test-drb January 2002

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

303 participants
1201 discussions

OT: DELL SUCKS! Re: PC Gamer, best 50 classic games issue?

by mythtech＠Mac.com

>While I generally refrain from joining OT posts, this one I have to. I >bought an Inspiron from Dell a few >months ago. The invoice added $1000 to the price! > >I called them, and after being on hold for an hour, they agreed it was a >mistake, and said they would credit >my account. > >Two months later, no credit! I called again, and after an hour on hold, >was told I was not credited, because >I had not proved to them what their price was!!!! They said they could >not verify the price, unless I faxed >them the "Quote". The price was posted on their website!!!! There was no >written quote!!!! > >I said I would fax them a picture of their web page (which I had made). >The fax was a toll call!!! > >I am still waiting for the refund. > >I categorize them as crooks. I am assuming you called your credit card company as soon as you saw this charge and had it marked as under dispute? -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>

22 years, 11 months

OT: DELL SUCKS! Re: PC Gamer, best 50 classic games issue?

by mythtech＠Mac.com

> I hate always having to >give my name, company and email address every time. they should have that >info already. No... they shouldn't even ASK for it... why does it matter who you are if you are browsing their support pages. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>

22 years, 11 months

Tek scope service manuals

by djg＠drs-esg.com

>Does anyone know of a source for Tek scope service manuals? > >Of specific interest are: 2246A and 2430A > I haven't found much of scanned manuals online. For older manuals at good price I have used Dean Kidd 27270 SW Ladd Hill Rd Sherwood, OR 97140 tel 503-625-7363 dektyr(a)teleport.com Also see list http://www.3rdtech.com/nick/boat/manuals.htm (Manual merchants/manuals plus I think have online manual search, or web search for model # and manual)

22 years, 11 months

PLD help

by swtpc6800＠attbi.com

I use the Xilinx XC9500 family of CPLDs. They are 5 volt and come in PLCC packages. (You can socket these and even get wire wrap sockets.) The design software is free and the programming is simple. The official download cable is $95 but I have built several for under $15. (Xilinx publishes the schematic.) You can find links to the Xilinx web site plus a design example (floppy disk controller) on this web page. http://home.attbi.com/~swtpc6800/ ------------------------------- Michael Holley swtpc6800(a)attbi.com www.swtpc.com ------------------------------- > Hello, all: > > Well, I'm picking up the 6502 SBC project that I started last year. > To reduce chip count I'd like to use Atmel PLDs for address decoding. I > downloaded some app notes from Atmel's web site but are there any practical > tips for using/programming these devices for use in a hobbyist project? > > Rich > > ========================== > Richard A. Cini, Jr. > Congress Financial Corporation > 1133 Avenue of the Americas > 30th Floor > New York, NY 10036 > (212) 545-4402 > (212) 840-6259 (facsimile) >

22 years, 11 months

OT: DELL SUCKS! Re: PC Gamer, best 50 classic games issue?

by SUPRDAVE＠aol.com

In a message dated 1/9/2002 3:23:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, dittman(a)dittman.net writes: << > > > > Huh?! That was the last piece of business I'll EVER do with Dell. > > > > > > Dell service sucks donkey cock. Computers: good. Service: very bad. > > > > > > F Dell! > > > > I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 that works very well. I've had > > excellent results when I've had to call in for service. > > It would seem the majority of people I confer with have nothing but pain > and anguish leading to murderous thoughts when dealing with Dell. > > F Dell and it's namesake! I wonder why the disparity exists? -- >> I've never a problem when I've had to call on a Poweredge series. Not sure how the consumer side of support is. One time I did call about a failed hard drive that was ticking like a clock. I had to convince the guy to just send me a replacement withouth having to go through his script. The premiersupport.dell.com site is pretty good although I hate always having to give my name, company and email address every time. they should have that info already. -- Antique Computer Virtual Museum www.nothingtodo.org

22 years, 11 months

Tek scope service manuals

by tuban＠cisco.com

Does anyone know of a source for Tek scope service manuals? Of specific interest are: 2246A and 2430A --tnx --tom

22 years, 11 months

Continuing PDP11 saga

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Jan 9, 9:12, Tom Leffingwell wrote: > > I tried taking an M8027 and setting its address to 170400, to make it look > like the ADV11-C. However, when typing that address before and after I > installed the board, at the @ prompt, it returned 177777. Whatever the address you set, it wasn't 170400... > Also, the > DRV11, at 167770, does the same thing. The DRV11-B gives 000000 (at > 772410), although at the CSR (772414) it gives 006800. Well, if you're using 18-bit addressing -- which you must be if the DRV11-B responds to 772410 rather than 17772410 -- then all the I/O addresses begin 77.... rather than 17.... 17.... in ODT would address the memory. I/O addresses are often given as 17.... for older QBus devices, because the original LSI/11 used 16-bit addressing. You have to mentally add two or six more '1's on the front for an 11/23 or later processor. > My printer card that I tried to use as a fake ADV11 has jumpers on pin 12 > and pin 8, with the rest removed. Is this correct for setting it to > 170400? No, 'fraid not. This is an LPV11, M8027? The jumpers that go between the two pins in each of the pairs labelled A3 to A12 set the address, a jumper inserted makes it a '0' and "no jumper" sets a '1' in that bit position. You can't control address bits 13 or higher, nor can you control A0...A2. A0 doesn't matter, A1 distinguishs the CSR address from the buffer address (one word higher), and A2 is fixed at binary '1' -- so this card can never be set to anything that doesn't end in octal '4'. If all the jumpers are out except A8 and A12, that would set binary 1110111011111100 as the base address, which is octal 167374. Not quite what you wanted :-) The closest you can get is binary 1111000100000100 (the leftmost bits are already set, A12 should be out, A11...A9 in, A8 out, A7..A3 in, A2 is set to a '1' and can't be changed, and the other two are "don't care") or octal 170404. > I noticed on the DRV11 card that it says jumper in = logic 0. That one > has one jumper on pin 12, which I assume gives it the proper address of > 167770. This one appears unmodified from the factory. That's right. The jumper sets address bit 12 to 0, so you get binary 1110111111111000. > Are my jumpers on the printer card the opposite of what they should > be? Is 177777 what is returned for a missing board? If I have the > jumpers reversed on the printer card, that would explain that situation, > but it doesn't explain the DRV11, unless its bad. Yes, you have the jumper sense wrong on the printer card. What you get back from a non-existent address depends on the bus termination, but all-ones is plausible. Maybe you have a bad DRV11, or maybe you've overlooked a jumper. At least some of the CSR bits should read as zeros. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

22 years, 11 months

Let me try this again

by mranalog＠attbi.com

Hi All, Last week I was looking for someone to host some Data I/O manuals. Sorry about that, I had no idea that they were already on the web. I thought they were created by the person that gave them to me. So now I have some scanned pages that someone might want to host. I believe that these are pretty rare and kind of historic. And again I want to get them out there to be a part of the Great Record and not be misplaced here in the Great Pile. And as before, let me know if these are already available somewhere else. Now the story. Well about 8 years ago I was in my favorite Bay Area electronic surplus store - Mike Quinn Electronics. At the time, they were still in the Quonset hut at Oakland Airport. I bought a pile of books and manuals. And when I got home I discovered among the books 3 handwritten and xeroxed, double-sided sheets stapled together entitled "MINI-MINI COMPUTER". The six pages described the design of a computer built using four core planes from an IBM 1401. At the time it was written, these core planes were available from Mike Quinn's for less than $9 each. The pages had no date on them, just the author's name and address. In 1999 I decided to track down this Hal A. Chamberlin Jr. Hal (I learned) is the author of the well regarded book "Musical Applications of Microprocessors". And I DON'T KNOW, but maybe the same Hal that started "The Computer Hobbyist". I contacted Hal in 1999 (at the time he was in Korea) and this is some of what he said: ---------- Start Quote -------------------------- > I'm searching for a Hal Chamberlin that at one time > lived at 123 Ashe Ave. Raleigh, N.C. > I'm trying to track down information about the > "MINI-MINI COMPUTER". > Thank you for your time, Hi, you've reached me. Where in the world did you find that address? That's where I lived when going to North Carolina State University junior and senior years! Right now I'm living in Korea but will be back in the 'States in a bit less than a year. The "MINI-MINI COMPUTER" is a paper design I did shortly after graduating in response to requests from hobbyists around the country about how to make a core memory unit function. It was a slimmed down version of the computer I had successfully built and run year earlier called the HAL-4096. MINI-MINI was described rather completely on 2-4 (don't remember exactly) hand-printed letter-size pages which I reproduced via blueprint machine. I filled about a dozen requests for copies but never heard of anybody actually building one. I have at least one set of the original blueprints in my archives in America. I take it from your by-line that you have a museum of sorts that concentrates on analog computation. MINI-MINI was strictly digital with 4000 (not 4K) 4-bit words of core memory. Each word could hold one octal digit plus a "flag" bit which was used to indicate the boundaries between words and whether a word was negative or positive. Thus it was a variable word length machine like an IBM 1620. Instructions were 10 digits long and consisted of 2-digit opcode and two 4-digit addresses. There was no accumulator; everything was memory-to-memory so one instruction could do a lot. Although MINI-MINI was probbly never built (at least not by me), HAL-4096 WAS built and ran from around 1970 until around 1979 when I moved from New Hampshire back to Raleigh (it was retired then and didn't make the move because wires in the core memory were corroding and breaking). I have some photos, a newspaper clipping, some of the homemade boards it used, perhaps a memory plane sample, and some software listings. It was a pretty complete system with full console, Selectric typewriter (and later a line printer), card reader, card punch, paper tape reader and punch, and modem (300 baud). Software included a full-featured assembler and BASIC interpreter, a version of which was remotely accessible via auto-answer modem (Bill Gates, eat your heart out - I beat ya by more than 2 years). There were tons of utilities and some experimental music synthesis software (the real reason it was built). I've still got much of the software on paper tapes, card decks, and printed listings. --------- End Quote -------------------------------------- I just contacted Hal again to nail down the date that these pages were written. And he said: --------- Start Quote ---------------------------------- > I was wondering, in what year the handout was written? I graduated with a BS in the Spring of 1970 so that would have been the Summer of that year. I believe that Mike Quinn had suggested that I write some plans for using IBM 1401 core memory planes which he had in abundance at the time and that was the result. It was really based on the then running HAL 4096 which used a larger IBM 1620 memory unit. >Did you know that there is a page at: >http://www.mtu.com/basics/mtufounders.htm that states: >> In 1966 as a college freshman, Hal designed his >> own digital computer (the HAL 4096) using scrap >> IBM magnetic core memory planes and logic cards. >> .... The HAL4096 was demonstrated publicly at the >> 1968 NC State University Engineer's Fair. That web site is run by my former business partner at MTU. The HAL 4096 wasn't really begun until 1968 (beginning of Junior year) when I got the core memory unit from Mike Quinn and some logic boards from IBM where I had worked the immediately preceeding Summer. What was shown at the Engineer's Fair was the core memory and ALU doing "something useful" (don't remember what it was) but the CPU didn't execute the full instruction set and have any useful software until 1969-1970. > Thank you for your time. Many people today are > interested in this kind of history. And your > design is a good indication of the type of serious > projects that were being attempted at the time. Again, feel free to do what you want with the MINI-MINI plans. --------- End Quote ------------------------------------ If these pages are not already available and someone would like to host them, let me know. Like I said before I'm not sure what the effect of many people trying to download this file would be, so I will give the filename to one person. And that person can make them available to anyone interested. The scans are a little rough but then the originals are 30 years old and copies from a blueprint machine. The 6 pages are 8.5x11 scanned at 300 dpi stored as .JPGs and zipped together for a total file size of about 15.5 MB!! Oh! and I'm on digest. Regards, --Doug And if I still have anyone's attention, does anyone know where I can find program to do Group 4 fax compression under Windows 98? Or a program to put a .PDF wrapper around scanned pages (for the budget conscious) under Windows 98? Thanks, --Doug ========================================= Doug Coward @ home in Poulsbo, WA Analog Computer Online Museum and History Center http://dcoward.best.vwh.net/analog Analogrechner, calculateur analogique, calcolatore analogico, analoogrekenaar, komputer analogowy, analog bilgisayar, kampiutere ghiyasi, analoge computer. =========================================

22 years, 11 months

Some pointers needed on a 11/70

by pete＠dunnington.u-net.com

On Jan 8, 10:44, The Wanderer wrote: > Pete Turnbull wrote: > > > > OK. From what you've written there, and a few other places, I assume you > > have some manuals and/or printsets? > > Most of them, but from the MK11 memory box, only the MOS board and both > controller boards. That's a pity, bacause he manual for the MK11 system has a lot of troubleshooting flow charts -- too much for me to try to reproduce. And it has the setup instructions, of course. > > > > That's an unusual address, and it's only 32K bytes (16KW). You said > > you > > > > had two 64KW boards. What type are they? They probably have switches > > Are they M8728-AA or M8728-CA? The latter is only 16KW. The easy way to > > tell the difference, if there's no -A or -C beside the number, is that > > One is a '-AA' version, the other is a '-AC' one, and both are fully > populated. >From reading the manual, it looks like two arrays (M8728) is the minimum for the box. It might work with one, though. > There are no switches at the front of the box, unless you mean the > control panel > which contains the thumbwheel switches and a few other switches? Yes, that's what I meant. The three thumbwheel switches on the left set the start address of the box, in 32KW blocks. That's the smallest size you can have in a box, and since the arrays are either 16KW or 64KW I think you need to have at least two (but you can have an odd number, eg 3, after that -- it just won't do any interleaving). Anyway, set these three to zero. The other thumbwheel (?) switch sets the external interleave; it has to be set to zero unless you are interleaving between multiple boxes. Then the cards have to be in the correct slots. Looking from the front, slot 1 is on the right, and slot 26 is on the left, PSU regulators are at the back. The address buffer (M8158) must be in slot 13, the data buffer (M8159) in slot 15. The #0 Control A board (M8160) must be in slot 11 and the #1 Control A board in slot 16. The #0 Control B board (M8161) must be in slot 10 and the #1 Control A board in slot 17. The #0 controllers handle the even-numbered arrays, in slots 2...9; the #1 controllers handle the odd-numbered arrays, in slots 18...25. Slots 1,12,14,26 are not used. You must set the power-fail jumpers on the M8158. The manual says W1 out, W2 in; W3 out, W4 in. I'm not sure if that's always true. I don't know what you do if you don't want the battery backup! You must also put terminators on the outgoing connectors on the address and data buffers of the last box (the only box, in your case). These are H873 terminator packs, four altogether, one for each BC06R cable. The incoming cables go on J1 and J3 (nearest the long edge of the board), and the terminators go on J2 and J4. You MUST put the screws in the terminators, as that's how they get the power. The first array, #0, must go in slot 9, and the next, #1, in slot 18. Then work out from the centre if you ever add more. There must not be any gaps. If there are some 16K boards and some 64K boards, the 16K boards must all be before the 64K ones. > Do you have documentation on the data buffer board? This one does have 2 > switchbanks, and all are currently 'open'. Those 2 boards are the > only one for which I do not have any docs. I didn't see anything about switches on the data buffer. The address buffer is described as having three switches to set the CSR address of the box. For the first box, set address 17777100 by setting S1, S2, and S3 all closed. For the next box, open S1. For the third, open S2, close S1. And so on. Ech box uses two words for the CSR. > > It looks as though the box might be set to the wrong address -- 400000 > > is > > 131072 decimal, or 128K -- and is only showing 16KW (32KB) of memory. I > > don't know how you set the address of the box, though. > > I changed the size register on the 8143 to 32K, and it 'disappeared' > completely > from the system, i.e. no memory address was usable. The MK11 logic checks the address on the bus to make sure it's between the limits set by the size register in the CPU, and it's start address. If the address on the bus is less than the box's start address, or higher than the size register, it will not respond. > > Why do you think address 777644 is the diagnostics ROM start address? > > That was a mistake, I did mean 765744, which is spoken about in the > documentation. That's not an entry point! It's not even executable code, it's the ROM Identification word. It contains the ASCII characters "B0" to identify the ROM. The only entry points are: 773x04 to boot without diagnostics 773x06 to boot with diagnostics aaaaaa address dependant on the bootstrap ROM version, which jumps to 765564 in the diagnostic ROM 765564 JMP to start of diagnostics 765000 start of disgnostic code Obviously there are other points at which you could enter the diagnostics, but you'd need to set some things in memory and registers first. BTW, I discovered you can disable the cache by setting 000014 in the status register at 17777746. If the cache is faulty, but enabled, the memory box won't work properly, apparently. I don;t think that's your problem, though. More like a start address error. The first part of the troubleshooting flowchar starts by saying that you want to boot XXDP and run the MK112 diagnostic program :-) Well, obviously you can't do that, but it does say that if you can't boot, then first check ALL the power supplies (sound advice anyway). The next part of the flowchart goes like this: 1) Can you boot XXDP? If "no", is the memory box ON LINE? If "no", put it ON LINE and go back to (1) If "yes", is MEM PWR READY lit? If "no", "ZAP 200" [I have no idea what this means!] If "yes", suspect (in this order): BA11K regulator 7014251 battery backup regulator 11/70 Unibus problem If "no", reverse or replace the grey box control cable If "yes", is "UNCORR ERROR"? If "yes", go to next sheet [which is too complex to type] If "no", is there an "ADDR ERROR"? If "yes", suspect (in order): bad or loose BC06R cable address interface, M8158 11/70 cache fault If "no", halt CPU power memory box off power memory box on again Is there "CONFIG ERROR"? If "yes", install arrays properly suspect Control A (M8160) on right side If "no", is "SELECT PANEL" lit? If "yes", go to next sheet If "no", set "FORCE FRONT PANEL" Is it lit? If "no", suspect (in order): "Reset Box" control cable switch or light on box controller data buffer, M8159 If "yes", suspect (in order): data buffer, M8159 address buffer, M8158 Maybe this will be of some help. > > All the 11/70 tests halt on error [...] > > So having it loop until you stop it, and then halt at some address > > ending > > in 344 doesn't make much sense to me. I wonder if it was trying to store data in 000700...000706 (which it does at the very start of the diagnostics), getting a bus error (no memory), trying to access the trap vector at the bottom of memory, getting a bus error for that too, and just getting stuck until you halted it. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

22 years, 11 months

Compukit UK101

by Adrian.Graham＠corporatemicrosystems.com

Hi folks, After the cap questions I got the new ones put back on my bare-board machine last night, re-socketed all the chips, resoldered the power connections etc (they looked a bit iffy) and switched on..... ....and got a screenful of garbage. Hmm. Then I hit both RESET keys..... and got a boot prompt! Woo! At this point I know I can either go into the Monitor or Basic or whatever (ROMS are on the board) but none of the keys would do anything apart from RESET. This made me connect up my other UK101 (with the lovely injection-moulded bright orange case :) and that one gets as far as the screen of garbage and won't reset. I'm suspecting keyboard problems on both machines, but if anyone can remember how they booted that'd be smart. I'm off to check the official UK101 web page to see if there's any tips there too. cheers! a

22 years, 11 months

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test-drb January 2002