On Jul 18, 13:24, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Pete Turnbull wrote:
>
> > What's special about the RAM for a Sparcstation 5 ?
>
> They're 5 volt, buffered, parity DIMMs. The only popular system that used
> 5 volt buffered DIMMs were the old PowerMacs, which don't use parity.
>
> Even beyond that, there's something else about them. I tried using
> SPARCstation 5 DIMMs in my Apple Network Server (also wanting 5 volt
> buffered parity DIMMs) and the ANS completely refused to see them. That
> was disappointing since SS5 RAM is infinitely more abundant, but oh well.
> I haven't tried the reverse test yet (whether ANS RAM will work in the
> SS5).
Ah, I see. I had assumed they were SIMMS, but I'd never opened up a SS5.
How many pins on the DIMMs?
And I see there was some prolonged discussion about the right DIMMs to use
in Sunblades, on the Sun newsgroups recently. They seem to be a bit of a
minefield. I know the ones SGI use in, eg O2s, are "odd" as well.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
{sorry for the delays in replying, but I only get the digest}
Ok... I broke out the meter, and did a few checks....
Tony Duell suggested:
>That's a nice, simple, circuit to start with. Carefully pull the
>connector off the base of the CRT and check the heater continuity. If it
>is a 7 pin CRT, it's a fair bet the heater pins are numbers 3 and 4.
Well, it was a 7-pin connector, and I put an ohmmeter across pins 3 and 4.
It measured 31.7 ohms. Is that reasonable?
Robert Feldman suggested:
>First thing to check is to make sure that you are getting +12V on contac1
14
>of the circuit board and pin 7 of the inline connector.
I am getting +12V at both of these points (And by the way, thanks for the
pinouts and other information!!)...
Also, I suspect what I am referring to as a composite video output may not
be that at all... It is an RCA jack that is attached to the front of the
case, and is located just to the right of the connector marked "Battery".
It has two wires attached, which go to a 2-pin plug on an "L" shaped circuit
board. The "L" shaped board also contains the Z-80, some 6116 chips, and
other stuff. It also contains the inline connector that Robert gave the
pinout for (and in fact, the 2-pin plug is in very close physical proximity
to the inline connector). I have seen several pictures of Osbornes, and now
that I review them, none have this connector. It does not seem to be a
hacked on modification, since the plug on the "L" shaped board was very
obviously factory done.
I will take Tony's advice and trace back to see if and where the 12V fails.
Thanks!
Rich B.
On Jul 17, 20:22, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> If the refresh memory is to support text and graphics, the pipeline must
be
> two-forked.
Not necessarily. In a BBC Micro, for example, the 6845 is essentially
generating a stream of pixel addresses, since what's stored in the screen
memory is the bitmap of the character, not the character code. That's how
you mix text and graphics on the same screen. When text is written to the
screen, the OS looks up the bitmap(s) of the character(s) and writes the
individual pixels to screen RAM.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
On Jul 18, 0:45, Tony Duell wrote:
> > Yes, but the schmitt-triggered one has a different problem -- it's too
> > slow! It's a long time ago, and the articles and my notes are buried
near
>
> Right... It's generally recomend for BBC lightpens (See, for example,
> the Advanced User Guide page 369). Are you saying none of these designs
> work properly?
Well, mine ended up having more in it than the one on p.369 (which has just
a Sweet Spot phototransistor mounted in the barrel) - it had a transistor
and bias resistor in there too, along with a CMOS chip to make a
touch-sensitive switch. I can't remember what the Sweet Spot part number
in the AUG is (schmitt or plain) so I can't tell you if that's the one I
used.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Saw this movie last night, and personally I found the use of "real" jargon
to describe what they were doing jarring because it didn't work right. Much
better to have the 'trek like' mishmash of terms that don't make any sense
but sound good.
The "mega system" that was supposed to be the wet dream of hackers
everywhere was this thing with about 8 LCD screens set up in some sort of
technotica holding unit. I thought about this and decided it doesn't work
on a number of levels, not the least of which is that you can't read stuff
on the top displays and you cant use them in parallel. Much cleaner to
build somthing like a jumbotron with 9 screens to give you a 56" monitor
with effectively 4K x 3K resolution. Then you could move things around and
even if they spanned monitors they would be readable.
In terms of classic hardware the multiheaded-ness of my SPARCStation was
useful in that regard, and I do this on my laptop as well (when its
docked). Clearly the BLIT kind of had the idea (Bell Labs Intelligent
Terminal) and the VT340 is nice (like the VT420) in that you can swap
screens easily. I _really_ like the idea of the VT525 on a big screen. I'm
definitely going to have to try that.
There was also an early hack done on Amigas that slaved three of them
running 'Jet' to give you three views and thus a wraparound screen effect.
So what is the ideal visual machine? Opinions?
--Chuck
On Jul 17, 16:54, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> Viewed from the 6845, is the block 1 scan line high?
Yes.
> Getting the horizontal location right, as you'd have to in order to do
precise
> drawing, might be a bit more complicated, don't you think? an 8-pixel
extent of
> uncertainty is quite a bit on a 640-pixel display.
But it's usually less than 8 bits. For example, the pen I built (which had
assorted other problems as per my other responses) was mostly used on a
4-bit-per-pixel display (16 colours) or a 2bpp (4 colour) display, so the
resolution was usually 2 pixels or, at worst, 4.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Hi all,
(And Tony Duell :^)
Repost of a previous msg, as for some wierd reason, I stopped getting
list
traffic for a couple of days.
Investigations at our mail server are inconclusive, but it may be
related to the fact we were using the ORBS database to aid spam control
and this has been
suddenly shut down. Or not.
Anyway, I've missed a couple days traffic and probably some responses to
this.
Have a friends Decstation 5000 power supply with a violently blown fuse.
(8A/250V)
He is a developer of VMS Freeware (in fact the WASD web server) and has
asked me to help.
Culprit is 2 x ZNR 14K241U devices, which I believe are Metal Film
Varistors Surge Absorbers.
The numbering system seems to be obsolete as current ZNR Surge Absorbers
use a quite different system, or I've guessed wrong and they are
something else entirely, but I don't think so.
These two gadgets are wired in series with each other, then connected
across the output of the mains rectifier.
240vac in, so they are across around 300+ vdc.
I could just leave them out and the supply will run, but would much
rather replace them to keep the protection they offer.
Their appear to be no other faults and the history of the incident is
consistent with a switch on surge after an extended holiday (3 weeks)
following daily useage of the machine, so it's possible the reservoir
caps may be just a little leaky or the varistor was just getting tired.
Anyone make sense of the device id so I can figure out what rating to
replace them with.
Device looks rather like a round ceramic capacitor, but gloss black in
colour, marked with white lettering
A Logo consisting of a small square box in top left with a capital M
inside and ZNR in caps next to it
then under it is 14K241U (or the 1's could be ell or i, hard to say).
underneath at bottom left is an reversed italic capital R with a
reversed italic capital L joined to the back main bar of the R.
To the right of this is a small letter s raised above the baseline with
the number 20 after it.
Any help appreciated.
Cheers
Geoff in Oz
> Me, too. My furthest haul was Columbus to Louisville for a PDP-8/L with
> high-speed punch/reader, ASR-33 and BM-08. It's what I show
> off to visitors.
Ethan-
Are you telling me you came down here to Louisville, KY and
grabbed a PDP-8 right out from underneath my nose?
Way to go, dude! But let me have the next one, OK?
;-)
-dq
On Jul 17, 22:12, James L. Rice wrote:
> Thanks to eBay and a couple of list members, I now have my Indy up and
> running and on the 'net using my ISDN router as the gateway. I can also
> ping my office network through the other router. I'm currently running
> IRIX 6.5. It has a R4400SC 150mhz cpu, 192mb ram, a 24bit graphics
> card, Granite kb, mouse and 20" Trinitron monitor, a 2gb hard drive and
> an Indycam. I'm building an external SCSI box to house a DAT drive, the
> CD-ROM, a CD-R drive and a 2gb option drive. Now I need to find a
> Presenter, a Cosmo board, a 10/100 GIO ethernet card, the XZ graphics
> board and floptical drive to have a fairly complete system.
Good luck finding a Presenter and 10/100 GIO at reasonable prices!
> It looks
> good sitting on my desk next to the NeXT TC slab.
On the subject of NeXTs, how do you get a NeXT to use standard files
(/etc/hosts, et al) instead of the netinfo stuff?
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
