test-drb August 2000

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

152 participants
352 discussions

Discontinued IC's: Fairchild (?) MB15604; FPGA?

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> The first time I was exposed to programmable logic it was with "PAL"s. > These are fuse programmed and-or-invert gates tied to an array of > interconnects. The term PAL was trademarked by the parent company (whose > name escapes me at the moment MMD?, but AMD bought them) and so the generic TI's PALs have their numbers printed on the chip as PAL162LA, etc., so I would have guessed TI... -dq

23 years, 9 months

Another reason to preserve systems

by rdd＠smart.net

Greetings, A short while ago, I just thought of yet another reason to preserve computer equipment, particularly that which is the most durable. While doing some research for someone else pertaining to application service providers (ASPs) - which I don't like, I began thinking of things mentioned by Sun and Microsoft that give me the creeps: the thought of programs, applications, operating systems and, worse yet, one's own data, aacessed by, and stored somewhere on, the Internet, not locally. A user would have no control over one's files. If enough people will be foolhardy enough to fall for the marketing hype, and begin using "network appliances" instead of computers, 10, 20, or 30 years from now, will home computers with local mass storage even be sold, or be legal to own, for that matter? After all, we know what mindless sheep most people appear to be when it comes to following the herd and not thinking for themselves. BTW, what I've been researching is the danger of the use of ASPs for medical claims processing, and when one begins digging into this, one begins to see the commercial and governmental interests involved in people's medical records, and it's not nice. There's the problem with non-objective medical information presented by web sites such as WebMD/Healtheon (which also want to process medical claims as ASPs) due to conflicts of interest who have advertisers and shareholders to consider. For those in the US, some may be surprised when they learn the realities of HCFA and the HIPAA, and how much privacy they stand to lose by laws promoted by certain politicians (including the president) as increasing privacy, when they really do just the opposite - not to mention the temporary moratorium on national IDs for everyone to be used for medical purposes, ...then there's the work towards the creation of a national database for medical records. I won't even begin to touch on such areas as the commercial and governmental influences involved with the A.M.A. (no wonder many physicians don't belong to it!) and conflicts of interests that affect nonpprofit web sites such as Intellihealth (look into its connections with Aetna, and what Aetna has done to people's health with it's HMOs) and Medem. Before anyone flames me, please look into this yourself if you value your health and the confidentiality of your medical records... then express your concerns to your physician. -- R. D. Davis rdd(a)perqlogic.com http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd 410-744-4900

23 years, 9 months

microfiche and scanning

by Innfogra＠aol.com

In a message dated 8/1/2000 1:00:15 PM Pacific Daylight Time, jim(a)calico.litterbox.com writes: > Get a photographic enlarger and hack the film holder > to hold the fiche, then blow the fiche up optically to 12x17 The trouble with this is the time to do it. 10,000 fiche is at least 40, 000 pages. Doing this manually would take years of spare time. For a large volume the best answer is to invest in one of the Canon Fiche to CD-ROM Printers that has been mentioned earlier. I know a couple of people who do this as a service business (and have been doing it for several years now). The equipment should be available used if one wants to save money. I have contacts in the microfilm equipment business if you want to contact me offline. Paxton

23 years, 9 months

Commodore 64 available

by spc＠armigeron.com

I received the following from a friend on another mailing list (not computer related) and thought I would forward it here. Please respond directly to Rosalie if you are interested. -spc (Thought you guys might be able to help her) Forwarded message: > From trailpal(a)mailcity.com Thu Jul 27 20:25:48 2000 > To: spc(a)armigeron.com > Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 17:25:01 -0700 > From: "trail pal" <trailpal(a)lycos.com> > Message-ID: <LOEBMBGPIOHNEAAA(a)mailcity.com> > Mime-Version: 1.0 > X-Sent-Mail: off > Reply-To: trailpal(a)lycos.com > X-Expiredinmiddle: true > X-Mailer: MailCity Service > Subject: Re: [dw] UPS rant > X-Sender-Ip: 134.4.50.89 > Organization: Lycos Communications (http://comm.lycos.com:80) > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > Content-Language: en > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > > Sean - > > I have a commodore 64 from around 1980, plus associated printer, tapedrive, diskdrive, joysticks, and software. Any ideas on : > a) possiblity of working? > b) possibility of selling it to someone? > Oh, yeah, I also have books on programming the 4-voice midi synth in it and something called a "memory map". > > Just wondering whether to hang onto it or find it a better home. > > Rosalie

23 years, 9 months

microfiche and scanning

by jim＠calico.litterbox.com

Since y'all are talking seriously expensive hardware ($50,000 and up), here's a much cheaper thought. Get a photographic enlarger and hack the film holder to hold the fiche, then blow the fiche up optically to 12x17. This quadruples the size and thereby reduces the necessary reslolution from 5000x5000 to 1250x1250, which a top end consumer scanner or midrange pro scannershould be able to do. The scanner may set you back a thousand dollars or more, but the other 49,000 buys a lot of photographic paper and chemicals... -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BeOS Powered! -----------------------------------------------------------------------

23 years, 9 months

SCSI settings HP 7980 S tapedrive

by fmc＠reanimators.org

wanderer <wanderer(a)bos.nl> wrote: > Does anyone know how to change the SCSI id settings on a HP 9 track > tapedrive model 7980 S? It's current setting is 3 but that is > conflicting with my disk. There is no thumbwheel and there are > no visible jumpers to find. It's on the front panel. You press: You see: OPTION TEST * NEXT CONF * NEXT INFO * NEXT ID * ENTER ID (blinking #) Hmm, I would think you could press PREV and NEXT to cycle through at this point, and ENTER to set the ID, but the drive I'm fiddling with (actually a Tandem 5160) doesn't want to let me use PREV or NEXT here -- I bet I have to play with a CONF option to unlock the SCSI ID. And I don't have the manual handy right now. -Frank McConnell

23 years, 9 months

Remote Services Consoles REVEALED!

by agraham＠ccat.co.uk

Chuck wrote: > I found DEC document EK-KCRSC-FS-001 "Remote Services Console: Field > Service Manual." Sometimes I'm sure God is a computer collector. So if I pray I might find that boxed Jupiter Ace then? :) > The dial in line uses the DDCMP protocol to insure data > integrity. I'm not > sure what this means in terms of being able to dial it from a PC. You won't be able to unless you've got DECnet running on your PC AND have some form of DDCMP protocol stack.......it's asynchronous DECnet. a

23 years, 9 months

Switch-Mode PSU Failure Modes, Repairs, & Parts Substitutions

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

Good Morning, I hope everyone had a great weekend, I sure did (not Classic-Computer related so I won't bore anyone with the details)... Subsequent to my first post about my Prime PSU, Don Maslin sent me a howto on repairing switchers, that was written by Keith Lofstrom. The howto is fairly comprehensive, but does assume that most repairs are taking place due to bad PSU design. I'm not sure mine failed due to bad design. It was dusty, and after I removed it, I found that the 2455 cabinet has an interestingly-design set of airflow guides that's above the cage; it's basically a sheet of thick plastic with holes in it, so that the dual-squirrel-cage blower dumps air into the cage through these holes. While there was some airflow, once the PSU was out, I could see that many of the holes were clogged up with dust and lint, and thus I think the PSU simply overheated inside the cage. One additional data point that I thought I'd mentioned, but may not have, is that: The system was up and running fine, no evidence of any problems. I shut the system down that night, and then the next day when I turned it on, I got nothing. I did not see any evidence that the PSU briefly came on and then died; it simply never came on. >From what I've gathered from the comments posted about switcher operation, and from Keith's howto, it seems like something failed that is part of getting the secondary supplies "jump-started" to an up-and-running state. So, as long as it was powered up, it would continue to operate. But once I turned it off, the portion of the PSU (something between the primary and secondary supplies? Something like that big power resistor, maybe?) that gets the secondaries going, couldn't get them going. So, has anyone else been in a similar position? Do I have a fair chance of simply replacing the parts I've found that failed, reinstalling it, and being successful? There is a 5v adjustment that needs to be made before bringing the system up all the way, and while I hate to use the system itself as a dummy load, I don't have the Prime bus pinout, so I can't easily determine what's what. One of the things Keith discusses in the howto is about parts substitutions. Most of his comments are w/r/t transistors and the like, and he suggests using as replacements devices that have voltage and current capacities that are increased over the part that failed. He goes on to say you need to test each such substition with a curve tracer before finalizing each such substition. However, I don't think any semiconductors failed for me. He says that in a good design, there are some power resistors protecting the switcher transistors, and from my examination to date, it appears that Prime did in fact put these in the design. I'm going to remove the other 3 of the 4 that are in that area to be sure whether any did or did not go open-circuit, as there is significant thermal discoloration of the underside of the PCB in that area. How reasonable a course of action is this? What's likely to happen should a problem still be present? I'm thinking that worst case, the parts that failed will just quickly fail again, putting me back at square one. As always, thanks in advance for any help y'all can give me! regards, -doug quebbeman

23 years, 9 months

Info Needed: QBus board

by kyrrin＠bluefeathertech.com

I have a dual-height QBus board from Micro Technology that I cannot identify. I suspect it's a tape/disk/both controller. Model is MQD19. It has the following headers: 2x10-pin, 1x20-pin, 1x34-pin, 1x60-pin. Any ideas? Thanks much. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 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..."

23 years, 9 months

FREE: TEK 611 Storage Display Unit manual

by jott＠saturn.ee.nd.edu

Hello - I have a TEK 611 Storage Display Unit Instruction Manual free for shipping charges. john -- ************************************************************************ * * * * John Ott * Email: jott(a)saturn.ee.nd.edu * * Dept. Electrical Engineering * * * 275 Fitzpatrick Hall * * * University of Notre Dame * Phone: (219) 631-7752 * * Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA * * * * * ************************************************************************

23 years, 9 months

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test-drb August 2000