>
>Subject: RE: cctech Digest, Vol 44, Issue 47
> From: "Barry Watzman" <Watzman at neo.rr.com>
> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:22:44 -0400
> To: <cctech at classiccmp.org>
>
>
>> On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, woodelf wrote:
>>
>> On that subject, what operating systems did the H-11 support? I have
>> one sitting in my collection, complete with paper-tape reader and 8"
>> disk drives. Never had the space to set it up until recently.
>>
>>Steve
>>
>The only Heath disk operating system offered by Heath for the H-11 was
>HT-11, which was a very slightly modified (dumbed down) version of DEC's
>RT-11. The only disk system offered by Heath was the H-27, dual 8" [Memorex
>SSSD] drives. Many customers wanted to buy genuine DEC RT-11, which would
>run on the H-11/H-27, but it was about $2,500 (and the differences from
>HT-11 to RT-11 were very, very few). HT-11 was "cheap", but it would only
>run on the H-27, it would not work on a non-Heathkit DEC floppy disk system.
>The H-27 had two modes, "Heath" and "DEC", to prevent HT-11 from being used
>on non-Heath H-11's.
A friend had one. HT11 was basically RT-11 V2 with V3.* was current.
I have a card cage, lsi-11, memory and serial and parallel IO card set
for an H11. Those were retirees when he went to a 11/23.
HT11 would run on a RX02 though they didn't supply the DX driver (one from
V2.5 worked fine!).
Also the H27 disk system worked fine in any Qbus system when in rx01
emulation mode (using DX driver).
>I don't recall if there was paper tape software for the H-11 or not (I think
>that there was), but even if there was, no one used it very much. The Heath
The paper tape software supplied was IOX or IO executive. It was a package of
routines you could build a closed system around or maybe your own OS.
>paper tape reader, the H-10, was a mechanically unreliable nightmare (mostly
>the punch, the reader worked ok), but they are worth a lot of money today,
>I've seen them go on E-Bay for over $600.
The punch had a lot of problems and the reader had a cog that would go
out of round.
>HT-11/RT-11 was no prize; it was a low level contiguous file operating
>system, less sophisticated even than CP/M, although it may have had some
>better utilities (and, for those to whom it mattered, it was of course "more
>DEC-like").
Rt-11 is still the same filesystem. However it's a useful realtime OS and
has a very small footprint.
>The H-27 was just two standard 8" drives in a case with a Z-80 based
>intelligent controller (WD1771 disk controller chip) that talked to the H-11
>using what we would now call a "host adapter" over a proprietary
>bi-directional parallel port. The interface and command set wasn't any of
>the standards for this type of configuration (e.g. it wasn't SASI or SCSI),
>but it used that type of architecture. For a number of years I used an H-27
>on an S-100 system with a Tarbell controller by simply disconnecting the
>internal intelligent controller and running a 50-pin cable direct to the two
>Memorex drives. They were Shugart SA-801 compatible, so it was an easy
>configuration to use, the H-27 then being just two drives, a power supply
>and a cabinet.
The drives were notorious for broken media hub clamps.
Also the H11 power supply tended to go poof easily.
However for the price it was a huge leap up in performance over the general
market S100 or SS50 machines of the day.
Allison
>
>Subject: IDE Qbus controller (was TU-58s)
> From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to>
> Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:19:15 -0400
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
> >Allison wrote:
>
>>I have a few contollers (dual width) that are Both MFM and
>>SCSI that sound like those.
>>
>>I keep putting it on my list of projects to do a simple IDE
>>for QBUS. the design goals would be dual width, boot rom on
>>board and uses a 2.5" drive on the card. So far I've only
>>seen one Qbus IDE and it was lacking for software. Software
>>driver for that hardware is for RT11 alone is a bit of a
>>project as I'd need both the FB and SJ versions of the
>>driver.
>>
>Jerome Fine replies:
>
>Device drivers for RT-11 are identical for FB and SJ
>(or SB) monitors. The XM (RT11XZ monitors use the same
>device drivers as XM) device drives are a bit different.
I know that. That was just a typo.
>If you feel that MSCP emulation (probably OK now that
>the patent has expired) is too much trouble, then
>perhaps the HD(X).SYS protocol from E11 would be
>easier. I suspect that the protocol is so basic,
>the concept might be included within other interface
>such as for RK05 or even a floppy.
Devices that arent MSCP like DD(tu58), DK(RX02), DY(RX02),
DL(RL02) might make for examples. I'm fortunate to have
the uncut sources on RL02. Unfortunately I'm not an
experienced PDP-11 programmer. The upside is I have the
RT-11 docset.
>Whatever interface protocol you use, if you want to
>extend the number of RT-11 devices that are allowed,
>I would be very interested in looking at allowing
>up to 256 devices using MSCP under RT-11. Naming
>might be the problem: D00: => D77: where the
>numbers seem to be octal allows up to 64 devices.
>Using D00: => DFF: where the second and third character
>seem to be hex would allow 256 devices. Alternatively,
>using D00: => D7V: where the third character has
>32 values including 0 => 9 and A => V.
Thats beyond me.
>The other possibility is to use multiple sets of
>hardware registers that look like multiple controllers
>under RT-11. And since even 256 RT-11 devices of
>32 MBytes each covers only 8 GBytes, multiple controllers
>may be required in addition to allowing 65536 RT-11
>partitions per drive by changing the table that
>holds the RT-11 partition number to a 16 bit word
>from an 8 bit byte. The later should not really
>be a problem since the unit number is already limited
>to a single byte even though a 16 bit word is available.
>Swapping the unit number word with the partition
>number byte should be reasonable and quite simple.
>
>Producing RT-11 bug fixes and enhancements is on
>my list of priorities. Y3K is at the top of the
>list. Does anyone else want to participate? There
>are only 92 more years left. If one additional
>word is allowed for the date, that would mean that
>23 bits are available for the year. Likely that
>should be enough for a while since the CE use of
>97 leap days out of 400 will certainly need to
>change before 8 million years.
I should live so long.;)
Allison
> Some have questioned the number of people on the list who have CP/M systems.
I have 2 Heath H89's, 1 with the hard sector floppy controller & the other has both hard & soft
controllers - neither in running condition at the moment
Kaypro II
Kaypro 10 - the machine that caused this thread because of turborom problems :) HELP!!
Dynabyte DB8/1 S100 system with 64K
Dynabyte DB8/4-2 (2 Remex 8in. floppies)
both of these haven't been touched in many years
TRS-80 Model 4 & 4P - both run LDOS & Montezuma Micro CP/M
Apple II with CP/M card
Atari 800 with ATR8000 thats runs Atari Doses & CP/M
many other non-CP/M machines
Ralph
We SV/SF Bay Area locals know this - but many others of you may not:
Weirdstuff Warehouse
384 West Caribbean Drive
Sunnyvale, California, 94089
Regards,
Lyle
--
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
Lucy said she called the Goodwill Computer Works and was told they have
stacks of disks (not surprising) so I guess the need has been fulfilled.
Sorry if I got someone all worked up over nothing.
At any rate, Lucy says when the film is complete she'll send me the link
to the video, which will apparently be posted to Pervasive Software's
website.
--
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 ]
> Does anyone on the list have documentation for the 1611s?
I found the docs I have this morning. Basic service manual and
Z80 personality module up on http://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/te/1611
I have the 8080 and 8085 module docs that I'll get to eventually.
Re:"
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
I'm still trying to get that H27 drive working. I should check bitsavers
or schematics for the Qbus floppy card. The card itself works to a point -
if I install it in a minimal system (CPU, serial, RAM, boot/terminator), I
can get the system to read in the boot sector from the floppy, but it hangs
about the time RT-11 is running far enough to turn the interrupts on. I
suppose I should also track down an H-11 configuration guide or module list
or installation docs or whatever it came with to ensure I have a happy set
of cards set to happy values. I've checked each chip on the H-27 interface,
so I'm reasonably certain it's not a simple hardware problem; I'm not so
convinced it isn't a jumper or other configuration problem.
Mine came to me with only the enclosure and backplane being native Heathkit.
The rest was 100% DEC (the floppy was never attached while I worked at that
company). If anyone has any H-11 "getting started" docs, I'd appreciate a
copy.
Thanks,
-ethan"
As I said previously:
"The H-27 was just two standard 8" drives in a case with a Z-80 based
intelligent controller (WD1771 disk controller chip) that talked to the H-11
using what we would now call a "host adapter" over a proprietary
bi-directional parallel port. The interface and command set wasn't any of
the standards for this type of configuration (e.g. it wasn't SASI or SCSI),
but it used that type of architecture. For a number of years I used an H-27
on an S-100 system with a Tarbell controller by simply disconnecting the
internal intelligent controller and running a 50-pin cable direct to the two
Memorex drives. They were Shugart SA-801 compatible, so it was an easy
configuration to use, the H-27 then being just two drives, a power supply
and a cabinet."
Your interface card (in the H-11/LSI-11) is apparently good. The next thing
to check is the two 8" Memorex drives. Since these are standard 50-pin
cable Shugart compatible drives, this is fairly easy to test if you have
another system .... just disconnect the daisy chain from the internal
controller (the Z-80/WD1771 board in the H-27 cabinet, below the drives
(below the sheet metal that the drives sit on), connect the drives to
another known-good 8" controller and see if they work. If they do work,
then the issue must be in the internal H-27 controller.
That controller is a Z-80 with a WD1771 FDC and, of course, it has it's own
firmware in ROM and it's own RAM (probably a few 2114's). Any of that could
be bad. Also, that board has two modes, selected with a front panel switch,
Heath and DEC (not what they were called, but the switch should be clear).
RT-11 may or may not work in the Heath mode, I'm not sure (but HT-11 most
definitely will not work in the DEC mode, which was really the point of this
exercise). Beyond that, I don't know of a good way to test that board
without something like a Z-80 ICE unit. That type of embedded system can be
very hard to troubleshoot. There may have been some built-in diagnostics,
but I have no information on that at this point.
I have an Imsai, a Z-100 and a Processor Technology SOL-20. Some special
notes:
Although it's not what I'm running, indeed they have been in a box and I
have not run them since 1983, I have the three Seattle Computer Products
cards required to implement 86-DOS (the OS that Microsoft bought from
Seattle Computer Products that became MS-DOS) on the IMSAI or any other
S-100 system. And I have 86-DOS itself, original floppy diskettes direct
>from Seattle Computer Products. I bought it myself back in 1980 direct from
SCP, it's original, and I think I have every version from 0.33 to 2.0 (e.g.
MS-DOS 2.0).
Also, I have a working Helios disk system for the SOL-20, and I have copies
of PTDOS that actually run. This might just be the last working Helios
PTDOS system in existence, certainly there are not many of them still
running.
Continuing work on restoring my /34, I'm trying to replace the badly
decayed filter it arrived with. A description with photos can be
seen at
<http://dundas-mac.caltech.edu/~dundas/retro/11-systems/34a/filter/index.html>
So the questions:
* Where is the filter placed? In front of or behind the velcro?
* What are the correct dimensions?
* Any specifications available for the filter material, thickness, etc?
* Any hints on the correct cable routing between the modules in the
BA11 and the KY11-LB?
I've been unable to locate this information in the on-line manuals
and print sets, but if it's there and I just missed it, I'd
appreciate the reference.
Thanks for any help.
John
Robert Armstrong wrote:
> Dunno about the H-9, but the H-19 was a nice terminal. I have one
> hooked up to an H-11; works great.
Does anybody know how long they sold H-11's?
I remember drooling over it when I saw the ad I think in BYTE, but I
remember the H-8 had the write up but very little other than 8080/8086 ever
seemed to have more than a passing glance with that magazine.
> Bob Armstrong
The H-11 was offered from 1977 (when Heath entered the computer business)
until about 1981 or 1982 ... I don't remember the exact date. While the
hardware was nice if you liked DEC architecture (it was just a standard
LSI-11 made by DEC), it was a terrible system for a computer hobbyist at the
time. There was very little software, and both the hardware and the
software was expensive. Although I didn't introduce the H-11 and by the
time I took over was only trying to sell off our inventory, I felt guilty
for offering the system, because I knew that almost everyone who bought it
was making a several thousand (1970's) dollar mistake.
