test-drb March 2005

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

291 participants
840 discussions

by pds3＠ix.netcom.com

Hello, I am always interested in all DEC gear. We maintain a large inventory of parts and assist customers in keeping their legacy systems alive. Please let me know what you have and I will make an offer. Thank you. Shannon Hoskins Pacific Data Systems 25197 Reeves Road Los Molinos, CA 96055 530/384-2013 shannon at theskybeam.com -----Original Message----- From: Phil Spanner <pspan at amerytel.net> Sent: Mar 5, 2005 6:55 AM To: cctech at classiccmp.org Subject: Scrapping of DEC Equipment Hello All, I am in the process of scrapping out my Telecom gear. I have some LA 120's and other Dec boards that I will be listing. The printers are not very economical to ship, so my thoughts are that there may be some interest in the parts. If that is the case, please let me know. A year or so ago, the folks next door talked about wanting to sell their Dec inventory, test fixtures and prints. Although I did forward all of the info to them, I don't think they did anything with the information. If there is still any interest, please let me know. Thank you. Phil

19 years, 4 months

Scrapping of DEC Equipment

by pds3＠ix.netcom.com

Hello, I am always interested in all DEC parts. We maintain a large inventory and assist end-users with keeping their legacy systems alive. Please let me know what you have and I will make an offer. Best regards, Shannon Hoskins Pacific Data SYstems 25197 Reeves Road Los Molinos, CA 96055 530/384-2013 shannon at theskybeam.com -----Original Message----- From: James Fogg <James at jdfogg.com> Sent: Mar 5, 2005 8:09 AM To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: RE: Scrapping of DEC Equipment > I am in the process of scrapping out my Telecom gear. I have > some LA 120's and other Dec boards that I will be listing. > The printers are not very economical to ship, so my thoughts > are that there may be some interest in the parts. If that is > the case, please let me know. Where are you located?

19 years, 4 months

Visit from Don Gaubatz

by jfoust＠threedee.com

After more than a decade of occasional emails about my Terak Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm/, yesterday I met with Don Gaubatz <dag at gaubatz.com>. He recently moved from outside Boston to Neenah, WI (45 minutes SE of Green Bay, at the top of that big lake on the left side of WI.) That puts him about two hours from me, or two hours from Madison. Formerly a VP at DEC, his groups in Palo Alto and Maynard delivered workstations based on the MIPS, VAX, and Alpha chips, as well as DEC's first 3D graphics and multimedia peripherals. Earlier at DEC, Gaubatz developed the first Ethernet and disk controllers for the MicroVAX. He's currently a consultant in the semiconductor industry. He's on the editorial board of Microprocessor Report, an semiconductor industry newsletter. He's on the board for NSF's sci-viz center, and a founding member of the Computer History Museum. We talked Terak for a few hours, looking over my docs and assembled hardware. It is always comforting to show my three-floor combo tree-fort / office / storage building and have someone say "Ah, yes, this looks like my place." Don said his computer stuff filled two 28-foot trailers in his move. The visit may spur me to update my inventory lists in order to better share docs and software with other Terak enthusiasts. Don would also like to track down ex-DEC people in Wisconsin, not to mention find the hidden caches of DEC equipment. - John

19 years, 4 months

Mick & Brick's Bit-Slice MicroProcessor Design Re: Must have books for Vintage Computing

by dvcorbin＠optonline.net

> Another suggestion is Mick & Brick's book 'Bit-Slice MicroProcessor > Design'. Hmmm. I was getting ready to put some books on E-bay and > I have an extra copy of Mick & brick. I think I'll throw it on there too. > Let's see, I also have 'LSI PDP 11/03 Processor Handbook' and 'VAX >Technical Summary' that I don't need. I'll throw them on > there too. Or you could offer them to list members (for a reasonable price.....)

19 years, 4 months

ok listen up (LIST ADMIN)

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

I have truly HAD ENOUGH. This was brought to a head by the fact that one of the most active list moderators has just resigned, specifically due to the excessive off-topicness (or more precisely, the amount of time necessary to moderate the off-topicness). Here is a snippet of his email to me: "I'm sorry, but I'm horrified by the state of my Inbox. ...snip... but I am no longer prepared to wade through the slew of offtopic sh** in order to forward the good stuff to cctech. I've just totted up over 160 offtopic posts from the past few days, on picking locks, gravity, merits of running your own mail server, mail vs NNTP vs forums, people's ages, and even installing Windows XP, for f***'s sake." We're losing a very dedicated person, for a very bad reason (I'm not saying he isn't justified, I'm saying it sucks to lose someone for this). Ya'll owe him a HUGE amount of thanks, and I daresay an apology. Now, before you go on and on about "some off-topicness" is ok on cctalk, let me explain something. The current setup where the list moderators manually read every post on cctalk and individually route select "on-topic" messages to cctech is made extremely time-consuming when there is a significant amount of off-topicness. I would easily bet that the list moderators spend an hour a day, seven days a week, sifting through all the messages one at a time. This means a few people are paying a very high price so that you can get wildly off-topic. The thing that truly irks me about this is I'm spending a lot of time on list infrastructure and such - trying to get to reworking the faq and cleaning up the archives - and the LAST thing I have time to do right now is start doing most of the moderation. My pinball machine known as "life" is screaming "TILT". I do NOT want to see a huge string of posts to the list with a subject of "Re: ok listen up". This isn't open for public discussion any longer. This list was entrusted to me years ago to take care of and I'll be damned if I'm going to see it degenerate. I love this hobby and this forum way too much for that. My current thought is this: Make cctech the main list. It will be rigorously moderated, anything posted there that isn't strictly on topic will be bounced. cctalk will become the list for discussion of the list itself, and will no longer be a place to post anything technical. It will be unmoderated except for personal flames, politics, etc. You can consider it "the water cooler". While it's primary purpose will be for discussion about list features, etc. you can also just banter with your friends. The key difference is that it won't be for discussion of technical/vintage computer items. People may get trounced on for posting technical discussion to it, instead of to cctech. Then I'll also probably create a classiccmp-announce list, to announce any changes that are implemented based on cctalk discussions. The above isn't a final decision yet. I'm perfectly willing to entertain other ideas - OFF LIST. If you have a concern, want to express some thoughts, just email me directly, I'm very willing to listen. So, you may ask... how is this different from the current setup? On the surface, the only difference is cctalk won't be for any direct computer discussion any longer and posts from cctalk will never make it to cctech. But under the hood... I'll tell you what the difference is - instead of moderators having to wade through the crap to gate stuff to cctech, YOU will have to do YOUR part to make sure you post to the right list with a given post. It's time to shift the workload people. I'll listen to off-list input for a few days, but then I'll act because I don't want this snowballing. Regards (and don't you dare hit reply to the list on this), Jay West

19 years, 4 months

Catweasel opinions, sources of info etc.

by dave04a＠dunfield.com

>> Do you have a Central Point Option Board (any rev) for your museum? I have one of these - haven't installed it yet. From reading the documentation, it looks like it can copy disk to disk, and disk to temporary file on the hard drive and back to disk, but it does NOT look like it can copy a disk to a file and then at some point later in time copy the file back to the disk... I am mainly interested in read disk images to files for long term archival. Does anyone know if this is possible with the option board? The option board isn't really a good candidate for this anyway, as the format of the archived data is not documented (at least not in any of the material I have with the card), so you would be relying on a non-obtainable and unsupported card to restore the disks in the future - but I thought I might play with it a bit. 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, 4 months

RT11 sysgen and disk partitions

by gordonjcp＠gjcp.net

> Jerome Fine replies: > > Once done, the SET command values are held in the > DU.SYS device driver file. You do NOT need to > do the SET commands each time. Probably not > recommended in any case. Ahaaa... Is that saved in DU.SYS when you issue the commands, then? Makes sense. I'll try it when I get home. > Assuming you are booting from an RL02, then the > DU.SYS device driver my be LOADed for a bit faster > response after the first usage. In addition, I > strongly suggest you use RT11FB rather than RT11SJ > unless the added size of the RT11FB monitor has > a serious impact on the program which you run. Well, the idea is to load TSX-Plus over it, which requires the SJ monitor. > In addition, it would be helpful to know the full > version number of the RT-11 version which you are > using. Based on the above SET commands, it must > be at least V05.03 or RT-11 which was released > in 1985. There are certain features which later > versions of RT-11 have that you may wish to be > aware of. the RT-11 command: > SHOW CONFIG > will provide the information, as will the banner > when RT-11 first boots. On bootup, and in SHOW CONFIG, the version is given as 5.00. > Finally, I strongly recommend against the SET > values which have been suggested since they > impact very negatively with regard to booting > RT-11. You will not lose anything with a Ok, why is that? > different combination of SET parameters, but > you will gain with respect to what drives > can be booted, in particular from a cold start. In this instance I want to boot from a "clean" install of RT-11 from DL0, but eventually I will be booting from DU0. > The exact nature of which disk drives are being > used will also help. I suspect an RD53 and an > RX50, but please confirm. Most novice RT-11 OK, this is where it gets tricky. I'm not totally sure how to identify the ST506 drives fitted to the machine. One is a full-height 5.25" drive, with (seemingly) about 65,000 blocks on each partition. The other is half-height, with considerably less on each partition - one is around 40,000 blocks, one is around 16,000 blocks (if I remember correctly - I'm not actually near the machine right now to check). The smaller drive is made by Fujitsu, may be something like M224XAS ? The label is rather hard to read. The other drives are an RL02 (I have two but lack the cable that links the two drives) and an RX02. Gordon.

19 years, 4 months

Panasonic HHC Basic on ePay

by zmerch＠30below.com

It's nutjob-expensive, if you ask me - but the guy's 2 - one he's epaying alone ($50 USD opening bid, BIN for $75) and he's got another complete machine with the BASIC ROM in it for $115 BIN, IIRC. No bids on either one... should I snag the ROM to make backups of it? :-O Will another chance come along like this at all??? Anyone wanna go in with me on it? *I gotz the Eproms...* Lemme know! "Merch" -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com What do you do when Life gives you lemons, and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

19 years, 4 months

List etiquette

by dm561＠torfree.net

---------------Original Message: From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> Subject: RE: List etiquette (was RE: cctalk Digest, Vol 19, Issue 15) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> >Mike, I like you, but your method of replying to messages leaves a LOT to be desired. You intermingled my message with your replies. Use some software with a quoting feature, eh? ----------------------------------- My apologies; I just changed ISPs and, along with that, my email SW. Looks OK at my end, but somewhere along the way the indentation got stripped out. >I don't consider my response either rude or condescending. ------------------------------------- Well, the tone of your posts has itself been the subject of several OT threads, but we love ya anyway. ==================================================== The rest of my reply to Sellam is off-list, except for: I think my main point is that, as historians, museum curators, technical resource people etc., maybe we have a special responsibity to present a friendly, helpful and more or less mature attitude to the outside world, *especially* in contrast to some of the other lists around. Sorry if the discussion's moved on in the meanwhile; that's the trouble with being on the digest list. mike

19 years, 4 months

WANTED: Commodore PET ROM.

by dm561＠torfree.net

-----------------Original Message: From: steven stengel <tosteve at yahoo.com> Subject: FREE: Toaster video tapes (copies). WANTED: Commodore PET ROM. ...... Also, I need ROM 016 for my "chicklet" PET 2001. Any givers? Steve. -----------------Reply: Maybe; can't put my hands on my spare ROMs at the moment, but when I find 'em, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, please confirm that that's a 6540-016 (Basic I, H4) and not a 901439-16 (Basic II, H6), off-list please. But I'd recommend what Dave suggested and replace it (or the whole set) with EPROMS if you have the facilities or know someone who does; 6540s were notoriously flaky in the long term, might not be long before another one goes bad, and you could upgrade the Basic at the same time. mike

19 years, 4 months

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test-drb March 2005