test-drb June 2003

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

275 participants
520 discussions

by erd_6502＠yahoo.com

Latest haul (courtesy of the new 11/750 owner I'm helping)... o Qbus grant cards, including a single-height Intergraph "PCB518" o Dilog DU132 tape controller (Pertec I/O, TS11/TU80 emulation) o M7504 DEQNA (broken handle, no cab kit) o M3106 DZQ11 (dual-height) o M7546 TQK50 o A012 ADV11 (says "A/D for 1103" on the solder side) o M7810 PC11 (with loopback jumper for "punch" connector) o M7608-BP MS630-B (uVAX-II 4MB memory card) o M8639-YB RQDX2 o M7606-AC KA630-A o M9404 / M9405-YB Q22 Cable Connector o M7168 / M7169 VCB02 (QDSS) 4-plane graphics o M8739 KLESI-U ("Aztec Unibus Adapter Card") o M-LSI-DR11 PLUS ... so plenty of uVAX-II parts and a couple of interesting items. I have abundance of VCB02s, so if anyone wants to turn a Qbus MicroVAX into a VAXstation, I'm sure we can work something out (no mice, monitor cables or cab kits, I'm afraid). -ethan

20 years, 5 months

pen

by ktoker＠marmara.edu.tr

I can provide you the required pens BP-2, EA-850B, EA-850C 4 ball point pens, if you still need them.

20 years, 5 months

manual for 5 1/4" HD drive

by tim＠tim-mann.org

Joe writes: > I have a project in mind that I'll be using a High Density (1.2Mb) > floppy drive for. But it's going to take some tinkering with the jumpers to > make it work and I'll need a manual for it. Does anyone know if where I can > locate a manual for any of the HD drives on-line or does anyone have a > manual (or copy) that they're willing to part with? Teac still has manuals for their 5.25" drives on their Web site. See http://www.teac.com/DSPD/catalog.htm#OldFD I found a scan of a Mitsubishi MF501B/MF503B/MF504B manual on a BBC Micro web site. See http://bbc.nvg.org/dir.php3?dir=doc/datasheets -- Tim Mann tim(a)tim-mann.org http://www.tim-mann.org/

20 years, 5 months

(no subject)

by Jerishepherd＠aol.com

Saw your ad in the net today, and I am looking desperately for a power pack for an XEC5. I am having trouble finding one, and need one as soon as possible. I am in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl, and my email addy is Jerishepherd(a)aol.com Phone Number 954 435-7813 Cell Number 954 600 7611 Thank you. Jeri

20 years, 5 months

Torch haul pictures...

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

OK, got a few captioned pictures of the Torch stuff up for those interested at: http://www.moosenet.demon.co.uk/temp/torchweb/index.html (the non-thumbnail images are around 640x480ish and between 50 and 100KB) I've been inside everything to do some initial checks - no obvious signs of damage and everything was pretty clean and dirt-free. Still need to test PSUs on a dummy load etc. before I try powering anything up though. cheers Jules ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/

20 years, 5 months

Stag 39M200 Module

by matthieu.benoit＠free.fr

Hello, I have some documentation about STAG 39M200 Module for Stag PP39 Programmer. I have Revision 14 Eprom for this Module. Are You still looking for it? Look at my resources page http://matthieu.benoit.free.fr/119.htm or contact me. @+ MB.

20 years, 5 months

Perkin-Elmer 7300

by pechter＠pechter.dyndns.org

> Message: 33 > Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 08:40:32 -0700 (PDT) > From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com> > Subject: Re: Perkin Elmer 7300 Pro System Museum Quality! > To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org > Reply-To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org > > --- Mail List <mail.list(a)analog-and-digital-solutions.com> wrote: > > Here's one some of you might like. > > > > Perkin Elmer 7300 Pro System Museum Quality! > > > > http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2738081449 > > I tried to sell one of those years ago at a hamfest. No takers at $15. > > We used it as a cross-development environment for COMBOARD and follow- > on products - mostly as a departmental C compiler that would emit > 68000 assembler (we were using Whitesmith's C on the VAX for the > system and VMS application code). > > Nice little box, System III. Got mine in storage, along with all > the diskettes and manuals. > > -ethan > > > System III or MicroXelos (UniPlus System V)... There were a number of misfeatures including a very slow video card and a bus that couldn't handle faster chips than the 68k that was in it. I dumped a pickup truck full of 'em (7350's) in the trash after rescuing a bunch out of Concurrent in '89 or so. Couldn't give 'em away at Trenton. I had all the distribution software including RM/Cobol, Idris, and stuff. Later I wanted to get my hands on a Masscomp 5550 or so to replace it. Concurrent bought up Masscomp but getting the boxes was nearly impossible at the time and FreeBSD and Linux made the 68010/020/030 Masscomps less than attractive in a price/performance/size kind of way. They also needed heavy hot tubes like the early Suns did. There was an attempt to get Concurrent to build a 68020 version of the 7350 for Perkin-Elmer (since they split into two companies) and the 68000 would barely take a 68010... but the Versabus backplane had noise and timing issues when you tried to push it. There was even an XF/200? version -- with 16 (IIRC serial ports). I ran a news feed to the box at home with 2 80 meg MFM ST506 drives... Slow but it worked. Fed it with a Trailblazer Plus and later a T2500. Amazing, but I think the modem had more processing power. Now the video cards have more power than the CPU's did back then. Bill -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@ureach.com

20 years, 5 months

Reading PDP-8 paper tapes

by gtoal＠gtoal.com

> A long-time acquaintance of mine (Graham Toal, whom some of you may > know) has access to a collection of PDP-8 paper tape which wants > reading. Unfortunately some of it is in the care of the Royal Musuem > in Edinburgh, who won't let it out of their sight. > Does anyone -- preferably in the UK -- have a paper tape reader that > could be hooked up to a modern machine (eg a laptop) to read the tapes > in the museum, and which they'd be willing to lend? > To see what Graham and friends are doing, take a look at > http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/ It's worth a look even if you're not > interested in Edinburgh. > I know Graham reads the list, so replies here or to me are fine. Hi Pete! Just to introduce myself to the folks here; I was an Acorn system programmer for several years which is how I know Pete, and I subbed to this list a couple of days ago - although my interest here is actually in older stuff, I *do* have an absolute sh*tload of old Acorn systems and boards that I've been trudging around for years and I'll be glad to help with Acorn info when I can. Any of the Acorn kit that I have which anyone needs, they're welcome to it - I'll never use it again, I just wanted to save it from the dumper... (for example I have lots of those 32K system/atom memory cards that y'all were talking about earlier. In fact I have one of the System (4?) file servers sitting on our washing machine right now that I've been meaning to run up as soon as I can find my 110-240v transformer again!; I've restored several hundreds of my acorn 3.5" disks but am only very slowly restoring my 5" disks via a raw-read program that's a pain in the arse to use; I think that job will go faster when I get a real beeb set up with a serial line to my unix - again, the bottleneck is a transformer. I have one somewhere but it's mislaid! Oh - that, and no monitor :-) ) Anyway, yes, we have a significant collection of paper tapes which I used to use personally around '76-78, at which point they were donated to the Royal Scottish Museum. Unfortunately the curators won't let us take them off the premises now in order to read them, so we need to take a reader of some description into their warehouse along with a portable PC. Even a serial ASR33 would do, although it would be a heavy lift! We're pretty desparate here... We also have some older paper tapes in the care of the University computing service which *may* have things like the KDF9 Atlas Autocode compiler on them which we also would like to read, but the PDP8 stuff is the current priority. One of our volunteers, Chris Whitfield, went to visit Hans Pufal last year and recovered data from some PDP9 DECtapes, including the full source of Hamish Dewar's operating system for the PDP9/15. Incidental to that - you may be interested in this file: http://www.gtoal.com/grenoble/source3/8tran.000 Which is the source of the utility whose manual is here: http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/dec/pdp15/DEC-15-ENZA-D_8TRAN.pdf There's other related stuff in that same directory such as the source to PIP. We hope to return to Grenoble some time and read some more of those tapes. One of the tapes *MAY* be the mythical PDP7 "Decsys" OS. At least that's what's pencilled on the tape, and the university did own a 7 for CAD work... We have an RL01?? (maybe an RK05?) disk pack from the Wavepower Project's PDP11 which we think may contain "GUTS" - Groeningen University Timesharing System - an EMAS-like personal OS written by Harry Whitfield and his students in Groeningen. We're looking for someone in the UK who may be able to read it. The disk format is the same as RSX11 we think, but we'd be happy even for a sector by sector raw copy. We've restored the sources of several operating systems: EMAS - on ICL2900 and IBM/XA PDP9/15 operating system by Hamish Dewar 68000 O/S by Fred King Mouses for the Interdata/Perkin Elmer range by Peter Robertson and Chris Whitfield This is all currently visible on the net but hasn't yet been organised into a web site. I'll be working on the web site over the coming weeks; it'll appear one day at the URL which Pete mentioned above. (WIP is at http://www.gtoal.com/athome/edinburgh/ ) I recognise a few of the names here. To the rest of you - nice to meet you. I hope to stick around, although I'm reading this via the daily digest so won't be posting as frequently as most of you guys. regards Graham

20 years, 5 months

New finds: enough Torch stuff to sink a battleship

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

> My guess is that you have normal XXX boards mounted in a non-standard > case. Possibly the case from some other Torch product. Yep, from some of the Torch docs I have, the case seems to be from a Torch 300-series workstation. These appear to have been the getting-more-familiar (!) BBC core with either a Z80 or 68k Atlas board attached and optional seperate disk cabinet. Seems like there was a stage in production where the disk ran via a controller in the expansion cabinet from a SCSI bus whilst the floppy used a seperate cable going to the controller on the BBC - not the 'SCSI floppy' type setup that my XXX has. >> wired to the back of the case though). There's also markings on the board >> for a VME bus connection, but no socket or associated circuitry. > > The VME interdace is a DIN41612 plug and a few buffers. AFAIK all > production machines had it fitted. fair call. Don't know why mine wouldn't, even if it were a prototype - if the circuitry's there on the card why not install the chips and sockets? Strange. > Yes, it's analoge RGB at TV rates + 2 syncs + drive for a piezo speaker. Ok. The Torch monitors I have all need seperate syncs - explains the RGB board in the Torch 725 machine, which essentially seems to be a sync splitter from the BBC's composite output. >> labelled 'video' - but as the case is a hack who knows... > It sounds like this case once took a BBC micro board... yep, that fits with my 300-series theory. > There's an 8 pin power connector on the stickleback. Is is connected to > anything other than the PSU and the battery? The touch-switch circuitry > is on the PSU board, and sends an interrupt over one pin of that > connector (I can dig out schematics/pinouts if you need them). *wanders off to check... Just PSU and battery. Connections as follows: ^- front of board GND o o +5V GND o o +12V BATT o o -5V +5V o o nc v- rear of board The battery is obviously wired to ground too. 12V from the PSU also runs to the battery via a lot of black insulation tape; I haven't looked what's under there yet... The PSU isn't a standard XXX PSU (which I do have one of; I see the touch-switch connections you're talking about) - this machine has a 100W Wier PSU in it, likely stock to the 300 series if that's where this case came from. [Torch "Hard Disc"] >> OK, been inside now - it is a BBC, with a Torch Z80 coprocessor. Torch SASI >> interface hooked up to the BBC's 1MHz bus, with a Xebec interface hanging >> off > > Are you sure it's SASI, not SCSI (not that it makes much difference. Yep it is - says so on the board :) I have the manual for the Xebec interface to which it plugs into and that's definitely SASI / ST506. There's not much to the SASI board as it turns out - see earlier post; most of it turned out to be comms circuitry for driving the modem and nothing to do with the drive interface. Far as the SASI side of things is concerned, it's just some octal buffers, latches and the like; only about ten LSxx ICs. I had some time to mess around with the machine earlier, armed with spare BBC for testing (which turned out to have an intermittant RAM fault so wasn't much use :-) Far as the Torch machine is concerned, it seems to have a power-on reset fault such that it needs break hitting after powering up (I swapped the Torch keyboard for a real BBC one so at least my keypresses make sense). That shouldn't be hard to sort out. Now, without the SASI controller plugged into the 1MHz bus, if I unplug the Z80 board I can at least get the MCP to drop into the 'no Z80' condition where it gives an error message. I can't get that if the SASI controller is present (whether I have any combination of Xebec board & hard drive present or not) - just the MCP test on the screen and a flashing cursor. I'm curious why I don't see any disk activity at all, like it's not even trying to access the hard drive (ditto replacing that drive with a known-working unit, just with no valid data on it). Maybe the Xebec interface is faulty... [ Torch 725 ] > Definitely not a Quad-X nope :-( I'm quite amazed Torch could produce so many different boxes all based around the same BBC / Z80 / 68k choices though :-) >> Information on what exactly a Torch Unicorn was would be useful, to be >> honest. > > I thought it was a 68000 coprocessor for the Beeb. Ahh, yet another case with the same guts then :) >> I do have a spare hard disk labelled as Quad X, those tape drives and >> controller boards, a surplus Torch-stock PSU, complete ROM set, and the >> complete schematics for the QX VME card. I'll just go build myself >> one... ;-) > > Good luck in finding that custom chip (oh, what did they call it?) that > handles video, etc... the Openchip? True. I do have the programming guide and the spec (which I believe you said that you had), but unfortunately not the chip. I bet the guy I got this stuff from has a whole pile of them! [tape drives] > Oh, it just hooks up to the SCSI bus... It's getting the software sorted > out that's the problem. ahh, fair enough. Not come across anything that'll help you yet though :-( > Still, it can't be worse than the PERQ3a. On that infernal machine, the > minor device numbers have no relation to the SCSI addresses at all! take the ol' tial-and-error approach huh? :) > The Manta is something I know nothing about, so if you have technical > docs I'd be interested in probing you for information... yep, I do - no schematics though :-) Just skimmed the docs, and it looks like it's a pretty flexible unit supporting up to 4 drives, which can be just about anything by the looks of it. Although there are built-in definitions for common drives I get the impression it's all pretty flexible so just about anything can be defined. Parameters can be set for a given drive, including data rate (125/250/500KB per sec), number of heads (i.e SS/DS), bytes per sector (128/256/512/1024), sectors per track (0..244), cylinders (0..245), write precomp, step rate, head settle delay, motor on/off delays, starting sector number etc. There's also a parameter for setting the relationship between logical and physical steps, for e.g. formatting a 40 track disk in an 80 track drive. They actually look like quite nice boards... one of those in the PC could come in handy... cheers Jules ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/

20 years, 5 months

Fwd: old hardware help requested

by vaxzilla＠jarai.org

DEC used a lot of these on it's systems. Their external TK50 drive: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Digital/timeline/1984-6.htm Their BA123 style enclosure--the nameplates you see next to the power switches are separate pieces of plastic which snap into the plastic of the case, if helps at all: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Digital/timeline/1985-2.htm http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Digital/timeline/1985-4.htm Their VAXstation 2000: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Digital/timeline/1987-2.htm The base of their VT-240 terminal is another example, but I can't find any clear pictures of it: http://vt100.net/docs/tp83/full0303.jpg http://www.montagar.com/~patj/dec/ware/GRA_SOF_REF_GD_VT240_241_1984.JPG The one example I have on hand is on my VAXserver 4000-300, though mine's manufacture date is Feb 20, 1991. I can find confirmation, but I believe these were first being built a year or two before that time. http://www.jarai.org/temp/0629_001-sm.jpg http://www.jarai.org/temp/0629_002-sm.jpg http://www.jarai.org/temp/0629_002-sm.jpg There's also the VAXstation 3100 and DECstation 3100 series of computers. I couldn't find a clear picture, but here's a diagram for the back of the case used by those models: http://www.whiteice.com/~williamwebb/Chap2/DOC-2-6.html -brian.

20 years, 5 months

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test-drb June 2003