test-drb May 2007

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

235 participants
483 discussions

by kahrs＠caip.rutgers.edu

I'll be there again this year. I like to eat at an Indian restaurant in Centerville ... Will there be a classic computing meet?

17 years, 7 months

Moving heavy hardware - or why not to put big CDC drives into a Chevy Venture

by ian_primus＠yahoo.com

Well, I managed to accquire more hardware... This time in the form of a couple CDC hard drives - one 9775 (Fixed media, 650mb) and one 9766 (300mb removeable). I also wound up with an 11/84 and a couple RL02's and one and a half RA80's. (my first Unibus 11, and my first removable pack drives - yay!) I'm very excited - this hardware is all new to me, and very different >from what I already have. The 11/84 is much "beefier" physically than my wimpy little 11/73, and I've never owned freestanding hard drives. But - I digress. I had to drive about 950 miles round trip to pick these up. Truck rental is very expensive. I drive a Toyota Camry. So, I borrowed my father's minivan, a Chevy Venture. I've moved all manner of heavy hardware, racks, printers, etc in it, and figured that it would be fine for the task. Getting the stuff in was pretty easy. The CDC drives were slightly bigger than I had envisioned, but they fit. We loaded it with a ramp and a loading dock, and I had two people helping me, so I didn't fully appreciate just how heavy the CDC drives were. The PDP-11 rack was a 5 foot rack that was a simple "tip and slide", and some loose rack mountable stuffs stacked easily next to it. At this point, I had the van completely crammed - the passenger seat was pushed forward and angled forward as far as it would go, with the two CDC drives behind the seats, then the PDP rack on the passsenger side in the back, and stuff stacked behind the other drive on the drivers side. Some disk packs were seat belted into the passenger seat. The van rode really low, but was still driveable, albiet more "sluggish", and I had to top up one of the tires before driving back. I drove the route back in one shot - no stops for anything. I didn't get home until late, and only brought in the disk packs. It took me the better part of a week to figure out how to get the CDC drives *out* of the van. I was able to get the PDP-11 out with little difficulty. It's just a rack and some loose stuff. No problems there. But those CDC drives were so heavy that I couldn't even tilt them much in the van, and they's sunken into the carpet and weren't able to roll, not to mention the holes in the floor where the seats normally latch into. I found the operators manual for the CDC 9775 (BZ7Ex) on bitsavers - it lists the specs for the drive - weight 639 pounds! Oh, good. At least I think the 9766 is lighter. A little. It took a few days to get friends with time to help me, but we managed to get the drives out of the van yesterday night. I'll spare you the gory details, but I removed the power supplies from both drives first, as well as the doors and panels. When moving these, heavy is an understatement. Now I just need to get them into the basement. So... now does anyone have a scan of the service or installation manual for a 9775? I'm sure others have stories about loading hardware in and out of vehicles... I'll post pictures later... -Ian

17 years, 7 months

Can disks be copied using only one RL02 drive?

by charlesmorris＠hughes.net

I've got a PDP-11/23+ with 4 Mb RAM, but only one RL02 and no software except an XXDP pack. Henk Gooijen helpfully made for me a (RT-11) bootable pack that is on the way (if the post offices between Europe and the US don't lose or destroy it). So I definitely want to make a backup copy. Is this possible to do with only one drive? Apparently you can't swap disks back and forth like the old DOS or CP/M systems. Henk thinks creating a RAM disk would work, and copy files but I don't know anything about RT-11. The alternative is to take the RL02 from my PDP-8/A and connect it, but then I don't have a "1" key, they are both unit "0". Any thoughts? thanks Charles

17 years, 7 months

Surely someone here knows what became of GRI Computer Corporation?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

Looooooooooooooooooong gone. One of the founders was Saul Denman, creator of the PDP8/S John Bordynuik contacted him years ago while researching the history of the 8/S great.. I see he has let pdp8.com croak. Info may be saved at archive.org

17 years, 7 months

What became of GRI Computer Corporation?

by paul＠frixxon.co.uk

I have an email address at the bottom of every page of Manx, my catalogue of computer manuals, and an invitation to people to send me questions or comments. I expect people to ask questions about the catalogue, but instead I usually receive requests from far-flung countries to quote for supplying spare parts for their ancient hardware. Ho hum. But today I received a question from someone who believes that my humble catalogue is the online presence of the mighty Manx Corporation. The email is reproduced below. Google has been no assistance in providing any answers. Surely someone here knows what became of GRI Computer Corporation? I'll pass on any responses. --quote-- I have some stocks (100 shares) that were purchased in 1972 for G.R.I. Computer Corp. When searching for information regarding this company and whether or not it still exists - I end up being redirected to this page for the Manx Corporation. Do you happen to know if G.R.I was purchased by Manx or how I might go about researching the value for these stocks? Any help is appreciated. --endquote-- -- Paul for the mighty Manx Corporation

17 years, 7 months

Unix disk copy using dd

by dm561＠torfree.net

Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 15:28:01 -0500 From: Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> Subject: Re: Unix disk copy using dd Sridhar Ayengar wrote: > M H Stein wrote: > >> Assuming you have a third disk or a spare partition on the larger drive, >> can't you tar the small disk > to a file there and then untar to the >> final >> disk/partition? > > > You're assuming that the small disk the data is coming from contains a > file system. > And, if it does, it's more efficient to use a pipe instead of a tarfile. >Peace... Sridhar -------------- Mike: I did indeed assume a filesystem; under what circumstances would a Unix hard disk not have a file system? And what do you mean specifically by "use a pipe"? Example? If you don't need an archive copy couldn't you just copy the boot file and cp the root? My experience with Unix is pretty limited, but this is how I archive and copy systems with Cromix; the tar file is copied to a PC and zipped, and unzipped and restored if/when needed. If there's a more efficient way, I'm definitely interested. ========= Doc wrote: > Enering pedant mode, even if the source disk has a filesystem, tar can't grab boot blocks, partition tables, extended attributes, etc. And various tar implementations have other nasty little warts. ------------- Mike: Granted, you'd have to create the boot block on the new drive, but I thought the whole point was to _not_ copy the partition table since you're moving to a larger drive? In my Cromix experience at least, which attributes are retained seems to be a function of the version of tar (or ftar) and the options selected. ======= > dd is about the dumbest** command on the planet, which is why I love it. > > Doc ------------- Mike: Ditto, but how would you use it in this case? m

17 years, 7 months

Unix disk copy using dd ?

by andy.piercy＠gmail.com

More disk copy questions.. Can you copy an entire disk using the UNIX dd command from a smaller disc to a larger one and retain the capacity of the larger drive? i.e. maybe create a partition on the larger drive which matches the smaller drive? Thanks, Andy.

17 years, 7 months

MacOS 6 on BasiliskII

by trag＠io.com

>Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 16:58:11 -0700 (PDT) >From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> >> I have BasiliskII installed via apt on Ubuntu. I've sucessfully read and >> installed the 6.0.8 system disks as downloaded from Apple's archive. The >> rom images I have and have tried are for a Quadra650 and a Performa. >> BasiliskII doesn't like the Mac Plus rom. On boot, I get a complaint that >> this Mac is set for 32-bit addressing and that I should switch to 24-bit >> addressing (since os6 doesn't do 32-bitness). Clicking "24-bit" doesn't >> work. Does anyone here know how to get this working? > >Which Performa? Those ROMs may be too new for System 6. To elaborate a bit on Cameron's point... System 6 requires 24 bit addressing on the host machine. The first Macs were based on the 68000 which only has 24 address bits. When they added the Mac II and SE/30 to the line-up they switched to the 68020 and 68030 which have 32 address bits, but the OS was still operating in a 24 bit address space. So, in order to run System 6 you need hardware which can translate to 24 bit addresses. Apple included the feature of a choice of 24 bit or 32 bit addressing modes in early Macs, but abandoned it somewhere in the middle of the Quadra (68040) line-up. So, for example, the Quadra 605 can do both 24 bit and 32 bit addressing, but the Quadra 63x family cannot. My guess is that the Quadra 650 does not include support for 24 bit addressing and neither does the performa you used. This would definitely be true of any Performa 63x, or later PowerPC Performas. So, you most likely need a ROM image from an older machine. Also, even if 24 bit addressing is supported in the emulated, ROM imaged machine, Apple dropped support for OS 6 somewhere along the way in their hardware/firmware. I suspect that regardless of the 24 bit/32 bit issue, the Q650 will not run anything earlier than some flavor of OS 7. I may be misremembering, but that's how I would bet. You may want to check a website such as everymac.com, because I believe it lists the OS's supported by each Mac model. Jeff Walther

17 years, 7 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 45, Issue 7

by dm561＠torfree.net

----------Original Message: Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 09:39:48 +0100 From: "Andy Piercy" <andy.piercy at gmail.com> Subject: Re: Unix disk copy using dd ? So basically you can only use dd to copy to a disk of the same size. OK so here is the real issue: I have a faulty Unis system disk that is 142 Mb, it had the sticky bumpers issue, now repaired but I want to copy the OS and apps to a second replacement disk, this is a 442 Mb drive. ----------Reply: Perhaps I misunderstood the problem earlier; when you say faulty but repaired, do you mean that you can read the disk but the file system is corrupted, or is the disk in fact bootable & runnable? mike

17 years, 7 months

Mentec

by tshoppa＠wmata.com

Al Kossow wrote: > It sounds like Zane (maybe Tim Shoppa) have been in > contact with them recently, so there is no need for yet > another set of people to be involved. If "Recently" is "2000", then yes, I worked extensively with Mentec to make three sets of hobbyist CD's (RT-11, RSX-11, RSTS/E) using my archives and their archives to get bootable kits for emulators. > As I understand it, they have no interest in offering a > low cost license no matter how many people ask about it. Internally, there was interest, and I discussed it with several at Mentec in the 1996-2001 timeframe as I worked with them on other projects, and it got as far as them having a web page with pictures of the CD's I made for them. But no, not all the legal barriers were jumped, so it never really happened. I don't think anyone truly understands the legal barriers that Mentec faces. They do not own all the stuff free and clear to do with as they wish. In the late 90's, they could not sell a copy of any PDP-11 OS unless they also sold DEC's printed manuals with it, and they were having extreme troubles getting DEC's printed manuals from DEC's print shop. The folks in Mentec who were most enthusiastic about it were really nice, energetic people. I don't have any sore feelings about the work I did back then (I had a blast) but I don't have as much interest in the subject as I did ten years ago. Being out at the CHM last year rekindled it a little... but there's no shortage of truly redistributable and very-few-condition other stuff that I'm worrying about now. Tim.

17 years, 7 months

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test-drb May 2007