-------------- Original message from "Glen Slick" <glen.slick at gmail.com>: --------------
> On 3/23/07, Richard Lynch wrote:
> >
> > I ran into this file a few years back and wasn't able to do much with it. I
> > later created my own Altos floppy images using both Teledisk and Imagedisk.
> > I'll send them to you offlist for you to try out.
> > Richard Lynch
> >
>
> I have an ACS8000-7 dual floppy and an ASC8000-10 floppy / hard drive.
>
> On both of them I get the monitor prompt to insert a floppy for
> autoboot (the -10 fails the hard drive boot first). I tried creating
> floppies from ACSBTMD1.IMD and DIAG26K.IMD and I don't get any
> indication that anything is happening on either system with either
> floppy. No additional output on the terminal and it doesn't appear
> that the floppy is seeking at all.
>
> I don't know for certain that the floppy drives are actually working
> on either system other than the motors running. I got them as-is a
> couple of years ago with no boot floppies and no way to create boot
> floppies at the time.
>
> I suppose I could pull the drives and attach them to the PC I used to
> write the floppies and see if I can read the floppies back ok. That
> sounds too much work like work instead of fun for this evening.
>
> -Glen
Glen
I have both of theses and you should hear the drives load and unload
the heads. . One of the problems I have is the head (nut and screw)
assembly stick and the head never gets back to track 0. I have also
had to replace the floppy disk controller chip in my 8000/2 in the past
These use different boot disks. I have both if you need another sorce.
No too sure what is in the ZIP file.
- Jerry
To all who replied, good point, when offering a machine, state the processor manufacturer,
number and speed. I'll eventually develope a system...
Model 30 is an Intel (AMD) 80286 at 10Mhz
Model 25 is an Intel (NEC) 8086 at 8MHz
Dan @ Butler, PA
are the byte magazines available online anywhere, including
scans of advertisements? I am interested in some ACP
ads, but don't know when they were placed. anyone with
a collection I would appreciate finding the full page rear
cover inside or outside ads, and getting a high res scan.
thanks
Jim
>>> 100 FORMAT( HX)=(1+BX )
>>>
>>> Recall, that prior to FORTRAN 90, FORTRAN had no reserved words.
>>
>> Yes that does look weird at first sight.
>
> The bigger problem is that it's absolutely ambiguous in the light of
> CDC FTN syntax. It can legitimately mean either a FORMAT statement
> with the Hollerith constant ")=)1+B" or an assignment to the HX-th
> element of an array called FORMAT of the value obtained by evaluating
> 1+BX. The PTR ended up on the "deferred" list for quite a long time
> as no one could think of an adequately airtight fix. Lots of work-
> arounds were proposed, such as "well, if the statement number is
> referenced in an I/O statement, then it's a FORMAT" or "if there's an
> array called FORMAT, then it's an assignment". Unfortunately,
> FORTRAN doesn't demand that FORMAT statements be referenced by an I/O
> statement--"orphans" are perfectly legal. It was a real puzzle.
Thanks for that, I had completely missed what you were saying, though
I still don't know what a PTR is, except for a Paper Tape Reader or
an abbreviation for PoinTeR. A bug report?
If a FORMAT statement is not referenced by a READ or WRITE statement,
does it matter if it is compiled incorrectly?
Anyway, if they wanted an assign 1+BX, why put it in parentheses?
Still an interesting example though.
> Smart*ss customers!
>
> The usual way for FORTRAN compilers to work back then was to look at
> the first word of a statement and attempt to parse it accordingly.
> If that failed, then the statement was deemed to be an expression and
> re-parsed.
I presume that's why some Basics needed LET before an assignment.
> This is only one case where a vendor's language extension got it into
> trouble. Early on, most language standard specifications called out
> the minimum subset of the language that had to be implemented and
> remained silent on vendor extensions. Hence, you got scads of
> differing dialects all claiming to be "FORTRAN IV". To my knowledge,
> this persists in BASIC more than in any other language, ANSI X3.113
> nothwithstanding.
Human languages are far worse of course.
Roger.
> From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
>
>> Later on we moved the compiler onto a GEC 4080 to cross compile
>> for the
>> 920. The 920 program grew and I had to modify the compiler so it
>> could
>> produce the binary output in chunks as it exceeded a 1000 foot
>> roll of
>> tape, and anyway I was the only person in the office capable of
>> rolling
>> up a full 1000 foot roll without damaging it.
>
> I am guessing you get 8 characters per inch of tape.
> That is a 93.75 K of data per tape.
Ten characters per inch, so 120KB. Useful content though was one 18
bit word per three characters, so 40K words. The 920ATC had 128K
words of program/data storage plus another 128K for data only. So if
every instruction was used, that's 3 full reels of tape and possibly
more if there were any pre-loaded tables in the data only section.
The reason it was difficult to wind up was our paper tape winders
only had a 6 of 7 inch back plate, so beyond that I had to use two
fingers to guide both sides of the tape, and got hard skin on both
fingers. It became such a problem the company bought Penny & Giles
1/4 inch cassette tape machines. They worked fine for a while then
the baud rate started drifting as it was derived from an RC network!
Eventually our engineers modified them to use a proper oscillator
circuit.
In the mean time I had hooked up a direct serial link between the
4080 and the 920ATC running at 9600 baud. My first comms program
(well, sort of).
Roger.
On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:20:51 -0700, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> On 22 Mar 2007 at 14:59, Steve Wilson wrote:
>
> > >4900796 (Somebody will understand this reference)
> >
> > Someone is trying to boot Fortran off of the Disk on an IBM 1620 me
thinks...
>
> Isn't 00796 where all-well-behaved programs went to die? I.e. reload
> Monitor (sort of a CALL EXIT)?
>
> --Chuck
We have a winner.
Just to add to the trivia, to boot the disk you needed a few more characters:
3400032007013600032007024902402111963611300102
Which if you were on a model 2, you needed to make sure that indirect
addressing was turned on (nothing worked right if you didn't!).
After doing that a few times, you remembered it pretty well.
OB Fortran reference:
There were several "load & go" Fortrans available for the 1620. The one I
liked the best was Witran. It fit into a 20k machine, but was interpreted.
Still not too bad for a Fortran. The best was the Monitor II Fortran II. It
generated automatic floating point instructions, and used index registers (only
for the compiler I think). Pretty speedy. The hardware floating point on a
1620-II was faster than the software on the (next generation) IBM 1130 (I used
that too). The 1620's bonus was that standard precision (in floating point)
was 8 significant digits. If you really felt ambitious, you could go MUCH
higher (28 digits with Fortran-II). Few machines today can match that in hardware!
--
Tom Watson
tsw at johana.com
____________________________________________________________________________________
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* Al Kossow wrote:
> I wonder which machine would take the prize for the
> most done with so little?
In the 60's, probably the LINC
1 or 2k 12 bit words, LINCtape, typewriter, CRT, and Lab I/O
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/ijs/epl/LINC.html
Billy:
It touched me as a little ironic that the photo attached said:
JPEG image, 20k
Linc could so much with 1 or 2K, and today we need 20K just for a simple
photo of it.
Billy
From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
>Jules Richardson wrote:
>> > I wonder which machine would take the prize for the
>> > most done with so little?
>
>I would have guessed something with plugboards for programming.
>Possibly drum-memory.
>
Bletchley Bomb and/or Colossus? Certainly the results to resources ratio
was pretty amazingly high.
It seems all of my removable media devices are broken (TK50 and
RX50). That leaves me wondering if I can boot a MicroVAX II or a
KDJ11-A off of a CD-ROM. I have a SCSI controller that should work
with either machine and I have a SCSI CD-ROM drive. Can either of
these machines boot from a SCSI CD-ROM?
Thanks,
David
