My employer has a DEC VT-180 with keyboard, disk drives, printer,
software, cables, and manuals, all in original boxes with original packing
slips, sitting unused on a shelf. Where should I look or who should I
contact who would be interested in it? Several local and national
computer history museums and centers have politely declined our offer
already. Ideally the recipient would have some use, either practical
(data recovery?) or educational, for it; my employer would prefer it to go
to a home where it would be used and/or publicly displayed, rather than
sitting idle in a private collection.
This is in the Greater Boston area, and we are unlikely to be able to
package and ship it.
Thanks for any suggestions!
Ariel
> My only claim to being *possibly* on-topic is the age
> of the article (1974) and the fact that it inspired
> many of the early phoneme-driven speech synthesizers
> (Votrax, etc.).
>
> Does anyone have access to a suitably good engineering
> library with a copy of:
>
> McIlroy, M D, "Synthetic English Speech by Rule",
> Bell Telephone Labs, CSTR #14, 1973 (though I have
> also seen it referenced as 1974!)
>
> or:
>
> Ainsworth, W A, "A System for Converting English Text
> to Speech", IEEE Trans Audio & Electroacoustics AU-21 #3
> pp 288-290, 1973
>
> The former is far more interesting to me than the
> latter :-(
Just maybe I have either or both; I'll check when I get home.
You know about the old post on net.sources?
Have a look at some of the stuff in here:
http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/text2speech/
It's the same vintage, may be of interest.
Also, I hacked the navy code around a bit to make it more
accurate and to assist with using a large phonetic
word list. And to parameterize the tables from an editable
data file rather than being hard coded in the C source.
The algorithm is considerably improved if you subject the words
to TeX's hyphenation algorithm before applying the grapheme->phoneme
rewrite rules. Hyphenation points roughly correspond to phoneme
boundaries, and stop words like haphazard from sounding half-assed.
Graham
From: jim stephens <jwstephens at msm.umr.edu>
>Roger Merchberger wrote:
>
>> IMHO, not worth it, but maybe they'll take a decent offer???
>>
><snip>
>
>> Laterz,
>> Roger "Merch" Merchberger
>
>Nice to spot roger. However if you read their crapola, they have
>all the worst attributes of a "power ebay seller". No support,
>therefore no answers about where it came from, condition questions
>pre or post sale, etc.
>
>No local pickup (have to steal as much for packaging it as they can)
>
>no phone calls
>
>I try my best to totally avoid these types, since that is all that I
>can do.
>
Ciro100 is definately one to avoid.
I won an auction from him, and he demanded that I leave positive feedback
for him before he would complete the deal. I finally agreed to cancel the
transaction to avoid him leaving a retaliatory negative.
> My current favorite to deal with is the fellow in New Mexico
> who posts as riatla.
Agreed! Riatla is a very, very honest seller who often has nifty items.
Ken
On 7/26/06, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> Someone on comp.os.vms suggested playing with the DIP switches that
> control the 500/667Mhz settings on the mainboard and daughterboard.
> Guess what, I had a 500Mhz CPU in a 667Mhz system. Obviously someone
> swapped the board out prior to my buying it. Another reason screen
> shots are good when buying a system on eBay.
Is it acceptable if you were to share who this unethical seller is so
that we may all avoid him?
>
> i am negotiating on purchasing a larage quantity of PDP8 boards which
> includes G,M, R, and S series boards. Also included in this are the M8341
> to match my M8340's to make up complete sets. I discussed these and
> seveeral other parts with numberous members of the list several months ago
> and have been waiting to get a detailed inventory.
If anyone is interested in these or any other PDP8 boards or options please
contact me off list.
Thanks,
Ppaul Anderson
useddec at gmail.com
(217)586-5361
BTW, it is also missing the interface card between the box and the Sun Sparc station that would be connected to it. So, for $8000 he is off his rocker...
Ram
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org on behalf of Ram Meenakshisundaram
Sent: Wed 7/26/2006 9:03 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts; cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: RE: Just in case you have *way too much money*...
I can get that same "SuperComputer" for about $200. But its a bit useless without the software and drivers. The person who was willing to sell it to me got a formatted hard-drive with nothing in there. Kind of hard to get this running without the drivers. I do have trollius, but it requires the drivers from Alexis for it to run on that machine. I have talked to the original developers of Trollius to see if they had any of the software, but alas no luck...
Ram
I can get that same "SuperComputer" for about $200. But its a bit useless without the software and drivers. The person who was willing to sell it to me got a formatted hard-drive with nothing in there. Kind of hard to get this running without the drivers. The software I do have, but the drivers are necessary....
Ram
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org on behalf of Roger Merchberger
Sent: Tue 7/25/2006 7:07 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Just in case you have *way too much money*...
IMHO, not worth it, but maybe they'll take a decent offer???
=-=-=
MCA-based NCR box w/386SX20... $386.20 (ain't that funny... not!) - but
it's a nice box if yer into that sorta thing - coprocessor & SCSI built-in.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320002549109
Or for you transputer(28each)/i860(24each) and at least 192 Meg RAM
"supercomputer" hunters with $8K burnin' a hole in yer pocket and want to
score the "Mother Lode":
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220007046405
Me? I was just looking for info on EPROM programmers... Too rich for my
blood anyway - I'll stick with my CoCos & Model 200's...
;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
Cleaning out - found a copy of the PDP11 Peripherals Handbook, c. 1975.
If anyone wants it, $5 shipped will do the trick.
Lemmeno.
Thanks!
--
Paul Braun
Valparaiso, IN
"There's a fine line between stupid, and clever." - David St. Hubbins
"Enjoy every sandwich." - Warren Zevon
"The Fountain of Youth is a state of mind." - The Ides of March
--------------Original Message:
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:20:14 -0400
From: Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com>
Subject: re: B-1700 (was Re: MLP-900)
"Al Kossow" wrote:
>
>The cold-load on all but the very last of the systems were from cassette. I ha
>ve them, but need to read their contents.
yes, I remember that :-) I remember looking at s-machine docs too. I
seem to remember lots of BNF like diagrams. I was young and
not-well-educated at the time.
I used COBOL and thought I remembered fortran and algol as well. I
remember the machine had a card reader/punch and disks which looked like
RP06's. Booting it was a little odd but not too painful.
I didn't want to mention the cassettes, mostly due to the terror of
thinking about reading them. But now I've said the words and wondering
whats on them - microcode? How would you read them?
(isn't this how you always find your victims? :-) "sure, just try and
disassemble the micrcode, how hard could it be?" :-)
hmmm... they're just cassettes. how hard could it be? :-) I'm willing
to try if you have any extra tapes.
-brad
------------------Reply:
If it helps, AFAIK they used separate clock and data tracks;
one or more transitions within a clock pulse denotes a 1,
no transitions a 0.
I think I have a cassette drive somewhere with tech docs
(schematics & interface signal description). Don't know if
it's compatible with B17 tapes though (I believe there were
several different recording methods used).
mike
> From: jim stephens <jwstephens at msm.umr.edu>
> My current favorite to deal with is the fellow in New Mexico
> who posts as riatla. He has S100 stuff right now, and had the
> CDC-160, and an 029 keypunch. he is the nicest reseller I have
> ever dealt with, and will answer questions all day long. It is possible
> to have an ebay business and be civil, as opposed to the lister
> of these.
I've been to their store in Albuquerque, and found them to be reasonably
friendly although they price most of their stuff by ebay standards. In case
anyone doesn't already know, riatla is Altair spelled backwards.
