test-drb January 1999

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

189 participants
897 discussions

by cswiger＠wilma.widomaker.com

>Yet another reason to prefer open-source tools whenever possible. Yeah - and be sure to check out the Unix 'cal' utility, it even gets Sept. 1752 correct ($cal 9 1752), actually, correct in Britain and the colonies, as well as 1 2000. http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/nature/calendar.htm Chuck cswiger(a)widomaker.com

25 years, 11 months

Why you won't fly on 1/1/00

by cswiger＠wilma.widomaker.com

>This is my biggest fear of Y2K. All of my programming life, software >developers have been able to get away with shipping buggy software with >virtually no liability. Now companies are already being sued for this Gentelpersons - certainly have been enjoying the thoughts on y2k, pretty much matches my thoughts. As for the above, just look at the Microsoft y2k statements, which claim to be compliant, immediately followed by the big screaming-caps legal boilerplate saying "but if your business fails due to ANY bug in the SOFTWARE, you can't sue me, nyah nyah-nyah nyah nyah, nyah". I think the right to peddle buggy software must be protected by 1st amendment free speech. My elder brother works with credit card processing in San Jose' and last August he wrote: " I have cards that expire now in 06/01 and 05/00 I believe. Anyway, I have not had any problem using them. I know for a fact that this is one of the issues that had to be dealt with last year. In fact, for a while there, we had to ignore expiration dates in the processing." Chuck cswiger(a)widomaker.com

25 years, 11 months

Fujitsu ESDI Drive Jumper Settings

by jolminkh＠nsw.bigpond.net.au

Does anyone have any clues about where to get jumper settings for a Fujitsu M2263E ? Fujutsu's websites ignore the existence of ESDI drives. I've also tried The Ref and Blue Planet who seem to have got their data from Fujitsu's sites. This is a 600Mb drive and has what looks like write protect set for the partition area. Hans Olminkhof

25 years, 11 months

Y2K stuff

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<> times per year). Last I looked I've never seen an airport move. My <> Cessna will continue to fly unimpeded < <Unless the automatic control system of some other aircraft fails and <causes it to fly into you :-(. Not that I believe for one nanosecond that <this is going to happen due to the change in year. Correct. NONE of the autopilot systems are date based/biased. Also the general design of aircraft systems is one of fail soft. Fail soft is simple fail to the least dangerous mode or disengage for manual override. So in the case of GPS with databases (maps) they fail such that you can only use the map for manual reference or emergency modes but the nav functions (whch way and all) are unaffected. Actually it's less a problem than that. Likely the ticketing systems or ground baggage handling are more suspect as they are not "safety of flight". <don't see why castings and gears and leadscrews and ... would care. <Actually I can't see why CNC systems would fail either, but manually <operated tools certainly will keep working. Unlikely, all the PDP8based system that do have any date function similar to OS/8 would have seen that problem every 7 years! <Yes, it's scare mongering. And that's the bigest problem - the public <panic that this could cause. That worries me a lot more than any minor <problems that may occur. All too true. Allison

25 years, 11 months

6809 vs. '286 (long - Was: Re: Still OT: Pentium / M$

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<If that's true, I'd really like a PDP-11! ;-) I have a few they are fun. <> It was however, slow! < <Compared to what? Clock per clock, it was the fastest thing for quite a <long time. And remember, the 6809 was *not* the fastest of the fast Compared by instruction cycle time. <8-bitters... ever heard of a *6309*??? Pretty rare critter there! Made by <Hitachi as an OEM to Motorola, CMOS, 3MHz (most overclockable to 4MHz) and <would kick a '286 in the backside easier than anything 8-bit (with 6309 <hand-optimized code) -- it did have twice the registers of the 6809 and ha <-- no typo here -- 32 bit math capabilities. Well I am familiar and the 6309 was still not so fast. It was however programtically efficient. Well written programs used less code and therefore executed quickly. Also the extra registers and long math made it particulary nice for compiler target for C language. <>Comparing it to a 286/10mhz, sorry, no way. < <I did it. Admittedly, it wasn't *purely* apples to apples comparison, but <took totally portable M$Basic programs doing integer & real math, and <integer, real & string sorting, and ran them in RS-DOS on a CoCo2 and in <Basic & BasicA on a True-Blue Bummer/AT '286-10. At .89 Mhz, the 6809 was <roughly .7x in everything except integer-related items - remember, RS-DOS <doesn't have integers... everything's a five-byte real. Your not comparing CPUs, you compared BASICs. Interger math is faster as iwould be five byte reals compared to the floating ppoint used on the PC/AT. A more reasonable would have been a collection of sorts and math tests that are in asm for the target machines. The 286 would have looked far better and the 287 would have made the case stronger. <vs. optimized assembly? IIRC, most (if not all) instructions execute in <fewer clock cycles on the 6809. But also, the addressing capabilities of Fewer slow cycles. <the 6809 far outweigh anything 86ish - I've tried learning x86 assembly - The '09 had better addressing modes and if you were not used to the way things are done in the z80/x86 world it would have been a hard translation. <ran screaming into the night... took my wife a week to find me! Any assy. <job I've ever seen can be done in a *lot* fewer instructions on a 6809 tha <an x86. maybe. <In my book, faster _and_ fewer gives a pretty decent improvement - sure, a <couple loops would run faster on a '286, but a regular proggie is more tha <just counting loops, and all of the branching & indexing capabilities of <the 6809 really improve the odds. X86 instuction set is strange but it is efficient. The problem is programming philosophies and methods are very differnt between 68xx and x86 due to type and use of registers and addressing modes. Then again the PDP-11 blows both away as it's not a primary accumulator machine also its regular in addressing modes and a two address machine. even the slow LSI-11 beats the 09. <version of Xenix available for an IBM / Clone? I know there was one for <the Tandy 2000, but that's the only version I've ever seen. How far did <M$'s licensing go with that OS? Yes there was, not cheap either. Rogue, is a good example of how code went from ASM to C, PASCAL, or whatever and grew huge in the process. Allison

25 years, 11 months

hard disk & controller from an AT.

by jim＠calico.litterbox.com

Hey all. I was just looking through my junk collection with the idea of organizing it a bit, and I happened across these chunks of a PC. 1 western digital WD1003-WA2 16 bit mfm hard/floppy controller. 1 seagate ST4053 5.25 inch fullheight hard disk. 45 meg mfm. >from when I looked it up. Both can be yours for the price of shipping. Note that the drive weighs about 10-15 pounds so do factor in shipping from Colorado. As to whether they work, in short, I have no idea. I'm told the PC they came out of was functional when I got it, but I used its case for a pentium box I put together for a friend and stripped and threw out the AT motherboard that was in it. -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

25 years, 11 months

Bulbs in parallel

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<The striking and maintaining voltages of a neon bulb are different. This <can be used to make a bistable using a couple of neons and a few <resistors. No transistors.. Also tunnel diodes and sever types of bilater switches (four layer semis). <> Or, how about a one bit readable, writable memory circuit consisting of <> one neon bulb, two resistors, and a capacitor? <> How about a ring counter with no ICs, no transistors? < <There's an interesting little book called 'cold cathode tube circuit <design' that I have somewhere. It covers the use of neon bulbs and related <devices as stabilisers/triggers/counters/shift registers/etc, etc, etc I have samples of similar circuits. The most common use was octave dividers in early electonic organs as it was the most commonly used circuit in an organ and therefore required lowest cost. At the '64 worlds fair Bell labs showed a TIC-TAC-TOE machine that was largely neon lamps, Cold cathode thyratrons and relays. Allison

25 years, 11 months

Y2K stuff

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<From: Don Maslin <donm(a)cts.com> <There was a piece in the Travel section of our paper today - a reprint <from the New York Times News Service headlined "Y2K could slow air <traffic, but airplanes won't fall, experts say". <ovens, sprinkler timers, etc. Am I dense? I have at least one each of <the above (not including fire trucks) and no one of them has the <foggiest notion what year it is! Because of the firmware, some few care <what day it is, but to the best of my knowledge there are seven days in <a week irrespective what year it is, or even the month. Generally those articles are bogus. The flight computers care not what day it is. The nav equipment will work though there is a remote risk that the data bases for moving map sysems could go out of date (they update many times per year). Last I looked I've never seen an airport move. My Cessna will continue to fly unimpeded <It would really be nice if the thoughts and opinions of truly knowledgeabl <folks were to be published and all of this type of panic mongering put <firmly to bed! That's exactly what it is panic mongering and total lack of knowledge of that y2k is. Allison

25 years, 11 months

Y2K stuff

by kurtkilgor＠bigfoot.com

> Alas on a few of the more complex systems there is a real time clock chip > - sometimes there's even an embedded PC in there. And if the code is > badly written then there can be problems. Note that AFAIK in every case > things fail _safe_. But they could fail - like the fire trucks not working. For one thing, the issue with 'expired' credit cards is real. Of course, the end of the world isn't going to occur because of this, but it is still serious enough to try to fix the problems. You wouldn't really _want_ that elevator to stop working when you're trying to make the appointment on the 40th floor, would you? Sure, it could fail for other reasons too, but this is something that ought to be double-checked since we know about it.

25 years, 11 months

TK50Z-GA

by dburrows＠netpath.net

Any luck with Zane on the board? Dan -----Original Message----- From: Bruce Lane <kyrrin(a)my-dejanews.com> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Saturday, January 02, 1999 6:30 PM Subject: WTD: TK50Z-GA > OK -- I'm making progress. Thanks to John Wilson at Dbit, I found out >that the TK50's I'm using may not actually be "standard" SCSI, but a >bastardized implementation used only for VS2000's. > > With that in mind, if anyone's got a TK50Z-GA in working condition >(NOT the -FA, which is what I have) that they feel like parting with, I >would be happy to buy it. > > Thanks in advance. > > >-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- >Bruce Lane, Owner and head honcho, >Blue Feather Technologies -- kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech [dot] com >Web: http://www.bluefeathertech.com >"...No matter how we may wish otherwise, our science can only describe an object, >event, or living thing in our own human terms. It cannot possibly define any of them..." >

25 years, 11 months

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test-drb January 1999