>
>Subject: Re: Recommendations for operating system
> From: "Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke at siemens.com>
> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 14:19:15 +0200
> To: Choctaw Bob <bob099 at centurytel.net>,
> "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>Now, coming back to systems, I still give out P166-P233MMX systems to
>people. A good configuration to run Office I found would be:
>
>P200
>64 MB RAM
>4+ Gig drive as C with all Apps
>4+ Gig drive partitioned as Z/D where Z is a 512 MB dedicated swap.
>1 DVD drive (if possible a writer at 40 Euro)
>WindowsXP
>Office2003
>Firefox
>
---------------
I suggest Warp connect in the blue box with win3.1 support built in. It
would be pretty snappy on a P200 and there's plenty of apps to run, although
later developed programs want version 4.0 however. You can use IBM peer on 3.0 to
share files, and if you use a 3com NIC, NDIS drivers are available.
Installing fixpaks is not that bad either if you use some of the free fixpak
installation programs. Google for OS/2 device driver pak online and you can see what
kind of hardware has drivers for it.
>
>Subject: Re: Recommendations for operating system
> From: "Hans Franke" <Hans.Franke at siemens.com>
> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 14:19:15 +0200
> To: Choctaw Bob <bob099 at centurytel.net>,
> "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>Now, coming back to systems, I still give out P166-P233MMX systems to
>people. A good configuration to run Office I found would be:
>
>P200
>64 MB RAM
>4+ Gig drive as C with all Apps
>4+ Gig drive partitioned as Z/D where Z is a 512 MB dedicated swap.
>1 DVD drive (if possible a writer at 40 Euro)
>WindowsXP
>Office2003
>Firefox
>
I'm not fond of MS software or OS but since it's pervasive having a good
system running it for compatability is handy.
The work a day box here is P166, 128mb 4.3gb, 20gb, SCSI CD writer(plextor)
running NT4server no MS apps though. All the apps are non MS including
Firefox and Thunderbird. Usual uptime for the system is months of 7x24
then I shutdown to clean dust of of the fans and the like. Reliability
beats speed as reboots take a long time.
Allison
>
>Subject: Recommendations for operating system
> From: Choctaw Bob <bob099 at centurytel.net>
> Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:13:57 -0500
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>
>I think that this just squeaks in as being on topic.
>
>I am looking for suggestions for an operating system for a PC, specs 75
>MHZ Pentium, 16 MB Ram, 4 GB HD, currently running PC-DOS Ver 7.
>Original IBM PC-DOS right out of the factory sealed box. I am thinking
>about putting GEM on the machine, maybe CP/M-86. Thought about GEOS,
>but rejected it, too closed.
>Specs seem too tight for Linux or BSD, or at least little advantage over
>DOS or CP/M.
>
>Anyone have experience with an operating system that might work, and be
>capable of useful work?
On boxes of that scale I've run DOS3.11->6.22, W3.11 W95, w98, NT4*,
ConcurrentDos, and OS2/Warp3. I'll add linux but stick to older
distros as the newer ones are big.
NT4 wants at least 32mb of ram but runs smoothly even on 33mhz 486s.
However as a useful box DOS, w3.11, W95 and NT4 were the most useful as
I could run a wider range of available apps. I have a p100 with 32m
running w98se with two disks, boot is 500mb and D: is 4.3gb and it's
a useful tool.
Allison
Hi Guys,
I'm attempting to recover some software from paper-tape.
Never actually had a PT reader in my "altair days", I fooled around
with magnetic tape systems (audio and 9-track), and later went to
the NorthStar disk system... Did a bit of paper-tape stuff with the
university systems, but I don't recall any real details.
Anyway - I'm using an OP-80A which is a very simple manual feed
reader - you position a light over the unit and pull the tape through
wire guides over an optical sensor and it provides parallel data.
This all appears to work OK.
The tape I've been testing with is a Processor Technology "BASIC
VDM DRIVER" - it contains driver software for the PT VDM-1 video
board.
My question - Does anyone know what they are using the 8th bit
for? - I get nicely readable ASCII BASIC source out of it, except
that the 8th bit seems to be somewhat randomly set on certain
characters. If I strip the 8th bit I get what appears to be legit BASIC
code.
I thought it might be parity, however this does not appear to be
the case - the codes 0A (00001010) and 0D (00001101) both
appear with the 8th bit clear - If the 8th bit were parity, one or
the other should have it set. Other characters always have it set,
for example 'T' (54) seems to always appears as (D4).
I checked the tape and it's not a read-error the 9th bit is punched
on certain characters..
Anyone shed some light?
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
I'm upgrading some systems here and am looking for some good deals on 256MB
PC100 or PC133 DIMMs. Any suggestions?
(The systems are just 10 years old, so it's OT)
Cheers,
Chuck
Fellow techies (and Tekkies),
Thanks to a very generous (and anonymous by request) donation of a replacement firewall/router (a Watchguard Firebox 1000), my domain and FTP archive should all be fully functional once again.
Those who have been patiently (or not) to download something from the archive, please give it a try now.
ftp.bluefeathertech.com
User ID: Either ftp or anonymous
Password: Anything you want, though I'd prefer you use your E-mail address.
Thanks to all for your patience during this nasty little outage, and special thanks to our anonymous donor (you know who you are). ;-)
Keep the peace(es).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com
kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"
I am in multiparty talks with a gentleman in the Seattle area who has a number of SGI machines in a storage
area that he is interested in getting rid of. These include several Indigos, Indigo2s, Personal IRISes, and Crimsons
(AFAIK, I am not the person in direct contact). The word is he's ready to deal on them.
If anyone in the Seattle area is interested, I'm going to be going over with someone (who initiated this), probably
next weekend, with a pickup to get some stuff. If something strikes your fancy, send me a offlist-message with what
you want and your offer, and I can try to get it stuffed in (might not be able to get more Crimsons, we're taking 3 and an
Onyx already - so those will be "space-available").
I've got a ZX80 here (issue 2A) which has a keyboard overlay attached that
looks very like that of a Sinclair ZX81.
The ROM in the machine is dated week 16 of 1981, and carries the marking
C77018, and a 1981 copyright.
Is this a machine that's been subjected to a ZX81 upgrade kit or something? I
wasn't aware that such a thing existed.
Now, the keyboard overlay's actually removable, revealing a pristine original
ZX80 legend underneath. However, two black press-fittings attach it to the PCB
at the corners of the front edge - are these press fittings there on all
ZX80s, or have these been added in order to secure the overlay in place?
The machine came with a "ZX 16K RAM" module (red lettering) which I assume is
later and more in keeping with a ZX81? Separately though I do have a module
marked as "ZX80 16K Byte RAM Pack" (white lettering). Question is, are they
interchangeable and the lettering was altered - or does the ZX80 variant map
memory to a different location than the later red-lettered type? (I'm assuming
that the expansion bus pinouts didn't change between ZX80 and the later machines!)
I've also got a ROM marked as: "ROM contents copyright 1980 Sinclair Research
Ltd" - is this the original ZX80 ROM (and the ROM in the machine is an
upgrade), or is this likely something else entirely?
Curiously there are a few stray fibres glued to the underside of the PCB -
presumably these are a left-over of cheap PCB manufacture and Sinclair's
horrible quality control! :-)
cheers
Jules
--
A. Because it destroys the natural flow of conversation.
Q. What's wrong with top posting ?
"Dave Dunfield" <dave06a at dunfield.com> wrote:
>>> If you look at the preceding character, is there any correlation to
the 8th
>>> bit of the next one? The 8th bit just might be garbage left over
and not
>>> masked out.
>
>
>None that I can tell - Also, the 8th bit is punched on the tape with the
>character - It seems unlikely that PT would have punched a tape in error
>that way (with garbage left over from the previous character in the
>8th bit) - although stranger things HAVE happened...
>
>
>
>>> It could be binary.The driver is loaded in the top of memory, and
>>> seems to patch over a TTY driver. I don't have manual handy
>>> but it does have a bootstrap loader @ 80H I think, the first
>>> 256 bytes to load in a hex loader.
>
>
>I have the manuals as well - this is the BASIC VDM driver, which I
>don't believe has a loader.
>
>Here is a HEX dump of the first 256 bytes retrieved from the tape
>(after the string of 00s occuring in the leader).
>
>0000 0D 0A 00 00 0D 0A 00 00 30 20 52 45 CD 0D 0A 00 ........0 RE....
>0010 00 32 20 52 45 CD 20 20 3C 3C 3C 20 20 42 41 53 .2 RE. <<< BAS
>0020 49 43 20 54 4F 20 56 44 4D 2D 31 20 4C 49 4E 4B IC TO VDM-1 LINK
>0030 20 50 52 4F 47 52 41 4D 20 20 3E 3E 3E 0D 0A 00 PROGRAM >>>...
>0040 00 34 20 52 45 CD 0D 0A 00 00 36 20 52 45 CD 20 .4 RE.....6 RE.
>0050 20 20 20 20 20 20 50 52 4F 43 45 53 53 4F 52 20 PROCESSOR
>0060 54 45 43 48 4E 4F 4C 4F 47 59 20 43 4F 52 50 2E TECHNOLOGY CORP.
>0070 0D 0A 00 00 38 20 52 45 CD 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 ....8 RE.
>0080 36 32 30 30 20 48 4F 4C 4C 49 53 20 53 54 52 45 6200 HOLLIS STRE
>0090 45 54 0D 0A 00 00 31 30 20 52 45 CD 20 20 20 20 ET....10 RE.
>00A0 20 20 45 4D 45 52 59 56 49 4C 4C 45 2C 20 43 41 EMERYVILLE, CA
>00B0 4C 49 46 4F 52 4E 49 41 20 20 20 39 34 36 30 38 LIFORNIA 94608
>00C0 0D 0A 00 00 31 32 20 50 52 49 4E D4 0D 0A 00 00 ....12 PRIN.....
>00D0 31 34 20 41 24 BD 22 28 48 45 58 29 20 49 53 20 14 A$."(HEX) IS
>00E0 59 4F 55 52 20 4C 41 53 54 20 41 44 44 52 45 53 YOUR LAST ADDRES
>00F0 53 2C 20 49 4E 50 55 54 3A 22 0D 0A 00 00 31 36 S, INPUT:"....16
>
>I have visually verified that the tape contains the binary values for
the first
>16 bytes as punched dots - (ie, it starts with 0D 0A 00 00 twice), then
>20 20 54 45 CD 0D 0A 00
>
>This is the line '0 REM', however the 'M' has the eight bit set, which
makes
>the code CD instead of 4D. You can see this in the remaining comments
>which are visible as well. However the 'M' in 'EMERYVILLE' appears with
>the high bit clear.
>
>You can also see that the 'T' in 'PRINT' has the high bit set.
>
>This is supposed to be loaded under Altair BASIC somehow (I'll have to
>dig out the Altair BASIC manuals and if it sheds any light) - I
thought that
>perhaps this in an internal representation, and that AB sets the high bit
>on the last character of reserved words ... except that 'INPUT' does not
>have the high bit set on it's last character...
>
>I have the machine code driver as well, and I will try reading that and
>see if the code disassembles into something that makes sense.
>
>Ultimately I will read these and other tapes and archive the code as a
>raw binary dump of the tape content, however I'm trying to understand
>what is recorded on the tapes so that I can verify my setup.
Ho ho ho...
Well, it looks pretty clear that the high bit is set at the final
character of BASIC keywords. Token marker, so to speak.
You've just made a big miss. The "INPUT" you're speaking of is a string
constant... Look again. :-)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
I have some 9 Track images that might work. They are not distribution
tapes, though. (I have some hard sector distribution floppies, but the
floppy drive and controller are not hooked up -- a project for another day)
These tape images are in AWS format (such as that used by the Hercules
mainframe emulator), so someone would need to reformat the files -- but it
shouldn't take more than a few hours of "C" coding).
I have LOTS more, but need to read those pesky floppies.
Jay
2363 MT CC0028 NOVA RDOS "STARTER" 12/30/88 NOVA 3/4, 1 Extra
file @ end rdos_starter Memorex 35CWA1 8/7/2000 ?
2364 MT CC0029 NOVA RDOS66 "STARTER TAPE" 12/31/88 NOVA 4/X,
Last file BAD rdos_66_star Memorex
27JHA9 8/7/2000 Y
2365 MT CC0030 NOVA RDOS 6.6 NOVA 4/x FDUMP Reel 1 of 2
12/31/88 rdos_66_fdum Memorex 35JWA9 8/7/2000
2366 MT CC0031 NOVA RDOS 6.6 NOVA 4/x FDUMP Reel 2 of 2
12/31/88 rdos_66_fdum Wabash 87623#1511 8/7/2000
At 08:40 AM 8/16/2006 -0400, Madcrow Maxwell wrote:
>I've decided to try out the Data General emulation in SIMH and am
>looking for software. Is there any place that has software for RDOS
>like extra programming languages, games and productivity-type stuff?
>If not is anybody willing to share?
>
>Mike "Madcrow" K.
---
Jay R. Jaeger The Computer Collection
cube1 at charter.net
