test-drb January 2005

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

254 participants
551 discussions

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

The local surplus place has an Alpha available. I know nothing of these machines. It is in a black 4U rackmount case. Front panel door opens to reveal a 3.5 floppy, removable hard drive (which has been removed and disappeared), and a CD drive. Inside the machine are two scsi cards, and a few others I didn't look closely at. There's 256M of ram (all big 32m modules). If anyone is interested, let me know, and let me know what you want me to look for, and I'll go back and look at it closer. If you want it, I'll put you in touch with the guy at the store. They typically let this kind of thing go cheap. Jay

19 years, 10 months

Data I/O manual sought

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

I don't see one in the dataIO section on bitsavers... anyone have a pdf of the logicpak manual? Thanks! Jay

19 years, 10 months

HP loader rom chips

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

Jameco claims to have real Signetics 82S129's in (not substituted parts). These are for the HP 21MX loader roms. They are quoting me $9.95 each for qty 1-10. Anyone know of a better source, or want to go in with me on this? I will probably get about 10. Equivalent parts (that my 29B can program): Monolithic Memories 6301 Harris 7611 Texas Instruments 24S10 Applied Micro Devices 27S21 So maybe someone knows of a source for the above parts that is cheaper. Jay

19 years, 10 months

IBM Record Unit....

by aek＠spies.com

I have never heard of these devices being called "Record Unit" I have seen them called "Unit Record" try http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/cardProc for information on IBM card processing equipment.

19 years, 10 months

IBM Record Unit Machines

by ron.hudson＠sbcglobal.net

What were some interesing record unit machines from IBM Card punches: Which IBM card punch had a dial on the upper part of the keyboard? I used one, but I forget what the dial was for. Card Sorters: What is the machine that read card and could add information and print reports, usually programmed with a patch panel? Were there any machines that read cards and wrote to Mag tape? Is there a collection of Information on the Internet about these beasts?

19 years, 10 months

IBM Record Unit....

by ron.hudson＠sbcglobal.net

I had a passing though of writing emulators for the machines found in an old record unit shop, Card Punches - would be something like an editor. Sorters, Collators?, and all the other machines, with text files as card-decks. I have the link on Wikipeadea, it also just gives a gloss overview. I am not finding the detail needed. Never mind, it wasn't important. I'll go on to other things.

19 years, 10 months

[LONGISH] Beware: dealings with Bert Thomas

by dwight.elvey＠amd.com

Hi One thing to consider by both parties is that when communicating over the phone, a lot of one's ability to convey the meaning of what is said is lost. Much of our communications is visual. We watch reactions as we talk. Most people think that they can communicate properly over the phone. It is a big mistake. I have had several times when I'd been misunderstood. It is still interesting that both sides see the interaction from a different perspective. They both need to realize that it was the phone that caused the misunderstanding. It would be truly incorrect for either to judge the other by the responses over the phone. Of course, even more of communications is lost in the form of email. I'm not saying that either side was wrong or right, only that one should be careful when emotions get involved over the phone. They are rarely interpreted correctly, by the other party. By the time they realize that there was a problem, a lot of damage has been done between them. Just my opinions Dwight >From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf(a)siconic.com> > >On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: > >> All, >> >> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Jay West wrote: >> >> > Fred wrote... >> >> ... >> > >> > Oh man! That just bytes. >> > >> > Thanks for letting us know. Bert is on the list I believe, so maybe he has a >> > response/explanation. >> >> This is not the right place for a dicussion of this topic; my >> message was a read-only object of class 'warning'. I will not >> be discussing any of it, in private or in public, as have a >> judicial system for that in place. >> >> In other words... thread closed, judges will decide. > >Fred, > >It's already public. You made it so. I think the simple solution here is >for you to arrive at Bert's place with a truck and money and settle it >quickly and easily. Bert indicates he is ready to hand it over and is on >record saying so. If he doesn't then he'd really be in trouble. > >I did notice in Bert's reply he cc'd Erik Brens, who has a bad reputation >with more than a few folks here (myself included), and that is rather >suspect. > >-- > >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 ] > >

19 years, 10 months

Altair8800 'kit' - can you identify this stuff?

by william.layer＠comcast.net

Thanks for the info so far.. here are the ugly details on the 'kit'.. Dave wrote: > Btw - if you have an unassembled 8800 - it might be a good idea to keep it that way - I > would think unassembled ones would be more rare than assembled ones. Sorry if I was confusing on this.. I was half-joking when I said 'kit form'; the unit wasn't so much *unassembled* as *disassembled* :) The unit is quite an interesting hodgepodge at the moment.. Here is a better description of what I have: Original 8800 Chassis, with early faceplate - dang I love that old 70's computer typeface! A ding in the white topcover, but overall very nice shape. Display / Control board (rev 1) removed, and showing evidence of a burnout in the lower left, 7400 chip I think. Someone has socketed every chip on the board, with a collection of random colorful sockets. The board shows some small rework with kynar, to fix lost pads/traces on one socket pattern. Needs a couple of switches replaced. Marked "3421K" in black Sharpie. 8080 CPU card (rev 1) removed and showing signs of modification (a mystery chip has been added with glue & kynar), and CPU is missing. Marked "3423K" in black Sharpie. Motherboard replaced with a Processor Tech (?) MB-1 Mainboard - 16 slots. The pullup/pulldown resistors look like they were installed by a small child, and not a gifted one. I will rework this area. Power supply replaced with beefy 8800B power supply, obviously to accomodate all that extra hardware that the motherboard will hold. Large fan is also added, without a grille. Watch your #&!$@ fingers, kid! A card marked "MCT R30 ASSY 105510" (seems like serial or parallel I/O) A card marked "SD Systems VersaFloppy II" (must be the disk controller) A card marked "SD Systems Expandoram II" (must be the memory card, and it's fully populated. No idea what the capacity is) A card marked "SD Systems SBC-200" (has a Z-80A cpu, and what I think is the matching Z-80 buss driver chip. Has 4 ROM sockets, two of which are populated. One is clearly marked 'EDO BIOS'. Also has edge connectors marked serial & parallel I/O. Seems like a multifunction card; CPU, ROM & I/O) A card marked "Signum Systems MICE-48" with a long ribbon cable leading to an emulator probe, bearing an EPROM chip. (It's clearly an In-Circuit Emulator device, my guess is that it was emulating an 8048 or similar) A card marked "Vector 8800V", which is a complete and utter disaster of Kynar and flying components. I wouldn't let this thing near a running system. (seems like a generic breadboard card, which has been built into some form of custom hardware, has a large device marked "Analog Devices 940", and about 12 other chips, plus a pile of discete components) A large dual-floppy drive chassis, blue in color, with 8" drives. Seems like generic Intel hardware of the mid-70's. No obvious markings. A collection of 8" disks, some clearly CP/M based. I'm quite certain that in light of the Z80 card, that this machine was running CP/M until it was taken (or took itself) out of service. A small board marked "John Bell Engineering Phoneme Synthesizer" with a DIP connector, wall-wart power supply, and a few chips including a Votrax SC-01 chip. (Ok, it's clearly a speech synth. Apparently, this thing could talk at one point..) Ok - I think that's pretty much all of it. If anyone can verify / correct me on identification, or provide other info, it would be greatly appreciated. Some of this stuff (like the ICE hardware) might be up for trade. Thanks for all of your time, Bill

19 years, 10 months

Altair8800 'kit' - can you identify this stuff?

by dwight.elvey＠amd.com

>From: "William Layer" <william.layer(a)comcast.net> ---snip--- > >Display / Control board (rev 1) removed, and showing evidence of a burnout in the lower left, 7400 chip I think. Someone has socketed every chip on the board, with a collection of random colorful sockets. The board shows some small rework with kynar, to fix lost pads/traces on one socket pattern. Needs a couple of switches replaced. Marked "3421K" in black Sharpie. Get a schematic and start plaing with it. Like the IMSAI panel, it uses the processor to actually generate the addresses and fetching from the bus. You should check for shorts with an ohm meter before powering up. After powering up, check for anything that is hot. These old TTL parts would run slightly warm but should not be hot. Be ready to remove the power quickly in case of smoke. With power applied, even FR4 will burn if sustained with an electrical arc. There is a schematic and layout on that CD ROM that has many of the schematics and such ( I've seen but don't have it my self ). > >8080 CPU card (rev 1) removed and showing signs of modification (a mystery chip has been added with glue & kynar), and CPU is missing. Marked "3423K" in black Sharpie. The extra chip is most likely to generate the correct status signals for the refresh of the dynamic RAM. The early boards were designed around static RAM systems and it wasn't until later that the status signals were added. The earlier DRAM boards had no standard way of providing these signals so there are several different ways this was done. ---snip--- > >A card marked "MCT R30 ASSY 105510" (seems like serial or parallel I/O) List major IC's? > >A card marked "SD Systems VersaFloppy II" (must be the disk controller) Will most likely only work with the Z80 processor board. The 8080 was a little on the slow side to handle the disk transfers. Most 8080 systems used a DMA interface for disk drives. I did look at some tricky software that I believe would have worked on a 8080 but it required transfering 4 bytes at a time. It has been some time since I looked at doing that so I'm not much help now. I think the main thing was that after the controller gave the status, you had something like 13 uSec to read the data or it was lost. > >A card marked "SD Systems Expandoram II" (must be the memory card, and it's fully populated. No idea what the capacity is) It depends on which chips are there. If it has the four banks of 16K chips, you have 64K. It could also be populated with 18K or 4K chips but that is unlikely as it came out just when the 16K chips were getting available. See my note above about the refresh signals. > >A card marked "SD Systems SBC-200" (has a Z-80A cpu, and what I think is the matching Z-80 buss driver chip. Has 4 ROM sockets, two of which are populated. One is clearly marked 'EDO BIOS'. Also has edge connectors marked serial & parallel I/O. Seems like a multifunction card; CPU, ROM & I/O) This is most likely the main processor that was used with the system for CP/M. > >A card marked "Signum Systems MICE-48" with a long ribbon cable leading to an emulator probe, bearing an EPROM chip. (It's clearly an In-Circuit Emulator device, my guess is that it was emulating an 8048 or similar) Most likely correct here. > >A card marked "Vector 8800V", which is a complete and utter disaster of Kynar and flying components. I wouldn't let this thing near a running system. (seems like a generic breadboard card, which has been built into some form of custom hardware, has a large device marked "Analog Devices 940", and about 12 other chips, plus a pile of discete components) I believe the 940 is an amplifier module but I'm not sure. It could be a voltage converter as well. They made many discrete circuit instrument amplifiers that had especially low offset inputs. I would get this was an analog board of some type. ---snip--- It looks like a good project. Later Dwight

19 years, 10 months

[LONGISH] Beware: dealings with Bert Thomas

by waltje＠pdp11.nl

Hi all, Today is a sad one, as I had to part with someone I considered a friend, a new collector, and recent addition to the CCtalk community. Bert had trouble with getting his PDP-11/34 to work (as we have all been reading here), and, a while ago, I offered him to have a look at it. We got together, and I was able to fix the system. Took a while, but hey, that's OK. I did mention to him I just acquired a new system, and needed to have it moved to my place. To return my favor, Bert offered to move my system, as he had a van available, which makes it a lot easier than using my car. Great deal! The selling party and Bert were put in contact, so they could agree on a date and such. And that's the last thing I heard about it.. until I got curious, and contacted the seller if something had gone wrong.. I _am_ out of the area and country a lot, so could have missed something. Nope, everything went as planned, the seller replied - Bert had picked up the system that saturday morning, and all was well. He did mention that Bert said that since he picked up _and_ paid for the system, he considered it his, now. (The seller had not yet replied to my question about how to pay for the system- this is a bit different in Holland, as we usually just exchange bank account numbers here, and then just transfer the amount needed. Easy. So, I was waiting for him to reply with his account number. Rather, he did not reply, and when the pickup ocurred, he wanted cash. Even this is normally handled fine.. one pays the cash, and then gets reimbursed by whoever is supposed to actually receive the system.) Anyway... when I heard that, I tried to contact Bert, and eventually got a hold of him. And when asked about this, he indeed told me the above - as far as he was concerned, it was now HIS system. To make a much longer story short- I have taken legal action against him to get my system back, and the extra (legal and other) fees and costs reimbursed for. Sadly, Bert decided to not accept his being wrong, so this will be a full case of fraud in Dutch court. Your mileage etc etc, but I'd like everyone to take extreme caution when dealing with Bert, as his definition of "mine" and "yours", and the being right or wrong, might very well be different from what you consider such. This surely was the case for me. With kindest regards, 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

19 years, 10 months

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test-drb January 2005