test-drb November 2005

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

255 participants
692 discussions

Vector Graphic CP/M Disk, was Re: CP/M 2 - what's its legal status?

by marvin＠rain.org

I just posted an original 16 sector Vector Graphic CP/M System disk for the 3032 on VCM (http://www.vintagecomputermarketplace.com/.) I'm not sure what the tpi of the disk are since it doesn't say on the labels. On a similar note, I've been really busy and not able to respond timely to requests. That will most likely continue until after Christmas :(. I am working though to try and get caught up! > > On 11/22/2005 at 4:21 PM JP Hindin wrote: > > >How helpful ;P > > >I'll have a close look at the disk drive tonight and see if I can look it > > >up and find something out about it. > > On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > Well, that drive looks like a Tandon TM-100M, so most likely, you not only > > have hard-sectored diskettes, but they're 100 tpi also. Vector had a DS > > format that held about 640K. > > ... just to add to the bad news,... > I've seen numerous TM100-4M drives that were labelled TM100-4 ! > So, a visual inspection may be inadequate to identify it. >

19 years, 5 months

Mouse Pissed! Need power supply help

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

> >Subject: Mouse Pissed! Need power supply help > From: Charles <charlesmorris at direcway.com> > Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 10:51:33 -0600 > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > >I've found the reason why my PDP-11 power supply (H7861) is not >putting out POK and DCOK signals. One of the small daughterboards >which appears to provide the level checks and timers (marked >Digital Type 1 SG-1 5015047B 5415048) has been badly mouse-pissed >and rusted. (Previous owner stored it in the carport). > >There is enough corrosion that the leads of two diodes and two >film resistors have been rusted right through and broke off during >gentle toothbrush cleaning, and several others don't look good. I >suspect the board would be better replaced than patched. >Unfortunately the H780 schematic does not match closely (they use >74123's while this one uses 555's, for example) so it'll be hard >to figure out the missing or unreadable parts anyway! > >Does anyone have a spare board from a "parts" power supply? >Or at least a schematic? > >thanks >Charles Your best bet is to scrounge a power supply as they can be had. The H786 and H7861 are interchangeable, not the same circuit but fit the same form factor. A H780 can be used but it's not a mechanical fit. Allison

19 years, 5 months

Mouse Pissed! Need power supply help

by charlesmorris＠direcway.com

I've found the reason why my PDP-11 power supply (H7861) is not putting out POK and DCOK signals. One of the small daughterboards which appears to provide the level checks and timers (marked Digital Type 1 SG-1 5015047B 5415048) has been badly mouse-pissed and rusted. (Previous owner stored it in the carport). There is enough corrosion that the leads of two diodes and two film resistors have been rusted right through and broke off during gentle toothbrush cleaning, and several others don't look good. I suspect the board would be better replaced than patched. Unfortunately the H780 schematic does not match closely (they use 74123's while this one uses 555's, for example) so it'll be hard to figure out the missing or unreadable parts anyway! Does anyone have a spare board from a "parts" power supply? Or at least a schematic? thanks Charles

19 years, 5 months

Cambridge Ring network hardware / docs....

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

Following on from a query over on the BBC Micro mailing list, did anyone here save any Cambridge Ring network hardware or documentation? I'm just curious as to how much has survived (sadly I scrapped a pile about ten years ago and now regret it) (for the curious see: http://koo.corpus.cam.ac.uk/projects/earlyatm) cheers Jules

19 years, 5 months

UK giveaways

by madcrow.maxwell＠gmail.com

How much do you think it would cost to ship the pizzaboz Sun/3 to the States? Given that it's not a very heavy computer, sea (surface> trasport might be fairly cheap and if it is, I'd be willing to pay the costs.

19 years, 5 months

CP/M 2 - what's its legal status?

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

> >Subject: CP/M 2 - what's its legal status? > From: JP Hindin <jplist at kiwigeek.com> > Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:24:04 -0600 (CST) > To: cctalk at classiccmp.org > > >Hey there folks; > >Decided to move into the CP/M world a little with my Vector Graphic >machine, which is expecting CP/M 2.0. > >I was curious what the legal status was these days? Since I find source >code for CP/M, MP/M and so on online, I'm guessing the status is fairly >free, but I wanted to check. >I can also find CP/M 2.0 online - but I don't believe I have any way of >producing a bootable 5.25" floppy disk of it. The copyright is still valid but the owners have released it for non-profit use. >If the OS is in a free-as-in-speech state, would it be possible for >someone to whip me up a 5.25" disk and ship it out to me (shipping paid >for, of course) for the Vector? If you look around there may be a copy for that machine and a way to get it to you. >The Vector suggests 2.0, but it appears that 2.2 is the superior release >of the 2 series, I'm hoping that this will work on the machine. Nominally 2.0 doesn't really show on radar. Almost all releases of V2 are really 2.2 and 2.2 is interchangeable upgrade (fewer bugs). The real issue is getting a boot able disk and Vector did make a few machines so copies are possible. Allison

19 years, 5 months

Need recommendations on a terminal server setup

by dave＠mitton.com

On 11/22/2005 01:00 PM, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote: >Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:07:36 +0000 >From: Adrian Graham <witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> >Subject: Re: Need recommendations on a terminal server setup >To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> >Message-ID: <BFA6B238.C3D%witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > >On 20/11/05 14:44, "Gil Carrick" <gilcarrick at comcast.net> wrote: > > > I can't find many references to it, but here are a couple: > > > > > http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Brochure/Overview/PCTelnet.overvie > > w.html > > > > http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~rikblok/TipsnTricks/win98.html > > > > The lack of references make me think that these people are just being > > imprecise. There are also references to "DECNet Adapter" but they are > > talking about a software adapter. > >Hmm.... The 2nd one is obviously a mistake since win98 has detected the card >as a PCI based DEC 21040-powered card like the venerable DE500, the first >one is talking about an ISA card and I don't know of any ISA cards that DEC >did, though obviously that doesn't mean they didn't exist :) > >The first card I'm aware of is the DE100 which was an AUI/BNC switchable >EISA card. Also for the first one, if it WAS a DECnet card you certainly >wouldn't have been able to run TELNET over it and I didn't think DECnet had >ever been ported to the PC architecture until DEC themselves did a DECnet >stack as part of Pathworks/PCSA in the 80s. > >Cheers > >A The first DEC manufactured Ethernet card for the PC bus was the ISA DEPCA. It was based on the AMD Lance design that was implemented in the VAXmate (the first DEC PC that was somewhat IBM PC compatible) DECnet-DOS was developed and released on Rainbows and IBM XT/AT compatibles before PATHworks. It supported third party Ethernet adapters (like the sucky 3Com 3C501, and an Interlan model) via a proprietary driver interface. When Microsoft got the NDIS driver standard going, we migrated to that. The DEPCA did not have "DECnet" in it. Though it might have had a boot ROM that could support MOP downline load. It did have a unique memory mapped architecture where the buffer pool on the card could be directly accessed by the network stack. Our stack avoided buffer copies using this feature. By the way PATHWORKS for Windows V3.1 and Windows for Workgroups supported DECnet, TCP/IP, NetWare and NetBEUI, mix and match, without rebooting. Dave.

19 years, 5 months

Acorn Econet Fileserver

by pete＠dunnington.plus.com

On Nov 22 2005, 22:52, Tony Duell wrote: > > > > Tony Duell wrote: > > >> I'd forgotten about that; in ADFS-land, ADFS knew nothing about device IDs - > > >> everything was ID 0 and so the host adapter could still only have one device > > > > > > How stupid! I wonder why they did that (after all, they allowed for > > > multiple floppy drives on the same controller). It's almsot as stupid as > > > POS haeving 2 storage devices (one floppy, one winchester) hard-coded > > > into the OS. I'm not sure. In fact I didn't realise it was single device; ADFS was designed to allow 4 winchesters and 4 floppies, and the only way to have four winchesters would be to have 2 Adaptec cards. The code to actually handle that may not be in the ROM, though. > > Isn't SASI just single target though? (I'd forgotten this, I was thinking that > > I thought SASI supported a total of 8 devices on the bus, like 8-bit SCSI. I thought so too... The Xebec manuals describe how to set the addresses. > > So if the board (despite Acorn calling it SCSI) is really just SASI No, it really is SCSI. It complies with the first ANSI spec. > > ROM for the device selection code (assuming that Acorn's board contains the > > necessary SCSI features anyway - I think you likely need /ATN to do device > > selection?) No, that's for something completely different (disconnects and reconnects). SEL is what is used for device selection. The initiator waits for the bus to be idle (BSY and SEL both inactive), asserts BSY and its own ID line, and assuming nothing with higher priority also asserts an ID line, then asserts SEL and the ID line for the desired target. Then it releases BSY, and waits for the target to assert BSY, at which point it releases SEL. > > You made me realise that I need to archive the ROMs from the E01 I have in the > > I will do mine sometime too, in case they're different versions. FWIW, I have FS 1.33 ((c)1988), FS 2.08 ((c)1989), MOS 2.07, and MOS 3.66. MOS2.07 has the string "Stacking FileStore" in it but I'm fairly sure it came out of my E01. It also has the string "Acorn Econet 3.68" i it, whereas MOS 3.66 has the string "Acorn Econet 3.66". Both are mostly empty. Somewhere amongst the Customer Services newsletters I will probably have several FCOs that will list the released versions, or most of them. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

19 years, 5 months

removing parts from PCBs

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

> >Subject: Re: removing parts from PCBs > From: William Donzelli <aw288 at osfn.org> > Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:27:05 -0500 (EST) > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > >> Then there is an efficientcy problem as you end >> up using power to move heat which adds heat.. > >I think that is a minor issue. Even a relatively small pump will move the >coolant around enough. The flow is generally not all that fast, nor is the >temperature gradient. > >William Donzelli >aw288 at osfn.org It's the pumps that are connected with the chiller or fans if they used a direct radiation to air I was refering too. The pump for the local loop may be small or not depending of the length of the loop and diameters. Water cooling had one less obvious avantage. You can dump the waste heat outside the building or at least outside the computer room. Allison

19 years, 5 months

Acorn Econet Fileserver

by pete＠dunnington.plus.com

On Nov 20 2005, 18:29, Tony Duell wrote: > > I forget whether it's the mark that's longer than the space, or the > > other way round, but in essence the longer interval gives the hardware > > Ah, does the TX output change on one edge of the clock and the Rx input > sample on the opposite edge, or something? Something like that. I forget the details. > The E20 hard disk unit contains the standard Host Adapter card linked to > a 20NByte SCSI hard disk. That was the normal thing to link to the 34 pin > connector on the E01. It sohuld be relatively easy to put one of those > together... Is there any restriction on the hard disk size? What would > happen if I linked up a unit of several hundred Mbyte capacity? Would it > just not work, would it only see it as a 20Mhyte unit, or would it see > the whole thing? There will be some limit, but I'm not sure what it is. More than 20MB, for sure. Might be 500MB, maybe less. I know that stacking filestores use the same code, and I know that although the largest ones sold and supported by Acorn were 60MB, they had bigger in-house. > Accordign to the manual, there is a utility disk for this unit, and maybe > a service disk too (it's not clear whether this is one disk or two). The > former contained the program to format the winchester, and is therefore > somewhat importent. Yes, two 3.5" floppies. And I just happen to have a set :-) One is for use with a Master 128 called "M128-FSUTILS" and the other is for use with a Compact and labelled "COMPACT-FSUTILS". They're 640K, like ADFS L format, but the actual disk directory etc is somewhat different, and called "Filestore Format". So I can copy them for you if you send me a couple of 3.5" DD floppies. I've never tried making a teledisk image; that *might* work. They're double-density, 256 bytes/sector, 16 sectors/track. Once upon a time I made a couple of normal ADFS copies, so I can see that the content seems to be most (all?) of the Master Series Welcome disk, plus the normal Econet library programs, the utilities that come with Level 3 for copying between filing systems and cataloging multiple directories, Level 3 library programs like the formatter, backup/restore, netmonitor, etc, some updated 1770 DFS ROM images, printer drivers, etc. > The latter ran on a BBC Master and contained various > test programs. There was a special test box for Econet testing that > plugged into the econet ports on the Master and on the unit-under-test > (here, the Filestore), and could source a clock and simulate a > poor-quality line, both contrlled by lines on the user port. Amazingly I > have this test box, I don't have the software. Ditto! The test box pre-dates the Master series, though. It was around when Beebs were. > The chap who sold this to me included a couple of such Sony > drives, alas missing the front panels and eject buttons. I now have to > try to find those. The missing mounting hardware is less of a problem, > as are the missing cables. Those probably came from a Master Compact or an Archimedes -- they used the drives without the bezels. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

19 years, 5 months

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test-drb November 2005