Well, I have good news and I have good news... (and just a little bad news)...
I have now erased a bajangle of eproms, I have quite a few Basics burned
and lots of spare blank carts, so they'll hit the mail soon. I have
tomorrow off, so I'll prolly pack/address/ship then. If not, definitely
over the weekend. Tuesday nite was going to be my "Pack'em up nite" but the
wifeypoo got a line on a good job, so it was transformed into "Rewrite the
Resume nite."[1] Wednesdays are a PITA for me (to work at 7:30am, get out
at 8:30 pm or later) so I rarely feel like doing anything after work. Of
course, my LCD monitor "went blank" Tuesday nite, so I had to figure out
the cause of that last nite... I was a grumpy dude by 11:00 pm. ;-) Turns
out the LCD monitor died... :-( I grabbed my wife's monitor and am using
that temporarily until I can get a new one in.
I did test a basic cart in my HHC, and it seems to work fine, *except* I
think my RAM's a bit wonky, as once I create a program, then exit BASIC, it
thinks I have 2 bytes of free memory left. Weird. It might also be a
limitation as to *which slot* the chip goes into - I didn't diddle with
that. Or... I don't believe that the internal batteries are functioning, so
it might be a power problem causing the wonkeyness... Anyway, the Basic
itself comes up and it takes immediate commands just fine, and I've entered
in 2-3 line programs that run fine until you exit basic, then it thinks
there's no free memory left. Like I said, weird.
Anyway, I'll send out individual emails tomorrow with the status of each
order, but I wanted to let everyone know I didn't forget 'em!
;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
[1] After a 10-year hiatus from the workforce, it was quite a job!
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
Hi list,
I pulled the following from a skip (or dumpster as you North Americans
would have it!):
http://img163.echo.cx/my.php?image=hp854qg.jpg (5 x HP85 computers)
http://img263.echo.cx/my.php?image=hp86b4wy.jpg (3 x HP86B computers)
http://img263.echo.cx/my.php?image=hpdrives8zh.jpg (5 x HP9121 dual
drives, 1 x HP9122 dual drive)
Is there anything specific to these machines I should check (aside
>from the obligatory stuff-from-a-dumpster drying-out period) before
trying to power them on? I haven't got a monitor that will do the NTSC
composite from the HP86Bs at the moment so I can't really try those,
but I can try the HP85s and the drives if it's OK to.
Thanks,
Ed.
There is a lot of 5 Addmaster paper tape readers (new in box) for sale on
eBay. No bids yet, ends April 9th.
Item number: 7505437498
I would buy one but I don't need five of them. These look like the ones Data
I/O uses to use for the PROM programmers.
Michael Holley
>
>Subject: Re: OT: EMP and Equipment
> From: jim stephens <jwstephens at msm.umr.edu>
>EMP as related to an atmospheric nuclear explosion is caused because
>of the release of energy from the atmosphere ionized by the radiation
>pulse sent by the blast.
Radiation as in Energetic Particles or as Waves like EM?
>when the ionized gases recombine, they release a huge amount of radio
>frequency radiation in a pulse. This causes any junctions to have
>induced a potential across them, unrelated to being plugged into anything.
That pulse wouldn't happen to be ELECTROMAGNETIC would it?
>This is similar to the damage from static electricity, but is not related
>to >direct conduction and release of potential to ground, which static
>usually is, but is rather induced potentially deep inside any devices
>however well shielded.
Your confusing netrons and gamma particles that go through most
everything to Electromagnetic waves that don't. Faraday shield
will stop or suffifiently attenuate EM waves.
>The only way to guard against this is to engineer all junctions and
>circuits to withstand and survive this potential.
That makes stuff resistant.
>This is also the reason that vacumn tube circuits recover faster or at
>least they should, if the circuits don't get damaged by a sudden jump
>in potential passing thru them and settle back down. They don't have
>solid state junctions to be damaged permanently in such an event, and
>in theory should settle back to original function.
Wrong in part. Tubes are more resistant as anything that nominally
operates with hundreds of volts is less likely to be terminally
affected by a 20V spike. However a piece of logic that runs on 5V
will be totaled with even a 1V spike.
>note that satellites in orbit, or airborne aircraft can be equally at
>risk to EMP.
Yes they are. At least the electronics will be. A C150 flying behind
a real honest to dog Slick magneto won't even notice it.
However Sats die not only from the EM fields from solar storms they
also suffer from the ionizing radiation that literally posions the
silicon and it's doping.
>Note that the high potential caused by lighting is mostly caused by
>conduction, not by the field of the bolt. It is an excess of electrons
>looking for a path that cause the damage there.
Really wrong! While that is the primary damage path it is far from
the only path. Near hits are a danger due to the EM field resulting.
I have a computer that was damaged by EMP from a direct hit to the
house I was in at the time. It was not connected to power or terminal.
The damaged chips were near the physical edges close to openings as
the case (NS* horizon with wood cover) was not 100% enclosure.
The terminal (an H19) was totaled. It too was no cables connected
and line cord laying on the ground. Another machine in the house
that was connected was totaled. A portable battery operated common
6 transistor AM radio was cooked, mixer/osc transistor connected
to internal loopstick antenna was shorted(that's a magnetic loop!).
Remember in an intense EM field any wire is the load side of a
transformer (or field of a generator) and the connected circuits
have to dissipate the power induced in that winding.
> Nuke EMP is from the radiation pulse and is effective far from
>the point of the blast, which is why it could be an effective
>threat over hundreds of miles distant.
Even then inverse square law says no, not that far. Check the
various studies done with the Nevada desert blasts and out in
the Pacific.
Military field radios are EMP resistant. Ever look at field radios?
They have everything going in or out through connectors, when
connectors are unplugged there are conductive caps placed over
the connector and the cases are all continous conductive including
closeable covers on things like speakers. This is partially to protect
against handeling and environment but also EMP. If "you" a user are
far enough away to survive without ill effects likely those radios
will. The key is anything too close is at risk. Distance is safety.
For known cases, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Pacific Islands that safe
distance only a few miles from ground zero. This does not include
radioactive fallout and it's longer term poisoning.
Further in the desert where thy did underground blasts for years
at the top of the hole were older computers with CORE memory that
were subjected to both EMP and physical shock waves. Usually the
system was trashed due to the trailier being tossed around but,
the cores would be pulled and read if the machines were too
mechanically damaged.
Fact, bombs are bad. Being close to them is very bad.
Allison
Ah yes, good memories!
At the Technical High School in Heerlen (very southern part of Holland)
our computer class program tasks were written in BEATHE.
I can't remember what the B and E stand for, but the "ATHE" stand for
Algol(60) Technical High school Eindhoven.
The school in Heerlen used at that time (1975 era) IBM 027's (?) to
enter the program on punch *card*. We always had a fight for the few
desks that had a punch that also *printed* the line of Algol on the
top of the punch card. You learned to want to enter your work on such
a desk after your deck of cards had once slipped out of your hands and
fell on the ground ...
You turned in the deck of cards, and one or two days later you got
the print out on green bar paper. In the beginning your program hadn't
even run because the compiler found a missing ";" Get the correct card,
remove it from the deck and put in the corrected one. Submit the deck
again, and before you knew a week had passed. Turning in the deck more
than 5 times would seldom produce a good score, so I guess I learned at
that time to be precise.
- Henk, PA8PDP.
>>>>> "woodelf" == woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> writes:
woodelf> But remember too you really had only two sized variables,
woodelf> ints and floating point. I think the big problem with algol
woodelf> you never were ment to compile it, just write programns in
woodelf> it.
> Nonsense. It certainly wasn't designed as a paper language, and it
> wasn't used as a paper language. The first compiler (MC Amsterdam, by
> Dijkstra) was a real compiler, and at the T.U. Eindhove the "THE"
> operating system used Algol exclusively, so all the programming for
> many years at that major university was done in Algol 60.
>
> paul
Adobe Acrobat has almost unlimited manipulation capabilities. You can
rearrange pages, add pages (from almost any format .... word documents,
JPEGs, other PDFs, scanners, TIFF .... just about anything), rotate pages,
delete pages, and export pages as graphic images (in just about any format).
You can export pages, do "whatever" to them, and reimport them.
Also, it may be possible to "re-image" the entire PDF file to shrink it's
size, although I've not done that. If you drop any requirement for
compatibility with versions of Acrobat versions 4 and earlier (the current
version is 7), the files can be shrunk dramatically, although I'm not sure
if there is an easy one-step way to do this in the "standard" version (there
is a separate stand-alone PDF file optimizer in the "pro" version). In my
own view, Acrobat versions 4 and earlier are now too old to be productively
used.
Of course, I'm talking about "full version" Adobe Acrobat, not simply the
[free] "Acrobat Reader".
Just picked up an IBM 5155 luggable which was working up until the point
the chap switched it on to show me it working, when it promptly
broke :-)
On switch on it gives a narrow horizontal band of amber about 1.5" high;
after a couple of seconds the whole screen changes to flickering amber
with brighter zig-zag flyback lines visible.
Just thought I'd quickly ask in case there's component foo that's a
common failure in these machines (I haven't even pulled the case to look
for an obvious failure yet, let alone do anything else)
ta
Jules
Dan Williams chucked us an Indigo2 the other week amongst a load of DEC
stuff - I've only just had chance to take a look at it, although I've
brought it home for the week to fiddle with :)
Initial questions:
How to I tell what IMPACT video board it has? (Other than powering it up
I suppose, but I'm going to be giving it a good clean inside first...)
Anyone have the SCSI connector pinouts? The machine has no drive sleds,
so I need to improvise something (I gather it's not compatible with SCA,
despite being the same physical connectors). Worst case I could run it
>from an external disk I suppose.
Any special flavour of memory the machine needs? I've got a bucket of 72
pin SIMMs of various types kicking around, so I'm sure I'll have
something that'll work...
... that'll do for now :) Once I've checked the machine over and made
sure it looks like it'll work I'll worry about install media (I've got
IRIX CDs - just a question whether they support the R8k / R10k CPU in
this machine)
cheers
Jules
Anyone have a copy of this Motorola app note? It seems
my 'fax back' paper copy has faded beyond readability
over the years and I can't locate an electronic copy.
The full title is ..
"High Speed DRAM Design for the 40MHz MC68EC030"
Cheers,
Lee.
.
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