>From: "Eric F." <elf at ucsd.edu>
>
>The recent death of Mr. Raskin has me Google'ing around for information
>about his Canon Cat machine.
>
>Even prior to his passing, I have always thought it a sweet looking machine.
>
>Does anyone of this list own a Canon Cat? If so, do you use it for any sort
>of regular everyday work? And what's your personal impression of the machine?
>
>Is it even possible to use it in the context of today's work demands (i.e.,
>for email)? Or is a proper network interface & appropriate software the
>limiting factor here?
>
>
Hi
I have a Cat. There are some companies that still use
these as editing machines. That is why they seem to be
missing from the collector group in general. I got mine
>from Al Kossow. I had to replace the lithium battery in it
but it otherwise works OK.
I'd love to get some information on the memory and I/O
mapping. It expects to use particular printers so it would
be nice to rewrite the driver to work well with my 3SI.
I could imagine that if I were doing a lot of writing
for college or writing a book, I'd find the editor a real
advantage.
It has one other nice feature. One can write out a formula
and it will give you the answer. It is kind of like having
a spread sheet in your text.
Of course, if you know the secret key sequence, you can
bring it into the Forth mode. From here, you can access
the inner machine as well. You can write Forth code and
execute it in the text as well. It then becomes a spread
sheet plus at that point.
Still, it is primarily a text machine in black and white.
I talked with Jeff about two years ago. He definitely
had interesting ideas about computer interfaces. He
didn't think much of the mouse. Besides being the major
source of carpal tunnel syndrome (sp?) it is a real time
waster for most applications.
The machines code wasn't completely written in Forth
but Jeff does attribute the quick software development
and the fact that there were no errors found in the released
version to using Forth in the creation of code.
Forth tends to make a person do incremental testing as
the code is written. This often helps to produce error
free code in the final product.
Dwight
I dug into some of the complaints that people on cctech weren't getting any
posts, except from me. Here's what happened.
Remember that cctech is 100% moderated. Nothing goes to it without moderator
approval. The moderators are behind ;) I just checked and there's a few days
of messages in there. I'm sure this will get caught up soon enough.
In addition - why are cctech people getting posts just from me? Well, see
above, PLUS, I set my own subscription to cctech to not require moderation.
Thus, any posts I make go straight to the users without an approval step. I
did this because sometimes when I send out notices like "I'm taking the
server down for a while", cctech users don't get them immediately like
cctalk users do, due to moderation. So by setting my cctech subscription to
no moderation, cctech people would get my notices immediately. The downside
of this, in hindsight, is that it looks REALLY squirrely to the cctech
people. They get a string of my normal posts, and them some time later,
possibly a day or so, when moderation occurs, they get all the other posts I
make. Problem solved.
I think what I'm going to do about this is change my personal cctech
subscription back to requiring moderation. That way cctech people won't see
the odd out of order behaviour. Then I'll create an additional "admin"
subscription for myself that doesn't require moderation. I'll then try to
remember to use that "admin" subscription to send out list notices and
things will be more sane for cctech people.
Regards,
Jay West
The following are available, but with a request.
Two clean TI DS10 (TI-990 era) disk packs. I've been charged
by a friend with finding a good home from them, which I think
means someone from this list trying to keep a TI-990 in good
order. The catch is, we'd like to get any recoverable data
off of these disk packs.
My friend is a board member for the TRAC Foundation. TRAC is
"an interpretive, recursive, string-based, macroprocessing
language with no compile step" invented by Calvin Mooers
starting in 1959. Going to www.tracfoundation.com one finds
that "entire subroutines can be inserted, or deleted, from
a running procedure, thus massively changing the behavior
during runtime." Whoa! Imagine changing a sort routine half
way through a long running job...
The reason I mention TRAC is that there's a chance one
of these packs has important/useful information about the
TRAC language, and my friend would really appreciate it if
the new owner could check for and recover anything that's
on these.
That's the only catch - we want whatever can be read from
them. And whoever wants them would need to pony up for
shipping and handling, or come collect them near Boston, MA,
USA. I can try to scrounge up a suitable box, but the packs
might have to go through the UPS Store too.
So, preference will be given to the person who stands the
best chance of recovering data. I can wait a week to see
what responses come in.
Thanks,
--Steve.
On Mar 2 2005, 22:50, der Mouse wrote:
> In passing, on the "whom to reply to" thread, this message came in
with
> a header
>
> > Reply-To: julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk,
> > "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> > <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
> I noticed this when I tried to reply and saw both addresses in the
To:;
> upon checking, I found that Reply-To:.
>
> How it got that way, of course, is a different question.
Probably because Jules' mailer is inserting an unecessary "Reply-to:"
header (pointless, since it's supposed to be used only when you want
replies to go to somewhere other than the "From:"), and then mailman is
applying the principle of "least modification" and *appending* the
classiccmp address, rather than replacing the one Jules' mailer put in.
I've noticed this with posts from one or two other listmembers.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Does anyone have the microcode source code for the
PDP11 native instruction set on the LSI-11/2/WD chips?
it purportedly provided with the LSI-11 WCS option (KUV-11 -M8018)
The descriptions I've found in documentation located on bitsavers
say the the kit included the microcode assembler/linker
tools as well as the full ' 11 source .mic code for reference.
Meagan? Alternate anyone have info on reading out the WD PMOS roms?
I've got 3x working M7264 LSI-11/2(quad height) with all the MICROMs loaded as well
as a M7270 LSI-11 (dual height), they all run RT fine. Anyone know
if you can just swap the MICROMS to make a WD Pascal Microegine?
Would be a good set if you already have an 11/23, 11/73 looking to complete the set.
Open to interesting trades.
Heinz
I'm in contact with two gents who worked on TI-990's back in
the 80's. Since this platform doesn't get a lot of traffic on
the list, I thought I'd share their recollections of working
on these systems.
======== Gentleman N
[ Referring to the pictures/links posted a few days ago of a
[ TI-990 in L.A. ...
The disk drives for this computer is actually a pair of drives in one
enclosure. One removable and the other "fixed" internally. They both
have the same capacity (5MB I think).
The funky terminal is just that. It's a great monochrome terminal with
addressable cursor and it is fast for its day when compared to
VT52/VT100s.
The OS seemed decent from what little I used it but I never did any
programming with it. In 1986 I helped out Bryan with an old client in
Honolulu who had a rack mounted version with three DS10's where two of
the unit (four drives) had failed with head crashes (don't move packs
between drives after those funny scrapping sounds begin). The service
guy had the system already repaired and I helped get the their
accounting system going again. I went back 1987-89 and wrote a new
version running on i386/AT&T Unix System V Release 3 so they could have
more modern hardware.
It was a nice system...but not an IBM 1401 (or CDC 8090)!
========
======== Gentleman A
Wow, that's a (nice) blast from the past. And to help connect the dots,
I am a friend of Bill's who handed over a customer with one of these for
Bill to provide software support.
I had a 2 person company (sales guy and me) that developed business
applications for a chain of radio stations, and we needed a system that
we could resell 1) quickly; 2) with no cash upfront; 3) that was
reasonably powerful for a multi-user terminal based application.
This was around 1980, and we talked to all the usual suspects, DEC, Data
General, HP, maybe Wang... It's been a while. Anyway the TI folks
basically sold us a machine and delivered it, no cash down, 120 days to
pay, lots of support, etc. I had the thing in my living room of my
bachelor-pad apartment for a few months of development and testing, then
we delivered it to the client.
The application was in Fortran (is that correct Bill?), but I remember
writing a few little assembler tools and twiddling a few bits here and
there. Once we delivered it to the customer my access was somewhat
limited to bug-fix and enhancements during evenings and weekends, so I
didn't get to play with it as much as I would have liked.
The coolest thing I remember from the OS was a near real-time display
of in-memory processes. Sort of a graphical version of 'top' mapped
onto physical addresses.
========
Two interesting articles:
- http://tinyurl.com/63yx9 (cnet)
- http://tinyurl.com/6y6rb (computerworld)
=====
Evan's personal homepage: www.snarc.net
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