Well . . . I did think one could get two short cards on one S-100. I did
have something concrete in mind, too. If one inserts a wire-wrap 62 pin
(8-bit ISA) connector into a DIN 41612 right-angle socket, such as what one
finds on a VME wire-wrap board, but of opposite gender, (remembering that I
once sold S-100 wire-wrap boards with a pattern certainly suitable for this
purpose, and VME wire-wrap cards as well) one can, indeed, host two 8-bit
ISA cards on a single s-100 board. This would certainly be cheap enough in
most cases, to warrant such an effort. The software might get to be a
problem, though.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com <CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Saturday, April 03, 1999 6:58 PM
Subject: Re: homemade computer for fun and experience...
>>What might be fun would be an S-100 card to serve as an interface to a
>>Monochrome/Hercules equivalent card and an IBM-style keyboard
>
>Compupro did a similart thing over a decade ago ... it's called the "PC
Video"
>S-100 card.
>
>>thrift store. That would save the hassle of having an extra keyboard and
>>monitor for your "extra" PC.
>
>I dunno - to me the most useful possible console interface is a serial
>port. I can hook a terminal up, I can hook a VAX up, I can hook a
>PC-clone up, etc.
>
>--
> 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
>> Are you insane? The excrutiatingly slow and bloated Microsoft Word
>> screams compared to Acrobat. I get so antsy waiting for Acrobat to update
>> a fricken PDF page on the screen that my head wants to explode.
>>
>> Unless you have the latest and greatest 500Mhz PII wonder machine, Acrobat
>> is a farce.
>Not to mention that the Acrobat user interface _SUCKS_!
There are several alternatives to Acrobat. I'm quite familiar with
them because there are no Acrobat binaries for any of the architectures
that I commonly use.
1. Any Ghostscript release from the past few years does PDF quite nicely.
You have a choice of a command line interface (very useful for doing
batch conversions from PDF to something more usable) or a point-and-drool
shell ("GhostView", aka "gv"). Ghostscript is available for many platforms,
it is independent of any specific windowing system, and it is quite usable
on platforms which lack graphic displays at all. For details, see
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
2. XPDF, which only does PDF (unlike Ghostscript which does postscript
as well) and only can display on X-windows screens, is also available.
See
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
Personally, I think Postscript is a better "high-level" approach to
describing page layout than PDF is, but I also understand the commercial
reasons that force Adobe to push PDF instead.
I've been having a blast lately doing my own printed circuit board layout
in Postscript, incidentally :-). Bezier splines, here we come!
--
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
This is why I'm positng about progress.
I'm well above average with tools, test gear, spare parts and debug
skills. I seriously wonder how many of the "I want a SROCTH because
I've heard they are neat(kewl, cool, gnarly...)." have the skills or
the clues to even power it successfully. These things are as far from
PCs as one gets. The end result is destruction rather than preservation.
OH, "SROCTH" is Some Rare Old Computer To Hack.
Part of the power supply work was removing and repairing an existing
bungled hack that had some of the foil burnt off the board, likely with
some soldering torch of killer proportions. When dealing with old power
supplies like this substitutions are not a good thing.
<Great progress! The stuck bit won't be hard to find/fix. I had a couple of
<bad TTL chips when debugging the 8/f here, they were easy to find. Similar
<problem (always-off bit in certain I/O operations).
I will find it but first back to the power supply as the -15V folded.
<Let us know how your core plane works!
Initial tests indicate it was good, I was able to run a simple 5
instruction program. Short story. The core in this one came from an
8E that had two 8k stacks I got from the Mill in '85 and gave away in
90 or 91 to another Digit (digit=person that works/worked at Digital).
It was known good when given away.
<Schematics and other info's on highgate (when you get time to download the
<viewer!).
There is no free or shareware viewer for that format I can find. If you
have one it can likely save the file as jpg of gif. Why an oddball version
of TIFF was used is beyond me.
Allison
Hi,
----------
> From: CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
> Subject: RE: bringing up an 8f...
> Date: Monday, April 05, 1999 9:33 AM
> I've been having a blast lately doing my own printed circuit board layout
> in Postscript, incidentally :-). Bezier splines, here we come!
But even then, having a layout in postscript for refrerence reasons is
nice. A quad qbus board doesn't fit on a letter format, but a "resize to
fit" do, what is really nice, if you try to document some rewiring..
cheers,
emanuel
Hi,
----------
> From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh(a)aracnet.com>
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
> Subject: Re: bringing up an 8f...
> Date: Sunday, April 04, 1999 8:18 PM
>
> Actually I'm of the opinion that PDF is just about the best format out
> there for documenation, although I know there are a LOT of people that
> disagree with that.
I prefer postscript. There are many tools to view the stuff, print it, or
change. Most of the time i like to print the documents, but i always
reformat them. (something like 2 pages on one pages, landscape format ,
duplex print) simply not to waste so much paper.
only my .002 $
cheers,
emanuel
I got the Base Set of OpenVMS 7.2 doc's that I ordered today. How
disgusting! On the spine, it says "Compaq OpenVMS", and the spines are ALL
white, so they aren't colour coded by type. Oddly two of them are the old
Digital manuals from the 7.1 release.
I don't mind the "Compaq" where the "digital" used to be, it's the "Compaq
OpenVMS" I find sick! How egotistical!
Oh, well, I've got doc's that match the version I'm running now at least
(though the V5 "System Managers Manual" will continue to be the most used
manual). Now if the two Cluster manuals that I ordered at the same time
would ship, I'd be almost happy. Still need up-to-date DECnet manuals
though.
Zane
(Axiously waiting for the V2 Hobbyist CD's to be ready)
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast |
| healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/ |
On 31 Mar 99 at 18:18, Mike Ford wrote:
> M0487 Small, no function or direction keys, and indents on both sides of
> the rear where the ADB plugs are.
Sorry, no IIgs handy at work to check the part number. However...
The M0487 is the model which first shipped with the Mac Classic and
LC.
It is is the successor to the M0116 which was supplied with the SE
series (the M0116 again has no function keys but the frame
surrounding the keys is rectangular and generally more conventional
in shape).
Phil
**************************************************************
Phil Beesley -- Computer Officer -- Distributed Systems Suppport
University of Leicester
Tel (0)116 252-2231
E-Mail pb14(a)le.ac.uk
<I seriously doubt, however, that anyone has written an article about
<mounting two ISA cards on an S-100 board which occupies only a single card
Form factor is of little meaning and actially in many cases pointless.
However I'd already done it using 8bit ISA cards and for many it's
trivial if DMA is not required.
Allison
Hi!
I know this is probably off-topic, but I figured that someone here may be
able to give me a bit of info on this thing.
Today my church gave me this old copy machine (Is mimeograph the proper word
for it?). I've figured out how to load the paper and turn it on, but that
seems to be all. I put the paper in the one side, drop the loading rollers,
push down a lever on the other side, some sort of liquid squirts out of a
reservoir onto a roller, the paper gets pulled through, and comes out the
other side (the side with the lever) into another tray, and is damp (from
whatever squirted on to the roller). On the side where the paper comes out,
there's a large aluminum roller with a slot in it.
I've seen things like these used in movies (I think), and on that roller is
what looks like a piece of carbon paper. If so, how does it work?
Now the questions:
- What is the liquid in the reservoir? It looks and smells like alcohol
(sort of - it's been sitting in there for about 20 years)
- What type of ink (if any) would it use, and where would I find this ink?
- Where does the thing (document - whatever) go that I would want to copy?
I think that's all the questions that I have for now. Please reply to me
privately (don't want to take up the list's bandwidth). I'd like to get
this thing working, since it's in pretty good shape, appears to function,
and still has the original dust cover :)
ThAnX,
--
-Jason Willgruber
(roblwill(a)usaor.net)
ICQ#: 1730318
<http://members.tripod.com/general_1>
>> Consider the instruction set of the x86. The MOV instruction is actually
>> implemented as a small sequence of microinstructions. There is, in fact,
>> no dedicated series of gates and other electronic aparatus which
>> implements the operation of MOV. Instead, it is implemented as a
>> series (or sequence) of smaller operations, such as LOAD REGISTER,
>> ADD REGISTERS, etc. If you are not familiar with the processes of
>> microprogramming, then you should become so. Microprograms are
>> not stored in RAM. Instead, they are stored in ROM.
>
>Microprograms can be stored in RAM. It may not be common to have a 'soft
>microcodes' processor (one where the microcode is stored in volatile
>memory and loaded when the machine boots), but they exist. I can see 3
>from where I am sitting (2 PERQs and a Xerox Daybreak).
>
>If you think of a normal machine code instruction, then there are several
>steps that have to be performed to execute that instruction and fetch the
>next one. You can represent that process either as a collection of random
>logic, or as a state machine with one flip-flop per machine state (which
>is how the Philips P850 does it), or as a program. The last is
>essentially what microcode is.
>
>> For those who are aware of the operations of the HP 21MX processors,
>> these are microprogrammed machines. As it happens, the user of
>> such a computer can alter the microprogramming. This is the computer
>
>In other words the microcode is partially stored in RAM on this machine.
>
>> Now, it is true that the printed text of the program must be converted to
>> the instruction set of the computer but, the process is like this.
>>
>> "CAR" corresponds to the instruction with byte code 0x01
>> "CDR" corresponds to the instruction with byte code 0x02
>>
>> and so on. Of course, the byte values I give are only examples. The
>> true translations are not known to me. However, each operator of
>> the Lisp language will correspond to a single instruction code of the
>> Lisp machine.
>
>
>There is a problem here. The process of programming in Lisp is
>essentially defining new functions. So either _all_ of these are stored
>in microcode (which would require a very large control store) or more
>likely (and I happen to know that the PERQ Spice LISP does it this way),
>there are some 'core' functions (like CAR, CDR, CONS, etc) that are
>implemented as microcode, and higher level functions, including ones
>defined by the user are defined in terms of these (and other higher level
>functions).
>
>In which case, the program that translates a user definition into the
>calls to both microcode and 'machine code' functions is pretty similar to
>a normal Lisp implementation running on a micro (many of which do not
>compile all user input to the machine code of the CPU they happen to run
>on). It's dubious whether you call that an interpretter or a compiler,
>though.
>
>-tony
>
Of course, I over simplified the discussion but, only to get my point
across.
Sure, it is possible for the microcode to be in RAM. The IBM 370's were
just such machines. More than once, while I was an operator of such
computers, the service representative came to the site, opened a panel
on the operator console, and changed the 5 1/4" floppy disk. By doing
so, he changed the microprogram of the computer. This microprogram
was loaded each time the computer was powered on.
For the x86 however, the microcode is hardcoded into the chip.
My wish is for a computer system that provides for dynamically modifiable
microcode, so that my self-modifying programs could obtain a new level
of self-modifyability!
As for the Lisp difficulties, remember, it takes only a few of the basic
operators to define the language. All else can be derived from same,
and AFAIK is derived from same. So, there is no need to implement
derivable functions in microcode.
William R. Buckley
