test-drb June 2000

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

160 participants
580 discussions

Compu-Das (Random Factors) S-100 A/D converter board

by rdd＠smart.net

While checking out the contents of some 8" floppies on my PDP-11/73, I spotted a couple of circuit boards sitting on top of my LA-120 (that reminds me, I've got to get another box of greenbar... hopefully Office Depot still stocks it; can you believe that I've had quite a few co-workers who had no idea what greenbar paper is?). One of these boards is an S-100 bus board, a Compu-Das model 696-33 made by Random Factors, Inc. of Durango, Colorado. The board is partially populated by chips (it came out of a repackaged Dynabyte 5200 system made by a company Computermotor Corp.), two of which are a Burr Brown ADC76KG A/D converter, and another Burr Brown chip: an SHC80KP (not sure what this one is), in addition to various TTL logic. What's interesting about this circuit board is that the chips are all socketed in little copper sockets made into the blue circuit board, and, apparently, to add D/A functionality to this board as well, one just plugs in some (or all?) of the missing chips. Does anyone know anything about this board? -- R. D. Davis rdd(a)perqlogic.com http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd 410-744-4900

24 years, 1 month

Defining Disk Image Dump Standard

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Jun 2, 0:48, Tony Duell wrote: > > {Apple ][<00>soft<00>trks:<40><00>rpm:<15><255><00>{trk:<00><00>logical<00> > > length:<12><34><00>sectors:<10>{sector:<00><00>{sync{bytes:<16><00>value:<255><00>}{header:GCR<00>trk:<00><00>sec:<00><00>physsec:<00><00>head:<00><00>size:<00><01><00>}{data:< > > ---256 binary bytes---- >crc:<xx><xx><00>}}sector: [repeat as reqd] > > }}{track: [repeat as reqd] }} > > Actually, that seems to give you the worst of all worlds.... > > The 'tags' are in ascii, so they're long, hard to search for, etc. And > yet the data is in binary, so the file is not printable. You can't cat it > to the screen to read the header information. No, but you can easily see it in any sensible editor (my definition of "sensible" has always included the ability to show binary or at least control characters :-))... > I must admit that I find files containing printable text information > mixed up with binary data to be _very_ annoying unless there's a good > reason for doing it. > > If you must use some kind of markup language, at least encode the data as > strings of hex digits, or base-64 encoding or something like that. I don't have any objection to that, in fact I'm inclined to agree, but I felt others don't want to take up more space than necessary. If encoded, I'd go for base64. It's the most efficient of the common schemes (hex, uuencoded, base64), has none of the ambiguities of uuencode (there are some very broken uu..code implementations around, because it's not fully specified), and if anyone does want to read it manually, a decoder is only a few lines of <language of choice>. On the other hand, hex has some advantages: easy to read, very easy to {en,de}code, and it would be more appropriate, perhaps, for binary values in tags (assuming the values weren't just written in ASCII in the first place). -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York

24 years, 1 month

Altos 1000 (fwd)

by vcf＠siconic.com

Can anyone help Yuval out? Reply-to: yuval(a)iapl.net.au ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 11:05:09 +1000 From: Yuval Avrahami - IAPL <Yuval(a)iapl.net.au> To: "'vcf(a)vintage.org'" <vcf(a)vintage.org> Subject: Altos 1000 hello, I am desperately looking for a manual for the Altos 1000. Will you be able to refer me to a source where I can find the manual? thanks and regards, Yuval Avrahami, CCA Consultant INFOTECH Associates Pty Ltd (ANC 081 288 539) 3/7a, Gibbes Street, Chatswood NSW 2067 Sydney, Australia Phone +612 9882 1022, Facsimile +612 9882 1134 Mobile (0408) 691 566 Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a six in a pile of nines... Coming soon: VCF 4.0! VCF East: Planning in Progress See http://www.vintage.org for details!

24 years, 1 month

Amiga Dev. stuff avail in SoCal

by jpl15＠netcom.com

I have been contacted by a person who was an Amiga developer and who wishes a rather large stash of Amiga Stuff to disappear from his garage, thus precluding the onset of domestic disharmony. And, as conscientious collectors, it behooves us to maintain harmonious domesticity, if in our power to do so... Please contact Don Jenkins at wa6ogh(a)msn.com for more info. I am posting this for Don, so please contact him directly. Cheers John

24 years, 1 month

New Find! Rolm 1602... Does anyone have any info/pointers/etc...?

by CordaAJ＠nswc.navy.mil

Hi! I just picked up a Rolm 1602 system at a local hamfest. It looks like an interesting toy (and a way to expand my horizons beyond the Sun/SGI/Dec arena. It even has a front panel interface :-) The unit seems to be in pretty decent shape (apparently it did not go through "Military" (i.e. sledgehammer) decommissioning, as the party I bought it from indicated that he obtained it from a NASA surplus auction). Unfortunately, there were no docs whatsoever with this critter. I seem to vaguely remember that some of the Rolm systems were just repackaged and beefed-up Data General Novas, but I could be wrong. Can anyone provide me with info/pointers/tech docs on this critter? I've done a web search and a dejanews search, but haven't had any luck. I even checked through some of the classiccmp archives, since I remembered seeing something on a Rolm system here a few months back, but I was unable to locate anything. Some of the things I'd like to know (or find pointers to): Hardware interface pinouts/docs: i.e. where do I connect an ASCII terminal... (There is no obvious serial connector, i.e. DB25, etc. All the connectors are some sort of mil-std twist-lock jobs) Does this critter have a disk interface of some sort, etc. Power requirements and pinouts: The previous owner had an AC line cord attached to a connector on the back, but I don't necessarily trust that he knew what he was doing. Is this really capable of running at 117V@60Hz, or did it need something oddball like 400Hz? Instruction set documentation: So I can play with the front panel :-) Software: i.e. Did this thing have a simple executive program of some sort? I downloaded Bob Supnik's Nova emulator in the hope that it might provide me with some hints as to Nova architecture, but there wasn't much documentation there. Will a Rolm 1602 run DG Nova code? If so, is there an archive of DG Nova software somewhere? The back of this critter uses a bunch of what looks like mil-std twist-lock connectors. Does anyone know an (affordable) source for these? I'm going to try pulling it apart tonight (It appears to be held together by about 17,000 screws :-). Any info would be greatly appreciated.... -Thanks in advance... -al- -acorda(a)geocities.com

24 years, 1 month

Defining Disk Image Dump Standard (ACHTUNG very long!)

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Jun 5, 20:55, Hans Franke wrote: > Well, back to our theme: > Pete, I realy agree to your idea about a sensible editor, just > we are living in a real world, where real software is to be used. > And since this is supposed to be an open standard, a sensible > editior can't be assumed... Even if we would try, I doubt that > such a thing is available on every obscure home computer system. > Even chances for a simple text editor can be bad. So including > binary as default is a bad idea :-) I only included it because there appeared to some strong opposition to "wasted" bytes. What I did was bolt tags onto the binary, deliberately producing what Tony accurately described as the worst of both worlds. Actually, if you look at the examples, the ASCII form in the tags, at least, typically takes just about the same space as the binary would, so there's absolutely no reason to use anything but ASCII. > - I would even go further and > restrict all markup specific parts for only using the characters > A-Z, 0-9 and some well defined (read only the absolute necersary > minimum) characters. Thereby avoiding 99.9% of the problems raised by incompatible character set representations. Agreed. > Let'S just assume we would need three times - oh, well lets > say four times the space to encode so an Apple Disk will > need a whooping 600 kb That's only a thousand on a CD ;-) -- Pete Peter Turnbull Dept. of Computer Science University of York

24 years, 1 month

Fwd: HX-20

by owad＠applefritter.com

Can anybody help her out? Respond to CTI(a)ncentral.com, not me. Tom ---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------------- Date: 6/5/00 7:08 AM Received: 6/5/00 2:20 PM From: Kimberly Bauer, CTI(a)ncentral.com To: owad(a)applefritter.com Tom, Browsed your information and thought maybe you could direct us to a parts center for HX-20. In need of the optional mini cassette recorder. Please reply to: Kim Bauer Contact Technologies, Inc CTI(a)ncentral.com ----------------- End Forwarded Message ----------------- ------------------------------Applefritter------------------------------ Apple Prototypes, Clones, & Hacks - The obscure, unusual, & exceptional. ---------------------<http://www.applefritter.com/>---------------------

24 years, 1 month

OT: Archiving data/video/movies/photos/oral history

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> >Don't tell tell any of my CD's that! I have quite a few oldies - first > >generation pressings from the mid-1980s - and they work just as well > >today as they did when pressed. To add to that, my CD player is also a > >old type (remember the Index feature on CDs? I've only run across two CDs > >that use them) > > I've got several CD's that uses the Index feature, but they're all > Bach CD's. (OK, one of them is Wendy Carlos playing, > but that counts, right?) > > For old-music-CD's, who here remembers the "Preemphasis" bit? I've got > a player that indicates that status on the display, though the only CD > I have that uses it is a special test disk. Here's another one for those with long memories. Who remembers subcode graphics? I have one audio CD that contains subcode graphics that I've never been able to view (they're encoded in something like the Euro Teletext format). Anyone know how to read and display subcode graphics? -doug q

24 years, 1 month

Info on the Dynalogic Hyperion

by mgregory＠vantageresearch.com

Hi Leo, bad news, I'm afraid. When I went back to my local thrift shop on the weekend, the Hyperion that had been there for a few weeks was gone. I asked the clerk if she knew whether it had sold or been dumpstered, but she had no clue. A quick check of the dumpster didn't turn up anything either : v ( Still, I'll keep my eyes open. They do seem to turn up every now and again around here. They must have been popular with the oilpatch guys, who were on the road a lot. Regards, Mark Gregory

24 years, 1 month

Woz and his (give or take) six chips

by wrm＠ccii.co.za

Mike Cheponis needs to know... http://www.retro.co.za/apple/ W

24 years, 1 month

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test-drb June 2000