test-drb October 2000

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

184 participants
568 discussions

by fauradon＠mn.mediaone.net

Yeah I do not inted to operate any of them in the shed (no juice there). I do not have the storage parameters for most of them so I'm looking for a generality. I will pull out all batteries and desolder the ones I can desolder. Where can I find dessicant? Francois -----Original Message----- From: Jim Arnott <jrasite(a)eoni.com> To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Date: Saturday, October 21, 2000 10:24 AM Subject: Re: Cold storage >Thoughts... > >Should be okay if: > >you pull the cmos/pram batteries >you seal in plastic with dessicant > >Of course, I could be wrong. You might also check the typical >'environmental conditions' for the systems though I believe that >that's operational parameters... > >Jim Arnott

24 years, 2 months

Cold storage

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

> I think so but I'd put each one in a plastic bad adn seal it first to >prevent condensation. Add silica gell to keep it dry in the bag. Prevent vermin from attacking it or nesting in it. Cold will generally not hurt anything. Heat can be worse. >>Should I insulate the shed first? Wouldn't hurt but making sure the wildlife don't go in and out all the time is important. Allison

24 years, 2 months

Vax Station 3100

by ncherry＠home.net

I just got my VS3100 and it has no drive (I expected that). It has a part number of PM20A-AB. It has ~16M of RAM, a Video ram sim and nothing else. What do I have? What RAM can this beast take? How large a drive can it take? The only other marking are BA42A and CPU KN01. Thanks PS This beast will be the drives for my Microvax ii until I get an IDE card in it. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

24 years, 2 months

Idiotic people who do not know the value of classic equipment

by Mzthompson＠aol.com

And the sad part is that the idiots are everywhere, including a local instituition of higher learning. I have said it before, and probably even on this forum, that being a member of such an instituition in no way indicates any common sense whatsoever. The latest just proves that it applies to just plain smarts as well. One of my friends who works there (until recently) returned from vacation a few weeks back to find that much documentation had been pitched, including the documentation for the currently in use machines and operating systems. Last year, while he was on vacation, they managed to fill a dumpster with DEC hardware, VAXstations, DECstations, uVAX 2000's to name some. He had already made arrangements for he and I to haul it off and we were just waiting for some warmer weather. He managed to dive and save a few, but the students who did the actual tossing had 'popped' the monitors. It was just to dangerous to dive very deep. There is a good side to this story though. Last month he heard the rumor of the decision to pitch some more and moved on it quickly. We started hauling almost immediately. In addition to the 100 BrandX machines mentioned in another post yesterday, they also allowed us to take a few DEC & SUN machines. He has since then left for greener pastures, but we believe we now have them 'trained' to call us as they retire more DEC in the near future. Only time will tell. Mike

24 years, 2 months

NatSemi 32000 (Was: RE: Drop the Microsoft & OS Discussion!)

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Oct 21, 3:24, Derek Peschel wrote: > Second, I believe Acorn made a 32016 "second processor" box for their BBC > Micro. Those boxes connect to the main machine (2MHz 6502) via a 2MHz bus > (the Tube) with a semi-custom chip (with a couple of FIFOs and some > registers) at each end. I believe the second processor has a stub OS in ROM > with entry points matching the ones in the main machine. The main OS knows > how to process calls from the Tube and how to download software to the Tube. > I thin the OS on the 32016 second processor was TRIPOS. I'm still sorting > out the conflicting docs -- one of them mentions UNIX but that might have > been scrapped. I don't think it was either. I think it was an Acorn proprietary OS called PANOS, which looked vaguely Unix-like. IIRC, it used BCPL rather than C. Somewhere I have all the advertising blurb (but not accessible ATM, if it's where I think it is), and I used to have a complete set of PANOS disks and docs, but I may have given that to someone who actually has a 32016. I never did, though for a while I did have an Acorn Scientific, which was a Beeb and 32016 co-pro integated in a bulky box with colour monitor and hard drive. PANOS, by the way, was names after a certain rather good Greek restaurant in Cambridge, which Acorn staff were later banned from -- not because of the OS, I hasten to add, but allegedly because one night Chris Curry took a swing at Clive Sinclair in there. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York

24 years, 2 months

classiccmp web page traffic report

by west＠tseinc.com

You know, it never dawned on me to tell people about this... i just thought about it and took a look and was suprised at the statistics :) For the traffic report of www.classiccmp.org, go to http://webtrends.tseinc.com/www.classiccmp.org Regards! Jay West PS - I'm still waiting for those two anonymous RK05 drives to show up, but HP 7900A's will do just fine too :)

24 years, 2 months

Semi-OT: "Mining" Web Sites

by healyzh＠aracnet.com

OK, I've got a question that I'm really not sure how to go about looking for the answer to. I know that there used to be commercial products for the Mac that did this several years ago, but I think their long gone. Basically the platform the software runs on doesn't matter as long as it isn't Windows. I'm looking for a software package that can take a snapshot of a website for archival purposes and go 'x' levels deep. I want it to be able to snag stuff such as PDF documents. The problem being that every time I turn around Compaq has managed to loose even more of the old DEC hardware related documentation, and if it's still there it takes ages to find it. I've saved numerous PDF files, but I'm now wanting to do a better job of mirroring the data and preserving it. For an example of the problem good luck figuring out which old PCI video cards are supported by OpenVMS! My thought is to archive specific area's and toss them on CD-R for latter access via a web browser. So something that can update the links to a local disk structure is also needed. I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing simular problems, or having a desire to do something like this. I'm also fairly sure this kind of a tool is of interest to this group. Zane

24 years, 2 months

NatSemi 32000 (Was: RE: Drop the Microsoft & OS Discussion!)

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> I vote to drop-kick this weeks discussion/useless rant > on Windows and other OS's and other pokes to list members. > Get back to you classic computers, VAXen, boxen, > whatever-you-have-en, which this list is meant for! > > Anyone with me on this? I've heard little discussion (since I joined earlier this year) about the National Semiconductor 32000 processor line. IIRC, some (but not all) of the chips in this family were true 3-address machines. Anyone familiar with them? Do any significant assembly language programming on one? -dq

24 years, 2 months

nice paper on Multics emacs

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> > http://www.best.com/~thvv/mepap.html > That link could go away if Tom ever chose to re-host the site. He says this link is the permanent one: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html > As Eric pointed out, it's nice to keep the h/w, but it's even > better if you can keep the s/w! (And, no, I don't know where > to get a copy of Multics emacs...) Two problems: It's written in PL/I and MacLisp. While the source to both of those exist, Bernie has said parts of MacLisp utilize some of the special EIS instructions in the 6180 machine that may or may not have ever been completely documented, so it's really tied to the hardware. But here's a teaser in the form of the comment block from the Multics Emacs Incremental Redisplay module, which was written in Lisp: ;;; ****************************************************** ;;; * * ;;; * * ;;; * Copyright (c) 1978 by Massachusetts Institute of * ;;; * Technology and Honeywell Information Systems, Inc. * ;;; * * ;;; * * ;;; ****************************************************** ;;; ;;; ;;; Multics EMACS Redisplay ;;; Greenberg, March 1978 ;;; 3/6/78 inceptus Luna meo adjutorio. ;;; 4/19/78 duas fenestras feci. ;;; 5/30/78 ^V creavi. ;;; 6/18/78 signum linearum elongatarum, ^0^L, &c ;;; 7/5/78 Cuncta lineae comparandae sunt, quicumque sint. ;;; 7/27/78 Ostendae sunt lineae quae non in textu sunt. ;;; 8/23/78 Dua fenestrae tacebant, atque mundae factae erant. ;;; 9/6/78 Indices linearum originalum per fenestris comparo. ;;; 3/1/79 Quando laboro in medio linearum elongatarum, omnes moveatur. ;;; 4/4/79 Minibuffer in multos divisus est. ;;; 4/12/79 Mille fenestrae florent. ;;; 8/24/79 ^V et ESC-V argumentes dedi. ;;; Septembri 1979 hoc redisplicator Paltere sustenetur. ;;; 2/12/80 tty-no-cleolp impletur, ;;; mode-line-hook & local-display-end-string ;;; 10/23/80 Praefix minibufferis non delendum est. ;;; 1980 Decembri e manibus meis dimissi te ut sole per mundum ambules. ;;; ;;; Welcome to the rosy-fingered dawn of the New Era: ;;; Presenting, at popular demand; ;;; A Comment In English! ;;; ;;; 30 June 1981 Extending local displays, Richard Mark Soley ;;; 1 July 1981 suppress-remarks and minibuffer-clear-all, Richard Soley ;;; 5 November 1981 truncate overlength modelines, Richard Soley ;;; 19 August 1982 fixed inverse-real-world-xcoord for \c lines, ;;; Barry Margolin ;;; 20 August 1982 added CAH's real underlining code, Barry Margolin ;;; 12 October 1982 modified underlining to use constant 400, Barmar ;;; -dq

24 years, 2 months

Preserving a Multics System

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> > > So is anyone archiving the software for this Mulitcs system? > > > > An archive of Multics exists at MIT. If my recent personal > > experiences with 9 track magtape can be considered representative > > and not anecdotal, then I think the tapes will still be readable > > even ten years from now. > > > What kind of 9-Track tape drives can read these tapes though? IIRC, the > drives we had on the DPS-8's were pretty much bog-standard 9-Tracks (I > remember writting a tape to be read on a Sun box). Well, these tapes were written by Multics tape_archive command (the granddaddy of tar). Back in '93, someone at MIT used what I presume was tar on some Un*x to restore the archive to the MIT Andrew File System. However, tar seems not to have handled the Multics symbolic links occuring on the tape before the objects to which they pointed, so not everything got restored. In particular, the portion of the archive that should have included the running binaries was not restored. This would mean recompiling the system and generating the boot image, but there's a worse problem... The most serious problem with the archive, though, was that MIT never had the source to the later Multics PL/I compiler, though they did at one time have the source to the earlier one. But of course the existing Multics source relies on the later compiler. So, assuming the restored archive contains all the pieces of the OS at the time the snapshot was taken, you'd still need to get or reimplement a PL/I compiler for the Level 68 architecture (a plain DPS-8 is a Level 61, IIRC, while the DPS-8/M is a level 68 machine, the original implementation of which was for the Honeywell 6180 machine). Ultimately, for a proper preservation, permission would have to be secured from Bull to run the OS, have the source, etc. What exists at MIT is valuable for some research on how a Multics was put together, but as a basis for a museum system would leave many many man-years of reprogramming left to be done. As a programmer, for me, that would be the fun part. But I intend on contacting TPTB at MIT to see whether I could donate the labor to attempt a second, more proper restoration of the archive, by using GNU TAR and making whatever changes need to be made to it so that it does the job right. Current plans are to contact them this time next year. -dq

24 years, 2 months

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test-drb October 2000