test-drb December 1999

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

186 participants
742 discussions

Data Media Conversion -- commercial interest?

by CLASSICCMP＠trailing-edge.com

>A quick pair of questions to the list out of curiosity: > >Do you think there is much data out there on older storage >media (paper tape, punch cards, 7-track tape, 9-track tape) >that is waiting to be converted to newer (cd-rom, 8mm) media? I certainly think so! >Are there commercial firms that specialize in such transfers/ >conversions of data from older media to newer media? Yep, see the URL in my .sig below for more information on one such outfit :-). -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/ 7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927

25 years, 4 months

uVAX-I and Plessy systems (was RE: VAXstation 3100 history)

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<looking forward to getting that MicroVAX 3100 is it will free me from the <tyranny of small, slow, fragile and increasingly rare MFM disks. One downs <I caught from a FAQ is that SCSI MicroVAXen don't like disks over 1.07Gb - <too many blocks to keep track of with a 21-bit pointer. Fortunately, I hav <a couple of old DEC 3105's I can pull off of an Amiga. Quite the disks in <their day, but discards now. The problem is the boot and system tracks must be in the first 1gig. I've never seen problems with larger. Allison

25 years, 4 months

Aim 65

by OLIVIERO.A＠mail.omnitel.it

Hello, i have a machine based on AIM 65: it is used to command a texile machine. I need to substite the disk driver. Do you know if it's possible to adapt a standard driver (such a 3 1/2 drive) to this machine? Thanks, Angelo Oliviero

25 years, 4 months

Teleco Question... More on my devious plan....

by ethan_dicks＠yahoo.com

--- Arfon Gryffydd <arfonrg(a)texas.net> wrote: > First, Thanks to all who have helped so far... > I have some old modems (TRS-80, acoustic and etc.) which I would like to > use (flashing LEDs are cool) so, I want to build a little telco emulator to > interface with the modems in one of my Linux boxes. > > I figure an LM556 for the dial tone... A tone decoder for dialing... Not > sure an easy way to decode pulse dialing. For cheap? Either a stepping relay or some kind of PIC might do it. I don't know how you'll do it for under $25, though. I have this one relay that would do it - it looks like a clock face on the back with thirty or so solder points. There are two relay inputs (110VAC) - step and reset. With something like this, it would be possible to assign a number, 28, say, and require that all the digits add up to that number. It would be, in effect, like a 1920's central office, but with a one-dimensional stepper instead of a three-dimensional stepper. Those things are fun to watch if you ever get to see one in a science museum. Perhaps you could simlate that relay in solid state? If you have a circuit that will detect tones, perhaps you could run another connection from the same line conditioners to a series of decade counters. The phone number wouldn't be software settable, but it might accomplish the task. The trick is that the phone company designates a minimum time between pulses on the same number and a minimum interval between numbers. Old dial phones had a mechanical governor to space the pulses jost so and to prevent the next number >from starting too soon. I'd tell you the timing, but I just don't know. If I had to, I could hook up a scope/timer to this old dial phone I have. > As for ring... I am thinking using two charged capacitors and switching > them. That's the first method I came up with to limit the current cheaply. The cheap-o boxes I've seen worked by running 110VAC through a half-wave rectifier and current-limiting resistors. It's not perfect, but there's lots of tolerance on the part of phone equipment. My dad used to work for the phone company when he was right out of high school. Much later, when we were growing up in the 1970's, he had a box of old phones. We ran wires from my room to my next younger brother's room and just hooked a couple of batteries in the circuit and had a non- ringing intercom. I don't recall the voltage, but I think it was only 6v or 12v. True telco voltage is, IIRC, -48VDC. > Any suggestions? I'd like to do this for less that $25.00. I've seen telco simulators made in electrical junctions boxes sell at hamfests for about that. They didn't do any sort of dialling detection, though. I used to make a Cadillac telco simulator... I still have a box of parts and boards. We charged $800 for them. They would do half- connections, failed connections, fake busy, etc. The only think I ever used them for was to program an V.24 autodialer driver for our sync datacomm products. The rig was two of our own MC68K serial boards in the same BA-11, two Motorola 2400 baud sync modems and this box. Ny changing the dialed phone number, I could change the behavior in the telco simulator to force the modems to generate BUSY messages and NO CONNECT messages to run the dialer software through its paces. It was a hoot. The cheapest ones I've seen that did anything more than provide voltage and fake dialtone were around $200. Good Luck, -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. All in one place. Yahoo! Shopping: http://shopping.yahoo.com

25 years, 4 months

Teleco Question... More on my devious plan....

by edick＠idcomm.com

Decoding the pulse dialing should be easy enough. If you consider what the mechanism was 40 years ago, i.e. the mechanical central office, with stepping relays which responded to the pulses created by your telephone, it will become obvious that what each number did was drive a stepping relay which selected which bank of relays would be the destination of the next stream of pulses. If you count the pulses, which wil be at either 10 or 20 Hz, depending on the age of the telephone generating them, you'll get the number dialed. count/time the pulses. When one pulse is missing or 10 have been accumulated, go to the next digit ... Certain digits have special meanings, i.e. starting with a '1' meant it should expect a 10-digit number instead of a 7-digit one. A '0' also had special meaning, didn't it? If you poke around in some of the older National Semiconductor data books, there are plenty of circuits which they no longer sell which show details of how many of these functions are created, including the DTMF decoding, etc. EXAR and Signetics published lots of examples also. It's no coincidence that they all sold PLL components. Dick -----Original Message----- From: Arfon Gryffydd <arfonrg(a)texas.net> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Wednesday, December 01, 1999 9:07 AM Subject: Re: Teleco Question... More on my devious plan.... >First, Thanks to all who have helped so far... > > >I have some old modems (TRS-80, acoustic and etc.) which I would like to >use (flashing LEDs are cool) so, I want to build a little telco emulator to >interface with the modems in one of my Linux boxes. > >I figure an LM556 for the dial tone... A tone decoder for dialing... Not >sure an easy way to decode pulse dialing. > >As for ring... I am thinking using two charged capacitors and switching >them. That's the first method I came up with to limit the current cheaply. > >Any suggestions? I'd like to do this for less that $25.00. >---------------------------------------- > Tired of Micro$oft??? > > Move up to a REAL OS... >######__ __ ____ __ __ _ __ # >#####/ / / / / __ | / / / / | |/ /## >####/ / / / / / / / / / / / | /### >###/ /__ / / / / / / / /_/ / / |#### >##/____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ /_____/ /_/|_|#### ># ###### > ("LINUX" for those of you > without fixed-width fonts) >---------------------------------------- >Be a Slacker! http://www.slackware.com > >Slackware Mailing List: >http://www.digitalslackers.net/linux/list.html

25 years, 4 months

Data Media Conversion -- commercial interest?

by kyrrin＠bluefeathertech.com

At 13:17 01-12-1999 -0600, you wrote: >A quick pair of questions to the list out of curiosity: > >Do you think there is much data out there on older storage >media (paper tape, punch cards, 7-track tape, 9-track tape) >that is waiting to be converted to newer (cd-rom, 8mm) media? Probably quite a bit, yes. >Are there commercial firms that specialize in such transfers/ >conversions of data from older media to newer media? Yes indeed. In fact, I run one. ;-) (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT) www.bluefeathertech.com/media.html for details. HOWEVER -- if it's just a minor job for a fellow listmember/classic computer user, like copying a distro tape or writing a NetBSD load onto some oddball media, I typically don't charge anything other than shipping, or I give a big fat discount on my published rates. Others have done the same for me, and I certainly don't see any reason not to do it for others. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Bruce Lane, Owner and head honcho, Blue Feather Technologies http://www.bluefeathertech.com // E-mail: kyrrin(a)bluefeathertech.com Amateur Radio: WD6EOS since Dec. '77 "Our science can only describe an object, event, or living thing in our own human terms. It cannot, in any way, define any of them..."

25 years, 4 months

Looking for Heath H89 software and some advice

by dmb＠itasoftware.com

Dwight Elvey <elvey(a)hal.com> wrote: >Before anyone can help you, you need to find out if the >drive is soft or hard sectored. Dwight (and Tony), thanks for the info. It looks like both machines have only a hard sector (H17) controller. All the disks I have are hard sector disks. It's a bit mysterious why none of the HDOS disks will boot, but the CP/M disks will. I would suspect bit rot, but when I check out the CP/M format disks, they *all* seem to read fine. I wonder if it has to do with the drive's rotational speed? I'd like to calibrate it, but I'm afraid doing so might destroy the disk I put in there. BTW, is there any place left that sells hard sector floppy disks? Or perhaps the CP/M file system had more error correction, and thus CP/M is better able to recover flaky disks? These disks are all 20 years old now, after all... Dave

25 years, 4 months

Amstrad CPC 6128 Floppy problem

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Dec 1, 17:13, Peter Joules wrote: > The motor doesn't move so plan B > I have taken a known working drive out of a PCW and that doesn't spin up > either. In both cases the LED which looks through the hole in the > middle of the disk comes on and the LED on the front flashes briefly as > the machine tries to access the drive. > > I suppose the next step is to check the voltages on the supply. There > are 4 wires 1 red, one orange, and 2 black. Do you know what voltages > are supposed to be on each, and relative to what? Sounds like the +5V which powers the drive logic is OK, and the +12V for the motor is AWOL. The black wires are the 0V returns for the two supplies, and IIRC red is +5V and orange is +12V. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York

25 years, 4 months

Amstrad CPC 6128 Floppy problem

by peter＠joules0.demon.co.uk

I have a CPC6128 which reports that there is no disk in the drive when I try to run a program or even |dir. I have opened the box up and it looks as if the drive isn't spinning up. Does anyone know about the internals of this (3") drive? I wonder if there is a microswitch somewhere which is perhaps not making contact. -- Regards Pete

25 years, 4 months

Obsolete media (was: Whats the screwiest thing you collect?)

by edick＠idcomm.com

Our local government facilities offer 8200 format to whoever asks for it, but they never offered 6250 BPI in the bureaus I occasionally visited. It's actually fact that though they offer 8200 format, that's because it's a common subset of what they use. I'm not sure that's the case with the 800NRZI or 1600PE formats they previously made available but I bought into the 8mm stuff because of the media cost. The 8500 has twice the capacity of the 8200 and the 8500C and 8505 have twice that. Currently used 8mm drives have twice what they have and the newer ones not only have doubled that on a 112 meter tape, but quadrupled the transfer rates at the same time. Now, the tape drives I see them using hold nearly 60 GB all on a cartridge of which two will fit in your shirt pocket if you're not as fat as the average American. Now, wouldn't YOU rather carry a $5 cartridge in you shirt pocket rather than 15 9-track reels, and how about buying them and storing them? Dick -----Original Message----- From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Tuesday, November 30, 1999 8:06 PM Subject: Re: Obsolete media (was: Whats the screwiest thing you collect?) >Rumor has it that Richard Erlacher may have mentioned these words: > >>Some years back, the GOV switched from 9-track to 8mm, using the Exabyte >>8200 as its standard. This was because you could hold what was formerly >>stored on a truckload of 9-track tape on a single cartridge which would fit >>in your pocket. > >A 2400foot tape at 6250tpi will give over 170 Meg or so, at my rough >calculations... (as in not counting the BOT, EOT and stuff like that...) >and even at 1600tpi it'll give over 43 Meg storage. An 8200 in >noncompressed cartridge will store 2500 Meg, which produces equal storage >to 15 9-tracks @ 6250tpi, or 58 tapes at 1600tpi. > >Having worked with the Gubbermint, I do know that they supported the >6250dpi datarate (if you could...) and I've carried 15 2400foot 9-track >tapes all at once when I worked in the tape library at EDS Auburn Hills >back in '89-'90. Hardly a truckload to me... or am I a *lot* stronger than >I think... ;-) > >I will admit that even back then, we used a lot more 3490 tapes, which >could store 550Meg per cartridge (and we had 8-cartridge autoloaders... >4Gig was a *lot* of storage way back then...). > >Cheers, >Roger "Merch" Merchberger >-- >Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers >Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig. > >If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead >disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.

25 years, 4 months

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

test-drb December 1999