test-drb January 2002

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

303 participants
1201 discussions

by steven_j_robertson＠hotmail.com

> >Well, scratch the idea of OS/2; my CD has a big scratch in it and is >unreadable. >-- >Eric Dittman In some cases it's possible to remove the scratch by polishing the CD. I've taken badly scratched CD's and removed the scratches with a buffing wheel, jewelers rouge, and a little patience. Just be careful not too overheat the CD or it may warp. The ones that I've done came out paper thin but, were readable. SteveRob _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com

22 years, 11 months

Hazing (was Re: Crescent wrenches ...)

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> On 04-Jan-02, Gordon C. Zaft wrote: > > At 10:04 PM 1/3/2002 -0800, Ron Hudson wrote: > > > >> A true navy story from my Navy days. > > > > When I was a Navy civil servant, every engineer who went out on > > his first ship qualification trial would get hazed. Usually it was being > > sent to get batteries for the sound-powered phones.... > > My favorite was always sending someone for a bucket of > steam....that or a snipe punch. Stud stretchers are popular with the contruction crowd... New pages to Congress are given important messages to give to Senator Cornpone... And to get this back on-topic, at IBM, new hires were sent to see Dr. Herman Hollerith to get the final answers on important questions. -dq

22 years, 11 months

Trailing-edge compute farm seeks gainful employment

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> ps -- i am not a warez dood - dont own a cell phone - and have never > instant messaged anyone I confess to having used TALK/NTALK/YTALK under Solaris once or twice... and in the old days, using SEND TTY under TOPS-10 seemed really cool... now I see it a bit differently. -old fogey

22 years, 11 months

Compaq Deskpro286 - Documents or Help?

by tarsi＠binhost.com

Hi all geeks! I have two Compaq 286 machines that I am trying to put back together. Unfortunately, I'm having some issues reattaching the harddrives and floppy drives to the drive controller cards. I seem (stupidly) to have forgotten how they go when I unplugged them. I know, I know, it's dumb, but help a guy out anyway? :) I promise to be good the next time, honest. Anywho, if any of you have documentation that you can email to me, I would appreciate, or if you can explain how to reattach the cables from the harddrives and floppy drives to the card, I would most grateful. Configuration appears below. Personal email: tarsi(a)binhost.com Thanks, Tarsi --------------- Configuration: Compaq Deskpro286 Model 2550 Harddrive controller: WDC WD1002-WAH J1 is a 33 pin J2 is a 19 pin J3 is a 19 pin Floppy drive/Printer board, has one 33 pin floppy connector Standard(?) 5.25" floppy drive, 33 (34) pin cable. Seagate hard drive, one 19 pin cable, one 33 pin cable. My confusion is mostly whether J2 or J3 should be used with the harddrive, and what the difference is. Also, can I put dual harddrive in there? If so, how? Thanks a mil! -- ---------------------------------------------- Homepage: http://tarsi.binhost.com binHOST.com: http://www.binhost.com Forever Beyond: http://www.foreverbeyond.org ----------------------------------------------

22 years, 11 months

Man alive, I just can't resist

by Golemancd＠aol.com

well glenn the statement was not meant to be confined to computers. most people prabably including you have a richer life that just working with computers. sure i program. i know when to be precise, and when i dont need to be. i'm sure you do to. i look at the mail and see an ad for something and i know im not interested , so i dont worry about which store is sending this junk to me. [trash can time] when i program i concentrate on being precise. whats so hard to understand about that. being a programmer you must be pretty good concepts. this is a simple one Joe

22 years, 11 months

Toshiba T3200SX Question

by CLeyson＠aol.com

Just got myself a Toshiba T3200SX laptop. Reformatted the hard drive and put DOS 6.22 onto it. However, the CMOS backup battery has gone flat. Anybody know where the battery lives, and is it PCB mounted ? Best Regards Chris Leyson

22 years, 11 months

Man alive, I just can't resist

by acme_ent＠bellsouth.net

> From: Golemancd(a)aol.com > This is becoming a pretty silly thread because there can be > understanding > without proper grammer ; if we are being technical here. Every computer I ever met would gag on the above statement ;>) > Sure there is > meaning, > u just dont understand it. Well, I've seen lots of COBOL and BASIC programs which fit this description, but that doesn't mean it's okay. > I get your point. I do use a lot of shorthand and because this is a > hobby > i dont focus very much on my grammer. If u see me post then dont read it. > That is all that i have to say about this matter. > > joee > > P.S i hope the grammer helps you understand this. I have no idea what your involvement with computers is, but I'm certain it doesn't involve programming . . . Glen 0/0

22 years, 11 months

11/53 - Qbus backplane question

by Antonio.Carlini＠riverstonenet.com

Gooijen H wrote: >The 11/53 has an H9278-A backplane. According to >Megan's fieldguide the first 3 slots are Q22/CD >and the last 5 slots are Q22. >What does that mean? The slots each allow for four "fingers" on each card - a quad card uses all four and a dual card uses only two (there are some single cards too, but not many). The holes on the backplane slot for the fingers are labelled A,B,C,D from left to right from the side the cards plug into. Q22/CD slots have A/B wired as Q22 bus, C&D are just wired straight through. C/D are not used for Q-bus comms and are just for card-card communication. Q22/Q22 slots have Qbus on A&B and Qbus on C&D. It sounds like in your machine, the path followed by the Qbus is: slot-1: A/B slot-2: A/B slot-3: A/B slot-4: A/B slot-4: C/D slot-5: C/D slot-5: A/B slot-6: A/B etc. i.e. Qbus goes down A/B in slots 1,2,3,4 and then hops over to C/D on slot 4, drops vertically down to slot-5 C/D, moves back to slot-5 A/B ... repeat until you run out of slots. The manuals refer to this as a serpentine pattern. There is a diagram in some of the MicroVAX manuals on http://208.190.133.201/decimages/moremanuals.htm (I cannot remember exactly which ones but if you pick up the 630Z Owner's and Technical manuals, I'm 90% certain one of them has the diagram ... note that BA23 has 3 Q22/CD slots and BA123 has four Q22/CD slots ... the principle is the same though). The Q22/CD distinction matters in two cases that spring to mind. The first is that some Qbus signals need to be passed on to the next card correctly (interrupt and grant signals). An empty slot breaks the chain here. So if your first three slots have processor + memory and you put a TQK50 controller in slot 4 (A/B) and an RQDX3 in slot 5 (A/B), the chain is broken because slot 4 C/D and slot 5 C/D are empty - you need grant cards (or other Qbus cards) in there to let the RQDX3 work. Just to make this more fun, the RQDX3 will show up on the bus (it's CSRs are visible) it just won't work :-) The other reason it matters is that quad wide cards need to do the right thing depending on the kind of slot they are in. Most seem to arrive defaulted for a Q22/Q22 slot (which means they can go straight into a BA23/BA123 chassis with no additional jumpering etc). Putting one of these in a Q22/CD slot is usually no problem except that the card is passing on the C/D signals to the next card. This may or may not matter. For those cases where it does matter, cards provide a means of preventing this from happening. On the KDA50 there is a zero-ohm link (looks liek a resistor) that you remove. Of course, if you move a modified KDA50 from a Q22/CD slot to a Q22/Q22 slot you are in for some fun :-) Later series chassis (certainly the BA200 series, probably the BA400 series) were wired Q22/CD throughout. >At this moment, this is the configuration: >slot 1 rows 1-4: M7554-02 - 11/53-PLUS CPU >slot 2 rows 1-2: M3106 - 4-line async EIA MUX >slot 3 rows 1-2: M7546 - controller for TK50 >slot 4 rows 1-2: M7555 - RQDX3 > rows 3-4: ??? >All other slots and not mentioned row positions are empty. >In slot 4 rows 3-4 is a card with just one 8-pos DIP switch >three 16-pin DIL resistor chips and some decoupling caps. >At the top are two BERG connectors, one 40 pin and one 50 pin. >These two flatcables connected to an external unit, brandname >Dynafive. Inside that box are several "Dynafive" boards and >one board of "VGScientific". The rear of the box has several >BNC connectors with markings that pops 'video' stuff to mind. >Like H-sync, Green-in, Red-in, Green-out, etc. >This box and the 11/53 were connected to eachother. On the >disk in the 11/53 I found .RNO files that describe the VGS5000 >and how to use the application (something with spectral analysis). >So far for the system description. Many years agon, on a PDP-11/23, we had an external box (about the same size as the 11/23 cab - including RL02 and RX01) which was just a frame buffer (i.e. video card). Your peripheral may well be similar (but this is just a guess based on the fact that it seems to have video connectors!) >1) Can I remove that ??? card I guess yes. Obviously you loose a really cool peripheral! >2) Put a DELQA or DECNA at the same position? You can put a DELQA there. You can put a DEQNA there (which is what I guess you meant). But a DECNA is (IIRC) the really *rare* ethernet card for the Pro 300 series of machines. It won't fit and you'd destroy a cool card if you put that there :-) >I seem to remember that the RQDX3 must be the last device in >the backplane for some reason. It doesn't *have* to be. The reasons for putting cards in a particular order is described in one (or more?) of the Micronotes that you can find on the web (e.g. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/hardware /micronotes/numerical/ ) Basically, the RQDX3 will hog the bus given half a chance, but has enough buffering not to mind yielding the bus to other peripherals (within reason). The nearer (electrically) you are to the CPU, the higher your priority. So the RQDX3 (and KDA50) traditionally go furthest >from the CPU. >So, should the Ethernet card go in slot 4 rows 1-2 and should I >move the RQDX3 to slot 4 rows 3-4? That would be normal. It will probably work even if you don't move the RQDX3 though. It's worth mentioning that the RQDX*2*/RQDX*1* are brain-dead and do not pass on one of the signals (GRANT I think). This means that they *must* go at the end of the bus (nothing after them will ever be able to interrupt!) Antonio

22 years, 11 months

11/53 - Qbus backplane question

by GOOI＠oce.nl

I got in the 11/53 running Micro/RSX. The 11/53 has an H9278-A backplane. According to Megan's fieldguide the first 3 slots are Q22/CD and the last 5 slots are Q22. What does that mean? At this moment, this is the configuration: slot 1 rows 1-4: M7554-02 - 11/53-PLUS CPU slot 2 rows 1-2: M3106 - 4-line async EIA MUX slot 3 rows 1-2: M7546 - controller for TK50 slot 4 rows 1-2: M7555 - RQDX3 rows 3-4: ??? All other slots and not mentioned row positions are empty. In slot 4 rows 3-4 is a card with just one 8-pos DIP switch three 16-pin DIL resistor chips and some decoupling caps. At the top are two BERG connectors, one 40 pin and one 50 pin. These two flatcables connected to an external unit, brandname Dynafive. Inside that box are several "Dynafive" boards and one board of "VGScientific". The rear of the box has several BNC connectors with markings that pops 'video' stuff to mind. Like H-sync, Green-in, Red-in, Green-out, etc. This box and the 11/53 were connected to eachother. On the disk in the 11/53 I found .RNO files that describe the VGS5000 and how to use the application (something with spectral analysis). So far for the system description. Now my question. 1) Can I remove that ??? card 2) Put a DELQA or DECNA at the same position? I seem to remember that the RQDX3 must be the last device in the backplane for some reason. So, should the Ethernet card go in slot 4 rows 1-2 and should I move the RQDX3 to slot 4 rows 3-4? TIA, - Henk

22 years, 11 months

Trailing-edge compute farm seeks gainful employment

by dhquebbeman＠theestopinalgroup.com

> > sometimes i forget that computer folks r technical people. > > i come from the arts where the only thing that is needed is > > understanding. > > i am on stage sometimes and all the musicians do is > > just nod or look at each other and everyone understands them. > > Yes, but they try to use established conventions for note pitches, > time signatures, keys, chord structures and all the other syntax of > musical language...you'd have to in my band anyway ;-) So, Stan, give us a nice twelve-BARR ClassicCmp Blues standard... ;) -dq

22 years, 11 months

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test-drb January 2002