Hello all,
Verne has some very early PC magazines available in Greenville, SC for
pickup or for shipping at your expense.
Please contact him directly at vern99t(a)charter.net to save these from a
landfill.
The usual disclaimers apply.
Best regards,
Erik Klein
www.vintage-computer.com <http://www.vintage-computer.com/>
www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum
The Vintage Computer Forum
---------------------------- Original Message
----------------------------
Subject: Old Computer Magazines
From: "Verne" <vern99t(a)charter.net>
Date: Fri, April 30, 2004 2:01 pm
To: webmasterNOSPAM(a)vintage-computer.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
I'm about to trash an old collection of PC Mag, PC World, PC Tech
Journal
About 4 Boxes in very good condition ranging from 1984 to 1988
Any Interest ?? The boxes weigh a ton.. Unless they have some value
The shipping cost will be prohibitive
Greenville, SC
Verne
> Everything on it is TTL except for one LSI IC marked
> MCH-01. Anyone know what that might be?
Probably a character ROM.
Lee.
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>TCF (NJ annual Computer flea) http://www.tcf-nj.org report
Damn it!!!
I was just thinking about this the other day and meant to put it on my
calendar. I wanted to go, and today would have been better for me (now I
have to see if I can get there tomorrow or not).
DAMN!
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
>I have a couple as well, and I thought it was quite descriptive of the
>processor's capabilities. I wonder what kind of neat logo we could come up
>with for the Hitachi 63C09... ;-)
You could make the circles '?'marks - for all the undocumented opcodes!
>>In hindsight, the 6809 while the best 8 processer it only has 64k of
>>memory space.
>
>So? Most (all?) 8-bit CPUs have that "limitation" -> which can be easily
>overcome with bankswitching and other techniques...
I agree that standard 16 bit 64k addressing should not have kept the processor
>from becoming more widespread than it did - look at the Z80 and 6502 - both
less capable processors, both with "only" 64k and both received much more
acceptance than the 6809.
I do think that a natural progression in the 6809 family (had it continued)
would have been an integrated segmented or bank switched memory manager -
this could have been worked quite nicely into the 09 architecture.
>> Also since the only
>>common 6809 system was by Radio Shack as games machine you never got the
>>good I/O like lower case letters and a real serial and floppy drives.
>>Ben.
>
>Game machine? Hardly... the Commodore & Atari were *much* better with games
>than the CoCo ever was. Floppy drives? RS drives were the best available
>for that class of market at the time.
I 1/2 agree (with each of you) - the original CoCo (and even the CoCo2) were
somewhat limited, and more importantly packaged (CoCo1) and marketed as a cheap
home console computer. Not so much a game console (although the cartridge slot
does suggest this), but as a cheap "toy" computer (that happened to play a bunch
of cartridge games). The CoCo3 was a marked improvement, however it was too
little/too late, and as no one else had really picked up the CPU, it got the
reputation as an "oddball".
I do agree on the RS drive - the drive cartridge used a standard floppy controller
chip (and you could use standard off-the-shelf drives) and interfaced directly to
the 09 bus through the cartridge slot - much better/faster then the custom serial
drive offerings by the "other guys". But, I also think that having to use a
cartridge for the drive seems a bit goofy - why not have implemented a drive
interface native to the machine?
I designed and built my own 6809 based workstations - both the homebrew ones shown
on my web page, and a couple of custom bus/racked limited production designs for a
couple of "big" companies as in-house test platforms - These "serious" systems were
remarkably powerful for their time, and gave a truer impression of the 6809's
potential than the CoCo which hid that power beneath a flimsy and toyish looking
case, an inadaquate keyboard (CoCo1) and artifically limiting system software (for
example, the CoCo ROM's required DP to be "Page Zero" - and hogged most of it).
>How does [[ Crappy graphics, crappy sound, great I/O speeds & Unix-class
>multitasking OSs ]] == "Game Machine"???
Speaking of multitasking, there's a really nice feature of the 6809 that is
often ignored, however I used this in a number of 6809 based products that
I designed to implement very fast simple multitasking.
This feature is the "Direct Page" register! - Unlike other CPU's which use
"zero page", the 6809 has DP which means that you can place your "zero page"
at any 256 byte boundary. This register is also saved and restored during a
full interrupt, meaning that in a multitasking system, each task can have it
own "zero page". This makes for compact code (many tasks never need to use
extended addressing for memory references).
Here's an example of a ultra simple task swapper in only 5 instruction, in
which each task runs in round-robin fashion, requiring only 3 bytes in each
tasks "page" - there is no system task control blocks/tables:
; Interrupt saves all registers (can be SWI for volentary swap)
INTHND: STS <MYSP ; Save current task stack pointer
LDA <TLINK ; Get next tasks DP
TFR A,DP ; Switch to new DP :-( can't load DP directly)
LDS <MYSP ; Restore new task SP
RTI ; Load new task registers & launch
Ah - such memories!
Regards,
Dave
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
I found two "new" Multibus cards in the last couple of weeks. The first
was made by Monolithic Memories and appears to be a RAM/PROM card. The
intersting thing about it is that it has three Dallas battery backed NV
RAMs and two RCA 62256 SRAMS. Another oddity is that it has cutouts along
the top edge, probably for some type of I/O connectors.
<http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/multibus/mmi%20mm8800.jpg>
The other card is a video card made by Matrox. Everything on it is TTL
except for one LSI IC marked MCH-01. Anyone know what that might be? There
are four other blocks on it that appear to be LSI ICs but it turns out that
they're really DIP switches with covers on them. There is one in the top LH
corner with not cover.
<http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/multibus/matrox%20msbc%2024-320.jpg>
Does anyone have docs for either of these?
Joe
On May 1, 12:17, Joe R. wrote:
> At 10:02 AM 5/1/04 -0500, Pat wrote:
> >On Saturday 01 May 2004 03:50, Bert Thomas wrote:
> >> "Joe R." wrote:
> >> Fred, can I use that MFM controller in my 11/750?
> >
> >No. You need UNIBUS cards for an 11/750. That's an RQDX3, a QBUS
card.
> >
> >You can find out what cards are using module numbers with Megan
Gentry's
> >field guide:
> >
> >http://world.std.com/~mbg/pdp11-field-guide.txt
>
> That won't tell any more than the listings will since that's where
> the descriptions came from.
The third column contains "Q" for Qbus or "U" for Unibus.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
I worked with many systems back in the middle to late 80s when the 386 was in vogue. I don't recall any of them using an older 287 math coprocessor though. Here is a link to a page full of mbs and DTK did indeed make a discrete chip 386 motherboard back then. The co-processor was a 387 though.
http://www.redhill.net.au/b-92.html
best regards, Steve Thatcher
-----Original Message-----
From: SHAUN RIPLEY <vax3900(a)yahoo.com>
Sent: Apr 30, 2004 6:15 AM
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: 386 motherboard with discrete logic chips only?
I talked with my friend the other day and he claimed
that 386 motherboards all used this or that chip sets;
But I vaguely remember I might once have such a 386.
It had a 287 math coprocessor and some memory chips on
board. What I can remember is that it had many logic
chips on board but I can't recall whether it had chip
sets or not. Unluckly I dumped it years ago... Could
somebody give me an answer?
vax, 3900
__________________________________
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I need two items to complete my omnibot 2000 robot. Missing are the tray and
the home base. I have searched google and eBay with no luck. The sites that
sell parts only have manuals, batteries, and chargers (from Radio Shack). It
took me a year to get a remote control for it. Anyone with an extra tray?
Thanks for your time.
Hi All,
While going through the *pile* of mail here at the office, I also
found a box filled with DEC cards. It was shipped by someone in
Wichita, KS, but no name.
I *do* remember buying this, but can't find a record of who I
bought it from. If this is you... please respond off-list, since
I can't remember whether I *paid* for it or not...
Thanks for the OT-ing,
Fred
--
Fred N. van Kempen, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Collector/Archivist
Visit the VAXlab Project at http://VAXlab.pdp11.nl/
Visit the Archives at http://www.pdp11.nl/
Email: waltje(a)pdp11.nl BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS / Mountain View, CA, USA
