Hi everyone,
Having conferred with Jay West, I'd now like to
introduce the readers of this mailing list to a new
publication, the Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter.
A few of you already know me as evan947@yahoo, the guy
who collects handhelds/PDAs. More than a few of you
know Michael Nadeau, formerly of Byte magazine, who
founded the Classic Tech E-Letter a few years ago.
Meanwhile, I and Sellam Ismail (who EVERYONE knows)
pondered starting a print magazine for the hobby last
fall. Ultimately we decided the hobby just isn't big
enough yet to support that.
Instead, early this year Mike handed over the reigns
of his newsletter to me. For those who don't know me,
besides being a computer collector, I (like Mike) am a
veteran technology reporter. Paid my dues at Gannett
(which owns USA Today and other papers), was a staff
engineer at a product review lab for telecom gear, and
spent 3.5 years at eWeek (formerly PC Week.) I'm 29
and grew up on Apple and Atari.
The first thing I did as the new editor is change the
name. I think "Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter"
is more intuitive and will help attractive people who
aren't necessarily familiar with our growing hobby.
I also changed some of the fundamentals. Before, the
newsletter had infrequent publishing, and in each
issue an attempt was made to cover all of the news out
there. That's a difficult way to run things. So now,
the newsletter is published every Monday. Also, in
every issue we have one main article (news, opinion,
etc.), vs. trying to be a comprehensive news outlet
every single week.
By "we" I mean myself, Mike, Sellam, and author
Christine Finn (Christine's known for writing the book
"Articacts: An archeologist's year in Silicon
Valley"), and Erik Klein, who runs
www.vintage-computer.com.
Of course we did not want to overlap with this mailing
list. Tech tips are clearly this list's domain. So
with the newsletter we're sticking to the root word:
news. To be crystral-clear, we're not a forum, and
we're not going to duplicate existing efforts.
We also didn't want to duplicate fragment the existing
online classified ads and marketplaces of Sellam's and
Erik's web sites. So instead they each send me their
top three or four ads on alternate weeks, which I
publish in the newsletter. Along with the ads there's
a link that says "click here for more," taking readers
to their respective sites.
So as you can see, we've revamped the old Classic Tech
E-Letter into something that's fresh, consistent, and
clearly carving out its own niche.
Besides the few of us behind the scenes, we also
solicit guest writers. For example, Visicalc legend
Dan Bricklin gave us a column, as did the Digibarn's
Bruce Damer. Macintosh inventor Jef Raskin did an
interview with us. We interviewed the CTO of
Hewlett-Packard's printer division, and even IBM's
David Bradley -- better known as the guy who invented
Ctrl-Alt-Delete. We also went to suburban
Philadelphia to write about a video game conference.
We currently have about 450 subscribers. On our
informational site, which is
news.computercollector.com, there is additional
content. There's a computer history bookstore, a
small but growing page of tales from collectors, an
events calendar, a summary of our articles to date,
and yes, some lame Google ads to help us pay for the
hosting.
Anyway, the newsletter is FREE, and if you subscribe
we promise to never, ever give away your email address
or send you spam. We also would love to have some of
you write guest columns. The slate is wide open;
write about anything you're passionate about in the
hobby. If you're not a writer, then just send us your
ideas for articles, and/or news we should be aware of.
Sometimes, we'll make factual mistakes, and we promise
to be vigilant about identifying and correcting those.
As I told Sellam, I respect and fear that most of the
readers of the classiccmp lists know way more about
computer history than I ever will. So please bear
with us when, not if, we mess up.
Thanks for taking this time to read this long message.
To subscribe to the newsletter, go to our site
(again, that's news.computercollector.com), click the
subscribe link, and just put in your email address.
Thanks again,
Evan Koblentz
PS -- I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you
visit the area and want to chat about vintage
computing over a drink, I'm always interested.
Does anyone out there have any information on the escape sequences needed
to control a DEC Mini Exchange? These are the serial switches that were
often used for printer and modem sharing on Rainbow 100 systems. I'm
trying to write a program to access it, but no luck. Any help is
appreciated!
-Jeff Armstrong
jba(a)sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
>Apparently all DOS 3.5" floppies are FAT format with the capacity
>is 1,457,664 bytes, regardless the version, after accounting for the
>two hidden files, so...
>Is there a way I can patch or debug the floppy after generic
>format to make it look bootable?
I thought there was a Format /b switch to set a floppy as bootable (which
is different then Format /s which sets as bootable AND copies system
files). Of course, I seem to recall that as an option with DOS, so I
don't know if it is an option with something higher. A quick look in
Win2k doesn't list /b as an option (or /s, and neither seem to work when
tried).
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
On 12 Apr 2004 at 10:45, I wrote:
> If you look on the lower left-rear of the big unit below the serial
> plate, you'll see that it says "64100A Mainframe." :-)
I've never owned a 64110A (portable) mainframe. Pictures in the sales
literature of the time, though, show the model number plate on the lower
right-hand side of the fold-down keyboard below the cursor keys.
-- Dave
Does anyone know anything about the Burroughs head-per-track disk
drives? Must be 1960s mainframe technology. We had two of these
gadgets attached to a (modified) CTL Modular One at Westfield College,
London. It was all scrapped out in the 1980s, but I still have a
power supply from one of the drives. Is it any use to anybody (it's
now in Bristol)? It's a massive transformer, rectifier and capacitor
setup.
--
John Honniball
coredump(a)gifford.co.uk
The magnetic tape you have is for the IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter. This machine was the first "Word Processing" device ever marketed. It was introduced 40 years ago in May of 1964!
Neither the term "word processor" or "text editor" existed at that time. After being on the market for about two years IBM sales representatives familiar with "data processing" began to call the concept "word processing", thus the term evolved.
The product was priced at $10,500 (in 1964 dollars!) It included a full size Steelcase desk with a recessed typewriter and a tape console 1' w x 2.5' d x 3' h that weighed about 100 lbs.
Text was entered on the typewriter keyboard, recorded on the tape and edited by playing text back from the tape a character, word, line, etc. at a time. Print speed was an awsome 15 characters per second.
Not sure what happened to your query in 2002 but I found it now. Not even sure which message treading service I am looking at (via Google).
Wondered if you still have the 7100 as I have just acquired one. It does boot (from the 20M HD) and seems to work fine. I also wondered if there was some legacy software to boot it from in the event that its rom battery goes flat. Maybe you can help? I imagine that the boot info could be retrieved from the rom via a ZIP disk from the parallel port if I knew how.
Bob Barrett, Adelaide
I'm sorry, but I've worked extensively on many differen't unices, and AIX is
truely evil. Guess if it's the only unix you deal with so you don't keep
having to switch mentality between AIX and everything else...
Jay
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