test-drb May 2007

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

235 participants
483 discussions

Harwell (was RE: A local computer history group for my area . ..)

by RodSmallwood＠mail.ediconsulting.co.uk

Yes slight aberration of the brain. The building was called "The Atlas Computer Laboratory" but the system was ICL. One of my first jobs as a junior engineer (circa 1972) was to refurbish 4K core memory stores for an Elliot system. They were about three feet long with a Mullard Core stack in a box in the middle and plug in cards on either side. They used early transistors of the OC71 era (Yup -ve supply). I soon learned all about read, write and sense amplifiers and how the cores actually worked. As a final test I would put the store back in the system (Elliot 4100?) load a very complex FORTRAN program from paper tape ( it worked out handicaps for large racing yachts based on their dimensions) then a data tape. The answer came out on one of two IBM golfball printers (no keyboards). That's what I call classic computing as opposed to a classic computer! Rod Smallwood -----Original Message----- From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Roger Holmes Sent: 15 May 2007 19:44 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Harwell (was RE: A local computer history group for my area . ..) > From: "Rod Smallwood" <RodSmallwood at mail.ediconsulting.co.uk> > > Well now let me see now I left School for College in 1964. My major > subjects were Industrial Electronics and Computing. > > We were taken to Harwell Research centre to see 'The' Computer. It was > an ICL 1900 series system. It took up three floors of a substantial > building. Input on the top floor (80col Cards and papertape). > Processing > and storage on the middle floor and output on the ground floor. Had to > be that way or the vibration from the line printers would have shaken > the building to pieces. > > I remember it was called Atlas and even had an operating system called > George III. So that's just over 40 years ago. In computer terms > certainly vintage if not veteran. Hi Rod, I think you have mixed up two different systems. The Ferranti Atlas (later ICT/ICL Atlas) was in a custom built building, I understand the CPU occupied two floors, and yes there was one at Harwell I've been told. I would expect that Harwell also had at least one ICT/ICL 1900, and that would indeed run the George 3 multi access system. I did my computer science degree at Queen Mary College (University of London) and we had a ICL 1905E, upgraded to a 1904S which ran George 2 batch processing and the Maximop multi access system. Later I used a 1906 (S?) at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and it used either George 3 or George 4, and I was relieved to find that all the Maximop commands worked on it. When I was in the sixth form we visited the computer centre at the NatWest tower - huge floors - IIRC, one floor had nothing but IBM CPUs (probably 370s - this was 1969) and other static electronics, one floor had all the storage - magnetic tapes, discs, and juke box like machines which picked up strips of magnetic tape. Another floor had the hard peripherals - card readers, line printers and a massive document reader with a curved 'retina' on top about 20 feet across where all the optical sensors were. Another floor had all the cheque reading machines, the operators were moaning about people stapling their cheques and the staples getting caught in the works. At that time a random 2% of the cheques were also processed manually for quality assurance purposes, and presumably to prevent fraud. That day was the first I heard of the fraction of a penny (or cent) scam, where all interest payments were rounded down and all the fractions of a penny credited to the programmer's account. The same day I visited the University of London's central computer centre (as opposed to the individual college's private ones). They had a CDC 7600 and one operator was using a terminal to send messages to chat up a girl operating one of the remote stations which fed the 7600 with punched card data and printed the results. A very early form of Internet chat room you might say. Roger Owner of a ICT 1301 built 1962

17 years, 7 months

Subject: Re: Manuals being scanned

by ed＠ed-thelen.org

Message: 8 Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 11:49:02 +0100 From: Paul Williams <paul at frixxon.co.uk> Subject: Re: Manuals being scanned To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <46459B9E.4040706 at frixxon.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > Al Kossow wrote: >> >> They are some of the ugliest, bloated pdf's I've ever seen. >> What are you doing to them to make them look so BAD. > This is Adobe Capture at work. I had a look at the CP/M manual to see if > the OCRed text was overlaid on an original full page image beneath, but > unfortunately, the 256-page document consists of 13441 image fragments > that couldn't be OCRed. There are no images where text has been OCRed. > -- > Paul Paul - in all kindness (I've been there, done that) Stop scanning a bit and consider: 1) your current technique is not good! a) your current files are indeed much too large by maybe a factor of 6 or 7 b) your current files contain OCR errors - with no warning to users, who tend to think .pdf means a valid image. Two easily found errors are on "your" http://www.cse.uta.edu/TheMuseum at CSE/Manuals%20Scanned/CDC/Control%20Data-Cyber%2070%20Computer%20Systems%20Models%2072,73,74,6000%20Computer%20Systems.PDF on page 3-7 or page 19 in the file in HTML, several variable which should be l<sub>i</SUB> have been mis OCRed and are shown as I, Adobe blunders such as the above caused me to abandon Adobe for several years, until I met an Adobe employee who straightened me out. I now use Adobe Acrobat Professional as scanning input control, (not optimum, but it works OK) - trim off the images of paper holes with "Crop Pages" - check the "Recognize Text using OCR" which places Adobe's interpretation "behind" the image (for direct searching) - and have figured how to make "Reduce File Size" work Another thing to consider is that GOOGLE OCRs .pdf files that it spiders, highlighting search hits :-)) To some extent, your Adobe OCR is bypassed by GOOGLE. So - I'm back "PDF"ing, http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/on-line-docs.html http://www.ed-thelen.org/#h-documents etc. For serious work, I suggest you look at Al Kossow's suggestions at http://www.bitsavers.org/ "Keep Smiling" ;-)) Ed Thelen

17 years, 7 months

Old electrolytic capacitors (IME-86s calculator)

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

I'm guessing that old (circa early-70s) electrolytics which have a green cap at one end and a red cap at the other are polarised and that the green end is -ve. Can anyone confirm to save me tracing out schematics? They're in the power supply of an IME-86s calculator and are decidedly past their best :-) (At least four of the ten in the PSU are showing signs of major leakage) The rest of the machine *looks* healthy enough; once I've replaced the electrolytics is there any good reason not to slowly run the system up on a variac (rather than giving it full AC from the start)?

17 years, 7 months

Problem reading CP/M floppy on a PC

by john_a_s2004＠hotmail.com

Hi, I have a Transam Tuscan system and recently received a set of boot disks for it. I am trying to back these up to a PC, but when reading the disks with Anadisk or Imagedisk I get 'no data' errors on tracks 3 and higher. The errors get worse from tracks 3 to 15 then nothing can be read. I have taken the 5.25" drive out of the Tuscan and put it in the PC, and the contoller passes the TESTFDC tests for single density and double density. The odd thing about these floppies is that Anadisk reports them as 512 byte / sector and 10 sectors per track. The norm for '360K' floppies is 9 sectors / track. The outer sector (track 0) can be read fine with Anadisk, and I can read the CP/M welcome message. I was hoping someone could advise on what tricks or techniques I could use? Would it help for example to slow the drive down below 300rpm? I assume that with 9 sectors / track there is more time for the FDC to recgnise the start of each track. I think the Tuscan FDC uses a WD1771 controller, is that better than the NEC765 type-controller and able to pack more data in? I read on http://www.s100-manuals.com/Disk-drives.htm that Kaypro also uses 10 sectors of 512 bytes. Another thought is to try different PCs, perhaps formating, writing and reading 10 x 512 byte sectors is another test that could be added to Dave's TESTFDC program to help find a suitable machine :-) Lastly (before anyone asks) yes the floppies are soft sectored. Regards, John _________________________________________________________________ The next generation of Hotmail is here! http://www.newhotmail.co.uk/

17 years, 7 months

DEC Pro380 RX50 boot frustration

by chd_1＠nktelco.net

I have been trying to boot my Pro380 from an RX50 and can't seem to get it to work. I have to be missing something. I have been using RX50 floppies that work fine in an -11/73. When I put those disks in the Pro I get an error code that translates to "Bad format or blank disk." and a picture of a floppy with a question mark. I created RT11 boot disks for the FB monitor and used the COPY/BOOT:DZ thing to get the right bootstrap. All on a real -11/73. I was able to initialize a volume on the diskette using P/OS from the Pro's hard disk. The resulting disk boots in the -11/73 with the message ***THIS VOLUME DOES NOT CONTAIN A HARDWARE BOOTABLE SYSTEM ***. In the Pro it gives me that same error code 340. The fact that this message was created by the Pro makes me think there is nothing wrong with the hardware or the floppy format. I have swapped floppy controllers and RX50 drives with no change. I have downloaded a couple disk images that I thought should be bootable (P/OS maintenance utilities) with the same results. I have a little less confidence in this because I had to convert .td0 images to binary images to copy to the floppy. I did find a note about installing 2.9bsd on the Pro that indicates that the floppy must have a special header for the bootstrap different from the NOP and BR that the normal PDP-11's usually require. Shouldn't this be taken care of by the RT11 bootstrap installation process? Is there something that needs to be in the first track that is missing from my disks? This Pro380 was a VAX console. Is there possibly something different about the firmware?

17 years, 7 months

Color Macintosh boot floppy?

by dbetz＠xlisper.com

Can anyone help me with creating a boot floppy for a Color Macintosh? I have a machine whose hard disk died and I'm trying to replace it but I don't have a boot floppy containing DiskTools to format the new (Apple) hard drive. I *do* have an install CD for System 7.5 but it doesn't seem to want to boot on the Color Classic even if I hold "C" down when I start up the Mac. I'd be happy to pay for shipping and something extra for the effort involved in making the DiskTools boot disk. By the way, I've already tried downloading the DiskTools 7.5 and 8.5 images that are available on the net. Unfortunately, they won't boot on the Color Classic. I get a message saying that a system resource is missing. I'm assuming that they don't have the right enabler for the Color Classic. Thanks! David

17 years, 7 months

phree stuph

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

reply offlist hosers Logitech Scanman Handheld scanner user manual a bunch of caddies, prolly 20+ generic Mac ADB trackball Wordstar Reference Manual for 2000 plus release 3, I may have others in this series, no disks/images I don't think though MCS-8080/8085 Family User's Manual Adobe Streamline, boxed, 5 1/4" disks, I won't vouch for their integrity DBase III Plus Command Performance Series (M$ Press?) The New Wordstar Customizing Guide Analyzing Broadband Networks, 3rd Ed. Soundblaster Midi Kit, boxed, disk and cable AS/400 User's Manual, wire bound The Modem Reference, 2nd Ed. Brady pubs. 3 non-functional Commodore Plus 4's (I think, the brown squarish ones). chips missing. Basically doorstops or parts. I might want to keep one, don't know... *these are moldy, but readable* PC Tools Deluxe Hard Drive Back Up PC Tools Data Recovery and Dos Utilities PC Tools Data Recovery and Utilities If any interest, postage must be payed in advance by snail mail. I don't have paypal and don't want to bother with it right now. If there's no interest after ~1 week, I throw it all in the trash. Muahahahahahahaha ____________________________________________________________________________________Got a little couch potato? Check out fun summer activities for kids. http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+kids&…

17 years, 7 months

interesting classic video game anniversary story

by innfoclassics＠gmail.com

This is an interesting read and some pics of the very first video games. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3159462 Found the link on slashdot. Paxton -- Paxton Hoag Astoria, OR USA

17 years, 7 months

opinion needed

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

a very nice man is offering to send me (2) 5170s replete w/5175 monitors and the associated PGA graphics boards. These were used in the "common area" at MIT. As such, do these represent any particular value? I have an AT already, but these are seemingly more interesting having dwelt w/i the hallowed halls of an illustrious technical university. Any thoughts... ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/

17 years, 7 months

Rainbow on eBay and looking...

by jba＠sdf.lonestar.org

The Rainbow does operate at standard TV rates, i beleive. The monochrome signal is actually a straight composite signal, meaning, if you build an adapter, you can connect any old composite monitor to it. I used a Commodore 1084 (I think that's the model...) for a while. One of the oddest features was that you could switch to European rates at any time through the bios. Just press F3 while the system was on to get to the Set-Up screen. One of the flags was 'Frequency' and it presented two options: 50Hz and 60Hz. Just flip the flag depending on your continent, and you're all done. The high-res graphics mode was 800x240, which does seem a bit wide. Maybe the engineers predicted the coming of widescreen monitors... ;) Low-res graphics mode was a more normal ratio at 384x240. The Rainbow in the auction looks nice, but there is no color monitor in the pictures. Is the seller sure that he has a color monitor? jba at sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

17 years, 7 months

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test-drb May 2007