test-drb October 2005

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

264 participants
655 discussions

by dwight.elvey＠amd.com

>From: "Scott Stevens" <chenmel at earthlink.net> > >On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:06:11 -0700 (PDT) >steven stengel <tosteve at yahoo.com> wrote: > >> Maybe he should split it up a little - 3 tons of >> computers is a lot for anyone to take... >> >> > >Perhaps his 'ego' is wrapped up in it remaining a collection. It isn't >unusual for somebody to spend a lifetime putting together what they >consider 'the ultimate collecton' and despairing at the idea of it being >split apart into fragments, undoing the thing the collector worked long >and hard to accomplish. It isn't unusual for collectors of various >things to want to bestow them, complete, to an institution that will >keep it together as a collection. > > Hi There is also the issue of putting together the documentation. Often times one piece of documentation or even a piece of software is really relevant to several items. Figuring what goes with what is not straight forward in all cases. Splitting these items into the smallest pieces detracts from the value of the hole group. To make things a little more difficult is that the overlap many not make nice partitioning either. It is difficult to say to what level he should split things. If he splits things into categories, like all the AppleII's in one pile, he may make the package less desirable to someone that already has most of the pieces. If he splits it down to the smallest piece, it loses value as a collection. On top of it all, he may not be physically or mentally able to handle splitting it up because of a medical condition. All that being said, it would be unlikely that he'd find a buyer for the entire lot that would compare with the individual values of the items. He needs to find a way to partition it into reasonable blocks. Dwight

19 years, 2 months

Dying PCjr drive; options?

by dave04a＠dunfield.com

>Ironically, I have a 5150 with the full-length FDC with a very long port on it >(something like 40-pin female?) that I assume I could connect drives to... but >I have no idea what the pinout is or where to obtain a cable. I am not the >soldering type (watch me duck as the flying tomatoes come from the peanut gallery) If I recall correctly, the 37-pin 'D' connector on the back of early XT controllers is 1:1 with the 34 pin ribbon cable, and you can use a ribbon cable 'D' connector to make up a nice tidy cable (check position on pin-1). Btw, I made some changes to ImageDisks Align/Test function this morning which may be useful to you. I added a real-time display of the following bits from status register 3 at the top of the screen: F - Fault W - write protect R - Ready Z - Track 0 D - Two sided In this case, 'Z' would let you see exactly when the track-0 sensor comes on and off (as you adjust it's position). I also added commands to Format and to Write individual tracks "on the fly" >from the test function (there was already a function to read tracks). So now you can do pretty much anything the drive is capable of under manual control. I should have it posted in a day or two. Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

19 years, 2 months

PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

by pete＠dunnington.plus.com

On Oct 11 2005, 12:03, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: > Chuck Guzis wrote: > > On 10/11/2005 at 9:24 AM Sridhar Ayengar wrote: > > > >>How about SCSI floppy drives? > > > > The problem with SCSI floppies is essentially the same--addressing is on a sector number basis, not CHS. So the drives have limited format recognition capabilities. I've never seen a 5.25' SCSI floppy I have a couple, from SGI equipment IIRC. They're basically a standard floppy with a bridge board fitted, and so are 3.5" TEAC floppies from SGI workstations. The Insite flopticals, though, are made as a native SCSI device. > But a DECstation 2100/3100 comes with a floppy drive hooked to a board > with a 34-pin floppy header, and then the SCSI bus from the motherboard > plugs into the translator board. Could something like this be used? Up to a point. You can certainly put either a 5.25" or a 3.5" drive on those boards, but as far as I remember, they still only recognise fairly standard (read "IBM PC/MS-DOS style") formats -- certainly that's true of the floptical and SGI devices. Anything with sector numbers starting at zero is hard to handle, for example. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

19 years, 2 months

CP/M on an Apple II ?

by hilpert＠cs.ubc.ca

So I was listenting to a radio play (a police investigation/drama) on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) today in which the plot centred around recovering data (the offshore bank account #, how cliche) from the dead guy's ancient Apple II/e. (The dead guy was apparently like a lot of people on this list: still used an old machine for his main/daily computing ...just so you all know you're actually getting portrayal in the popular arts :/ ) Well, that went by me OK, then they threw in the plot twist: the guy wasn't using the standard OS, he was using an oddball system which was going to make the data recovery more problematic, that system being CP/M. At this point my pedantic-critic bells went off. So somebody either confirm my pedanticism or show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they? ... maybe the scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!

19 years, 2 months

9-track round-reel tapes available

by George.Wallace＠po.state.ct.us

Any chance that these tapes are still available? Yea, somebody is still using them !! I don't know about coming to Nebraska but we'll pay the shipping if they're in decent shape. Thanks, George Wallace CONNDOT

19 years, 2 months

Electronics recycling (Now OT)

by compoobah＠valleyimplants.com

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 Sellam wrote: On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Chuck Guzis wrote: On 10/9/2005 at 1:03 PM Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Whatever the case, we have enough problems to solve domestically that we shouldn't concern ourselves with what's going on 8,000 miles away. ...and neither should we export our problems to far-flung lands. :) If they didn't want it, they wouldn't be taking it in at the rate of thousands of tons per day ;) and creating toxic dust that blows back to us . . . In the US, companies are liable for cleanup expenses if their contractors dispose of hazardous waste improperly. Do we not have an ethical obligation to ensure that our potentially toxic waste does not harm others, even if they are 8,000 miles away? I may not be able to control what others do, but I have an ethical obligation to not become complicit in evil/wrongdoing.

19 years, 2 months

Archival storage

by mamcfadden＠cmh.edu

Fred Cisin wrote: >>I would suspect yes ... I think too the computer could be kept at just >>above zero >>in a dark place in a light vacuum too. > > > How much would it cost to move Sellam's collection > to the dark side of the moon? Actually the other half of Sellam's collection is already there waiting for indexing after Google finishes indexing the net. :) Mike

19 years, 2 months

VINTAGE COMPUTER FESTIVAL 8.0 - November 5-6

by brain＠jbrain.com

As part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Quantumlink and the formal introducation of QuantumLink RELOADED, the system will be displayed and available for use at the VINTAGE COMPUTER FESTIVAL. Keith Henrickson, the genius behind the reverse engineering of the Q-Link protocol, will be on hand to demonstrate the new system and answer questions about his work and the new system. There will be live connections for attendees to chat with Q-Linkers or play games on the system. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations brain at jbrain.com http://www.jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times!

19 years, 2 months

Kaypro help desperately needed in Ohio...

by news＠computercollector.com

Got this message today; a guy in the Columbus, Ohio area needs help reading his father's will which was made 20 years ago on a Kaypro 2x. Do not contact me, contact the guy directly at gpgammon at sbcglobal.net. ----------------------------------------- Hi Evan - I got your name from David Weil at the Computer Museum of America in San Diego. I have a unique situation and he suggested you may be able to help or provide some direction. I would appreciate any assistance. Here it is, briefly: I have a 5.25" DS/DD diskette that contains my deceased father's will (he died in April). It was created on a Kaypro 2x in 1986. I am desperately trying to locate a Kaypro 2x that will read the diskette. I have the Kaypro that it was written on in my possession, and I have had no luck in reading the diskette - I have a CP/M diskette for a Kaypro 2, and each time I put it in Drive A:, the message "No operating system is present on this disk" appears. I have tried swapping Drive A: and Drive B: - no luck. I have tried reading the diskette using a DD drive hooked up to a PC running Windows - no luck. The only success I have had is using EnCase Forensic software to read the data sector by sector. Of course, that produces unformatted text, so it hasn't been helpful. Any thoughts? If you would like, I would be willing to call you to discuss this over the phone. Thank you. Greg Gammon Westerville, OH ----------------------------------------- Evan Koblentz's personal homepage: http://www.snarc.net Computer Collector Newsletter: http://news.computercollector.com Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists & Museum: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/midatlanticretro/

19 years, 2 months

Archival storage

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

> >Subject: Re: Archival storage > From: Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> > Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 15:39:22 -0500 > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > >Vintage Computer Festival declared on Sunday 09 October 2005 03:12 pm: >> On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, James Fogg wrote: >> > Does anyone know if there are optical formats that can reliably >> > deliver 10 year shelf-life? How does one achieve it (different types >> > of cd-r chemistry, using cd-rom, etc)? >> >> Just use hard drives. Cheap, high capacity, and reliable. > >And make sure you keep them spinning, so that you can tell when they >fail, along with a redundant copy on another machine which you mirror to >periodically (even automatically once every N days is fine). Migrate to >newer media when the old stuff is pretty much obsolete. > >If you manage to do that, your data will long outlast any CDRs that you >store in a filing cabinet next to the computer(s). I've done that exactly. The oldest of the lot is a ST506 from 1982 that still runs CP/M and still has stiction since day one! Other than the need to give it a manual twist it's been relaible. Of course that data is backed up to a newer Quantum 31mb (AKA RD52) and thats been backed up to a newer 45MB SCSI and a newer still 52mb SCSI and so on. Along with 8", 5.25, and 3.5" floppy copies and those on the PCs where that process sorta repeats itself it would be hard to create a total loss. The key is many copies, in many places and at lest a few on current or reasonably current media. Allison

19 years, 2 months

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test-drb October 2005