test-drb August 2001

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

295 participants
726 discussions

by mmcfadden＠cmh.edu

I know that the control key on the DEC terminals stripped off the high order bit on the character that followed. The Control-G series would sound the bell on either the VT100 or LA34. the G character is an octal 107 Control-G sends out an octal 007 which is the bell All sorts of modem, printer, and terminal combinations used the entire ASCII character set. When we replaced our VT52's we found out you could send out series of cursor control codes on VT100's to move the cursor and then output a character. Early star trek games on video terminals used this instead of sending out spaces and characters. You could also plot line graphs and barcharts using control codes. Mike mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu

23 years, 4 months

classiccmp-digest V1 #690

by dittman＠dittman.net

> > PROGRAM SayHello(INPUT, OUTPUT) > > BEGIN > > WHILE (TRUE) > > BEGIN > > WRITELN('Hello World'); > > END; > > END. > > I think what you wanted to say was this: > PROGRAM SayHello(OUTPUT); > BEGIN > WRITELN('Hello World'); > END. The BASIC program printed "Hello World" over and over, so the WHILE loop is used do the same thing in the Pascal program. Your program just prints "Hello World" once. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net School Zones: Man's attempt to thwart natural selection.

23 years, 4 months

FS: Silent 700s and Trimm 19" rack mount box with slides

by cmcmanis＠mcmanis.com

Hi everyone, cleaning out more stuff this evening and have unearthed a few things. Everything is in Sunnyvale, California, zip 94087. First an EXTREMELY rare Texas Instruments Silent 700 with Bubble Memory storage (model 765). These are very unusual because there was only a short period of time between when bubble memory was practical and the whole Silent 700 was impractical :-) The Silent 700 series are thermal printing, hard copy terminals. Works fine. $75 + postage. (Strangely a bubble memory unit for this thing brought $76 on Ebay a while back, go figure) Second, is a less rare but very nice Silent-700 model 785. The thing that distinguishes this terminal from the others is that it has real lower case letters (versus the original Silent 700's "short" upper case standing in for lower case). Works fine, $25 + postage. Third a very nice Trimm Technologies 19" rack mount box. This box has a full rack slide mounting kit (both the rails and the slides for the rack) so you can put it into a 19" rack, it is 4U high and has an opening in the front for a 5.25" full height peripheral (disk or tape). It also has the mounting brackets for said peripheral which will hold either one or two devices (you could, for example, mount a CDROM drive and a DAT drive above each other. Inside is a standard switching power supply with at least 8 "standard" power plugs for SCSI devices (4 pin disk/tape power plug). There are also two SCSI-2 connectors on the back, each connected to a long ribbon cable inside (reaches to the front of the box) to allow you to run dual busses. This is extremely useful on VAXen where you have one SCSI controller talking to a tape drive and the other talking to a bunch of disks. The power switch comes to the front and has a 'Highland Digital' logo on it. There are many strategically placed holes on the bottom for mounting additional disk drives or brackets for more stuff. $20 plus postage takes it, if you want just the rack slides I'll understand can send just those. They are the 40 lb ones (1" wide) versus the 100 lb ones (3" wide) If no one wants this stuff I'll probably put it up on Ebay. --Chuck

23 years, 4 months

non HP RPN calculators (was: Re: SemiOT: Mourning for

by dittman＠dittman.net

> #As I said, I find any calculator other than an RPN one to be very > #difficult to use (and I make a lot of mistakes attempting to do so). > #There would have to be something _very_ special in a non-RPN machine > to > #convince me to use it... > # > #-tony > > I totally agree with this. I bought an HP 21 when I was in college > (the first calculator I owned, and which I stll have), and even today I > have a hard time figuring out when to hit the "=" sign on non-RPN > calculators. What's so hard about a non-RPN calculator? If you want to do the equivalent of 2+2, you enter 2, +, 2, and =. For a non-RPN calculator you basically enter the calculation the same way you write it. If you've got a non-simple calculation and you've not a calculator with ( and ) you can use them, too (most reasonable calculators have them). -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net School Zones: Man's attempt to thwart natural selection.

23 years, 4 months

SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Douglas Quebbeman wrote: > > > I do think it's less likely for someone to pick up bad programming > > habits if they start with Pascal, but that's not an absolute, just a > > probability thing. > > Bad programming habits are either LEARNED or NOT CORRECTED early enough! Semantics? Around here, "picked up" would include LEARNing, among other things... > My high school computer science teacher was a great TEACHER. I envy people who had the benefit of teachers whose skills were farther advanced than those of the students. No one could ever answer the questions I asked, so I realized I'd have to teach myself. > TEACHERS make all the difference! So it is imperative that you go out and > find STUDENTS to TEACH! I find myself in a bad situation everytime someone wants me to "show them"; I show them precisely as I learned, and they just give me deer-in-the-headlight look. As I said above, no one taught me, so I'm clueless as to how to teach others. Regards, -dq

23 years, 4 months

Assembly vs. Everything Else (was: SemiOT: Mourning for ClassicComputing)

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On August 18, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: > > Now, why is it so important to have a PRINT statement? > > Iggy Drougge said: > > So that you may print "HELLO WORLD". It's essential for the newbie. > > Please bear with me. Does it have to be "HELLO WORLD" exactly, or could > something different suffice? This is an important point...It needs to be "HELLO WORLD" exactly, otherwise it won't work. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Laurel, MD

23 years, 4 months

SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

by jeff.kaneko＠juno.com

On Fri, 17 Aug 2001 23:23:05 +0100 (BST) ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: >> The assembly languages I like are ones where the instructions and > addressing modes are 'orthogonal'. That is to say that any > instruction can use any addressing mode, and any registers. Like a PDP11 or a > P800, or to a lesser extent the VAX. That was the cool thing about the NS-32000's-- it was designed to be *very* orthogonal. I find it very sucky that good design is frequently hampered by crappy marketing. > The ones I dislike are the ones with all sorts of special cases (the > destination operand must be in this register unless it's this mode, > etc). Well, after having had to program one for a while, the Z-80 definitely fits into this category. I strongly suspect that parts from that era had these design aspects (e.g. orthogonality) limited by their die size. ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.

23 years, 4 months

free for postage or or toss

by thompson＠mail.athenet.net

VITALINK Translan 350 bridge. LAN interface: ethernet II or 202.3 Data link: V.35, DS-1, RS232, RS499 Data Link speed: 9.6kbs to 2.048Mbps Dimensions: 5.5in x 17.5in x 23.5in Weight: 32lbs, 14.5Kg (Motorola 68000 processor, as I recall) Includes two manuals and a floppies that worked to boot the machine several years ago. Software Version 10.4 Ref. Manual Gettings started guide. >From about 1988-1990 timeframe. --

23 years, 4 months

Marketing (was RE: SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing)

by zaft＠azstarnet.com

At 07:15 AM 8/16/2001 -0400, you wrote: >I've always believed that consumers should research the products they >purchase, and that a good product will sell itself. Marketing merely >raises the ultimate costs of a product, so perhaps you'll understand >why I don't have a very high opinion of it. Or of a generation or >programmers who rose to serve marketing's needs. While marketing costs money that must be recovered in sales, if a product has a high volume in can be sold at a smaller margin and therefore cost less than it otherwise would. Therefore good (<-) marketing can lower the price of a product even though it adds to the cost. GZ

23 years, 4 months

DECMux 300?!?

by dittman＠dittman.net

> What the heck is a DECMUX 300? I thought it was a DECServer 200/MC when I > pulled it off the pallet but no, it wasn't. I think the DECmux 300 is a 8/16/32 port to single serial port multiplexor, usually used to multiplex several terminals over one high speed link, but my memory could be misfiring. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net School Zones: Man's attempt to thwart natural selection.

23 years, 4 months

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test-drb August 2001