Hey all
I've been in and out of the classic computer collecting 'circles' over the
past decade and a half, but these days don't have much time to play with the
old toys. I thought I'd divest myself of some of the items that I've been
collecting and though I wasn't sure if it were appropriate to advertise 'for
sale' on the list, it's probably OK to let people know that I have these
items and that I'll be happy to provide pictures and/or information for
historical reasons. If you are interested in trade/sale discussion please
contact me privately (andrew - at - taswegian.com). General questions about
functionality/history can go to the list.
I have a DataNumerics DL-8A. This is possibly the only one still alive,
certainly the only one I've heard of in a decade+ in collectors' hands.
It's a front-panel machine very much like an early Altair - lots of blinking
lights. Very nice visuals, and appears to work perfectly - I fire it up
every year or so. Inside it's an 8080, I think - haven't had it open for a
while. Totally wirewrapped, quite neatly made. and with a low serial number
in the 20s, from memory. I'll be happy to do images and/or provide
additional information as requested.
I also have a Dulmont Magnum with original manual. This is one of the very
first laptops, comes with a fold-up 4-line LCD display. I haven't had this
one working, nor have I tried. I'd be guessing to say it was functional,
but there are no obvious issues like battery damage, etc. Weighs a ton, but
for its day it was no doubt a portable marvel.
I do have an extensive collection of early Soviet calculators and handheld
computers. I collected most of these in the mid to late '90s when building
my site Museum of Soviet Calculators -
http://www.taswegian.com/MOSCOW/soviet.html . The collection includes a
prototype or two, including one of the only two known MK-98 machines. The
collection as a whole (100 machines?), but not individually is available for
trade/sale.
Finally, I have a very interesting homebrew machine built by a fairly well
known Australian electrical wizard of the '70s and '80s, who published many
articles in the aussie electronics magazines. This particular machine was a
Signetics 2650 machine, but configured to run 8080 code (and hence, CP/M)
through a software emulator. The whole machine, including the video card,
was designed and built by the one guy and can be considered historical and
one-of-a-kind.
That's about it, really. If anyone would like pictures and/or further
information on these just ask.
Cheers
A
I'm away from home right now so I can't check, but the "5K BASIC" was really about 6.5K. I imagine 5K was what their target was and what the advertised and presold it as while it was still under development. Even though it ballooned to 6.5K by the time they were done, they kept calling it 5K BASIC.
Extended cassette BASIC was close to 16KB. Besides adding string support, it also has the "MAT" statement set and a bunch of other features. Nevertheless, it seemed pretty big for its feature set.
So, I'd agree with Al, this is probably 5K BASIC.
----- Original Message ----
From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
To: classiccmp at classiccmp.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 9:46:24 PM
Subject: beware: "Microsoft BASIC" paper tape on eBay
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230107368051
You can read the first dozen bytes in the picture, which
are 7 bit ASCII, starting with 1010000 1010010 1001111
"PROCESSOR TECHNOLOGY BASIC"
most likely 4K Proc Tech BASIC, given the tape length..
Jim B. could probably confirm that.
>
>Subject: Re: single transistor projects?
> From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:28:29 -0700
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>Tony Duell wrote:
>
>>
>> These days, you can get 9V (PP3, 006P, 6F22, whatever you call them)
>> batteries very cheaply in the 'Everything's a pound' shops (I assume you
>> have similar shops that sell all sorts of things for a dollar a time). 5
>> to 10 of those in series will work as B battery, of couse.
>
>Well you can still buy a B battery here on this side of the pond.
>http://www.tubesandmore.com/
Its way OT but I run a RCA tube portable off 10 9V and 4 "C" cells
and it's very satisfactory. I took the old battery skin (cardboard label)
and made a wood box inside of it to hold the batteries so it even looks
like the real thing. Besides being the best AM broadcast radio I have
it's an attention getter. Runs for about 20 hours on alkaline C cells
and the 10 9V batteries usually outlast 3 to 4 sets of C cells.
>> Personally, I'd use a mains supply. a 30V transformer (15-0-15, ignoring
>> the centre tape or a pair of 15V windings in series) feeding a voltage
>> doubler rectifier (2 diodes, 2 capacitors) will give about 85V, ideal for
>> most 'battery' valve circuits.
>
>They also sell a power pack kit too for small radios.
>I suspect if you dig around over there you can scounge up
>a better power supply, for the simple reason parts are whole
>lot cheaper now than in one's youth.
I have a PS I did using power mosfets and a tapewound toroid
I wound up. Full wave bridge and filter. Also it's adjustable
and regulated from 80 to 200V which makes it ideal for small
tube projects (power limit is ~40W).
Allison
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:12:40 -0700
> From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
> Subject: Re: single transistor projects?
>
> William Blair wrote:
>
> > Is this it?:
> TINY URL:
>
> > 125 One-Transistor Projects (1970)
> > http://tinyurl.com/2fzqhm
>
> BIG URL:
> http://www.somerset.net/arm/fm_only_one_transistor_radio.html
> http://www.somerset.net/arm/fm_only_lowtech.html
Wasn't the original poster asking about a book on one-transistor projects that he used back in the
late 60s? I don't get the TINY URL, BIG URL humor (if any was intended).
Wm Blair
____________________________________________________________________________________
Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast
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http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather
Still cleaning out... up for relocation: 1 IBM PS/2 Model 25, completely functional.
Boots to DOS, has WordPerfect 5.1, 640K ram, 20Meg hard drive. What a head trip
waiting for it to boot and then listening to the HD access, retro..
Dan @ Butler, PA
On 3/20/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> You might want to keep your eye out for a 3rd
> party disk controller with the bootstrap built in.
That's a good point. I have more than one Emulex QD21, a Dilog DQ696,
and a Sigma RDQ11, which are all Q-bus ESDI controllers and they all
have firmware with boot and built-in formatting support. They were
much cheaper on eBay than Q-bus SCSI controllers, although SCSI drives
are basically free and you'll pay something for an ESDI drive, but not
as much as for a large working MFM drive.
Another plus of a SCSI controller is that you might be able to use it
to boot a SCSI CD-ROM. I have that working with a Dilog SQ706A SCSI
controller and a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM in my 11/73.
But if you do have a working RQDX3 and working RD drives it's probably
still cheaper to get a board you can put a boot ROM on. That's an
exercise I haven't gone through myself, yet.
-Glen
Another machine for whoever wants it. It's an IBM PS/2 Model 30,
complete with DOS and 20Meg hard drive. I powered up the machine
and was greeted with a classic DOS menu showing games and WordPerfect 5.1
available to use. This machine is in excellent condition, been stored inside.
Dan @ Butler, PA 16001
On the subject of Blinken lights and toggle switches, I have had
difficulties finding decent mechanical keyswitches to use for projects.
Essentially, I need to make a hex keypad, with a couple of extra
function keys. I know that now we would simply get a membrane rubber
thing made up, but once upon a time, I would purchase 20 mechanical
switches, and solder them to veroboard.
Sadly, I can't find a source of these switches any more.....
Same applies to ACSII keyboards - I am fully aware that I could get a PC
keyboard and a microcontroller and have ASCI out - but that is 'yet
another pc keyboard'
Any ideas?
Doug
> From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
>
> On 21 Mar 2007 at 12:12, Roger Holmes wrote:
>
>> I used Fortran 4 on the IBM 7094 at Imperial College London. I
>> remember one day the compiler reported:
>
> I used FORTRAN II under FMS II on the 7090 but never saw a FORTRAN IV
> implementation there. It's been entirely too long ago, but, as I
> recall, one punched a "B" in column 1 for boolean expressions, "D"
> for double-precision and "I" for complex, as FORTRAN II still relied
> on implicit typing for variables.
>
> One of the most diagnostic-bald versions of FORTRAN I ever used was
> the "USA BASIC FORTRAN" under DOS/360. The thing couldn't have had
> more than about 10 diagnostic messages, most of them single-word.
One of my bosses at Marconi Avionics thought that compilers should
only have one error message because as a compiler cannot find all
errors (such as a mistyped number), you should not rely on it to find
errors in your programs. You should only ever submit 100% correct
code to the compiler. I think he worked on the Jaguar aircraft's
flight program, so there is some justification in that field where a
software error could cause a fast jet to take out a street or two of
a city.
>> I was used to syntax error messages by the dozen but this was the
>> first time I had seen the compiler correct an error and run the
>> job. Of
>> course we are used to warnings now, but I think it was that one
>> which
>> got me interested enough in compilers to eventually get a job
>> writing
>> them.
>
> Pat could probably fill in details here, but Purdue for many years
> used 7090/94's to run a student variant of FORTRAN called PUFFT. The
> basic idea was for the compiler to 'fix" as many errors as possible
> so that a program would run somehow. I believe it was described by
> Saul Rosen in an ACM paper and republished in one of those
> "Programming Languages Survey" books. IIRC, the 709x were also used
> as I/O front ends for the CDC 6600 there, which ran Purdue's own
> variant of MACE, rather than the more-or-less standard SCOPE. Greg
> Mansfield was pretty proud of that.
It was indeed PUFFT that I used, around 1969 when I was a schoolboy.
>> If you stuck to floating point and small numbers but there were big
>> problems with word length variations when using integers.
>
> IIRC, the 32-bit floating point word (with 4-bit normalization
> granularity) of S/360 cost IBM a bunch of business in the
> "scientific" world. It had one of the lowest-precision FP
> representation of big iron at the time. I believe that IBM
> eventually remedied this with "extended precision".
Interesting. I guess that's why, after the 7094, the University of
London used no(?) IBMs, just CDC and ICL machines until minis came
along.
>> I seem to remember that some of the people who taught me to program
>> considered Fortran to be too close to the 7094 instruction set, in
>> particular they said the computed goto mapped directly onto a 7094
>> instruction and
>> hence considered it to be not very universal, and to support it
>> would be to
>> assist IBM in its domination of the computer market.
>
> That must have been some clever propganda on the part of someone!
> But conspiracy theories have always been popular. Computed GOTOs
> weren't exactly the dominant feature of most programs--and they were
> implemented as simple indexed jumps for the most part--a feature
> scarcely unique to IBM hardware!
>
> For small systems, FORTRAN was amazingly useful. The other day, I
> ran across some code that I wrote for CP/M to convert between ISIS-II
> and CP/M file formats--in FORTRAN.
>
> Compiler design has come a long way since. In the 1970's, I recall
> that a co-worker pushed a PTR in front of my face that was, frankly,
> quite surprising. CDC FTN for years allowed an alternative way of
> expressing Hollerith constants using any arbitrary delimiter
> character, so 5HCHUCK and H*CHUCK* were equivalent ways of expressing
> the same constant. Most people used asterisks or the not-equal
> symbol (the standard character set didn't have quotation marks), but
> the compiler would allow just about anything.
>
> The statement in question looked something like this:
>
> 100 FORMAT( HX)=(1+BX )
>
> Recall, that prior to FORTRAN 90, FORTRAN had no reserved words.
Yes that does look weird at first sight.
Probably later version of Fortran were better, but version 4 was just
so restrictive, after using Algol's For..Step..Until..Do.. with
expressions, I could not really go back to Fortran IV's for
statements with single, simple unsigned integer constants for the
start, end and step values.
Roger.
