Hi Folks,
As many of you know, the venerable Mike Quinn Electronics in San
Leandro, CA (down by the Oakland Airport) closed last Saturday with
virtually no advance notice. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area,
you know Mike Quinn is the one of the very last of the nitty gritty
electronics salvage shops left, with an emphasis on gritty.
I stopped by today, and mentioned to Maurice, the owner, that a lot
of people would have liked to have had one last shot at a visit. So,
he has extented an invitation to y'all to visit next week, Tuesday
through Friday February 7-10, 2006, during normal business hours, for
one last shopping spree. He is trying to find a buyer for the stock
in the store. This is almost certainly the last chance to visit. If
you can, it's worth doing whatever you have to do to make the
pilgrimage. Buy some stuff to thank Maurice for keeping it going all
this time.
There are zillions of connectors and components, heaps of
transformers and power supplies, scads of cables and keyboards and
monitors and other PC junk, a jet fighter console or two, a couple of
early 80's HP desktop computers (the ones with built-in BASIC, can't
recall the model numbers), lots of relays, and much more, all
arranged in an archaeologically interesting and un-seismically-safe
way. If you need it, they have it, and they might even be able to
find it.
Mike Quinn Electronics
401 McCormick Street (at the corner of Adams and McCormick)
San Leandro, CA 94577
Brian
-----------------Original Message:
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:48:55 +1000
From: Doug Jackson <doug at stillhq.com>
Subject: Re: 2708 EPROM progreammer - old magazines designs
John S wrote:
> > As 2708s are obsolete few moern programmers support them, apart from a few
> > that cost many $100s. So I thought why not try and build one? I've found
> > references to the following classic magazines, and I would be willing to pay
> > a small fee for photocopies or scans of the articles:
> >
> > Program your next EROM in BASIC. Schematic for a 2708 erasable read only
> > memory reader and programmer which uses parallel IO ports to set data and
> > address. The software to drive the programmer is written in BASIC.
> > Byte - March 1978 page 84 on (main article)
> > Byte - April 1978 page 62 (Byte Bugs)
>
I have a programmer designed by Steve Ciarcia from BYTE - It uses an
8051AH-Basic (The 8051 with basic embedded) as the controller - and
still works a treat - to this day. - Standalone board, interface via
serial. It was fun to see peoples faces when you shipped a ^C down the
serial line, and dropped through to a READY prompt.
I can find the doco for yo, but it is a high end solution to a simple
problem.
Alternately, I'm more than happy to read an eprom for you, and email
contents - I'm in Oz though. Perhaps there is somebody in the US who
could do the same.
Doug
-----------------Reply:
I have one of those as well; alas, it does NOT do 2708's.
To the OP:
I can scan the KB article for you, but the 2708 programmer is
intended to work with a Motorola MEK6800-D2, and consists of
nothing more than 3 transistors to switch the 27V (and a couple
of switches and a socket for the EPROM). It's all done in software.
mike
Does anyone have docs for this beastie? it's an apple-II on a card that
goes into an XT... or does anyone have any interest in it? it's been
sitting on my shelf for ~ 12 years now...
There's what appears to be a very nice Olivetti Programma 101 up on
eBay, with a little over a day to go and no bids. It's in the Netherlands.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8801280590&sspagename=AD…
The Programma 101 was a very advanced programmable calculator,
introduced in 1965. Discrete transistors, delay-line memory, magnetic
card I/O.
I've exchanged a little bit of email with the seller. He says its been
in storage for a long time, and a couple of rubber belts inside have
turned gooey, but looks to be complete and in otherwise good shape.
If you want a little bit of discrete-transistor goodness, I doubt you
can find it in any smaller package than this (Ok, so a 9100A/B has both
discrete transistors *and* core memory, but the Programma 101 was
earlier.) I don't have any relation to the seller, I just decided that
I wasn't going to bid on this, so I'd make sure the list saw the listing
-- this is a very desirable machine and I figure someone, maybe one of
the UK folks, would go for it.
--Bill
> ----------
> From: John R. Keys Jr.
> Reply To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org
> Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 2:54 PM
> To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re-finding more items as I open boxes
>
> Found the following while unpacking in the warehouse:
<<<<<clipped>>>>>>
> Took some other goodies home to play with like the 20th Annv. MAC,...
>
---
20th Anniversary Mac? You booger... I may have to grab it when
you're not looking.
;-)
--- David A Woyciesjes
--- C & IS Support Specialist
--- Yale University Press
--- mailto:david.woyciesjes@yale.edu
--- (203) 432-0953
--- ICQ # - 90581
Mac OS X 10.1.2 - Darwin Kernel Version 5.2: Fri Dec 7 21:39:35 PST 2001
Running since 01/22/2002 without a crash
This is my attempt at an "art" x-ray.
This image includes the entire range of densities. If I were to penetrate
the motor I would blow through the plastic.
This is a high resolution x-ray. Zoom into the front label and see if you
can read the embossed name plates... What COLOR is this actual drive? The
answer is in there! ; )
http://www.stockly.com/images2/061231-Disk_II_Drive-120kv6ma15msDG35SFD.jpg
This shot was taken with the drive elevated at an angle by foam so that you
would get a 3d feeling and not a flat picture.
Let me know if its cool. I may x-ray an entire computer next... : )
Grant
> Has anyone else noticed that ftp search services like archie seem to
> have disappeared
The web as subsumed all of this, in an inferior fashion, IMHO.
You will notice that bitsavers looks exactly the same as it did as
an anonymous ftp site on its previous host.
> Should we be working to archive large FTP software repositories?
Absolutely! And try to find old backups that you have.
Make sure to use something that can preserve file dates of the files.
The old recursive ftp programs didn't do this.
Well, the Univac III is back: UNIVAC III Computer (In Storage since 1975),
eBay auction Item # 2733726990. This time the starting price is $7,500 and the
buy-it-now is $11,000.
The URL is:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2733726990&category=1247
OK, somebody, jump right on it! :-)
(Not me, I'm into LITTLE computers like PDP-11's and VAXen, with an occasional
side dish of 6502 or 8085)
Stuart Johnson
Built a number of wireless data apps in the 80s and 90s.
Interested in finding cards, code, APs and anything related from mfgs
like Moto, Windwave, WiLAN, NCR, Proxim, Telxon etc.
Any responses appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve
This email is short on questions; just a vintage computer putzing
report. I do have one question of opinion at the end.
I've had a northstar horizon 8/16 system for a year and a half now, but
I was able to finally get everything together and a bit of time to get
it running.
The 8/16 is a normal horizon (in the aluminum cabinet, not wooden), with
a beefier power supply. There may be some other mechanical differences,
such as many more punchouts in the back. The purpose of the system is
to host multiple CPUs running in a S-100 backplane, each with its own
local memory, using the Z80 down on the motherboard to act as a server
for the shared resources. As the 8/16 name implies, you can have 8b
(z80) or 16b (8086) CPUs, or a mix of them. Mine has two Z80 cards,
each with 64KB DRAM, in addition to the Z80 on the motherboard and 64KB
DRAM that is uses on the S-100 BUS.
The box has a single 5.25" floppy and a 30 MB Rodime hard drive (ST506
type interface). The way things are set up in the horizon, you can't
boot directly off the hard drive; the usual procedure is to boot the
floppy, and the floppy contains a bootstrap to load the OS from the hard
disk.
I first booted into HDOS from floppy, the hard disk version of NSDOS.
It has both non-destructive and destructive disk tests. "LI" shows that
there is no meaningful HDOS file system on the drive.
Next, I ran only the non-destructive test since one goal is to see what
is on the hard disk. HDOS, like NSDOS, has a command for reading
arbitrary absolute sectors from the floppy, but it isn't supported on
the hard drive -- instead you can load sectors relative to a named file,
which doesn't help me here.
Next I booted turbodos from floppy. "DIR" shows no meaningful file
system on either of the two partitions on the drive.
Finally, I'm at an impasse. I assume that this system had *something*
on the drive, although I suppose a previous owner did a FORMAT on the
drive before passing the system on. It would be easiest for me to just
format the drive and install either HDOS, or more likely, TurboDos and
get on with it. If I had more time I'd look into finding a mechanism to
read the hard drive sector by sector and make a copy, but the reality is
I have more projects than I have time for, so this seems unlikely.
Does anybody who has read this far have an idea what to do next? Format
and reinstall? Write my own driver to dump the disk first? Find an old
PC with a controller card that could interface to the drive?
