test-drb September 2004

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

268 participants
648 discussions

Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

by vcf＠siconic.com

I told ya so! http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040906/ap_on_hi_te/flop… ath_4 Mon Sep 6, 5:17 PM ET By MARK NIESSE, Associated Press Writer ATLANTA - Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. And good riddance, say some home computer users. The march of technology must go on. Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say. Dell Computer Corp. stopped including a floppy drive in new computers in spring 2003, and Gateway Inc. has followed suit on some models. Floppies are available on request for $10 to $20 extra. "To some customers out there, it's like a security blanket," said Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca. "Every computer they've ever had has had a floppy, so they still feel the need to order a floppy drive." A few customers have complained when they found their new computers don't have floppy drives, but it's becoming uncommon as they realize the benefits of newer technologies, Menchaca said. Almost all new laptops don't come with a floppy. More and more people are willing to say goodbye to the venerable floppy, said Gateway spokeswoman Lisa Emard. "As long as we see customers request it, we'll continue to offer it," she said. "We'll be happy to move off the floppy once our customers are ready to make that move." Some people may hesitate to abandon the floppy just because they're so comfortable with it, said Tarun Bhakta, president of Vision Computers outside Atlanta, one of the largest computer retailers in the South. At his store, the basic computer model comes with all necessary equipment, but no floppy. "People say they want a floppy drive, and then I ask them, 'When was the last time you used it?' A lot of the time, they say, 'Never,'" Bhakta said. But plenty of regular, everyday computer users don't want to let their floppies go. "For my children, they can work at school and at home. I think they're a pretty good idea," said shopper Mark Ordway. "I just want something simple for me and my husband to use," said Pat Blaisdell. The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break. Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around. "There's always some nostalgia," said Scott Wills, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Georgia Tech who has held on to an old 8-inch floppy disk. "It's a technology I'm glad to be rid of. I'd never label them, and I never knew what any of them were until I put them in and looked." In a sense, it's amazing floppy disks have hung around for this long. They only hold 1.44 megabytes of space  still enough for word processing documents but little else. By comparison, CDs store upward of 700 megabytes, and the flash memory drives typically carry between 64 and 256 megabytes. And it's been a long time since floppy disks were even floppy. They used to come in a bendable plastic casing and were 5.25 inches wide, but Apple Computer Inc. pioneered the smaller, higher density disks with its Macintosh (news - web sites) computers in the mid-1980s. Then Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998. "It's not officially dead, but there's no question it's a slow demise," said Tim Bajarin, principle analyst for Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm near San Jose, Calif. "You had a few people ... who were screaming, but in a short time, they adjusted." It may not be too many years before floppy disks are joined by DVDs. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) recently predicted the DVD would be obsolete within a decade. -- 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, 3 months

Survived another one!

by mmcfadden＠cmh.edu

Actually I feel sorry for people that want uniform weather and climate. I also feel sorry for any classic computer that has to survive out in the weather in Florida or the Midwest. /fun on What a bunch of wimps, a little wind and water and everyone wants to leave town. 100 mile wide storm and you can see them coming for days. Here in the Midwest we like our wind and storms a little more concentrated, tornados are a lot more fun. You can see them coming and do the "just barely missed me trick". The sneaky thing about tornados is that they can come at night and you can't see them. They have professional storm chasers for hurricanes with planes, for tornados amateurs in cars. On our lake we always are interested to check the wind speed meters to see how bad it was. I've only retreated under the concrete porch once and watched the neighbor's boat and boat dock flip up into the yard upside down. Weather was clear in about 2 hours. Instant storm, instant storm gone. I keep some of the classic computers in the garage attic to keep the house "down". My wife has only visited there once and made a comment "what's all this stuff". I put it in the attic when the garage was built. There is a nice National Weather Service Doppler radar site very near us, you can watch their web page and when the red storm zone is in the center it's on top of us. /fun off Mike

20 years, 3 months

Job change and shameless plug

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

Sorry I've been more unresponsive to email than usual lately. I've been going through a rather gutwrenching job decision - right during the middle of a major implementation for my current day-job employer. The counter offers have been made and delt with and the dust has settled so things should start to get back to "normal" very shortly. Well, actually, better than normal. The new job I'm taking is almost the same pay but only 3 days a week - work >from home - with full benefits and total flex time (yes, it's a real IT job, not an MLM *GRIN*). Needless to say, this will give me more time with my collection, this list, etc. It will also allow me to spend much more time growing my consulting practice and internet service (web hosting and colocation), which is really what I want to do full time. So needless to say - if anyone is aware of any consulting/support opportunities in the areas of FreeBSD Unix, sendmail, Bind, apache, mysql, etc. I'd love to hear it. My particular specialty is high availability clustering of both apache and mysql. I'm targeting true consulting rather than contracting. I'm not looking for long term contracts. Just ongoing support, maybe a day onsite occasionally if need be. I can do most things remotely but have no problem traveling either. I'm also a good C programmer but I really prefer to keep that to the hobby side of things. In addition, I'm definitely looking for companies who need a firm to host their website or wish to colocate gear. I've been very pleasantly suprised so far at just how quickly a lot of cheap web hosting customers can add up to real dollars! I won't repeat my diatribe on my datacenter - suffice it to say it's a world class datacenter with serious connectivity - not a couple of servers in my basement. Who knows... might even try to find some companies who still run 21MX gear and want hardware support (lord knows I've got the excess inventory), or maybe I can finally start real work on getting that computer museum off the ground :) Regards, Jay West --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

20 years, 3 months

M-series at govt. auction

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

I was thinking about going for the M series at govt. auction mentioned on the list previously. I noted the condition was F7, which means "broken, repairable" or "needs refurbishing". I don't usually buy stuff there... can anyone advise me if F7 is likely to be something as serious as a dead mainboard? Or could it just be and I/O or memory PCA? Any thoughts? Jay

20 years, 3 months

Axlon Ramdisk 320 ???

by rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com

I found this this morning. Anybody know anything about it? I found an Apple Disk II external full height 5 1/4 disk drive in the same lot and this is the same style, size and color so I'm guessing that it might be made for use with an Apple II. However it does have one important difference, it uses a 34 pin ribbon cable instead of the 20 pin like the Apple drive does so it definitely uses a different interface. Joe

20 years, 3 months

M-series at govt. auction

by Innfogra＠aol.com

My bet from looking at the pictures is nothing is wrong with them. The one pictured looks quite clean and the gaylord (big box) seems to have been carefully packed. Probably missing hookup cables, maybe missing some cards but probably not. What it means is not everything is there to make it work but it looks like it might (repairable). If you can go look at them it is a good idea. It is a long time before the sale ends. Looks like a good one to watch. My bet is they ran test equipment for the F16 that was obsoleted and are pretty complete. good luck. Paxton Astoria, OR

20 years, 3 months

rewriting legacy OS for new iron

by ron.hudson＠sbcglobal.net

Would there be any interest in re-writing somthing like RSTS/E, ITS, TWENEX or one of the other legacy OS to work on x86 machines? The idea would be to do something like Linux has done for unix but for one of the other OSs, I think all the ones I mentioned ran on pdp machines, whatever we choose to write could have once run on anything. The new OS should be entirely self hosting. What would be the most interesting old OS to do. This would differ from the simh machines in that actual serial ports would connect to serial devices and printers would connect via parallel port.

20 years, 3 months

Relay computers - OR functionality

by dwight.elvey＠amd.com

Hi I thought I'd show a case where one might want to use diodes. In my logic, 'A' would indicated the normally opened contact an 'a' would be the normally closed contact for relay A. I'll use + to indicate OR and . to indicate AND. Lets say we wanted to create the equation: X=(A.B)+(C.D) We can stack the normally open contact of A in series with a B contact. We can then parallel these with the series of C and D. The output of these can be tied to the coil of X. Now say we also needed: Y=(A.B)+(E.F) We would have to used a new set of contacts for the A.B term because the wires work both ways. If we were using DC relays, we can add a pair of diodes in series with the two AND'd terms used to drive each X and Y. This reuses the same contacts to drive both X and Y. So, as you can see, the diodes are not necessary but can be used to save on the number of isolated contacts needed. One can also play boolian games with these equations to do things like reduce total power required. Since each relay is assumed to have both inverting and non-inverting outputs, one can change where things are inverted: y=(a+b).(e+f) If the case is that Y would be more likely to be active, this second equation makes more sense for power. You can see here that we have optimized the power without doing anything other than change a few wires. We may have also minimized the need for extra contacts and or diodes. Like I said, designing with relays takes a different way of looking at the problem. One can also see that the OR function can be created by putting contacts in series or in parallel, depending on the active state of the relay that one is driving. The same goes for the AND function. This adds another flavor to things because one can move which side of the relay one places the term to optimize, power, delay or number of contacts used. Dwight

20 years, 3 months

78MGT2 and 79MGT2

by tothwolf＠concentric.net

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Dwight K. Elvey wrote: > >From: "K. Venkataramanan" <rvtechno(a)vsnl.net> > > > >Hi there > > > >I saw your posting. I think I know where I can pick up these > >Regulators. Do you have the datasheets / pinouts so that I can test > >them? > > Hi Venkat > These sound like standard 78xx and 79xx series regulators. The 78xx > stuff are positive output and the 79xx are negative output. The pinouts > on these are relatively standard for each particular package. Note that > the negative and positive use different leads in the same package. It > would seem that these are 2 volt regulators but I don't recognize the > MGT package type. Look on the Jameco web page under regulators and I'm > sure you'll find data sheets for similar regulators. I believe the email he was responding to was one I posted in 2002. The regulators in question are Fairchild uA79MG and uA78MG. They are 4-terminal adjustable voltage regulators with a package style similar to a typical TO-220. The actual Fairchild part number of the regulator that I'm still hunting for is uA79MGU1C. I have the Fairchild voltage regulator databook and responded to the poster off-list. If someone has an electronic copy of the datasheet for these regulators, speak up as it will save me the trouble of scanning the relevant pages from the databook. -Toth

20 years, 3 months

78MGT2 and 79MGT2

by dwight.elvey＠amd.com

>From: "K. Venkataramanan" <rvtechno(a)vsnl.net> > >Hi there > >I saw your posting. I think I know where I can pick up these >Regulators. Do you have the datasheets / pinouts so that I can test them? > >Venkat VU2KV > > Hi Venkat These sound like standard 78xx and 79xx series regulators. The 78xx stuff are positive output and the 79xx are negative output. The pinouts on these are relatively standard for each particular package. Note that the negative and positive use different leads in the same package. It would seem that these are 2 volt regulators but I don't recognize the MGT package type. Look on the Jameco web page under regulators and I'm sure you'll find data sheets for similar regulators. Dwight

20 years, 3 months

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test-drb September 2004