test-drb February 2006

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

224 participants
452 discussions

by ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk

Does anyone have, or know of a source of, data on the STK7551? This is a hybrid circuit, designed to mount onto a heatsink. It's got 16 (or so) connectons on oen edge, which are soldered to the PCB. What I know : It's a voltage regulator. It says so on the package. It's used in the Epson TF20 disk drive power supply, where it outputs +5V and +12V. It's clearly a dual regulator, and I uspect it's a switcher. What I would like is at least a pinout, and preferably even more data (Please don't send anything but plain text to me here, if you've got images, or pdfs, or something, contact me, and I'll give you an address to sned them to. Thanks!) -tony

18 years, 10 months

What's CIS for? (was RE: Original 11/74 front panel)

by henk.gooijen＠oce.com

now you got me thinking, Zane. I have FIS in my 11/44, and I am not sure I have CIS either installed in the /44, or the module is somewhere, or I passed on it for the same reason I did not install the CIS chip in the QBUS-based 11. My 11/35 OTOH does have FIS and CIS (and MMU plus SLR), but that's just to have a complete CPU with *all* options :-) - Henk. ________________________________ Van: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org namens Zane H. Healy Verzonden: vr 10-02-2006 20:27 Aan: cctalk at classiccmp.org Onderwerp: Re: What's CIS for? (was RE: Original 11/74 front panel) > > Speaking of CIS, can anyone point me to a good document as to what the > benefits of CIS are? I've often wondered what this is about, as it's a > plug-in chip on my 11/23+ > As I recall, it's for *business* computing, rather than *scientific* computing. I think it speeds up Cobol, and maybe some other stuff. Out of *all* of my PDP-11's, the only system I have with the CIS option is a /23+. I rather wish I had it for my /44, though I don't actually need it :^) Zane This message and attachment(s) are intended solely for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient or agent thereof responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone and with a "reply" message. Thank you for your cooperation.

18 years, 10 months

HP150-II

by Glen.Heiberg＠gijima.com

Hello list, A couple of questions on the HP150-II... 1) Just how rare are these machines? www.hpmuseum.net rates the HP150-II with a "rarity factor" of 2/10 (where 10 is extremely rare). Is this about correct? I know the original HP150 was quite widely used in HP shops, but I've seen only 2 HP150-II's here in South Africa. I've got one, and the other was used as a console on an HP3000 series 70. 2) I've already had most of the software available that hpmuseum.net offers for the HP150; however, anyone got Windows (was it v 1.03?) for this box? Cheers Glen.

18 years, 10 months

What's CIS for? (was RE: Original 11/74 front panel)

by bqt＠update.uu.se

"Julian Wolfe" <fireflyst at earthlink.net> wrote: > Speaking of CIS, can anyone point me to a good document as to what the > benefits of CIS are? I've often wondered what this is about, as it's a > plug-in chip on my 11/23+ As others have said, CIS stands for Commercial Instruction Set. It's an add-on to the PDP-11 for string manipulation. It's entirely described in a number of versions of the PDP-11 processor handbook. Probably any version dealing with the 11/44, 11/23 or 11/24, since those were the only CPUs to have CIS (if we ignore the 11/74). Further comments on this thread: An 11/44 cannot have FIS. (Jeez, don't you know anything? :-) ) The FIS was an early floating point implementation which only exists for the 11/35, 11/40 and 11/03. All others use some variant of the FPP-11. Different opcodes, different data formats, different just about everything. RSTS/E in late versions use MOVC if it exists, to move data around in the kernel. RSX never use CIS in the kernel. Neither FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN 77, PDP-11, nor BASIC+2 uses CIS. They will all use FPP however, if it exists. FORTRAN IV can also use FIS, if I remember right. I don't think DIBOL uses CIS, but I'm not entirely sure. COBOL uses CIS if it exists, however. Of course an assembler programmer can use CIS if he wants to. :-) EAE is another beast, and one which any Unibus cpu probably can use, since it's not really an addition to the CPU, but actually a peripherial. Not much point in it, however, atleast not if you have EIS. Since that does more, better and faster than EAE. It was mostly something used in the 11/20 and 11/15. And e11 V5 actually have the 11/74 implemented, along with the other stuff needed for multiprocessor PDP-11s. And it works, even if it is a bit tricky to set up, and not really documented any good. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at update.uu.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

18 years, 10 months

Original 11/74 front panel

by bqt＠update.uu.se

Don North <ak6dn at mindspring.com> wrote: Johnny Billquist wrote: >>> "Julian Wolfe (FireflyST)" <fireflyst at earthlink.net> wrote: >>> >> >>>>> Okay, what I immediately noticed is that these machines say "MP" and >>>>> Don's panel doesn't. >> >>> More differences: Don's panel have the location for the key moved to >>> the other side of the parity lamps. Which is rather weird. >>> Also, the screenprint of 11/74 looks shadowed, which is weird. And the >>> right hand side have a different color than the left hand side. >>> And of course, the 11/74s from Tim don't have any CIS stuff on the >>> front panel. > > Besides moving the keyswitch, the dial selector knobs on the righthand > side were moved around as well to make space to label all the extra > switch positions. > > As I mentioned in another reply, the artifacts are due to scanning the > panel on a 14" flatbed scanner in two pieces, and merging the scans. > When I get around to it I'll take a high quality single-view photograph. Yes, I saw that. Well, that explains those artifacts. It would definitely by nice if you could take a good photo of it at some time. >>> (I'm still thinking that Don's panel have never had a matching piece >>> of real hardware, since I don't think that CPU was ever built.) > > I can only say that I worked on real 11/74 hardware in 1978-9 writing > microcode for the 11/74 CIS (commercial instruction set) accelerator > (packed decimal, string instructions, etc). See http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1174/Prelim_KB11-E_Diffs_Aug78.pdf > for a memo written by Ray Boucher, one of the hardware designers (Al, > how did you ever come across a memo such as this???). The other hardware > designed was Mike Brown. The other microcoders were Dave Sager and Lewis > Costas. The project manager was Dave Barry. How much more do you need to > know? Ok. I'm conviced. :-) Thanks, by the way for clearing that up. > Not a lot of 11/74 CIS systems were built, probably no more than a dozen > or so maximum. The 11/74 folded in the 11/70MP changes which had been > done about a year earlier, so an 11/74 was really an 11/70MP base plus > the CIS option. Later when the 11/74 CIS was killed as a product, the > 11/74 name lived on, but it was strictly a renamed version of the 11/70MP. Wonderful that some were really built. Were they every used for anything, or were they just built to prove it worked, and then cancelled? What happened to those machines? Hmm, you raised a new question in my mind. I have always been under the impression that the 11/74 designation was for the MP system, but here you seem to imply that the 11/74 was really the 11/70 with CIS, and the moniker was actually only taken over by the MP system after the 11/70 CIS was cancelled. Is that correctly understood? If so, that's interesting. Do you know why they cancelled it? (Well, I could guess that the CIS really didn't turn out to be something customers asked for, especially not after the VAX started rolling, but anyway...) >>>>> Were there non-multiprocessor 11/74s? If so, what would have been >>>>> the benefits over 11/70s? >> >>> >>> Yes there were. And the benifits were none. Actually, they were >>> slightly worse than normal 11/70s, but the difference were minimal. >>> After DEC decided to not make the 11/74 into a commercial product, >>> they used 11/74 parts for 11/70 machines. Atleast inhouse. Not sure if >>> any of those parts found their way into customers machines. >>> >>> Used as such, the differences were basically related to cache: The MMU >>> have the cache bypass bit. The ASRB instruction always bypass the >>> cache, and you can also order the machine to explicitly bypass the >>> cache (unless my memory fails me). >>> >>> But nothing of this was used by any OS normally, so the only thing >>> noticeable would be the slower ASRB instruction. >>> > > All true statements. ASRB to memory was modified to act as the semaphore > instruction and thus always bypassed the cache AND did an atomic > read/modify/write cycle to the memory. The valid semaphore memory values > were 0 and 1; ASRB would then always set the memory value to 0 and > return the old value in the C-bit from the right shift carry out. Just to clarify things here. The ASRB didn't always write a 0 back, it's just for the spinlock semaphores that only held the value 0 or 1 that ASRB in effect always wrote a 0 (right?). I seem to remember some other paper about this that also pointed out that one optimization done was that if the data read by the ASRB was already 0, it didn't do a write at all, which improved efficiency a lot. Thanks for providing some insight here. If you have more gems stored in your head, perhaps we could talk a bit offline. There are things I'd like to know. :-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at update.uu.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

18 years, 10 months

Paging Henk.....

by jim＠g1jbg.co.uk

Henk, I sent you a message last weekend, which I think may have fallen into your spam filter. Regards Jim Please see our website the " Vintage Communication Pages" at WWW.G1JBG.CO.UK

18 years, 10 months

Original 11/74 front panel

by henk.gooijen＠oce.com

Hmm, I was wondering ... (as if I don't have enough projects at hand), the 11/70MP or 11/74 are of course real unobtainium gold-pressed latinum (perhaps even literally!). So, I think it makes sense to get SIMH running on a PC/104 board (trivial), add the Blinkenlight Core and I/O Board and build an 11/74 console. You could make a replica of the console, or perhaps re-use an 11/70 console panel and make a new plastic front. If the key switch or the rotary knobs are in the wrong position, you could re-arrange that. What matters are the switches and the LEDs for a "real" replica. Of course, I am *not* saying that you should rip a console of a real 11/70 ! We know a source, just be prepared to put down some money ... I bought a real 11/70 console, and started on the metal workz to build a nice (smallish) box behind the panel. Guess what's going inside that :-) But this gets close to the new thread "mounting new hardware in vintage hardware". - Henk, PA8PDP. ________________________________ Van: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org namens Tim Shoppa Verzonden: wo 08-02-2006 19:24 Aan: cctalk at classiccmp.org Onderwerp: Re: Original 11/74 front panel Don North wrote > So how many of these panels exist is hard to say. I know only of one. Two more can be seen at http://www.trailing-edge.com/~shoppa/1174Xopen.jpg <http://www.trailing-edge.com/~shoppa/1174Xopen.jpg> So that makes three :-). Tim. This message and attachment(s) are intended solely for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient or agent thereof responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone and with a "reply" message. Thank you for your cooperation.

18 years, 10 months

archiving hard drives, Televideo PM/4T and AT&T7300

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> Don't the Unix-based OS's have a similar capability with the 'dd' function, BTW? dd will fail on the first bad block on the device. It also wouldn't work if the SCSI device is using a sector size different from what the raw device driver is expecting. Getting disc images of these discs may be more difficult than you might initially think, because they aren't likely to be either SCSI or IDE. If they are ST506, you have to have a disc interface that matches the sector encoding. It is unlikely you are going to be able to find one that will match using commodity ISA controllers. If the computers are working, you'll probably have to write some code to send the data out through some interface on the computer, like a serial port, dealing with the possiblity of bad sectors. The 7300 was common enough that I would think a program exists somewhere to to that.

18 years, 10 months

What's CIS for? (was RE: Original 11/74 front panel)

by uban＠ubanproductions.com

At 08:44 PM 2/10/2006 +0100, you wrote: >now you got me thinking, Zane. >I have FIS in my 11/44, and I am not sure I have CIS either installed >in the /44, or the module is somewhere, or I passed on it for the same >reason I did not install the CIS chip in the QBUS-based 11. >My 11/35 OTOH does have FIS and CIS (and MMU plus SLR), but Do you mean EIS (M7238) instead of CIS here? --tom >that's just to have a complete CPU with *all* options :-) > >- Henk. > >________________________________ > >Van: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org namens Zane H. Healy >Verzonden: vr 10-02-2006 20:27 >Aan: cctalk at classiccmp.org >Onderwerp: Re: What's CIS for? (was RE: Original 11/74 front panel) > > > > > > > Speaking of CIS, can anyone point me to a good document as to what the > > benefits of CIS are? I've often wondered what this is about, as it's a > > plug-in chip on my 11/23+ > > > >As I recall, it's for *business* computing, rather than *scientific* >computing. I think it speeds up Cobol, and maybe some other stuff. > >Out of *all* of my PDP-11's, the only system I have with the CIS option is a >/23+. I rather wish I had it for my /44, though I don't actually need it >:^) > > Zane > > > > > > >This message and attachment(s) are intended solely for the use of the >addressee and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or >otherwise exempt from disclosure under applicable law. >If you are not the intended recipient or agent thereof responsible for >delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified >that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is >strictly prohibited. >If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender >immediately by telephone and with a "reply" message. >Thank you for your cooperation.

18 years, 10 months

Project Delta pictures

by legalize＠xmission.com

Some of you guys may have noticed I often refer to the computing center at udel.edu "back in the day". Here are some B&W photos of their machine room at the time. You may find them interesting. Systems shown: PDP-11/70 DEC-10 Burroughs B7700 Control Data Corporation Cyber-173(?) Xerox 1200 laser printer <http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mader/delta/erniepics.html> -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

18 years, 10 months

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test-drb February 2006