>
So is this a motorola 68K Qbus board??
--
There were a few companies that made Qbus 68k systems, including
Cadmus and Integrated Solutions, mostly running some version of Unix.
The ISI board used a DART and CTC, and has a SUN style mmu.
I picked a HP-110 Plus (the German version, if it matters) recently, but
the power supply was nowhere to be found.
Does anybody have the pinout and voltage/current requirements?
Failing that, would it be safe to remove the battery and connect a 6VDC
power supply to the battery terminals?
Thanks for the info on formatting an RK05 disk. I guess I did not
know this was possible. Does anyone happen to have the program to
do the actual format? I use Dave Gesswein's dumprest to load code from
a PC to my 8f. That program is not part of the package. I don't think
I have ever seen it, but may have overlooked it while browsing the main
pdp-8 sites. Thanks. It would be great if that's all I had to do to
make the disks useful again.
Tim R.
_______________________________________________
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Interesting day at the auction.
The Data General Aviion 9500+ went for a whopping $17.00. The pallet of
ultrasparc's went for $300, (way over my budget), but I walked out with a
pdp11/73 in a BA11 case.
And the mystery box. A black DEC BA11-m case with a dark camo-green panel and
3 qbus cards, a DRV11-b, a dual qbus card with two 20 pin berg connectors. No
I.D. except for the stencil EXTREL 500869 C-81, I have no idea maybe a floppy
controller or a serial card.
And finally A Quad height Qbus board with a Motorolla MC68000l12 processor and
a paper label at the bottom of the board that says:
590139
BUS CPU
REV A
EXTREL 2MHZ
It also has 2 Zilog Z80 chips a
Z80B CTC and a
Z80 UART
So is this a motorola 68K Qbus board??
Can Anybody enlighten me. Any documentation, a quick google search found very
little .It probably was part of a instrument that was sold in another lot.
I picked this one up as I spotted the ba-11 qbus box.
Cheers
Tom
--
---
Please do not read this sig. If you have read this far, please unread back to
the beginning.
I just received a copy of Introduction to DECsystem-10 Assembler
Language Programming
by Michael Singer, published in 1978 by John Wiley ISBN : 0-471-03458-4
I would like to share some excerpts from the preface which resonate with
the recent (long)
discussion on teaching assembler language programming :
With the widespread availability of higher level languages (such as
ALGOL, COBOL
FORTRAN, PL/1) for computer programming, as well as packages put out
by the major
computer manufacturers that, almost at the touch of a button, will
perform a variety
of complex tasks, it is reasonable to ask why any other than a
relatively small
number of specialists should trouble to learn assembler language
programming at all.
There are good practical, theoretical and aesthetic reasons for doing so.
...
In our opinion, however, the most useful function served by a
knowledge of assembler
language programming is to give the user a much closer awareness of
how the computer
works, as well as inestimably greater control over its workings, than
is feasible with
a higher level language. In our experience, the higher level language
user who is
familiar with assembler language is a more efficient - even happier -
programmer than
one who is not.
....
The notion that assembler language programming is esoteric and
inherently difficult is,
in our experience, very much mistaken. On the contrary, for many
people it seems to be the
natural way to start off with computers.
...
All computers have a great deal in common, and much of what is said
here applies equally
well, with only minor changes, to many other machines.
...
Octal and binary numbers must be introduced, and indeed a programmer
should ideally be able
to think with numbers in any base. Such a facility, however, may be
acquired gradually, and
so in Section 1.3 we go no further than is necessary to understand
what follows. At no stage
do we encourage the reader to gain skill in performing calculations in
various bases, or in
base conversion; in our experience, once the principles are
understood, the student's time is
better spent in learning how to pass such drudgery to the computer.
....
Those readers who want to proceed further, particularly into systems
programming, will be
ready after reading this book to refer to the manuals. A warning
should be given that much
less care goes into [the] preparation of the descriptive literature
than into the machine
itself and its software, and the manuals contain many obscurities and
errors.
-- HansP
>Hi Dave
Hi Dwight - seems we have several interests/machines in common.
> I have a couple of Horizons and a older style box ( no wood ).
I used to have an early Horizon in the blue metal (no wood) box -
gave it away years ago, which I regret - would love to be able to
build up another one, so if at some point you decide you have too
many boxes (metal or wood) - please think of me - I still have a
spare SD controller and a few other N* parts.
>I've not had time to fiddle with these but I think the Horizons
>use the double density controllers. Right now, I'm still fiddling
>with the H8 machines but the N* was on my list of machines
>to create a transfer program for. It sounds like you have already
>done the work here.
I wrote a transfer program for the N* SD controller in order to
extract the disk images for my Altair simulator (I'm running the N*
SD controller in the Altair) - All it needs is a bit of tweaking to
allow it to handle DD disks.
I've got tons of native software that I wrote for the N* system, and
a few other utilities (the PC->N* binary input program I mentioned
in previous post, as well as utilities to transfer files directly into
and out of N* disk images) - I have no idea how many people are still
into N*, but perhaps we should think about creating a pool of resources
such as we have for the H8 - If enough people are interested.
> None of my machine have been powered on since I got them ( at
>least 2 or 3 years ). It'll be fun turning them on and watching
>the smoke.
I assume you know the right (and wrong) things to do - if not, contact
me off-list and I can provide some pointers.
> I think I have some disk with these but I've not looked to
>see what I got. Projects, projects and more projects.
I've got tons of SD software (much of it my own) - and I know a few
people running DD horisons - I'm sure we can get you setup with usable
software.
Btw, in doing my Altair project, I contacted Dr. Charles Grant - the
surviving founder of NorthStar, and he granted permission to distrubute and
use all of the NorthStar material - I have the SD software and many of
the N* manuals posted on my web site.
It would be a fairly simple matter to tweak my Altair simulator into a
Horizon simulator - mainly removing the front panel support and modifying
the I/O map...
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
>From: "Dave Dunfield" <dave04a(a)dunfield.com>
>
>At 11:40 29/06/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>>On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Dave Dunfield wrote:
>>> Hi Guys,
>>> I am trying to help someone with a NorthStar Horizon that has the double
>>> density controller obtain a copy of CP/M for his system. I have located
>>> someone with the software - not it's just a matter of figuring out how to
>>> move it.
>>> My plan is to write a little utility that will allow the one person to read
>>> the disk image into a file on a PC which can be transferred by email, and
>>> then the other guy can write it out to a diskette - this is somewhat
complicated
>>> by the fact that NorthStar allows mixed single/double density on a diskette
>>> (I don't know if CP/M does this or not) - my idea is to read it a sector at
a
---snip---
Hi Dave
I have a couple of Horizons and a older style box ( no wood ).
I've not had time to fiddle with these but I think the Horizons
use the double density controllers. Right now, I'm still fiddling
with the H8 machines but the N* was on my list of machines
to create a transfer program for. It sounds like you have already
done the work here.
None of my machine have been powered on since I got them ( at
least 2 or 3 years ). It'll be fun turning them on and watching
the smoke.
I think I have some disk with these but I've not looked to
see what I got. Projects, projects and more projects.
Dwight