test-drb December 2001

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

243 participants
1096 discussions

by KenzieM＠sympatico.ca

I saw one of these yesterday. It looks like a monitor with floppy drive in the bottom, at the back was a plug for the power and another labelled video. I could not see anyplace for a keyboard to be attached. Does anyone know anything about this machine? Collector of Vintage Computers (www.ncf.ca/~ba600)

22 years, 9 months

Power Series

by csmith＠amdocs.com

> -----Original Message----- > From: Tothwolf [mailto:tothwolf@concentric.net] > On Wed, 26 Dec 2001, Christopher Smith wrote: > > Well, on one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I like my > Indigo 2 Elan with > > no texture memory just fine. I'm also considering trying > I didn't know you had another SGI box ;) Yep. > A couple people I've known who ended up with old SGI gear thought they > were going to create some kind of fancy animations with this kind of > hardware, so I never know what to think now. Depends on what you mean by "fancy animations." It will probably do better out of the box than most new peesees depending on what you'd like to animate. (and whether it requires texture memory, of course) Both of my SGIs, for instance, have analog video in/out, which is a start. On the other hand, you can't really do a good animation with anything "out of the box." It usually takes a lot of strange stuff. The graphical prowess of the machines is still something, though. For instance, the ability of the machine to provide individual color-maps for different windows on the screen, without the nasty palette-flashing that's seen in xfree86 on an intel box (for example) when you try the same... > Sounds like you at least have an original VGX chassis then. > It is possible > someone upgraded some of the boards, but the only way you'll > be able to > tell is to pull them and cross reference the part numbers. I'm thinking about doing that. The label on top of the chassis actually says "4D/440 VGX" or something to that effect. Regards, Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '

22 years, 9 months

I need an RM03...

by DSEAGRAV＠toad.xkl.com

I need an RM03, preferrably within sane driving distance of Peoria, IL. Having a KS10 as a paperweight is absolutely no fun. I can trade PDP-11 stuff for one, I have all sorts of 11 kit that I'd be more than willing to trade for KS10 stuff. Also, if anyone has the 120V-AC plug that goes in a TM02, I am short one of those as well - I have the 220 volt version (but the rest of the drive is all 120 volt parts; Odd!) Basically, I'm sick of using the KS10 as just emulation validation and I want to get it running. ^_^ -------

22 years, 10 months

Ancient "toy computer"

by acme_ent＠bellsouth.net

Okay, in order to pose this question I have to come clean here and admit my age: Right around 1960 or '61 (I was five or six years old at the time) I was given a toy computer. I suppose it was meant to represent a mainframe (what else could it have been, given the era?) and there was a rectangular (4 x 8? 5 X 7?) array of blinkenlights on the front of it. There was also a tray in the front which accepted a small punched card. A set of these cards came with the toy. Each card had a multiple-choice question printed on it, as well as four answers to choose from, numbered A through D. Additional card sets could be purchased separately. When a card was placed into the tray and the tray was then closed, the blinkenlights would display a "random" pattern for a couple of seconds (always the same pattern) and then the array would display the correct answer to the printed question, A B C or D. It didn't take long for me to be able to read the holes in the cards, and I even "modified" a couple of them so that the toy displayed an incorrect answer. Does *anyone* remember this thing? It must have cost a few bucks back then. What was it called? Glen 0/0

22 years, 10 months

[PDP8-Lovers] Re: if you hadn't already known this about the PDP-8

by jones＠cs.uiowa.edu

Mark Crispin <MRC(a)CAC.Washington.EDU> wrote: > Stacks are very useful, but they are not the solution to everything. Absolutely agreed. > One of the biggest deficiencies of C is its lack of co-routines, since > it only has the stack style of subroutine calling. Yeah, I know about > setjmp/longjmp, but those are one-way, not true co-routines. Well, setjmp and longjmp are pretty powerful. see http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/opsys/threads/ for a machine-independent user-level thread package implemented in C using setjmp and longjmp for control transfers between threads. It comes very close to what a real coroutine afficianado would like. (Writing the thread launch code in a machine independent way was murder.) Curiously, the same thing can be done without longjmp()! I had a student write me a thread package in Pascal once. All he needed was a mechanism to convert pointers to integers and back again (easy enough in standard Pascal, so long as it doesn't check variant records). Given this, his code did essentially the same thing as my thread package. > Of course, talking about co-routines to youngsters is likely to get > their eyes to glaze over, since they won't have a clue as to what I'm > talking about. Indeed. Doug Jones jones(a)cs.uiowa.edu

22 years, 10 months

Connectors (was: NEXT Color Printer find

by CLeyson＠aol.com

Fred Cisin wrote > In place of current accepted sloppy terminology, > how many remember what they were called THEN? Most of the engineers I work with have never heard of Amphenol or Cannon, let alone "blue range" or "red range" (popular Cannon connectors) It's a classic chicken and egg thing. Ampenol connectors were adopted as a "standard" connector for Centronics printer, IEEE-488 and SCSI interface, but are often mis-named. As I don't have an Amphenol catalogue to hand, I'm afraid I can't tell you what Amphenol's designation is for this connector. On the subject of D-sub connectors I've sometimes come across some with metric threaded jackscrews instead of the usual UNF thread, or is it UNC ? Chris Leyson

22 years, 10 months

Another Nile in North East

by dancohoe＠oxford.net

There's another Nile with 4 large racks of drives in a scrapyard in Ottawa. I doesn't look like it's been there long. I should have spent more time checking it out. Likely Mike Kenzie could take a look at it and report back since I only get to Ottawa occasionally. Please see my post to follow with questions on the Pyramid 90x. Dan Cohoe

22 years, 10 months

Collections vs. accumulations, was Re: How many collectors?

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> > > Does anyone know what sort of machine is in the car's > > > onboard controller? A few pictures I've found make them > > > look like PC104's. These machines are hitting zero value > > > quickly and may not last 10 years unless picked up now. > > > > What car? They don't all use the same controllers, you know... > > Want a fuel injection "brain" from a 1968 VW Squareback? Had Bosch come up with EFI already by 1968? Every VW (and Audi & MB, etc) of that vintage that I've seen used CIS, which was a purely mechanical system. I have seen a 1969 Audi Super 90 (wagon) that had an aftermarket Capacitative Discharge Ignition (CDI) System... by 1974, Audis had those as stock, while CIS was still 1 year off... My 1986 Audi 5000 CS Turbo Quattro uses a Motorola 6802-based controller... very simple to upgrade, too.... ;-) -dq

22 years, 11 months

Punch cards, punch & mag tapes (Toronto)

by mhstein＠usa.net

Sorry, a little overwhelmed by all this at the moment; will get back to ya. Ethan, AIM65 stuff is ready to go. John, still waiting to hear what you need for the Cromemcos. Will be off 'Net till Monday. mike ---------------Original Message----------------- Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:32:40 -0700 (PDT) From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Punch cards, punch & mag tapes (Toronto) - --- "John R. Keys Jr." <jrkeys(a)concentric.net> wrote: > Has anyone claimed these yet ? If not I will take them. I tried to. Haven't heard back. Don't know who the lucky winner is, but I suspect several people expressed interest. - -ethan

22 years, 11 months

Stan Veit's History of the PC Books - Blow Out - $4 Shipped!

by MTPro＠aol.com

I have a number of brand new copies I'd like to move out. This is a super deal just for classiccmp subscribers. Please e-mail me! For more info on the book, see: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1289515294 Best, David David Greelish Classic Computing www.classiccomputing.com "classiccomputing" on eBay

22 years, 11 months

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test-drb December 2001