< Any idea where I could pick myself up one of those? The CDROM is not
<the only price factor that i'm worried about, it's also the external
<SCSI cable. I looked at a DEC SCSI cable that will fit into the back
<SCSI port, and it cost a mere $95. I'm running a incredibly tight
<budget, the story of a teenager's life, and $95 is simply out of the
<question.
Where to get a scsi drive have been covered by others. Since you don't need
the drive all the time you don't need the cable either.
Here's how. Pop the cover amd locate teh SCSI cable (50pin). The design
allowed for several drives internal so plug in to one of those, also
pick up power there as it's available. It's ugly, but it works.
Allison
< Here's my question: I have a VAXstation 3100, and i'm interested in
<upgrading VMS. Currently it runs VMS 5.4. Since the VAX doesn't have
<a cdrom, and i'm assuming the cost of a DEC CDROM is outrageous (i'm
<15, give me a break.), I was wondering if there is a way to install
It does not have to be DEC. IT does have to be SCSI and capable of
512byte blocks. I have an old Toshiba 2x scsi that works ok for this.
<from a network CDROM drive. Could I setup my Linux box to share it's
<CDROM via NFS? Or is there perhaps any software that would allow this?
<Or am I insane? The questions..
Your not insane but, I think the tools to get from Linux NFS(TCPIP) to VMS
(VMS networks with DECNET unless you have UCX or CMUIP) files-11 are not
there.
The real question is why? VMS 5.4 is fine for a standalone system and
likely kermit is on the machine and if you real lucky CMUIP, that enough to
communicate with the net or other machines.
Allison
> >You might be better off looking for a replacement hard disk unit.
There's
> >a 'shoebox' sized thing that contains a 300Mbyte ESDI (I think) drive +
> >the appropriate HP interface board. I can find the number if Joe doesn't
> >beat me to it.
>
> You're way too slow! Who do you think found this and told Steve about
> it? And THEN helped him load it. The ESDI drives are the 7957/7958/7959
> series. They're about 80, 158 and 300 Mb capacity. I think there's a 7957
> on E-OverPay right now.
>
I've got several of the "showbox" drives with my HP 3000/42 but, don't want
to cannibalize that system (I think they're 7963B's). I may have to shop
around for another one.
Last night I fired up the 9000/840 again and got better results. Seems like
the HD is starting to loosen up a little. Could be that the servos were a
little sticky from being stored. Every time I start the system, it gets
fewer errors.
I was able to boot the system in single-user mode and got in as ROOT. I
don't know the exact boot sequence because my terminal failed during the
process ( cold solder joint in the verticle defelection circuitry). By the
time I got it hooked up again, the system had completed booting and I was
magically logged in as ROOT. Yipee!!!
Before I can start the system in multiple user mode, I gotta figure out a
fail safe way to change the ROOT password. According to the MAN pages, you
gotta supply the current password if you use the "passwd" command. That
won't work because I don't know the current password. DOH!
I can think of two possibilities:
1.) Create a new user with ROOT permissions.
2.) Modify the ROOT entry in the /ETC/PASSWORD file. This sounds kinda
risky. If the syntax isn't correct, I could really be screwed.
If anyone has any better suggestions, I'd like to hear them. In any event,
I don't want to risk locking myself out of the system.
It looks like there are very few user files on the system (at least on this
HD). Mostly what I'm seeing is the HPUX OS installation. Either the files
were purged, prior to decommission, or they're on the other HD.
Now, I gotta figure out how to mount the other drive. Every time I run the
command 'mount' I get an ugly error. When I run it, I can hear the HD
seeking and after about 2 minutes, the error message displayed. Gotta
feeling this utility is on one of the bad HD sectors.
Anyway, things are looking better :-)
Catch Ya Later,
Steve Robertson - <steverob(a)hotoffice.com>
The problem is with the pictures and diagrams. Now, if you have tools which
make this a straightforward task achievable in a day or so for the 5k or so
pages ultimately involved, then maybe you're the one for the job, but
beware! It's never as simple as it looks. BTW, I don't think GIF is an
efficient way to represent LINE ART, which is what generally is involved in
illustrations and schematic diagrams.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, June 07, 1999 8:08 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents
>>
>> That, in fact, is the case here. I have two laser printers and three
>> ink-spitters, and a pen plotter, none of which speak PS. They even
require
>> different dialects of PCL. There's even an impact printer from the
>> DOT-Matrix (for multi-part forms) which doesn't speak either.
>>
>> The only language common to all my printers is ASCII. All but the
TOSHIBA
>> Dot-Matrix printer speak HPGL if they're prodded.
>
>Doesn't that say something? Like use plain ASCII if at all possible :-)
>
>Actually, Ghostscript should be able to drive (or be modified to drive)
>at least one of your printers. And it will read/print at least Level 1
>postscript files.
>
>-tony
>
I ran into this from time to time myself, and, in the case where company
politics prevented me from drawing my own, I drew dashed lines around the
structural blocks in my diagram. This made the draftsment less prone to
rearrange my work. Dashed lines are something many draftsmen really hate.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Dwight Elvey <elvey(a)hal.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 5:55 PM
Subject: Re[2]: Disk Drive Documents
>ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
>>
>> On the other hand, I've seen schematics that have been redrawn by
>> draftsmen. They have rearanged the components to make the diagram look
>> balanced on the page. The result is that the logical structure of the
>> schematic has gone. Figuring out how it works is next-to-impossible.
>>
>
>Hi
> I used to hate that when the draftsmen would take my
>carefully organized schematics and crunch them down into
>an unreadable mess. I had them as logical blocks
>because that is the way I thought about the designs.
>When the techs on the bench were trouble shooting,
>they'd always come to me for the original drawings.
>I tried to fight it once but the boss said it
>was wasting too much paper ( let me see, a $60K system
>couldn't afford $0.20 more paper?? ).
>Dwight
>
I received several boxes of old parts, I hope someone might be able to
tell me something about them.
Hard drives...
1- Seagate ST-251, 3- ST-4384E (94186-383H).
1- Control Data 94166-182
1- Miniscribe 3053
Plug in cards...
5- WDC1985 - WD1003-WA2 These look like they might be HD controllers.(I
hope)
Several Zenith Data Systems cards, including a cpu card with an 8088. These
look as if they may have been a PC Clone built on sort of a backplane.
There were about twenty pounds of other cards, but these seem to be the
most interesting.
Regards
Charlie Fox
Charles E. Fox
Chas E. Fox Video Productions
793 Argyle Rd. Windsor N8Y 3J8 Ont. Canada
email foxvideo(a)wincom.net Homepage http://www.wincom.net/foxvideo
It looks to me like the format which offers the most hope of providing for
users of formats other than PDF is the TIFF output from the scanner. That
can be compressed using a commonly available tool like pkzip and it's
already pepared in the process of getting from a paper document to PDF.
Each page will be more or less as it was scanned, though there may be some
noise specks. No extra effort is involved aside from naming and storing
each one, then transferring the whole mess to the web site host.
If Tony wants to OCR it, he can, if SAM wants to skip the schematics, he
can, and pretty much anyone else who wants to do anything else can do that
too. Since a typical scanned page in raw bitmap is about 1 MB, though I
don't know how much compression can be squeezed out of a page of text or a
page of line-art, server capacity may become an issue. However, it may be
realistic to reduce the TIF-formatted files to CD, assuming there's a CD
available on the web host, and then it can deal with the TIF files.
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: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 4:50 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents
>>But, and this applies to text as well, once you've printed them out and
>>scanned them back in again, you've lost that structure. The scanner
>>produces a bitmap (probably a slightly distorted bitmap as noting is
>>perfect). It is _very_ difficult to automatically recover that structure
>>(would you like to write a program that analyses a bitmap and finds
>>component symbols in it?)
>
>Such programs do exist, however. Most of the fancy electronics-oriented
>CAD packages have "schematic capture" modules. And, of course, such
>packages run into the many kilobucks.
>
>--
> 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
>But, and this applies to text as well, once you've printed them out and
>scanned them back in again, you've lost that structure. The scanner
>produces a bitmap (probably a slightly distorted bitmap as noting is
>perfect). It is _very_ difficult to automatically recover that structure
>(would you like to write a program that analyses a bitmap and finds
>component symbols in it?)
Such programs do exist, however. Most of the fancy electronics-oriented
CAD packages have "schematic capture" modules. And, of course, such
packages run into the many kilobucks.
--
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
Please take a look below.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, June 07, 1999 8:27 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents
>> The problem with PS is that it's not trivial (or achievable with
freeware)
>> to display, scale, search, or selectively print portions of it, is it?
PDF
>> allows all these. True, that's no help if you can't run Acroread.
>
>Remember that Postscript is a full programming language, and thus often
>the only way to figure out what a given file will do is to interpret it.
>Even the total number of pages printed by a given file is not easy (or
>even possible) to determine without running the postscript program that
>the file contains.
>
>Ghostscript (at least some versions) is free. That's a complete
>postscript interpretter for just about any modern OS that will run
>postscript programs and output a number of different formats (mostly
>bitmapped images of various types, possibly to drive particular printers
>(like PCL, some dot matrix, etc)).
>
>I don't believe postscript is a particularly useful format for something
>like this. But I could justify it's more portable than PDF (although you
>can do less with it).
>
>
>> Perhaps not the art of the layout, but the order in which things are
>> presented certainly can make the different between a very informative and
>> easy-to-use document and one which is impenetrable. That doesn't mean it
is
>
>True, but...
>
>Very often (in my experience) a given diagram (lets say a schematic)
>applies to several areas of text in a document (lets say the circuit
>description, the set-up instructions, etc). Often this diagram is printed
>in a convenient (for the printer) place in the manual (hopefully near one
>of the sections that applies to it). But continually flipping through the
>manual to relate the diagram with the text is a pain.
>
>A different point, also to do with layout is : Is it better to provide
>text in a platform-specific word processor format (so that the original
>fonts and layout is maintained, but some people can't use it) or in plain
>ASCII so that everyone can use it, but you won't get the right
>fonts/layout all the time. I would argue strongly for the latter (or even
>better, some ASCII-based markup language will hopefully allow you to do
>both).
>
>> I don't like those minimal-effort-PDF's which look like faxed documents,
>> badly aligned with the page boundaries, and looking like poorly rendered
>> dot-matrix images either, but I think it's highly important, for the
>> confidence of the user if not out of respect for the originator, to put
>> forth a creditable presentation of the original document. Making it
barley
>> readable means nearly illegible which is nearly worthless. OCR'ing,
>
>I think you're missing the point...
>
>IMHO if you're going to simply provide a number of scanned pages (not
>OCRed, not editted at all), then you lose a lot of the benefits that PDF
>may have over a simple directory of individual scanned pages (which can
>be equally well cleaned up, etc to make them legible). In which case you
>might as well go back to providing a directory of scanned images which
>can be read on many more types of machine.
Well, I disagree. The guys who write technical doc's get paid a good deal
because they're good at what they do. Most engineers and programmers,
though they are excellent at what they do, they don't read, write, and spell
very well. That's a stereotype I find very well rooted in reality. Why
would I want engineers and programmers to fiddle with writing and
illustration done by competent professionals? If they want to fiddle with
the context, they can transform the source document in some way into the
format they like and edit the result. They shouldn't be allowed to p*ss on
the work many of us have learned to use with great success. It's imperative
that the documents be clean ( no gratuitous specks, spots, etc, that the
lines in the illustrations be straight where they should be, and curved
uniformly if they should be, and the white space be white, not speckled) and
a precise representation of the document it claims to represent. No
gratuitous cartoons, commentary, etc should be included. Neither should
anything be omitted.
>PDF (may) becomes useful when you have text _as text_, not as scanned
>bitmaps. When you have hotlinks in the document to other sections, etc.
Frankly, I don't know how text is represented in PDF. Some of these
documents have hotlinks, others use a tree at the left of the screen. I'm
not sure why there are multiple ways to do navigate.
For reasons I've already explained, not at all relating to my preference,
though it IS my preference, these doc's will probably turn up in PDF.
Whether they are also hammered into a form some of you like better depends
on whether you're able to come up with a way to build that way and find
someone to do it for you. If it's important to have non-PDF formats
available, and I believe it is, then someone has got to build the non-PDF
documents. Since places hosting such document collections already support
several major formats, I doubt there will a dearth of space for additional
formats. I am convinced, however, that, were I not already in possession of
these documents, I'd get them in PDF, maybe even put them on a CD if there
were enough of them, and use them as I please.
>-tony
>
