I had a dead VT220 at some point (just the monitor, no keyboard). I
kept the enclosure with the idea of making something out of it
someday.
Has anyone taken 'classic' terminal enclosures and put a Mini-ITX PC
inside? I was thinking an appropriately sized LCD display and the ITX
mobo and possibly a CD-ROM drive.
See <http://www.mini-itx.com/projects.asp> for more on mini-itx projects.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
> The downside, of course, is that as the hobbyist-end-user, you are
> somewhat out in the cold if you don't own a GAL programmer. They can
> easily run to hundreds of dollars for basic ones, and, unlike an old
> 4K EPROM, they are not trivial to make programmers for from scratch.
There are no excuses .. http://www.geocities.com/mwinterhoff/galblast.htm
Lee.
It is on the CPU side. It sounds like there is a high voltage leakage
problem. Before I open it for an investigation, could somebody with
experience give me directions about what is the usual cause of this problem,
which component to check, and how to fix the problem? I have experience with
analog circuits. Thank you!
vax, 9000
We have the chips produced from earlier eras, but what attempts have
been made to preserve the design tools from those earlier eras?
Schematic Capture
PCB Layout
Netlist Tools
IC transistor-level design
IC gate-level design
etc.
I know several of you out there have microprocessor development
environments from Intel and TI, IIRC. Ditto for things like PROM
programmers.
What about the design software? I imagine the first generation of EDA
software was created in-house by pioneers of VLSI design. But what
about when the tools started to become commodities? What about early
releases of software from a company like Mentor Graphics?
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
I have two TI Silent 700s, both claim to be model 743 KSRs. One of them
only produces upper case. The other does lower case with small caps.
Did any model Silent 700 ever do "true" lower-case, with descenders and
ascenders, as opposed to small-caps only?
-Seth
I've got a stack of DC300 and DC600 tapes which I'd like to get images,
for archiving. I'd like to find a SCSI drive which can read the tapes,
so I can archive them, and hopefully make images of some of them
available (they're install media for the Intel iPSC/860, and ETA-10
supercomputers).
Another option is to send tapes to someone to make images of, but I've
got well over 100 tapes, and I'm not quite sure if any of them have data
that shouldn't be made available (other than the source code tapes,
which I may not be able to make available).
After this, I'm hoping to make available whatever I can (I also have some
9-tracks of install media for the ETA-10 and CDC Cyber 205).
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
Billy Pettit wrote:
>Many of the computer systems of the 1960's and and early 70's used the
IBM
>Selectric typewriter as a console device. A few even used it as a
>peripheral ...
Another source, although not exactly the same as a Selectric I/O, is the
Wang Model 611/711 Input/Output writer. This was a rather standard IBM
Selectric 72 modified by Wang with solenoids and various switches, which
interfaced with a Wang 600 or 700-Series calculator, and provided full
input/output capabilities. Like Selectric I/O's, these devices aren't
common, but they add to the search base.
The solenoids controlled the tilt/rotate action of the typeball, key
activation, index, carriage return, tab set, tab clear, tab, and
backspace.
The interface used Wang-proprietary character codes, but was a very
simple parallel interface.
Datasheet at http://oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-wang711.html
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Web Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
> Did anyone salvage any of the very expensive hardware simulators of
> the mid 80's?
Mentor and Valid both had systems which could integrate actual parts
into a software simulation (Valid's was called RealChip).
The largest of these sorts of things were seas of Xilix FPGAs that
attemtpted to simulate entire designs. The software wasn't very good,
and while they simulated the design a few orders of magnitude faster
than software simulators, they still were not very fast. One of these
showed up at BDI this past year, with absolutely no interest from bidders.
I worked on MacOS bootstrapping of both the G3 at Somerset and the
Exponential BiCMOS processors on those.
> Do you have a picture of it?
I picture would be useful. If it's from Dortmund, I don't seem to have a
picture of it. The 2311 drives I've been able to identify from the pics
were made by are CDC, Century Data, and Memorex.
> http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/nd560-unproc.jpeg
The 9766 is the drive with the pack on top. There is a CDC FSD drive
directly below that.
Someone at CHM is currently writing a history of the SMD interface for
the mass storage SIG. The interface appears to originate with the 80mb
9762 and 40mb 9760 in 1973.
Formatted capacity can vary on a number of factors, including number of
sectors per track.