Just some useless info, FWIW.
All this recent talk of bubble memories got me to
remembering.... A company I worked for in Buffalo NY
around 1982 was putting bubble memories into a small
diskless machine that they sold (or rented?) to golf-course
pro shops. It was called a "handicaputer" - it kept track
of golfer's scores and handicaps and such. No idea how
many were made, but my impression is not very many. But
it might be something to watch for, for anyone into bubbles.
We also had, IIRC, an SS-30 card (SWTPC I/O bus) with a
bubble memory on it, for which I hacked Flex "disk" drivers.
(Somebody else had already written the lower-level bubble
read/write code.) At one point it booted into Flex. Might
have been called "disk-bub" or "flex-bub" or something
similar. Sold only a handful though. Really cool but
probably too expensive unless you really needed bubbles for
some reason. One went to some research station in Alaska
(or Antarctica?) - they said disk drives would have frozen
up.
Bill.
__________________________________
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Dwight, I ran across your posting about the EC-1. I am afraid I go back to the EC-1 period and used hybrid analog-very early digital computers at North American in the early 60s. I wondered if you knew of a source for a fairly good condition EC-1? I just purchased one and am in the process of getting it to work again. But would like to have a second unit to share parts with, etc. Hope this gets to you. Thanks. Larry Royster.
I've still got a bounty out on the documentation for the following
products (circa 1990-1991):
Probe X (from the Strategic Software Group)
HP GlancePlus
HP PerfView
HP OpenView
IBM Tivoli
IBM Netview
Please contact me if you've got anything.
Thanks!
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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All,
A question: I wondered if results from the Byte Sieve of
Eratosthenes "benchmark" are publicly available anywhere, or if I
have to root out a copy of Byte Magazine? I googled for it, and found
nice C and Forth versions at
http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/nsieve.html
and *some* results, but I'd sort of like to re-read the original
article and see what the results for all of the classic computers
they tested were.
The above URL cites Byte, Sept. 1981, pp. 180, and Jan. 1983,
pp. 283. Copyright law being what it is, I assume the articles are
still Byte magazine IP, but I'd think they could gain a fair amount
of publicity from having that article posted somewhere as a "teaser",
particularly if they link to some of the url's showing modern machine
performance. Can't find such a pointer on their site,
http://www.byte.com however. And the site itself is not encouraging.
--
- Mark
210-522-6025, page 888-733-0967
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
I have one of the these too. They were standard IBM IO Selectrics, modified
electrically for what appears to be use on a military aircraft. I'm planning
on building
a serial or USB interface for it so I can use it as a remote terminal for my
IBM 1130
simulator. I've gathered a lot of information about it including the
connector, signals
etc. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send you what I have. These
machines
being sold on eBay, by the way, are in wonderful shape mechanically but most
likely
have a shorted or open control soleloid.
Brian
Thanks to all who sent me copies of that MM58174A app note. I'm not quite
to the stage of using the contents, but it's nice to have.
I do have scans of the board that I intend to put up on my website, in the
meantime, I have been tracing the board and have puzzled out the 10 pin
connector - it's power, gnd, battery-backup for the 6114 and MM58174A,
serial in/out, and three of the I/O bits (SB, F2, F3) on the CPU. I have
raided the local electronics scrap bin (we have to sort our waste into
numerous categories from "burnables" to "food waste" to "light metal",
etc., including "electronic scrap") for the connector off of a dead CD-R
drive, mounted the power connector and the audio/master-slave connector
to a piece of perfboard, and constructed a daughter card that gives me
easy-to-plug-into access to the signals that the board needs, and, ta-da,
I just got a '>' prompt from its Tiny Basic.
At the moment, I haven't puzzled enough out to enter programs (I get an
"ERROR 1" - Out of Memory), but I can write statements in immediate mode
and see the results (FOR loops, PRINTs, etc.). If I pull its 6116, I
don't get a prompt, so I don't think it's a problem with the SRAM, but
"PRINT TOP" gives me -32768 rather than an expected 4353 or similar
number.
So one thing I'm going to do with this is to change its baud rate from
110 bps to the max of 4800... After that, who knows. I could use an
enclosure for it.
For something out of my junk drawer, it's pretty cool. I'm going to write
to the guy who gave it to me to see if he knows what it was used for.
I used to have access to an RB5X when I worked at COSI. Now, at least, I
can play around in its environment. Somewhere at home, I have a backup
of our robot disk. I'll have to see if I've brought an image of that
in my C-64 directory.
Let me recommend the INS8073 for anyone who wants that late-70s/early-80s
BASIC experience in a bread-board computer. I think you could put one
together on a single (large) breadboard slab. You'd need 40 pins for
the CPU, another 24 to 32 pins for the SRAM, and some sort of RS-232
level shifter, like a MAX-232. The rest is all caps and resistors.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Apr-2004 23:40 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -81.4 F (-63.0 C) Windchill -113.3 F (-80.7 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 7.2 kts Grid 059 Barometer 687.1 mb (10361. ft)
Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
>I was SOL with Linux - I had to fire up a 68K Mac (there is no installer
>for PPC) _just_ to dump the camera and convert the QT-encoded PICTs to
>JPGs. I did use GC, but it wasn't my first choice - I'd rather use a
>Perl script.
First you should have been able to install on a PPC anyway. 2nd, I'm
pretty sure I have a PPC disk for the QT100 install. And even if I don't,
I have only ever used my 100 on a PPC, so I know the software installs
and runs just fine on a PPC running OS 9.1
If you want me to pull out my disks and check, and send to you anything I
have, just let me know. The 100 and 150 software I think is the same, as
the only real difference between them was the 150 has more memory and an
attachable macro lens (the 100 could even be upgraded to a 150 if you
wanted to pay Apple's price to do it)
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
> For a rough test, set the switches on the back to 'Internal sync' and
> 'Terminated' (they'll be set like this if it was used on a 'Bow) and then
> feed a composite mono signal into the green BNC socket. 'Internal Sync'
> is sync-on-green, of coruse.
>
> If yoy get a green image on the screen, then the monitor is basically
> working. You could still have a problem with the red or blue video
> amplifiers, but theyr'e not hard to fix (unlike the horrible
> PSU/horizontal deflection system -- I still shudder when I remember that
> schematic!).
>
> -tony
Thanks alot for your hints Tony and Paul, I'll give it a try at home.
Pierre
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