January 2007 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

by rick＠companje.nl

Hello Don, I just read your forum post from 2002 regarding a bootdisk image (MS-DOS v2.11) for the Sanyo MBC 555. Can you please send me a copy by email? I'm running 1.25. Do you know what kind of software is available for this machine besides Basic, Wordstar and Calcstar? Regards, Rick Companje

19 years, 3 months

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eBay idiocy

by sellam＠vintagetech.com

M H Stein said: > I suspect that if he really did give eBay a run for its money and > someone offered him a bag full of money (not so ridiculous these days), > he just might say yes. Yeah, you know what? Under the right conditions I probably would, because I just can't see myself still running something like that when I'm your age. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

19 years, 3 months

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Jules Richardson wrote on "Digital Archaeology of the Microcomputer, 1974-1994

by Billy.Pettit＠wdc.com

William Donzelli wrote: OK, Mr. Curmudgeon, what can you tell us kids about the CDC Mass Store System? I got a couple of cartridges in the mail today from a buddy that used to be in the supercomputer business. Nearly everything on the web is about the IBM noodlepicker. -- Will ------------------------ Sorry, but I never worked on it. Saw it in action a few times and was fascinated with the picker arm moving so fast over the honeycomb. I don't believe a lot were sold. I saw one status report that only had 18 of them world wide. There may have been more sold, but I doubt it. The lack of compatibility with legacy tapes was a huge detractor. Pople who needed big tape libraries already had thousands of tapes and didn't want to convert them one by one. I do know that they were great job security. It required a full time field engineer. Don't think I have a manual on it, though I may have some Sales literature. I'll check the controlfreaks twiki and see if any info is there. Billy

19 years, 3 months

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VCM idiocy

by sellam＠vintagetech.com

> Ooh, good one. I'll bet he STILL feels that. Oh jeez, shut up already. > Starting a business is hard work, and success is difficult. Right, but what would you know about this, Donald Trump? > (By the way, while I feel it inappropriate for the list, or any other > civilized or pseudo-civilized discussion, anyone who wishes to see the > e-mail exchange between Sellam and myself should e-mail me off-list, and > I will be happy to send them a copy.) By all means, please do. But why not just post it here for all to see? It doesn't fall below the level of your Tourettes-induced outburst. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

19 years, 3 months

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dovebid is a good source for wire racks/shelving

by legalize＠xmission.com

FYI, There are scads of lots up there right now... dunno what they will sell for, but I'm guessing lots cheaper than the several hundred you would have to pay for these new. If you're not local to the sale location, you'll have to add shipping, but they are light and when disassembled can be shipped rather easily by a company like Craters & Freighters. -- "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/>

19 years, 3 months

1
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Need help Imsai Floppy disk system

by keith＠harrells.net

I now have a working Imsai now need to try to get the 8" Imsai floppy sub system working. I have a number of floppy disk controller but no Imsai FD controller. I have Cromemco 4fdc, Cromemco 64fdcCromemco 16fdc, dual systems FDC and some CCS fdc. I'm not sure of the cable connection from the Imsai disk to the controllers. I had heard the Caldisk pin out is not the same as the Shugart I do have CP/M working on another 64k Imsai using the CCS controller for 8" shugart and a Northstar controller for 5 1/4". Has anyone gotten the old Imsai drive working using CP/M? Thanks.

19 years, 3 months

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Lilith (was Archiving workstation hard drives)

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> Early Liliths use a 10MB Cartridge drive from Honeywell/Bull ( Mididisk > D120) I did not find any info on this drive Are copies of the hardware documentation around anywhere that could be copied/scanned for the system? I've searched the CHM archives, and we don't appear to have anything other than the user's manual (which I've put up on bitsavers) It would be nice to find this, since we have a Lilith.

19 years, 3 months

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Looking for OS/278 to boot up a DECmate I

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

Hello, fellow 12-bitters, I know this has been discussed recently (as in, "how can I boot my DECmate?"), but IIRC, the "easiest" way to get OS/278 to a DECmate I is by copying a boot floppy and putting it in the mail. Can anyone on the list assist me with this? I have NOS blank RX01s, so I can do a diskette swap, or a mail-and-return, or whatever arrangement is required; but at the moment, I have no way to hang an 8" floppy off of modern hardware, so I'm pretty much limited to solutions that are based on 100% DEC and DEC-compatible hardware. All I have for my DECmate I is WPS-8, not all that interesting, frankly. One of my goals, BTW, is to snarfle off images of my PDP-8 RX01 and RX02 disks for preservation and sharing. I have a few boxes of disks from the 1978-1985 timeframe, up to the time I stopped using a PDP-8 on a daily/weekly basis. Thanks for any assistance, -ethan

19 years, 3 months

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Archiving workstation hard drives

by legalize＠xmission.com

OK, suppose you have a workstation and it has stuff installed on its drives. You don't have the original distribution media for the OS and any installed applications and you don't have a spare system with the same stuff installed. What's the best way to make a backup of the entire hard drive so that the essential software doesn't get lost? The drives are SCSI. -- "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/>

19 years, 3 months

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eBay idiocy

by dm561＠torfree.net

Sellam: I'm sorry you took my reply (and others) as a "personal assault" and yes, perhaps I should have prefaced them with a paean to your indeed considerable contributions to the CC community; I did NOT say that you are "only" in it for the money, nor do I see any problem with your generating income that helps defray your costs and/or puts $$s in your pocket. More power to ya! I was just reminding Evan ("The man just wants some reassurance that his time and hard work will be appreciated. What's wrong with that? More people in our hobby should be that devoted!") that money was also a factor: >But first I want to take the time to congratulate the community for the >big fuck you they gave to the VCM. It has always been the intention that >we would start charging at some point for using it, but we never got to >that point. I wasn't offended by your language per se, but by the contempt and lack of consideration it expresses for the members of this list and the fact that you are blaming us for the VCM not becoming a viable revenue generator. I thought I was also offering you what I thought was constructive criticism, that perhaps your time and energy might be better spent in promoting VCM instead of alienating at least some of your potential customers by ranting at us for not beating a path to your door . FWIW, the same thing happened between you and me back when we were talking about some things I was going to send you; your talking to me in the same manner made me decide that I didn't really care to deal with you. But if it works for you to alienate people, good luck to ya. mike cc: Sellam

19 years, 3 months

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Jules Richardson wrote on "Digital Archaeology of the Microcomputer, 1974-1994

by Billy.Pettit＠wdc.com

William Donzelli wrote: Yes, I realize when...no, never mind...I think some of you guys were born with grumpy old man syndrome fully in place. -- Will --------------------------------------------- Can't speak for the others, but I worked hard to earn my right to be a curmudgeon. After 45 years of dealing with all the bullshit in this field, I relish my chance to be cynical and know-it-all. Let the kids be nice - I'm gong to have fun. Billy

19 years, 3 months

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NOS librascope heads for rpc4000

by aek＠bitsavers.org

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1247&item=2500753548… these appear to be for the RPC4000

19 years, 3 months

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Ebay idiocy

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> My two items of low-denomination currency, anyway. Which goes to everyone EXCEPT Sellam, since he DOESN'T READ THE LIST! I sent email to Jay asking that Sellam be banned from posting. I suggest others do as well.

19 years, 3 months

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Unrealistic price?

by cclist＠sydex.com

$148,995 starting bid for a 32GB AS/400 memory. http://auctions.yahoo.com/i:IBM%203017%2032GB%20CHIP:216674201 Cheers, Chuck

19 years, 3 months

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VAX Assembly question

by spc＠conman.org

I'm currently perusing _Computer Programming and Architecture: The VAX-11_ by Levy and Eckhouse and I come across the description of the CALLG and CALLS instructions. They go on to describe the stack frame created by the CALL* instruction: Condition handler (initially 0) <- FP SPA | S | 0 | MASK | PSW | 0 FP + 4 Saved AP etc ... Saved FP Saved PC Saved R0 . . . Saved R11 My question is about the condition handler. In the text, it's described as: A longword condition handler address. Here, the calling routine may store the address of an error-handling routine to be called if an exceptional error condition arises in the procedure. This is the only section (as far as I can tell) where this is described, and I'm curious as to how exactly it worked. It appears that while the CPU may set this location to 0, its purpose isn't really dictated by the hardware, but it a convention used by VMS. But then (as I was typing this), I was struct by this bit: ... the calling routine may store ... Huh? How? The calling routine either does a: argsize: .long 0 arg1: .long 0 arg2: .long 0 arg3: .long 0 arg4: .long 0 movl #4,argsize ; use fixed memory movl filehandle,arg1 ; for the arguments moval somememory,arg2 movl #0,arg3 movl #4096,arg4 callg argsize,dump_memory or pushl #4096 ; use the stack pushl #0 ; for the arguments pushal somememory pushl filehandle calls #4,dump_memory (forgive if my assembly isn't quite right, I'm going from the book rather quickly here). How can the calling code set the condition handler? The CPU creates the stack frame (as diagrammed above), not the calling routine. Am I missing something? -spc (Really curious about this ... )

19 years, 3 months

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Sellam

by compoobah＠valleyimplants.com

Since there have been many people asking about Sellam's posts: In the past he was a very active poster, and he has the collection and documents to be able to give very detailed answers. If I recall correctly, the major reason that he withdrew from the list was because he became a father and had very little spare time. Perhaps when his children require less time he'll come back. This is not to be read as an endorsement of his post, writing style, hairdo, or method of eating asparagus- just as an answer to the Sellam FAQ.

19 years, 3 months

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VCM, was Re: Ebay idiocy

by marvin＠rain.org

> From: "Michael B. Brutman" <mbbrutman-cctalk at brutman.com> > > I like VCM a lot. I've been browsing it for over a year. It's always > fun to speculate on what Marvin is holding onto based on what he has > listed. :-) That is *really* hard to do since I generally list things as I find them ... and there is a lot to find :). > Sadly, I haven't found anything I want to purchase. My particular weak > spot (the PCjr) doesn't show up there. Yet :). > If I were to unload something, VCM is the first place I'm going to go. > I'd rather sell to a group of like-minded individuals first. If it > doesn't sell there after a reasonably long period of time, then I would > consider eBay. One of the things I tried to do was to put enough stuff there that others would also start to list. And I do have another motive as well ... if something doesn't sell on VCM, depending on what it is, I already have the listing done to port it over to Ebay. It is unfortunately a fact of life that stuff will sell better on Ebay. It is also a *very* unfortunate fact of life that I either need to buy this house or move. VCM will not provide enough money to do that, and the reality is that Ebay will. But I still try and list somewhat uncommon items on VCM that are unlikely to generate ebay bids. > As for Sellam, > > I've never met the guy. I've heard a lot. :-) What I like about Sellam and a lot of other people here is that they *DO* rather than just talk. VCF started out as a thought here, but he was the one that took it and ran with it to create VCF. And ditto for Jay when ClassicCmp needed a new site. Jay didn't just say woe is us, but took the ball and ran. And with his hosting other classic computer related websites, all I can say is that I greatly respect the man ... and I've never met him :). And look at Al with what he has done with Bitsavers, and Erik, and Curt, and ... The amount of knowledge available on this listserver and what is being done is truly incredible. I've met quite a few people on this listserver, and at times it is fun to just talk and listen. It would be nice if everyone would just get along and not jump on every annoyance that comes along.

19 years, 3 months

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Scrap equipment and fraud (was Re: Digital archaeology of the microcomputer, 1974-1994)

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

On 1/18/07, Billy Pettit <Billy.Pettit at wdc.com> wrote: > Ethan Dicks wrote: > It's not just manufacturers (who are trying to comply with various > regulations on scrapping equipment and taxes)... When I was at Lucent > in Columbus, they started drilling through the HDAs of discarded > drives, not to protect against data theft from a working drive, but > against employee harvesting of the scrap bins. > > There is another reason for this. Warranty fraud has become a 7 digit > problem for most OEM manufacturers. Get a good stock of scrap products, > take parts off a good product, replace them with the bad parts and send the > good product in for repair.... I did not witness this, but I heard at a DECUS that some time in the late 1980s, DEC had a different kind of scrap problem - they would scrap numerous things at the factory, load them into bins and sell them to gold scrappers. The problem came with a gold scrapper started selling bits and pieces (like MicroVAX CPU and memory boards) to other parties which would end up in the 3rd-party resale stream and end up in customers' hands. The damage was two-fold... 1) reputation, and 2) the IRS discovering that "scrapped" items were being bought and sold. The solution, I heard, was to get a chipper that could reduce boards, racks, etc., into postage-stamp-sized chunks before handing the waste over to the salvage companies. I understand that the first guys to get a bin of metal and PCB chips rather than boards and boxes they could cherry pick, were a bit surprised. OTOH, one of my co-workers from Software Results took a pile of boards >from the scrap bin and drilled and mounted them to make a 1.5m-tall PCB Xmas tree (the solder mask was green). The bean counters were initially upset until the drilled holes were pointed out to them - clearly the boards had been damaged sufficiently that nobody was going to be mistaking them for usable product. -ethan

19 years, 3 months

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Ebay idiocy

by dm561＠torfree.net

>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:09:21 -0500 >From: "Evan Koblentz" <evan at snarc.net> >Subject: RE: Ebay idiocy >Sellam knows he's, shall we say, a "direct" communicator. That's why I like >the dude. :) Anyway, the fact remains that his auction site DOES address >all of the stuff we hate about ebay -- and if it's doesn't in some case, he >will quickly fix it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interesting that you, who took offense when someone used the word "Jew" for its phonetic value without, as far as I can see, in any way casting aspersions on people of that faith, likes what you call "direct" communication, i.e. using the "F" word six times in 13 paragraphs without any consideration of whether that might offend some of the 2000 or so readers of this list, not to mention what it says about this list to someone stumbling across it through the Web. If he'd just reminded us that VCM was there and asked us for more support, fine; I'd probably have clicked on it right away and bookmarked it. As it was, however, I found his message quite offensive, FWIW. I assumed that his comment about the IPO was meant tongue-in-cheek (as he pointed out to me in a similarly "directly" worded, ("F"'ing) off-list reply), but I suspect that if he really did give eBay a run for its money and someone offered him a bag full of money (not so ridiculous these days), he just might say yes. Nevertheless, if he were truly as altruistic as you say, why is he ranting at us so forcefully for, essentially, not generating enough traffic for him to be able to justify charging for his service? I imagine that Jay and the moderators donate far more time gratis running this list than VCM demands of Sellam... Not that I see anything wrong with it, but perhaps it is relevant that he does make money from renting out equipment, sourcing obscure items, etc. I doubt that he will be able to address the stuff we grudgingly like about eBay: the wider selection of available items (and price range) for buyers, and the vastly larger number of potential buyers for the sellers; blaming us for that is pretty silly. Maybe good will isn't worth what it once was, but I don't think ranting at and offending potential customers has quite made it on the list of successful business tactics yet. m

19 years, 3 months

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Burroughs S40?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> Al, would you like it to add to the > library? absolutely! I can forward my adr if you need it.

19 years, 3 months

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Burroughs S40?

by cclist＠sydex.com

I just came across a binder in my library with a (roughly) 200 page document labeled: Burroughs Confidential System Specification 3704 3833 S40 System Software Disk Subsystem Design Specification Release Rev B Burroughs Machines Ltd. Software Engineering Livingston, Scotland Date: 03 OCT 1986 It seems to describe the disk software interface to some system. Is this of interest to anyone? Al, would you like it to add to the library? I believe that I was sent this as part of a conversion program I did for someone. Exactly who escapes me. Cheers, Chuck

19 years, 3 months

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HP2645As.... again

by steerex＠mindspring.com

I may also be interested in one or two. Exactly what is a 2645A? SteveRob ---------- From: Bob Shannon Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 8:51 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: HP2645As.... again I'm game for a terminal or two, if there is a bulk-buy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard" <legalize at xmission.com> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 2:59 PM Subject: HP2645As.... again > Ebay item # 280070687500

19 years, 3 months

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Jules Richardson wrote on "Digital Archaeology of the Microcomputer, 1974-1994

by zmerch-cctalk＠30below.com

Rumor has it that William Donzelli may have mentioned these words: >>Perhaps I just have less faith than you in the technology being available in >>20 years to probe inside modern systems to figure out how they work and keep >>them running :-) > >Do you think that tools will not evolve in 20 years? Short answer: No. ;-) Heck, you can't get schematics, technical information, or anything on most newer hardware now, so one would need to reverse-engineer almost everything; and the tools that do evolve that are necessary to work on even today's stuff (fast oscilloscopes, etc.) are priced out of the hobbyist's pocketbook. Not to mention: Back in the day, there might've been more computer companies with more "different" computers and OSs back then, but at least each computer was "standardized" to a point. All CoCos ran a 6809, all Commies, Apples & 8-bit Ataris ran 6502s (or derivatives ;-)... Now, you get 10 people with PCs with an Asus motherboard, and you'll have 10 different motherboards, with 3 different CPUs, 2 different types of RAM, and gawd-knows-what for peripherals and interfaces. Even tho the OSs and whatnot are standardized, the underlying hardware is completely different >from machine to machine. >Am I the only optimist on this list? Cripes... I like to be an optimist, but I tend to be a *realist* and IMHO, realistically, today's PCs aren't "hobbyist quality..." read: with no available schematics, very little available information, expensive tools necessary for board/component rework, and whatnot, that to me anyway, it would be very hard to consider today's hardware platforms a good basis for a hobby[1]. Now software & whatnot, sure... Anywho, that's just IMHO and all that. Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] And I say this with fairly decent "hobbyish" motherboard - Tyan 2462 Extended ATX Dual-Athlon w/Dual SCSI 160 & Dual Ethernet; takes up to 3.5G RAM (not bad for a 5-year-old board!) w/dual 2600+ AthlonMPs. A pretty rare critter in the home setting, and most servers with it are prolly still in service... 'Tis a workhorse to be sure - it's *still* a very viable machine even by todays standards... but if the sucker ever broke beyond leaky capacitors, I doubt I could repair it. -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch at 30below.com |

19 years, 3 months

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Digital archaeology of the microcomputer, 1974-1994

by Billy.Pettit＠wdc.com

Ethan Dicks wrote: On 1/18/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com <http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctalk>> wrote: > Chalk that up to CDC's not-so-imaginative "asset disposal" policy; > things must be mangled beyond all usability before disposal. I saw > CE's take sledgehammers to disk drives. It's not just manufacturers (who are trying to comply with various regulations on scrapping equipment and taxes)... When I was at Lucent in Columbus, they started drilling through the HDAs of discarded drives, not to protect against data theft from a working drive, but against employee harvesting of the scrap bins. Saw a lot of things there I wish I could have saved, including a 3 cu ft box loaded with PDP-11 core memory, and other DEC items from the 1970s and 1980s. I would have happily have paid many times the gold scrap value of the boards, but, for obvious bean counter reasons, no mechanism exists for that. -ethan ---------------------------------------------------- There is another reason for this. Warranty fraud has become a 7 digit problem for most OEM manufacturers. Get a good stock of scrap products, take parts off a good product, replace them with the bad parts and send the good product in for repair. Whether very little effort, you can amass a huge stock of good parts and sell or assemble them in units for resale. There are even places on the internet where you can get labels made, or do it yourself. The best way to discourage this type of fraud is to physically damage the parts so they can't be reused. At Philips, we specified a hydraulic punch through the PCBA and the Optical Pick Up unit. But by time this was implemented, Philips had lost several million dollars to the fraudsters. So most OEM companies have explicit protocol for scrap destruction. There are just too many people out there trying to make a buck out of it. Billy

19 years, 3 months

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Early Unix micros; AT&T 3B5

by cclist＠sydex.com

This mention of the Lisa, M20, Onyx, etc. running some flavor of Unix around 1982-84 and my memories of the Hated Plexus reminds me of an experience that I had about that time (i.e. right about the time of the Ma Bell breakup). I'd read in one of the trade rags about the AT&T 3B5 and thought it would make a great development machine. To this day, I don't know if my hunch was right or not. I called AT&T computer sales and got the runaround for at least a week. Fortunately, most of the referrals I was given were 800 toll-free ones. I never could find someone who could sell me one. It seems that everyone thought I was talking about the 6300. It was very frustrating--"We have dollars; we like trade them for computer. Don't want 6300; want 3B5. Ugh" Did anyone on this list ever succeed in acquiring one around that time? If so, how was the service and performance? Cheers, Chuck

19 years, 3 months

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Early Unix micros; AT&T 3B5

by ken＠seefried.com

From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> > I'd read in one of the trade rags about the AT&T 3B5 and thought it > would make a great development machine. ... > Did anyone on this list ever succeed in acquiring one around that > time? If so, how was the service and performance? AT&T carpet bombed Georgia Tech with 3B stuff around the time I got there (1985). There were at least 2 3B20s (rebadged control processor for a 5ESS) brutally overloaded with freshmen writing Pascal programs, lots of 3B2 + AT&T 5620s and as I recall at least one 3B5. Compared to the Sun gear I got to use at the time (3/160 & 3/50), they were slooooow, but built to last. Seriously physically over-engineered.

19 years, 3 months

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mouse for ATnT Unix PC

by dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu

Does anyone here have a spare mouse for an AT&T Unix PC lying around? -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

19 years, 3 months

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Compaq Portable III HDD replacement. (Was Re: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter)

by josefcub＠gmail.com

On 1/17/07, 9000 VAX <vax9000 at gmail.com> wrote: > > After one hour of surfing the internet, I finally bought 4 IDE-CF adapters > (laptop and desktop versions, $2 each). One for the laptop, one for the > pentium PC linux router, one for the 386 desktop. > As a pseudo on-topic aside, what do y'all think the chances are of this working in a machine like a Compaq Portable III or Portable/386? I've got one with the old 40MB Connor drive still ticking along, but I'd really like to make sure I can keep the old girl running after it finally spins down for the last time. Would I be stuck with a 32MB CF card, or would the BIOS not work with it at all? (I've currently got my rebadged P/386 running Linux, for various uses including serial and Ethernet telnet terminal). Josef -- "I laugh because I dare not cry. This is a crazy world and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke." -- Hilda "Sharpie" Burroughs, "The Number of the Beast" by Robert A. Heinlein

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS (OT?)

by lbickley＠bickleywest.com

If you're going to write the person at eBay responsible for this new policy, contact Rob Chesnut, Senior Vice President, eBay Global Trust & Safety. Here's his email address: Rob Chesnut <RChesnut at ebay.com> I have already sent an email to him - with this theme: "I hope you understand the gravity of this newly implemented change. It literally changes the entire character of eBay - and makes eBay a much less desirable auction site." Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

19 years, 3 months

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storage solution?

by legalize＠xmission.com

Its climate controlled and probably will end up being "priced to move" <http://www.dovebid.com/assets/display.asp?ItemID=tbd309906> -- "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/>

19 years, 3 months

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dovebid: Compaq 386 painting 29x40"

by legalize＠xmission.com

<http://www.dovebid.com/assets/display.asp?ItemID=tbd310965> -- "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/>

19 years, 3 months

1
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Lisa (was Re: Olivetti M20)

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:31:05 -0500 > From: Ray Arachelian <ray at arachelian.com> > Subject: Lisa (was Re: Olivetti M20) > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Message-ID: <45AE6B69.7020506 at arachelian.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > Roger Holmes wrote: >>> >> Well OK 5k dollars is not much, but in January the following year for >> 10k, Apple's Lisa had several of the above, though I have to admit I >> have seen some spectacular crashes as it was possible to corrupt the >> sound buffers and also to seriously derange the CRT scanning. > Erm, I'm not sure how this is possible as the Lisa had no sound > buffers > at all. All it had was a bunch of resistors hooked up to a latch in > order to act as a volume control for the VIA's shift register. It > beeped in the same way as the Commodore PET. That is by setting > timer2 > on the VIA and setting a value in the SR, then setting the ACR to loop > the data in the SR. There was no sound buffer, there was no way to > play > anything other than beeps. Oh, I must be getting confused then. After developing for Lisa we continued to use the Lisas as hosts to develop software for the Mac using a serial cable to send the software and to run the debugger on the Lisa screen and the target software on the Mac. I think at first we had Lisas with twiggy drives so we could not write Mac discs on the Lisa, but maybe I've got it wrong again. I do know that Apple loaned us a Mac with a 5 1/4 inch slot in it for a twiggy drive, though there was a 3 1/2 inch installed in it. That would probably be worth something now. Back to the crashes, I remember they really made you jump out of your chair, the screen went haywire and the horrible sound it made like hitting bone with a coarse circular saw. Though the Lisa was black and white, the phosphor must have been made of a mixture of two, as you could get a purple effect if you crash made the screen flash at a particular frequency, and on another time it seemed to make one flash of pale green, though maybe thats the 'Pink Elephant' effect. Even with only square wave output you can make more than beeps, my old mainframe built in 1962 can play crude music. Not that Handel and Bach wrote crude music, it was the rendition which was crude. > > Nothing is available to the OS to derange the CRT scanning. All > you can > do is enable interrupts on the vertical retrace, or disable said > interrupts, and you can also select which 32K of memory to use as the > framebuffer. That's it. Yes thats all the system routines allow anyway, I just checked (on Lisa). As both 128k Macs and Lisa had a single built in CRT I can't see why the refresh rates would have been programmable, but thats just how it appeared. The only other option I can think of is we had somehow managed to do something which had affected the power supply rails, but the machines rebooted OK so there was no permanent damage. Could switching the position of the framebuffer between frames full of ones and ones full of zeroes cause this perhaps? I remember you could get the spark gap capacitors to fire on old monitors on the Apple ][ when you rapidly changed the screen image. The screen image would expand and contract while this happened. > > >> The compiler generated some strange code to 'touch' the new top of >> stack on subroutine entry so the OS could allocate all the extra >> space >> in one go rather than in little bits. One enterprising British >> software house even got Unix running on a Lisa with the (then) >> optional 5MB profile hard disk. It wasn't C.A.P. but one of the other >> big ones of the time. > There were two. Microsoft/SCO Xenix, and UniPlus. I'd love to get my > hands on UniPlus, but it seems to be rare. If this was something > else, > it would be wonderful to get a copy of it. Maybe the UK firm was merely selling one of these under licence. > > I'm not sure what the strange code is about, I suspect something to do > with the MMU. If you'd access a page that wasn't mapped to your > process, the OS would either load it from disk, or allocate more MMU > pages to your process, thus getting more memory. The Lisa Pascal compiler had an option for "automatic stack expansion". IIRC, this was off when compiling for Mac and on when compiling for Lisa. Each routine started with something like LINK A6,#constant where the constant was the space for the local variables and maybe the parameters too. If automatic stack expansion was on, the compiler would then generate the weird instruction, which was not useful to the program but would apparently cause the allocation of more stack space if necessary. I have just found the reference in the manual: "6.6.1 The Run-Time Stack Automatic stack expansion code makes procedure entries a little complicated. To ensure that the stack segment is large enough before the procedure is entered, the Compiler emits code to 'touch' the lowest point that will be needed by the pocedure. If we 'touch' an illegal location (outside the current stack bounds), the memory management hardware signal a bus error that causes the 68000 to generate a hardware exception and pass control to an exception handler. ... then allocate enough extra memory to the stack that the original instruction can be reexectuted without problem. To be able to back up, the instruction that causeed the exception must not change the registers, so a TST.W instruction with indirect addressing is used." It then goes on to talk about a compiler fudge factor and what gets generated if more than 32k of extra space is needed on the stack, and what is needed if working in assembly language. Best regards, Roger Holmes.

19 years, 3 months

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cctalk Digest, Vol 41, Issue 52

by dm561＠torfree.net

>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:58:14 -0500 >From: "Evan Koblentz" <evan at snarc.net> >Subject: RE: Ebay idiocy <snip> >The man just wants some reassurance that his time and hard work >will be appreciated. What's wrong with that? More people in >our hobby should be that devoted! >- Evan -------------------- A rather naive perspective, I think. Aside from whatever personal interest he may have in classic computers, he's also in it for the money and apparently wants to generate enough traffic for VCM to generate revenue and potentially sell it for some ridiculous (IPO) amount. As Warren points out, competing with eBay is a rather dubious business proposition anyway, but ranting at and offending his potential customer base with foul language for doing business with his "competition" does not strike me as a very effective way of creating the good will that a successful business venture needs; he should spend his time advertising and promoting VCM instead. mike (cc to Sellam)

19 years, 3 months

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Jules Richardson wrote on "Digital Archaeology of the Microcomputer, 1974-1994

by aek＠bitsavers.org

>> So the question is what should be saved? Is there something about the >> 'exotic hardware/software' that is historically significant? > Well, if you adopt the "only historically significant" things are to > be collected mantra, you never would have had something like the Henry > Ford Museum in Michigan. *All* of the stuff he amassed for that > collection was considered not historically significant at the time. > Now its amazing to be able to walk down an aisle and see the evolution > of the sewing machine, or the dishwasher or the clothes washer/dryer, > etc. > > I think there are some things you can say have obvious historical > value. Others aren't historically significant *by themselves* but > allow you to make a realistic historical portait because they > represent samples of devices over time. This is an argument that people in archives and museums have to confront every day when donations come in. If there was infinite conditioned storage space time/money to process donations, much more would be accepted than happens in the real world. As a curator, I have to make the decision to commit CHM's resources to preserve something in perpetuity. From the time I have spent talking to Doron Swane about the British Science Museum's collecting policies this is not unique. "You cannot save everything, where would you put it?" isn't a joke when you are talking about collections expected to last hundreds of years. One of the most serious responsibilies that I have, along with the activities of physical and electronic artifact preservation at CHM is making the decision to accept an artifact into the collection. Things created in the PC era and forward are especially difficult, since there was so much produced in a fairly narrow product niche (personal computers). Do you need to save EVERY version of a software package (and all of the documentation)? Remember, storage and processing isn't free.

19 years, 3 months

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Old Digital Disk Drives

by thomas.gardner＠sbcglobal.net

Hello: I'm working with the Computer History Museum, Mountain View CA, on a project to identify significant disk drives - the RP01 and RP02 have been so identified. Would anyone on this mail list have any knowledge of any such drives still in existence, operational or not? Tom Gardner Los Altos CA

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS (OT?)

by marvin＠rain.org

> From: Jim Leonard > > William Donzelli wrote: > >> their policies back. Nobody will notice if everybody from this list quit > >> ebay forever. > > Gee, I guess we ought to just give up then. > Yes. > > Why bother voting, too. > That's a terrible comparison. There are less than 1000 people on this > list, "voting" against a company of 90,000+ employees in a Fortune 100 > company. There are more efficient and useful ways to spend your time. Voting is a terrific comparison. For some reason, you think that the only uproar is taking place on this listserver ... you are wrong there. Perhaps you (and others on this list) are not aware that among other things, people have reported that they can find out what the bidders proxy bid is using apparently legitimate software. Shill bidding *is* a concern and Ebay is doing their very best to prevent users from detecting shills. I see nothing to indicate that Ebay is doing anything other than attempting damage control.

19 years, 3 months

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Olivetti M20

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

> >> 1) To prevent one process overwriting the memory belonging to another >> process. >> Segments did not HAVE to be 64k, that was their maximum size, the >> minimum >> was 128 bytes. >> 2) To provide virtual memory. >> 3) To protect the executive from processes. >> 4) To allow non contiguous physical address space to appear as a >> logical contiguous address space >> 5) To provide mapping out of faulty blocks of memory >> and probably as many reasons I have not thought of off the top of my >> head. > > Consider the time this was introduced. It was a $5K personal > computer from 1982 whose base configuration was 2 floppies and no > hard disk. Just about any of the above was probably held to be > superfluous by most manufacturers in that context. Well OK 5k dollars is not much, but in January the following year for 10k, Apple's Lisa had several of the above, though I have to admit I have seen some spectacular crashes as it was possible to corrupt the sound buffers and also to seriously derange the CRT scanning. The compiler generated some strange code to 'touch' the new top of stack on subroutine entry so the OS could allocate all the extra space in one go rather than in little bits. One enterprising British software house even got Unix running on a Lisa with the (then) optional 5MB profile hard disk. It wasn't C.A.P. but one of the other big ones of the time. Before I left Marconi in 1980, we had at least one Z8010, but I don't know what date they became commercially available. Fitting one might well have saved Olivetti money, depending on unit price of course.

19 years, 3 months

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HP2645As.... again

by legalize＠xmission.com

Ebay item # 280070687500 The seller has zero feedback, indicating to me that he stumbled across these terminals and liquidating them gave him the impetus to create an ebay account. Jay, shall we try again at a bulk purchase? He's got 30 of them, and its not clear if they are all 2645As and some of them might be 2648As. The seller says some are used, some are new, although I don't know how you could tell from his picture of the pile :-). Maybe the "new" ones are the ones with the little cover for the switches on the upper left of the keyboard? -- "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/>

19 years, 3 months

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Another super-useful find: single Sun 200-pin 128MB DSIMM

by compoobah＠valleyimplants.com

If you have an Ultra-class 200-pin machine with one broken 128MB DSIMM and you're wondering what to do with the other: 1 free 128MB DSIMM (no, it doesn't work in SPARCstation 20s) Renton, WA

19 years, 3 months

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General Automation Zebra!

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

In a prior life I owned a company that was a Pick dealer (Pick Systems, Microdata, GA, Ultimate, etc.), so all kinds of interesting Pick-related stuff still floats around the house and I rediscover things from time to time. Today one has surfaced that I thought was lost forever. My father sold his business recently and in cleaning out things he found a QIC cartridge tape I had left there for safekeeping as an off-site backup many years ago. It's a GA (General Automation) Zebra Pick OS Dealer Sysgen tape. This is a tape that was only provided to GA dealers (for dealers to replace an end-users lost or damaged boot tapes, or to sell with new systems {the licensing was in the terminal ports, not the OS}). It was an Account-Save format tape of an account called DEALER-SYSGEN. On that account was stored the monitor and ABS sections for every different system GA made. A menu ran when you logged on to the account and it asked you what system you wanted to make an OS load tape for (1700, 1750, 2820, 3820, 3000, 3500, 5500, 7820, 8830, etc.), and what tape media you want the tape created on (QIC or 1/2 mag tape). It then wrote a complete bootable tape with bootstrap, monitor, abs, and files sections for any of those systems. What a find!!! Of course, I haven't tried to read this tape, perhaps it's got some worthless datafile backup from something else on it. But it still has the original GA Zebra lable stating it's the dealer sysgen tape and the write protect is on.... so I'm hopeful. I happen to have a GA1750 and a GA2820 in my collection, so I'm thrilled to know that I can make new boot tapes for them now. More importantly, I can make boot tapes for any other GA Zebra system. Note that this tape is for rev 3.8, which was the last non-R91 Pick GA produced (I wasn't a fan of R91, so I'm really glad it's the pinnacle of the 3.8 train). I need to see if I can find my manual patch sheets that bring it up to 3.8T1. Anyways, if anyone has GA Zebra's in their collection and needs a new boot tape I can help you out. Now I just need to find the DEALER.ASSY account for 3.8 :) Jay West

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS (OT?)

by MGemeny＠pgcps.org

George wrote: I totally do not get your point. Sorry if I was not clear on that. I did my homework on the seller, the seller?s feedback, the types of items the seller deals in, the sellers other open auctions, and so forth, before I placed a bid. It all seemed to be quite consistent. The impression I was left with was that the seller (or an employee) messed up, and eBay or their policies helped to ?Fix it?. Don?t get me wrong here. I don?t have a problem with an auction being canceled if it was listed in error, nor do I have a problem with hijacked accounts being returned to the rightful owner. But I don?t think the latter is what happened here. I think that eBay may be trying too hard to accommodate sellers. (Could it be that the more money that changes hands the more money eBay makes?) Thanks, Mike Gemeny.

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS (OT?)

by MGemeny＠pgcps.org

eBay wrote: "As the internet evolves, eBay continues to strike a balance between preserving transparency and protecting our Community of members. eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information. In certain cases, some bidders will no longer be able to view Bidder User IDs on the Bid History page. Your User ID will be shown only to you and the seller of the item you're bidding on. Other members will see an anonymous name, such as Bidder 1, applied consistently to the Bid History page." Al replied: "So now, you can't see who you're bidding against. Frickin' wonderful." Yea, that would make it a lot easier for a seller to bid against their own buyers, now wouldn't it? Yes, eBay will argue that sellers bidding on their own items is a violation of their "Acceptable use policy", but then again "target bidders with fake offers" would also likely be a violation of the policy and they don't seem to be able to do anything about that, do they? On Jan 11 '07 I had placed a bid as the only bidder on an item with no reserve. eBay later told me that: "We're writing to let you know that eBay has ended the following item you were bidding on because the item appears to have been listed without the account holder's permission: ... We are now working to restore the account to its original owner as soon as possible. For privacy reasons, we can't share any further details regarding this member's account. ... As eBay removed the item, you are not obliged to send payment for it. Please don't send money or respond to any further emails regarding this listing. ..." Now we see who they are really trying to protect, don't we? Mike Gemeny.

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS

by korpela＠ssl.berkeley.edu

On the other hand, I have restrained myself from bidding against people I know unless the item was very rare. I guess I won't be able to do that any more.

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS

by marvin＠rain.org

This latest BS only applies to bidding over $200.00 ... or at least that is what they are saying. Personally, I would still *really* like to see a link on ClassicCmp.org to VCM as I think that might increase the traffic there. If I don't know the bidder on classic computer type stuff, I will generally make them aware of the site. Ebay has a lot of weaknesses, but so far, nobody has been able to successfully exploit them. > From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> > "As the internet evolves, eBay continues to strike a balance between preserving transparency and > protecting our Community of members. eBay has decided to change how bid history information is > displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information. In certain > cases, some bidders will no longer be able to view Bidder User IDs on the Bid History page. Your > User ID will be shown only to you and the seller of the item you're bidding on. Other members will > see an anonymous name, such as Bidder 1, applied consistently to the Bid History page." > > -- > > So now, you can't see who you're bidding against. > Frickin' wonderful.

19 years, 3 months

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Latest eBay BS

by aek＠bitsavers.org

"As the internet evolves, eBay continues to strike a balance between preserving transparency and protecting our Community of members. eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information. In certain cases, some bidders will no longer be able to view Bidder User IDs on the Bid History page. Your User ID will be shown only to you and the seller of the item you're bidding on. Other members will see an anonymous name, such as Bidder 1, applied consistently to the Bid History page." -- So now, you can't see who you're bidding against. Frickin' wonderful.

19 years, 3 months

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Draper article in Wall Street Journal

by marvin＠rain.org

A friend of mine who knew him gave me this URL: http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/Play/history/stories/nuke.html

19 years, 3 months

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Digital archaeology of the microcomputer, 1974-1994

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> What follows is a ten-point plan outlining the primary issues of digital archaeology ... > I love it when someone publishes an article without doing any proper > research. His total lack of knowledge of the subject was obvious by what he thought the 10 primary issues were. He seems ignorant of the serious problem of verifying that a program was copied in its original form (as opposed to have been hacked, or with viruses) or the need for EVERY archival container to have something like an MD5 sum to detect corruption in the future. One of the problems I have as a CHM curator is trying to decide how much of the on line stuff that is out there from the pre-PC time period to snapshot (there's a LOT!). As someone else mentioned, the monoculture and proprietary systems are the real preservation problems, mid 80's or so and beyond. The best I've been able to come up with is to try to save as many SDKs as I can find, which at least gives some level of detail on how they worked.

19 years, 3 months

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General Automation Zebra!

by g-wright＠att.net

-------------- Original message ---------------------- From: "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> > In a prior life I owned a company that was a Pick dealer (Pick Systems, > Microdata, GA, Ultimate, etc.), so all kinds of interesting Pick-related > stuff still floats around the house and I rediscover things from time to > time. Today one has surfaced that I thought was lost forever. My father sold > his business recently and in cleaning out things he found a QIC cartridge > tape I had left there for safekeeping as an off-site backup many years ago. > > It's a GA (General Automation) Zebra Pick OS Dealer Sysgen tape. This is a > tape that was only provided to GA dealers (for dealers to replace an > end-users lost or damaged boot tapes, or to sell with new systems {the > licensing was in the terminal ports, not the OS}). It was an Account-Save > format tape of an account called DEALER-SYSGEN. On that account was stored > the monitor and ABS sections for every different system GA made. A menu ran > when you logged on to the account and it asked you what system you wanted to > make an OS load tape for (1700, 1750, 2820, 3820, 3000, 3500, 5500, 7820, > 8830, etc.), and what tape media you want the tape created on (QIC or 1/2 > mag tape). It then wrote a complete bootable tape with bootstrap, monitor, > abs, and files sections for any of those systems. What a find!!! Of course, > I haven't tried to read this tape, perhaps it's got some worthless datafile > backup from something else on it. But it still has the original GA Zebra > lable stating it's the dealer sysgen tape and the write protect is on.... so > I'm hopeful. > > I happen to have a GA1750 and a GA2820 in my collection, so I'm thrilled to > know that I can make new boot tapes for them now. More importantly, I can > make boot tapes for any other GA Zebra system. Note that this tape is for > rev 3.8, which was the last non-R91 Pick GA produced (I wasn't a fan of R91, > so I'm really glad it's the pinnacle of the 3.8 train). I need to see if I > can find my manual patch sheets that bring it up to 3.8T1. > > Anyways, if anyone has GA Zebra's in their collection and needs a new boot > tape I can help you out. Now I just need to find the DEALER.ASSY account for > 3.8 :) > > Jay West > > > > Hi Jay My Zebra says 2510 on the botton sticker if I remember correctly has a 8" drive and a Qic Tape. Still Boots pick OS. I have the same tape you have but did not know how to to use it. My machine model did not show up on the label of the tape either. Jerry Jerry Wright JLC inc. g-wright at att.net

19 years, 3 months

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PDP8 Diags on RX01

by useddec＠gmail.com

> Does anyone have PDP8 diags on a RX01available? Thanks, Paul Anderson 217-586-5361

19 years, 3 months

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Draper article in Wall Street Journal

by evan＠snarc.net

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116863379291775523-_EQCu93LyjSommsN6J 7qiCozuu8_20070122.html?mod=blogs TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/y8vquk I met the article's author at VCF 9. That is the Apple event he refers to in paragraph #8.

19 years, 3 months

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test-drb January 2007