test-drb April 2004

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

248 participants
481 discussions

Making the decision to specialize on a particular classic comp. arch?

by dzubint＠vcn.bc.ca

I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem. For years and years, I've basically collected anything non-Wintel old-ish (older than ten years) computer-related stuff. I've got quite a few systems which aren't really "rare" like Commodore 64, Radio Shack Cocos & MC-10s, TI-99s, etc. etc. I've also been amassing a collection of DEC PDP and VAX "stuff" which I work on, use, and enjoy on a regular basis. My basement is a mess and I'm starting to think about scaling back by selling or giving away some of the non-DEC common stuff. (I regularily see Commodore 64s on eBay for $20) Is this specializing the right approach? Am I likely going to be kicking myself in fifteen years because I *had* a working Radio Shaft Colour Computer and I eBay-ed it for $10? Also in my mind is the possible demise of analog TV and it may not be possible to find a TV with a composite-input to plug my C64 into in fifteen years if everything (including broadcast) is digital Any thoughts, comments, or opinions? Thomas Dzubin

20 years, 8 months

BASICON MC-1N?

by Lee.Davison＠merlincommunications.com

> I've tried building a circuit to manually dump the PROM (it's > only 32x8), but no success there - all the bits read '0', You do know the 74S188 is open collector outputs? You'll need pullups or the data will always read '0' Lee. ________________________________________________________________________ This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star Internet. The service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit: http://www.star.net.uk ________________________________________________________________________

20 years, 8 months

IBM serial number query

by vcf＠siconic.com

Someone contacted me and said they have an IBM PC that he was told was the 35th off the assembly line. The serial number he gave me off the unit is 0205544. He also gave me a number he found inside the chassic which is IBM1800841. He said the motherboard has been upgraded to 64K. I don't know if he meant it was upgraded to the 64-256K motherboard or if the RAM sockets on the original 16-64K motherboard were populated. Can anyone shed any light on the serial number(s)? Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

20 years, 8 months

HP Viper problems

by rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com

Does anyone here have any experience with the HP Viper or HyperViper cards? Now that I have a working HyperViper system I've been pulling out all the Viper and HyperViper cards that I've has stashed away and testing them. I found the the software on the working system works fine with the 82321C Viper cards but not with the 82321B Viper cards. The device loader and BASIC loader both work fine and they start what looks like a HP 9000 type boot sequence that shows all the installed devices and does a memory test. After that completes it SHOULD looks for a HP system file and boot HP BASIC. The C cards work fine but the B cards never find the system. Everything is EXACTLY indentical except the card revision. I'm using the last version of the drivers and according to HP they should work for all versions of the card but I've checked two HyperVipers and two C cards and they all work and yet none of the four B cards work. FWIW I have another system with an older version of the software. It used to work but the hard drive in it has been slowly dying and now it won't can find the system either. It has a B card in it and I think version C software. The odd thing is that it looks exactly like a 9816 or 9836 booting up. It even displays a message saying that it's a 9816 or 9836C (depending on which you select with the configuration utility). The later system says that it's a PC 300 and the boot screen is somewhat different. I think the difference in due to the newer software but I'm not sure. I need to pull the card from the old system and try it in the newer one to be sure. (There is a Boot ROM on the cards and in a real HP 9000 it controls those messages but I don't think that's the case on these.) I tracked down a new sealed package of the Viper software but wouldn't you know it, it's missing disk 2!!!! Does anyone have any original software for these or any experience is getting them running? I'm also looking for some of the key combinations that HP uses to emulate the HP keyboard for thing like the Stop and Reset keys and how to get back to the User keyboard from the system keyboard. Joe

20 years, 8 months

New find; HP HyperViper

by rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com

Hello Bernd, I'm still experimenting with the Viper system. The HyperViper is a real pleasure to use! Today I hooked up a couple of different external HP-IB hard drives and tested them. Two of them were untested and it turned out that both were bad :-( The third one is an old reliable standby HP7958B with HPL, three different configurations of HP BASIC 4, BASIC 5 and BASIC 6 installed on it. At first I couldn't see the drive when the HV started looking for operating systems but I was able to CATalog the drive after it booted the Rocky Mountain BASIC from the PC's hard drive. It took me a while to figure out why I couldn't see the external drive when the HV booted. I finally realized that it was booting so fast that I never saw the list of OSs on the external drive! The funny thing is that it showed the OS of the PC drive for several seconds before it booted but it booted IMMEDIATELY after showing the OSs on the HP-IB drive. I found that I had to press the space bar on the keyboard as soon as the Boot ROM kicked in and started showing system devices. Pressing the space bar stops it from booting after it shows the OSs. At that point you can boot any OS that you choose (same as any HP 9000 200/300). Anyway I was able to do a SYSTEM STORE of the RMB to the HP-IB drive and then boot it from that drive. It appears to work exactly the same as the copy loaded from the PC's hard drive. I could also boot BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 but the display was shrunken vertically on all of them. One configuration of BASIC 4 worked ok but the others of BASIC 4 and BASIC 5 all filled the blank areas of the screen with various characters when you did a CAT. However they all did seem to run. BASIC 6 was the real surprise. It definetly didn't like it! As soon as it started to load, the machine would jump back to DOS. Under normal conditions you CAN jump back to DOS but you should be able to go right back to RMB and your OS and application will still be running as if nothing happened. But in this case, you couldn't go back to RMB until you powered down the system and powered it up again and rerun the device driver and loader. The loader said that RMB was still running but you never could access it again. HPL was just as bad, when I tried to load it the screen cleared and the machine appeared to lock up. I couldn't switch back to DOS and Control-Alt-Delete didn't have any effect. IIRC HPL has a similar effect on the HP 9000 300s. HPL is only supposed to run on the 9826 and 9836. I think it will work on a 9816 but I don't think it will even run on the other 9000 200s such as the 217 and 237. I haven't tried Pascal yet. I have it on a drive but it's on another system and it will be a pain to get to. But I'll probably dig it out tomorrow and try it. I found a long list of optional parameters in the loader program (BASIC) including things like SELFTEST, MENU, SHORT, LONG and others but none of them appears to do anything. Anybody know anything about them? Joe At 06:10 PM 4/22/04 +0200, you wrote: >Hi Joe, >does it run a version of HP Pascal too ? I'm not sure but I believe it will. I think I remember reading that it will boot an OS from an external HP-IB drive just like a regular 9000/200 will. I need to dig out a drive and try it. Joe > >Thanks Bernd > >On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:24:23 -0400, Joe R. wrote: > >> Today I finally had a chance to check out a PC that I found a few weeks >>ago. I had picked it up becuase it had an HP-IB connector on one of the >>expansion cards. When I looked closer I saw that the card had a sticker >>marked "HP 82324". Bingo! That's the part number of the souped-up >>Measurement Coprocessor card that's commonly called a HyperViper! I have a >>number of Viper cards with 68000 CPUs but I'd never even seen a HyperViper >>card. The HyperViper uses a 16MHz 68030 CPU. The Vipers and HyperVipers are >>HP 9000 series 200 or series 300 computers on a board. You install them in >>a PC and run a driver and it switches over to the 680xx CPU and runs >>(almost!) exactly like HP 9000 computer. It has a built-in HP-IB port and >>supports additional HP-IB cards. It also mounts a HP 9000 file system in >>one file on the PCs hard drive. It uses the PC's parallel and serial ports >>and uses the PC's keybaord and monitor for user I/O. Anyway today I opened >>it up and cleaned all the dirt and insects out and fired it up. It booted >>to DOS then loaded the HP software then switched over to the HyperViper >>card and booted HP BASIC version 6.2 (Rocky Mountain BASIC) without a >>hitch. Wahoo! I'm in business now! It even has the last version (D.00.00) >>of the HP divers. >> >> HP's Viper and HyperViper site >> >><http://ftp.agilent.com/pub/mpusup/pc/old/vp_over.html#m5> >> >> Joe > > > >

20 years, 8 months

Time article about Jobs

by aek＠spies.com

As far as the design, Woz optimized it to such an extent (not letting any gate on any TTL go unused) that the Atari engineers could not follow the logic or the physical layout of the wirewrap...something like that. -- sure... and there's an Easter bunny too. see my previous post for the truth.

20 years, 8 months

Yet another MC-1N post... this time, there's a picture

by dickset＠amanda.spole.gov

OK... This will probably be the last one from me on this unless I can dig up some more info... I scanned the board to see if anyone recognizes it... http://www.penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/pix/sbc/MC-1N/MC-1N.jpg Might this be a Basicom MC-1N? -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 25-Apr-2004 10:50 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -60.1 F (-51.2 C) Windchill -120.4 F (-84.7 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 15.6 kts Grid 347 Barometer 685.6 mb (10416. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

20 years, 8 months

BASICON MC-1N?

by dickset＠amanda.spole.gov

More digging later has revealed three Usenet articles from the same week in 1997 of a product called the "BASICON MC-1N REV A" - there's no vendor name on my INS8073 board, but the part number matches. The Basicon, Inc. website says they are the victim of the current economic times. I've written the repair service listed on their page, but we'll see if they answer. In the meantime, has anyone heard of Basicon? Might their "MC-1N" be the same as what I have (INS8073, 2K SRAM, 8255...)? I've figured out most of the circuit - what has me stumped is that the chip selects are all run through a 74S188 burned as an adress PROM (its address lines are attached to A15-A11 of the CPU, and its data lines go to various chip selects on the board). I've tried building a circuit to manually dump the PROM (it's only 32x8), but no success there - all the bits read '0', which means "always selected" for all devices... clearly not correct. Once I figure out where in memory the MM58174A and 8255 are, I can do more than enter simple BASIC programs. I'd like to see if there's room in the memory map to add more SRAM - there's stuff I'd like to port from my collection of PET programs that would need more than 2K (especially since the 8073 doesn't appear to tokenize its BASIC code when it stores it in RAM or ROM). I've tried writing a program to read every Nth location between the top of RAM and the top of memory space (the RAM, I've already proven, is at the standard address of $1000)... because of the way the INS8073 determines its baud rate (110 bps in this case :-P), "empty" locations read back "182" - no matter where I look, though, I can't get any locations outside of RAM space to answer back with anything else. I'd love to get a manual for this, but there just doesn't seem to be that much information on the 'net about it (if I _have_ that particular product). I'm hoping that it is one of these... it's a pretty neat board... 24 I/O lines out the front, 2K of SRAM and either 2K or 4K (2716 or 2732) of ROM and a clock/calendar. There's even optional battery-backup for the clock chip and the SRAM (just add 3V-5V to a particular pin on the serial/power connector). Thanks for any leads. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 25-Apr-2004 10:10 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -60.3 F (-51.3 C) Windchill -114 F (-81.09 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 13.3 kts Grid 004 Barometer 685.5 mb (10420. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

20 years, 8 months

HP 64000 with 80186 emulator?

by rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com

At 03:10 PM 4/24/04 -0700, Don wrote: > > >On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Joe R. wrote: > >> At 11:05 PM 4/23/04 -0600, you wrote: >> >There was a prototype of the 64000 with a 5MB >> >hard drive, but I don't know if it was ever >> >produced. >> > >> >The original 64000 benchtops had a tape drive >> >(DC100? DC300? >> >> I want to say DC300 but I'm not sure, it's been a long time. However >> it's the same tapes that are used in the HP-85s. Check the archives, they >> have been plenty of discussions about HP-85 tapes and drives. Don't waste >> your time or money on old HP tapes, they're ALL bad. Take my word for it!!! > >DC100! DC300s were the big suckers - about 4x6x.625 inches! You're right. I should realized that. That what my Tektronix and IBM 5100 used. Joe

20 years, 8 months

Whitechapel MG-1 workstation questions

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

On Sat, 2004-04-24 at 21:20, Bernd Kopriva wrote: > Hi Jules, > i got that one formTony Duell some times ago : [snip] thanks for that. > Btw: do you have a spare power supply (or maybe some schematics) ? Mine > is dead, so i never got my machine up and running :-( The machine I've looked at so far has a good PSU, but the track on the power distribution board that feeds +12V to the system board is totally burned away, and someone had bypassed it with a piece of wire. Obviously the system board has suffered some major short at some point - I'm yet to find out if the bypass wire was added after they fixed the fault or not! In other words, it's possible one system board is completely dead, in which case yes there could well be a spare PSU. Depends on what state the system board is in this machine, and whether the PSU in the other one works or not; idealy getting two machines working would be nice! You could always use a standard PC PSU I expect. There's six different lines running to the PSU in these Whitechapels; GND, +5V, +12V, power fail are four of them. The purple wire I expect is -12V. That leaves a red wire, which would seem a strange colour to choose for a negative voltage. Maybe it's +15V or something odd, perhaps for driving the display. I'll let you know when I work it out :-) cheers Jules

20 years, 8 months

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test-drb April 2004