test-drb May 2007

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

235 participants
483 discussions

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-1982-Televideo-TS-802- CP-M-Z80-PC-Computer_W0QQitemZ250077921603QQihZ015 QQcategoryZ4193QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem ____________________________________________________________________________________Ready for the edge of your seat? Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/

17 years, 7 months

General SCSI+ DLT speed questions

by james＠attfield.co.uk

> Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 13:07:03 -0500 > From: Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> > Subject: Re: General SCSI+DLT speed questions > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Message-ID: <4649F6C7.4010402 at oldskool.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > On the system I had it hooked up to (a 933MHz Linux box with hardware > RAID) keeping the drives fed was no problem. > > Anyway, I'm happy to see that, although seeming to need a cleaning tape > every 4 loads or so, they function as expected :-) > -- > Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ The cleaning light can also indicate media problems, not just head cleaning time. I have a few tapes which frequently trigger the head-cleaning light even though recently cleaned. Jim

17 years, 7 months

3.5" Altair CP/M

by grant＠stockly.com

I have a tarbell floppy controller card that has been rewired to access 3.5" disks using a standard PC 3.5" disk drive. I have 3 disks that the Altair can boot off of and read, but my windows computer can't do anything with them. I've tried rawread.exe and diskinfo.exe and they both choke on the disk. I assumed that if a disk could be written with the standard 3.5" disk drive on the tarbell card then it should also be read on the same drive connected to a modern IBM compatible. The disks are 720K style, they don't have the high density hole. I was hoping that these disks would be an easy way to move data to and from the Altair. The version of CP/M is 1.4. What could be missing? If the bitrate is fixed, then is CP/M not writing standard sectors? Rawread says "Address not found" and diskinfo says the drive is not ready. Grant

17 years, 7 months

Disk Nicolet 1280 spectrometer

by mikeee＠tiscali.it

Good morning, excuse me for the trouble, have I seen a discussion on a forum and have I seen that her posside it "Nicolet 1280", do I have the necessity to restore mine "Nicolet 1280", don't I have the floppy disk that allows the operation anymore, is it possible to send me by mail the packet of the softwares? I Thank you in advance. Dr. Michele Marongiu

17 years, 7 months

General SCSI+DLT speed questions

by trixter＠oldskool.org

(Hopefully this is on-topic since the technologies and hardware are over a decade old) Background: I rescued two DLT 7000 drives this weekend (one Quantum, one SUN) and hooked them up to an Adaptec 29160 HBA. The Adaptec has an external 50-pin (Ultra 2?) connector, so I used a 50-to-68 pin (Ultra wide SCSI?) cable to connect the HBA to the first DLT drive, and a 68-pin to connect both DLT drives together. It took a bit of configuring in the Adaptec BIOS (had all targets set to U160 16-bit) but after some sane reductions they both were recognized and speed was set to 10MB/s. My concern is that it takes nearly two hours to fill a DLT IV (35GB) tape, regardless of which drive I use or HBA settings I configure. The Quantum drive averages 4168 kB/s; the SUN drive is slower and averages 3355 kB/s. Are these times normal? With such large capacities per tape, I would have assumed they could be filled faster... They are reporting a 10MB/s speed, why am I getting only 4MB/s? Another question: Is it normal for DLT drives to go faster if compression is disabled? I thought the point of hardware compression was that it came without cost. I'm running a test now, but was curious to know if other drives were known for being "slower" with compression on. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

17 years, 7 months

Anyone know the MTI "THORN" board?

by oldcpu＠rogerwilco.org

The recent discussion on tape backup devices has been timely, to say the least. I just picked up an Exabyte 8505XL 8mm tape drive, hoping to scan a ziplock bag-full of 8mm tapes that were included in a pickup of several Qbus PDP-11s and uVAXen last year. Included with the drive is a bare board that rumor has it came from a Micro Technology 'Liberator' tape backup subsystem. The interesting part about this board is that it is also rumored to be a DSSI-to-SCSI adapter. If true then I just maybe, sorta, kinda, might have a way to connect SCSI hard disks and/or a CD-ROM drive to my DECsystem 5400, which would be very, very nice. Unfortunately, I have no docs or technical information on this board, or the Liberator. Nothing turns up on bitsavers.org, Manx, the MTI website, or a general search of Google. I have tried to query MTI's support group via email, but no reply for a week, and I'm guessing that whoever received that email just took me for a crank collector of old comptuers! ;) While this board isn't really a 'classic' item by any means, nor even the DECsystem 5400, I'd still appreciate any information that anyone might have on this. It is marked "Model: THORN / T/A: 640036-007 REV M / S/A: 640036-001 REV K" and is built around a 68C000 @ 16Mhz, a couple NCR 53C700 SCSI drivers, 3 (I think) AMD 29c983 bus exchangers (whatever they are) and a bunch of logic, and two 68-pin SCA-like connectors on the SCSI side. You can see an image of the board on my mystery boards page at: http://www.rogerwilco.org/mystery_boards/#MTI_THORN If I can sort out the power connection, I might start experimenting a bit through what appears to be an on-board RS-232 port. The big question is: can I really use this to connect at least one SCSI hard disk or CDROM to my system? Thanks! Jared

17 years, 7 months

CBM Plus/4 sluggish keyboard

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

I'm leaning toward the idea of offloading my Plus/4 as it's sat in the attic for years and I've never got around to *doing* anything with it. :-( It works, but some of the keys are a bit sluggish - are there any gotchas involved in dismantling the keyboard in order to give contacts a clean? (I just want to check I'm not going to be faced with tiny springs going every which way if I unscrew the backplate :-) Also, am I right in thinking that the tape unit was an optional extra? I don't have one [1], but looking at the boxed plus/4 on ebay at the moment, it doesn't seem to include one either in the standard package. [1] I *did* have a broken one once, but it's either seriously buried or I tossed it out long ago.

17 years, 7 months

Looking for a dead machine

by ploopster＠gmail.com

Hi. I'm looking for a dead IBM 5155 Portable Personal Computer. The only conditions are that the power supply, monitor and floppy drive need to work. None of the motherboard-based devices (including the CPU) need to work. A canvas carrying case would be a nice plus. Anyone have a line on one? Peace... Sridhar

17 years, 7 months

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

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

> 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

Sun 2/120 chassis

by bear＠typewritten.org

Howdy, guys. I'm working on restoring a Sun 2/120. My particular machine appears to have been a diskless workstation (no storage controllers). I think I have enough spares to give it a local disk and QIC-11 drive, but there is no obvious way to mount a drive of any type in the upper part of the chassis. There's a cutout on the front panel, so I know you were at least supposed to be able to put a tape drive up there. Can somebody draw me a picture of how things are supposed to look with drives in the cabinet? I guess if worse came to worst I could attach one of the 511 shoeboxes, but I'd need a panel kit for my multibus SCSI controller. Also: I guess this is a long shot, but I would also like to find a Sun-2 keyboard and mouse for this machine. I'll pay some money for it, if somebody has one they would be willing to part with. Thanks! ok bear

17 years, 7 months

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test-drb May 2007