron automobile
-- and
people (the end-users, not the engineers) found all of this incredibly
irritating. The single most requested option on the LeBaron, by far and
away,
was to have the speech generator deleted.
Talking appliances were a technological fad that lasted only about three
years, 1979-1982.
...
Wirt Atmar
Sam Ismail <dastar(a)ncal.verio.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Doug Yowza wrote:
> > IIRC, the Star had both a custom microcoded CPU and had an 8080 (or 8085)
> > to handle I/O.
>
> I believe 8080 is correct (remember, the design was started in the 1975
> timeframe, but did extend into 1981 when it was released). The 8085 is
> circa 1976. Why didn't I take better notes!? ;)
Yeah, me too. But this is where I stopped: it was an 8085.
...
The Star presentation was certainly well attended -- it was packed to
overflowing! I was out in the lobby watching the presentation on a
monitor, and apparently there were other folks watching other monitors
in the cafeteria. Anyway, that is why I gave up on notes -- couldn't
concentrate on the palmtop keyboard and the monitor at the same time.
Afterward a bunch of us did get together outside the auditorium lobby,
Uncle Roger tried to make me hold up a classiccmp sign, I tried
waving my appendages a bit whenever I saw someone I recognized, and
somehow I think we completely missed Rax. Sorry about that, Rax.
I will try to plan better next time.
So who was there? Roger Sinasohn, Rachel ? (Uncle Roger's girlfriend
-- the schoolteacher who is always on the lookout for Macs), Doug
Yowza, Doug Coward, Paul Coad, Sam Ismail, Edwin El-Kareh, and y'r
humble narrator. Stuff was swapped, stories were exchanged, we moved
to the parking lot, yakked some more, then security came around,
someone made the mistake of asking me where to go and I suggested the
El Paso Cafe in Mountain View. (Hey, I know *I* can get some
good cheap eats there.)
Notes:
(a) At least some of us seem to want to do this get-together
thing again. Of course we did not reach any consensus w/r/t time
and date as Roger now wants to check and see whether his tap
dancing lessons collide.
(b) We need to start earlier, 9:00 PM is late for dinner and
the El Paso closes at 10:00. Other places close earlier than
that.
(c) So...fine, here's a time and place for all us Bay Areans to
argue over: Second Thursday, 09 July 1998, 7:00 PM, El Paso Cafe,
1407 W El Camino Real, Mountain View. Y'all can flame me about
this in public or private, and I'm still open to change, but I want
to announce the real time and place on 30 June.
-Frank McConnell
At 05:55 PM 24-06-98 -0400, William Donzelli wrote:
>CD-ROMs have the advantage that they are far more widespread than any of
>the above disks ever dreamed to be. They are world standards, as oppossed
>to company-specific standards. With the music industry behind them,
>CD-ROMs will be around for a long time.
Indeed, and with DVD being able to read CDs you'd expect no difficulty in
reading CDs for the next 20 years or so. I'd certainly want to be able to
listen to my music CDs for that sort of time-span. In fact, with the number
of CDs I have, if I listened to a couple a week, it'd take 20 years :-)
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)latrobe.edu.au
Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479
1999
La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
On Jun 24, 23:38, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > So, how easy is it to crock up a keyboard and mouse for either
machine?
> > > Can I modify IBM gear to fit the bill?
Not for the keyboard, it uses 8 data bits with no start/stop/parity bits
and a separate clock; XT keyboards use 8 data bits with 2 start bits, 1
make/break bit, and a stop bit; AT/PS2 keyboards use 1 start bit, 8 data
bits, 1 parity bit, 1 stop bit.
> > null modem enclosure). The keyboard is Mac proprietary.
>
> Yes, it's _strange_. 4 wires, +5V, Data, Clock, Ground. The mac end uses
> the shift register in a 6522, the keyboard end uses a microcontroller
> (8021?). Given a keyboard the protocol is probably hackable with a logic
> analyser (future project?),
Yes, it is an 8021. The protocol is in "Inside Macintosh", Vol. III
pp30-32. It's fairly simple, though it's bi-directional.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
>It certainly has been (and will continue to be) for me...
>
>But seriously, since my workshop isn't open to the public, and almost
>nobody knows who I am, where should %random_person go to find out
>about real front panels, forerunners of Windows, etc. If not a science
>museum, then where?
>-tony
The local public library. Get a comfy chair, sit in front of the
terminal, call up lynx, get a hotmail account, and subscribe to the
mailing list. Of course, if the library has some back issues of computer
magazines or computer history books, those never hurt either ;) A museum
is generally considered to be a 'fun place' and though it is possible
to learn quite a bit, they can't beat reading a good book (though they
are a visual compendium). BTW, the Boston Computer Museum has a very
good history section. Books like 'A Secret Guide To Computers' also
educate quite a bit. Lastly, since you're so worried about this (we all
are, I hope) why not just write a book?
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