Anyone here going to the Dayton Hamvention? I'll be there in Space 3069
in the outside vendor area. FWIW, I saw some *tremendous* bargains when
I was there in 1999, and hopefully will find some again :). How
tremendous? One example is the Heath EC-1 for $50. With 2500 or so
outside vendors, there *has* to be some good stuff :). Hope to see some
of you there!
On May 13, 13:58, Mark Tapley wrote:
> I think they do; the one I built (matching instructions given
> previously) does, with a caveat: I've used it to connect two (OT, sorry!)
> Mac Powerbook 3400's. The two machines in question have to have Appletalk
> changed to use ethernet within a few seconds of one another - otherwise
> they each assume they are on a "dead" network and will not recognize the
> other machine when it comes up. This may be a unique feature of the
> Powerbooks. It is *not* a problem when the two machines are successively
> hooked into a hub - even minutes apart - so I don't think it's a problem
> with the Appletalk implementation, but I don't know.
> Anyone else with more experience on this? Do hubs do any
> keep-aliving for their ports, or recheck periodically for connections? Do
> other two-node networks need "pinging" from both ends simultaneously to
> bring up?
A hub -- or indeed any other 10baseT or 100baseT network device -- is
supposed to emit a stream of "link pulses" all the time it's available for
use but not sending data. The link pulses are short but regular (100ns at
16ms intervals) and only positive-going, so they're not confused with data.
These are the same pulses used by 100baseT and 10/100 devices for
autonegotiation.
In the case of the Powerbooks, what's happening is, as you say, that the
software is deciding that the network is dead and shutting down the
interface. Yes, that's almost unique, and certainly not the normal way to
operate. I've come across only two other devices like that, and in both
cases they were devices that fell back to 10base2 if they didn't see link
pulses within a very short time after initialisation.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
> I keep a drawerful of AUI-10bT transceivers. They're usually a buck
> or 2 at computer junk stores, and work fine with any box I've ever stuck
> one on.
>
> Doc
Have you any exp with ODI transceivers? I have 4 which just do not work. Inside there are 3 jumpers that you can set, however they are not labeled. Anyone know how to get these to start talking nice on my network?
-Linc Fessenden
In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded - Yeah right...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Lafleur [mailto:bob_lafleur@technologist.com]
> You can download the RSTS/E V7 distribution from
> http://simh.trailing-edge.com/kits/rstsv7gen.tar.Z although you might
> have to have to jump through hoops to get it into a media you can
> install on your PDP-11.
Probably. :) I have meant to try that sometime.
> It also has a "moderated" conference feature which allows one
> person to
> control who can and can't speak in the conference -- good for panel
> discussions, etc.
I got the impression that it may have been a more "complex" system.
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
This weekend I picked up a DECsystem 5000/240 system, with 112MB of ram,
and a Prestoserve NVram card in the last slot (otherwise it would be
120MB of ram). This system was never turned on! Brand new, just never
got used...
I have a 2gb disk, and cdrom on it, and am installing Ultrix 4.5 now...
I am using a VT510 as the console.
Anyone know how to setup, etc the Prestoserve option?
Does Ultrix 4.5 like a 4.3 gb disk? I have a barracuda I was going to
hook up as rz1 for a data drive.
I have an exabyte 4mm dat drive, I would like to hook that up as tape
backup... comments ???
Anyone else running this fine system?
David Barnes
John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote:
> Congratulations on saving them, and be sure to find the other
> collector while the trail is still hot! He may decide to trash it.
> Where was this?
Thanks, my pleasure, and if I get tired of it (which is possible,
I have to admit my interest is pretty much derived from seeing an
"8510" prompt somewhere in UCSD Pascal for the Apple ][ and wondering
what it was 20+ years ago) I will pass it along to someone else who
will appreciate it.
Anyway, this was at Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA. I know who
the other collector is and don't think he's likely to trash it. I
just don't know him well enough to say too much about who he is.
> Yes, it's a bit old-style, but it's mono composite. I think
> someone else contacted me about wanting to build a compatible
> keyboard, but I never heard if they did it.
It doesn't look hard, but then I'm a software guy and would be
thinking about how to change the encoding of an existing keyboard with
parallel output, or how to front-end a keyboard with another processor
running my code, even if that other processor is newer and faster.
What I'm curious about is that this doesn't seem to have quite the
same arrangement as the 8510/a machines that you have described on
your web pages and the manuals in the ITDA. This one has the "terak"
name plate at the top front, both disk drives in the one box
(something which I guess was made possible by the introduction of
half-height 8" drives), and the serial card and distribution panel
appear to be different. Guess I should try to take some pictures,
next weekend perhaps.
-Frank McConnell
I picked up a pair of Shiva FastPath 4 Appletalk to ethernet 'boxes' that
were going to get tossed over at Purdue Salvage. Does anyone need one of
these? Will these boxes connect an AppleTalk (localtalk) network to an
ethernet network?
They have a DE9P socket labelled 'AppleTalk' and an AUI and 10Base2 (BNC)
connector on the back, with a switch to select the ethernet port. They're
marked model # KFPS-4.
-- Pat
After I graduated from high school in 1981, I attended U-Mass at Amherst
>from 1981-1983. There, I got my first introduction to a larger mainfraim
system, a CDC Cyber 170. My first semester there I tried to avoid the
computers totally, as I knew if I got involved, I?d get hooked. A friend
in the dorm had rented a terminal for his room, and near the end of the
semester I gave in and took a look at what it was all about. My second
semester there (Spring, 1982) I took a Pascal course, and rented a
terminal for my room. I rented some kind of clunker, but it was a CRT,
and it had a 300-baud acoustic coupler, and it cost $180 to rent for the
semester. But it was better than waiting in lines in the terminal room.
The guy who rented a terminal the semester before showed me about
?Talk?, a program written by Ron (I can?t for the life of me remember
his last name, but his ?nickname? was Salamir). Talk would allow a bunch
of people to chat at once, and with a system that would allow 250 people
logged in at once, there was usually 10-20 people on Talk at one time.
This was a huge step-up from the ?two people talking to each other?
programs I?d previously used on RST/E systems. Unfortunately, Talk was a
HUGE computer resource hog, and the computer center powers killed it a
few weeks into the semester.
So I had to find other things to do. I learned some about the system ?
that it was running NOS 1.4. You could buy all the NOS programming
documentation at the bookstore, but I had absolutely no idea what it all
meant. After coming from a DEC environment where documentation was
?pretty?, and fairly easy to read and understand, the CDC books with
tiny print, and odd terms, were impossible to understand.
I met Alan Green, who became a good computer friend, and taught me a lot
about the Cyber system. I think Alan lived computers. I don?t know where
or how he learned what he did, but he seemed to know everything about
the Cyber before anyone else. He taught me how to understand the
manuals, and all the ins and outs of NOS 1.4. Our accounts didn?t have
any privileges, so we couldn?t do much. I spent most of my time working
on my Pascal projects for class, and learning some system programming
tricks from Alan.
Everybody had to pick a ?nickname? for using Talk or MAIL. Everyone had
a different way of picking names; some were based on favorite
characters, others were based on their name, or something they liked. I
didn?t know what the heck to use, so I said I would just pick a random
word. I picked ?Skidaddle?. Who knows why. It soon got shortened to
Skid, which is what I used for everything at U-Mass, and even afterwards
on systems like AOL and Genie. People even started calling me Skid
instead of Bob in the hallways, etc. It did not catch on though (after
college) and no one calls me Skid these days.
When I came back in the fall of 1982, there was a big change. I went to
the terminal room right away, and the sign on the door said it was
moved. So I went to the new place, and they had all new, ?sleek? looking
terminals. I don?t remember exactly what they were, but I think it was
something like ADM-3A?s. Alan was there, and he said they had upgraded
the Cyber to NOS 2.0. That was a big change from NOS 1.4, he said. With
a lot of new features. He had some ideas about writing a new ?talk? like
program that would be much less resource intensive than Talk was, and
that maybe the computer center would allow to run. He wrote a very
simple prototype, which I helped him test and enhance. Alan, in his way
of naming things, called it ?Wasteme? because it wasted people?s time.
Wasteme grew from a very small prototype, to a larger program with some
pretty neat features, and it got renamed to Twinkle. Alan appointed me
Twinkle manager, whatever that meant. Basically I could use a few
commands that others didn?t have, like evict and blacklist commands. The
computer center never really tried to shut Twinkle off for quite a
while. I think Alan had the pull with the right people to keep it going.
U-Mass Amherst shared it?s Cyber with a few other schools; U-Mass Boston
(which had their own machines, but also had access to the Amherst
Cyber), and Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke College. Twinkle was
neat because people from the other schools could be on also.
I wrote a lot of crazy programs during the fall 1982 semester. John
Curran, who?s nickname was ?Avenger? wasn?t really much of a programmer,
but had a lot of good ideas. So he gave me the ideas, and I implemented
them. Alan Green was really the programmer ? he could sit down, and type
Pascal code into the system without any line breaks for indenting,
jamming as much on one line as possible, and he was a FAST typist. He
would have an idea for a program, type away like this for half an hour,
compile and run it with no errors. Of course, no one else could
understand his programs.
One of the main programs I wrote that a lot of people used I called
?GOODDAY?. You?d add it to your startup procedure, and when you logged
in, it would ?greet? you. You could configure it with a multitude of
options. It could print the dining commons menu for the day (or
tomorrow, if it was after supper already), tell you who was on Talk,
Wasteme, Twinkle, or whatever other talk system happened to be in
common use at the time, and count your mail messages in a variety of
mail systems that were in use. I?m sure it did other things also, but I
don?t remember them now.
In the Spring of 1983, Alan got much more interested in how the Cyber
actually worked. There was a lot of stuff we didn?t know about NOS. A
lot of mysteries about what the operators did, or could do. None of the
students were operators, or had access to the ?back room? where the
Cyber was housed, so the whole system operations side of it was a
mystery. Alan started to experiment with things like what ?subsystems?
were, and what other ones existed, what some of the system accounts were
and what files were used to control system operation. Alan found (don?t
ask me how) a way to go to up to a logged-in terminal and find out the
user?s password in about 30 seconds. So, if someone left the room to go
get a printout, but left their terminal logged in, it was easy to
?steal? their password, and of course their account was easy to find
out. Alan kept this little loophole very quiet, but a few of us knew
about it.
We also knew that if the management wanted to talk to you, they?d change
your password to something like ?SEEJUDY?. When you couldn?t log on,
you?d go to the operator window, and they?d look up your password. Of
course, they knew the secret ?code? ? if your password was ?see? or ?c?
somebody, it meant they were to tell you to ?see? that person.
One day, I was working on a project for a class and all of a sudden my
files were gone. I thought this odd, as no one else had a problem. I
used our little trick to see if my password was changed, and sure enough
it was changed to ?CCHUCK?. Chuck was the head guy in charge. I used the
command to send a message to the operator, saying my files were deleted.
Some of the operators would send messages back to us at times, so we
knew how to send messages to them. Anyway, there was no response. I sent
this a few more times, and finally sent a message that said ?my password
has been changed to cchuck? what?s going on??. Within a very short time,
two computer center people were at my sides, asking me to come into the
hallway. They wanted to know how I knew what my new password was. I told
them how it was done in exchange for them giving my files back and not
bothering me anymore. I still don?t know what triggered them to delete
my files and change my password.
During the Spring 1982 semester another interesting thing happened. Word
was going around that you could go to Radio Shack, and ask them to give
you a demo of CompuServe. You could watch what ID and password the
salesperson used to log on, then go home, and log on yourself. Each
store had their own demo ID. You could use these to log on and use
CompuServe?s CB simulator. Well, the simulator was limited to users of
other Radio Shack demo accounts, but I think just about everyone on were
?hijackers? like us. Anyway, one day our Cyber was down, so I got on the
CompuServe CB simulator for lack of anything better to do (wow, was that
primitive compared to Twinkle!) and started talking with a girl from
Sacramento, CA who used a Cyber just like ours. Before half an hour, we
had exchanged computer phone numbers and login information (before we
even exchanged voice numbers) and later took turns calling each other?s
Cyber to check out what it was like. We eventually became good friends
(thanks to phone phreaking, it made long distance calling possible), and
have visited each other several times. A friend of hers started logging
onto our system, met someone from our system, came out to visit, and got
married.
One of the cool things the CSU Sacramento Cyber had was a ?oneliners
bulletin board? where each user could post one line, per day. At the end
of the day the board would be cleared. Their version was neat, but
crude. I liked the idea, so sat down and wrote one myself in a few
hours. My OnelIner program was one of the few programs we had that used
single character input (i.e. you didn?t have to hit return after a
command).
At the end of the Spring 1982 semester, I spent a fair amount of time
locating many source codes for all kinds of things ? programs I had
written, programs my friends had written, and a lot of things I probably
wasn?t supposed to have access to. I made a list, and prepared to make a
batch job to back it all up onto tape. My last night there, I submitted
the job, and one of the last things I did before leaving campus that
semester was go to the operator window to retrieve my backup tape. They
had it there, with a big note on it ?DO NOT RETURN?. It took a little
coaxing, but I finally got them to give it to me. I?ve still got this
tape, although I don?t know if it is readable, or how I could get the
data off, or make use of it. I haven?t seen any Cyber 170 simulators,
and don?t expect to find one anytime soon.
After leaving U-Mass, I still kept in contact with the people and system
for a few years via dial-up, and ?loaned? accounts. Alan had actually
figured out how to create accounts on the system, and we had several
self-created accounts such as TWINKLE, AVENGER, and SKID (that was me)
for several years. Numeric-only accounts stood out even less, as student
accounts were based on their 7-digit student ID number; I had two
accounts I created, 4444555 and 7171717 which existed for even longer
than the named ones.
The computer center finally sanctioned a talk system called CONFER. It
was actually a subsystem of NOS, so it was much more efficient. I don?t
know if someone at U-Mass wrote it, or if it was purchased. No one knew
anything about it, or if they did, they wouldn?t talk. It was quite
different than Twinkle. The Talk system I wrote for VMS several years
later embodied the best parts of Twinkle and Confer.
There were quite a few people I came in contact with at U-Mass Amherst,
especially through the use of the Twinkle system. I?ve lost contact with
all of them. If anyone is reading this and remembers me, or the system,
please drop me an E-mail.
- Bob Lafleur
Springfield, MA USA
> My guess is that the reporter failed to grasp that they are probably
> looking for milspec parts, as opposed to the common stuff found in PCs and
> whatnot. These of course would be far harder to find in quantity.
>
> I don't doubt that they are also looking for regular parts for test
> systems as well. I know they are using a lot of older systems. Last year
> I did a data recovery job for them where the data was 8080 assembly code.
God knows, reporters are idiots about everything except journalism,
and who cares except another journalist. But this reporter made a
point of stating that the stuff most people have in their basements
doesn't qualify as NASA-sought-after...
Yes, agencies like this may once upon a time have relied upon
milspec parts, JUST AS THEY USED TO RELY ON SECOND-SOURCING,
which we all know died some time ago.
Where else ya gonna get a Pentium? P-II, P-III, or P-IV?
But clearly, as they buy only in bulk from "qualified"
suppliers, no one on the list other than Sellam might
have what they want in bulk.
However, this could still put pressure on the supplies of
stuff that we like to collect. Think about the effect as
it propagates upstream...
-dq
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Lafleur [mailto:bob_lafleur@technologist.com]
> Although I was primarily working on the account project, the bank?s
> minicomputer was a VAX 11/780 (or two). We backed up our
> source code to
> the VAX system, so I had some limited contact with the VAX. I was
> intrigued, because I wanted to know how this VMS was similar, and
> different from RSTS/E.
Please let me know if you find out ;) I've been trying to find RSTS/E
to go on my PDP-11, actually.
> I wondered about the VAX, and how I might go about writing a
> talk system
Of course, there are others these days, including a built in "PHONE"
command.
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
