test-drb June 2007

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

224 participants
486 discussions

Semi-OT: Interesting or unusual PC Compatibles?

by jbmcb1＠gmail.com

OK, branching off another thread. There probably aren't many, but there are a few clones that I'd consider "interesting." I'd say the PCjr counts, it was a pretty strange system - the unsuccessful IIgs of the PC world. Sidecar expansion slots, IR keyboard and cartridges... The last of the PS/2's had some strange designs. The 95 was really strange - a fold-out power supply design with a spring loaded plunger power supply connector. C2 level hardware, which meant if you forgot the BIOS password you're SOL. I'd count the whole MCA based PS/2 line as a string of oddities in the PC world. There were some really odd Japanese designs as well. My favorite is the FM Townes, which was a hybrid PC and game console. It ran a proprietary OS, but could run language-localized Windows. It also had an oddball graphics system that could overlay multiple screen modes over each other, so you could play full-motion video games with text overlay.

16 years, 8 months

The late, great TRS-80

by theresa＠explainamation.com

The True Story of Microcomputer Pioneers 2007 is the 30th Anniversary of the TRS-80! Only $19.95 348 pages, with full Index 121 illustrations Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Microcomputer Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution takes you back to the largely unknown origins of personal computing. We wrote this book from personal experience, since we were part of the community of small software entrepreneurs from those days. The First Off-the-Shelf Microcomputer We tell the story of how Steve Leininger, working alone in an old saddle factory in Fort Worth, built the first TRS-80; its total development costs were less than $150,000. He had to make a product that could be sold for a price Radio Shack customers could afford. Yet no one had ever sold a complete off-the-shelf mass market personal computer before. The TRS-80 took the microcomputer from an expensive device built by electronic hobbyists to something anyone could buy and operate. Introduced in August 1977, the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy Corporation was sold in Radio Shack's 3500 stores across the nation for the modest price of $599.95. It all began in the late 1970s when a computer hobbyist at Tandy Corporation, Don French, suggested to his bosses that they should build and sell a computer. The Tandy managers were dubious that anyone would buy it, but they paid a visit to Silicon Valley and finally hired a young engineer, Steve Leininger, to come to Ford Worth and build a computer. Leininger siezed an opportunity to do hands-on work with the new microchips that hobbyists were using to build their own computers. The result of his efforts was the revolutionary TRS-80 Model I, a product so successful that Tandy Corporation found itself overwhelmed with orders it was not ready to fill. But as eager customers finally got their hands on their very own computer, for the first time, they could experiment with software. Now anyone could affordably use word processing, spreadsheets, accounting, database and other kinds of software... as soon as someone wrote programs to perform those functions and made them available. And enterprising individuals working in basements and garages did create those programs. By the early 1980s, as the first wave of software entrepreneurs sold their wares through the bulging pages of 80 Micro magazine, customers had a big choice of software. The Real Story, From the People Who Lived It In our case, I (David Welsh) was one of those self-taught programmers. My word processor, Lazy Writer, was sold worldwide to enthusiastic fans who were eager to dump their typewriters. My wife, Theresa, created our product literature, dealt with dealers and customers and managed our office. These were extraordinary years, when software was new and everyone was learning. It was before Microsoft was a household word, and when software generally had only one author. Programmers were proud of fitting useful features into limited memory, and some became stars. Incredible Stories, All True! a.. John Roach, Tandy's product manager, got an agreement from Charles Tandy to build 3500 units after Leininger demonstrated the prototype; this was exactly the number of stores they had -- Roach figured if no one bought the computers, at least the stores could use them. Don French, a true believer, predicted they'd sell 50,000 the first year and urged the company to gear up the factory for mass production. Tandy managers, thinking they could never sell that many, were surprised when, in the weeks after the introduction, the Tandy switchboard was paralyzed with over 15,000 calls from people wanting to order a TRS-80. In the first year, over 250,000 people went on waiting lists to buy a TRS-80! b.. Tandy contracted with Randy Cook to create a Disk Operating System (TRSDOS) for its next generation TRS-80, which would come with floppy disk drives. The company agreed Cook would retain ownership of the code. But Cook, believing Tandy violated the agreement, created a rival DOS which he sold through his own company. Clueless Tandy managers found Cooks' name embedded in the TRSDOS code. c.. TRSDOS replacements appeared - five of them - and programmers made up their own homespun magazine ads touting their products great features and attacking their rivals' products in the pages of magazines like 80 Micro, the most popular of many publications devoted to the TRS-80. d.. Wayne Green, publisher of popular computer magazines, promised to "editorially break" Radio Shack because they would not carry his 80 Micro magazine in their stores; his vitriolic column often lambasted Radio Shack CEO John Roach. e.. Bill Schroeder, a successful businessman, bankrolled Logical Systems, Inc. and sold Tandy on LDOS as the company-sponsored TRSDOS replacement. A state-of-the-art headquarters and a pile of money followed the lucrative contract, but once he sensed the coming demise of the TRS-80, Schroeder simply shut down his company, a move he came to regret. f.. Scott Adams created popular Adventure games for the TRS-80 and other early microcomputers, became a celebrity in the magazines, but went broke when he produced too many game cartridges for a computer that died in the marketplace. g.. Along with microcomputers, robots were also hot. Meet the robots of the 1980s - and the man who said we were all going to have mechanical men in our homes by the year 2000. Unlike the PC revolution, the robot revolution fizzled. h.. A notorious scam artist preyed on the gullibility of microcomputer enthusiasts, destroying the Southern California Computer Society with a Ponzi scheme, then bilking TRS-80 owners out of thousands of dollars with magazine ads from a bogus company called World Power Systems showing phony products. Get the real story, based on interviews with microcomputer pioneers like Steve Leininger, Don French, Randy Cook, Mark Lautenschlauger, Bill Schroeder, Ed Juge and others. They tell their story for the first time, captured by the authors, who lived through it all. Visit www.microcomputerpioneers.com to read excerpts and order your copy. NOTES: You can get the book from us or from amazon.com. We thank all the people who emailed us about the book. We really appreciate your interest and your comments. Please forward this note to anyone who might be interested in Priming the PUmp.

16 years, 8 months

Who wants some press in south florida?

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

a media organization in south florida (palm beach, broward, miami-dade counties, cities such as West palm beach, delray, boca, fort lauderdale, hollywood, miami, etc.) is looking for people who collect vintage/classic/old computers regarding an article on that topic they are working on. If anyone is interested in this, please contact me off-list as soon as possible for details. Best regards, Jay West

16 years, 8 months

Telephony switches - is there anyone out there collecting these?

by jplist2007＠kiwigeek.com

Hey all; So I'm reading "The NEW McGraw-Hill TELECOM Factbook" (Second edition, "A plain English guide anyone can use!", 820 pages, phone book sized) and while delving into the sections on Circuit and Packet switching it occurs to me that these machines are just as much of an object that has enabled our industrial and technological revolution to continue in leaps and bounds as the minis and mainframes of yesteryear. They're also damned cool. Are there people out there, on the list or otherwise, that are actively collecting these machines? Admittedly, unlike a PDP8 you can use (as Dave McGuire does) on a daily basis, a twelve ton NEAX isn't too 'dramatic' as an attention piece. But, according to my little book here, they tend to be multiprocessor, reel-to-reel storage (as they 'reboot' so infrequently they need a very long-lasting storage medium), all sorts of good stuff. And with an average "Mean time between failure of 1 failure in 40 years"... boy, that just speaks for it. So, anyone out there have one of these in their... basement? JP

16 years, 9 months

Best solvent to remove sticky tape residue.

by austin＠ozpass.co.uk

I picked up a Silicon Graphics Crimson at the weekend. It?s in working order and the skins are in rather good nick as well. Unfortunately, at some point in the past it has had sticky tape wrapped around it, presumably to prevent the front access door from opening whilst it was transported. This has (predictably) left sticky bands around the computer. I was wondering what the most appropriate solvent might be to remove this crud, given that the skins themselves are some form of plastic. Thanks in advance! -Austin.

16 years, 9 months

LISA

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> given the historical importance Preservation of Lisa software is a particularly sore spot with me. I tried to find someone who would permit releasing it for many years while I was there. It is dead, dead, dead. People who worked on it didn't really want to admit they even worked on it. Any hope of it ever being released died when Steve came back.

16 years, 9 months

What are the really unusual or weird computers?

by lproven＠gmail.com

I never cease to be amazed by the level and depth of knowledge of obscure machines on this list. Knowledgeable discussions of machines I've never even heard of in 20y in the business and a good while longer as a hobbyist. So I thought I'd ask a question on a slightly different tack. What are the most bizarre, way-out or just plain *different* machines that folks have seen? The basic von Neumann computer is well-established, but most of them have a lot more common ground than that. Uniquely-identified disks, an OS with a command line that lets you create, rename, execute, edit and delete files on those disks. Maybe graphics. Maybe dumb terminals. Maybe a teletype. But set aside the cosmetic differences, they are, to a large degree, much of a muchness. From a PDP/11 to a VAX to MS-DOS, the actual overall CLI experience is very similar. Unix is a bit different - cryptic commands, one big virtual directory tree - but it's really more of the same underneath. The Mac was pretty different when it was new: no CLI at all, for example. Otherwise, though, it's not that remarkable. But I keep reading about Lisp machines. No good general-purpose introduction for the interested computer-literate reader who's never seen one and doesn't speak Lisp, though, but from what I've read, they sound unique. The Canon Cat had a unique UI as well, from what I've seen. What else was there? What other machines - general-purpose desktop (or desk-side or whatever) computers were there that Thought Differently? I'm not really thinking of embedded systems and the like here, but thinks you sat in front of and worked upon. -- Liam Proven ? Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

16 years, 9 months

"Oddball"

by Billy.Pettit＠wdc.com

Christian Corti wrote: And don't forget the LGP-30 (450 built in total, 45 built in Germany) and compatibles (LGP-21, ...). Its word size is officially 32 bits, with only 31 bits usable (only the accumulator can hold all 32 bits, once stored on the drum the LSB is forced to zero). So I call it a 31-1/2 bit machine. And its design is marvelous, a CPU with all four basic arithmetic functions (fixed point) that contains only 15 flip-flops. Christian Billy wrote: Delightful machine wasn't it? To accomplish so much with so little logic. Those were the days when an engineer would be consider a genius and could get a big bonus for eliminating one flip-flop! Billy

16 years, 9 months

Billy Pettit real disappointment

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

On 28 Jun, 2007, at 04:59, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:23:32 -0700 > From: "Billy Pettit" <Billy.Pettit at wdc.com> > Subject: What are the really unusual or weird computers? > To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Message-ID: > <5BC121186B788C48A0EE35A16FD0D34D29C6E2 at wdscexbe01.sc.wdc.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > This thread has been a real disappointment. Almost all of the > responses > have been about computers using standard microprocessors - off the > shelf > components. Yes a few had non-vanilla flavored OS's, or idiotic I/O > schemes. A few were even painted different colors from PC Beige. Then you are not reading all the replies. > But nobody got into the really weird internals that have made the > industry > so fascinating. Go back to the real early days, like the Atlas, > that let > you build your instruction set from scratch using micro-code. > Nobody seemed > to remember that most of the late 50's and early 60's used 40 bits > as a > standard. MOST????? STANDARD????? Rubbish! IBM 7094 - 36 bits. ICT 1301 - 48 bits. CDC 6600/7600 60 (or was it 64?) bits. CDC SC17 (not sure exact era) - 16 bits. Elliott 903/920B/905/920C/920ATC - 18 bits. Many of the BCD machines used 4 bit words I believe. Mid 60s ICL 1900 - 24 bits. What used 40 bits? > What about the MicroData machines with a build your own > instructions on the fly? Tell us more please. Microcoded or 'Extra code' ? > And then there were the ultra-strange like the G-15 - 29 bit word > size, all > instructions were modified moves through arithmetic logic or I/O > devices. > The I/O devices were actually part of the internal logic - no > channels. Actual physical memory, access my DMA from the device or just memory mapped I/O ? > Burroughs had some fascinating ideas on virtual memory in the 5500 > series. > Seymour Cray lived weird and unusual in most of his designs. > Several people > have developed machines to run high level languages in native mode: > ADA at > Rational, APL on the Star 100, LISP, COBOL, etc. > > > > There's not much unusual about putting some glue logic around a $3 > micro > chip. We've all done it. How about the truly weird machines? > Doesn't > anyone remember when logic didn't come in million transistor packages? Remember? I am restoring/maintaining an ICT 1301 which has individual Germanium transistors, wire-OR, four and gates to a PCB, one flip- flop one a PCB, a clock derived from the timing track of the last addressed drum store, a core store unit weighing half a ton an stores just 2000 x 48 bit words (plus 2000 x 2 parity bits). Its got Ampex TM4 mag tape drives (not industry standard 7 or 9 track, these are ten track units with hubs the same design as professional audio tapes and the 2 and 3 inch wide video tapes once used by TV broadcasters). Its got readers and punches for 80 column cards and 5, (6 or 7?) and 8 track paper tape, its got a 600 line per minute barrel printer with 120 print positions. The mag tape transfers are done by DMA but the rest and unbuffered peripherals, if you want to print a line on the printer, you check to see what character is in line with the hammers, see if you have any of them in your line, and fire those print hammers which match, then wait until the print barrel moves on then repeat until you have printed the whole line. Then you look up where the paper advance mechanism currently is and select the next sprag and release current one. If you want to page feed, release all the sprags and count the 60 lines as they go past. To punch a card, in software, turn the 3 phase contactor on to start the motor, wait until its at the correct speed, activate the picker knives to start the card in motion (sideways), look to see which if any of your 80 columns need a hole in the first (10) row, wait until that row is under the punch bail, fire those interposers, repeat for the 11 row, then the 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 rows. Then feed the next card and at the same time get ready to verify the card you just punched. Wait until the 10 row is under the check reading wire brushes, read them in and see if they match, repeat for all the other eleven rows, if anything fails to verify, send the card (and the following one) to the reject hopper, stop the punch and inform the operator. > Come on people: there were computers long before there were > microcomputers. And some of them still work and have 'design council' award winning control consoles 4 feet wide and 2 and a bit feet tall, consume 13KVA three phase and weigh about 5 tons. > And many of them were wonderfully different and creative. Indeed. And some of them almost make you cry because so much more could have been done with the same amount of electonics. My machine has been modified to implement an index instruction. Previously all indexing and indirection had to be done by program modification, and even now subroutine return is done that way (see my previous e-mail). I have one machine in 'conserved' state, unmolested, unrepaired non- runner, and one with extra tweeks and darn right mass rewiring which runs and I can't stop thinking about how it could be improved, yet somehow manage to stop myself doing so. There are so many gaps in the instruction code and spare bits in the instructions etc. The only modification I am working on plugs into an extension port lashed up by a previous owner. This is to capture the data from the machine onto modern media. May replace with an RS232 interface later to drive a teletype and/or pen plotter, and/or a parallel inteface for a Friden Flexowriter. Anyone got a spare plug for the i/o port of the Flexowriter, or for an IBM keypunch (model 836) or spare patch leads for the patch panel (4mm with a ball in them). Anyone got a spare Ellliott paper tape reader, preferably 1000 characters per second but a 300cps unit would do. My machine originally had two readers but somehow I only ended up with one of them. Anyone got any spare 'ICL Standard Interface' peripherals I could plug into the vacant port on the machine? Anyone in the UK want an Elliott surface grinder which leaks hydraulic fluid or want an Alba shaper (a planing machine for steel, a brutal thing, takes out about 1/16 - 1/8 at every stroke, comes off bright red). Or a really old pillar drill, large capacity, looks prehistoric. All three phase of course. Again in the UK, anyone got any punched card trays, the steel type, preferably with the racks too, but the trays only would be a help. Willing to pay (reasonable) price for any of the above. Roger Holmes. Classic computer collector, classic car collector, machine tool collector/user (for the prior mentioned hobbies), and for a job, programmer of CAD and graphic software and printer/plotter drivers for Apple computers. > > > > Billy > >

16 years, 9 months

Drum vs. Core

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

> > Core was available by 1952, most of the big machines after this > date (on this side > of the pond at least) were core based. The IBM 650 was actually one > of the smaller > machines, at least inasmuch as IBM was already making much larger > machines > (the 700 series). Wasn't core memory very expensive in the beginning? It had to be hand assembled, at least in the early days. I think there was a more gradual take up than you suggest. Of course the more expensive machines which used it first saw a huge speed increase over drum main memory. When I was at university (71-74), the college's mainframe still used a drum from program overlays (probably really the virtual memory backing storage, but possibly just dumping and restoring the whole program between time slices. The machine was no slouch, it was serving about a hundred terminals and running a couple of batch streams as well (Maximop and George 2). Mid 1970s I remember seeing a small plastic pot about the size of a 35mm film canister, which was full of about 100,000 unstrung cores, they were tiny! They were used in the Marconi-Elliott 920ATC computer and also in the early Cruise missiles and some torpedoes. Ever wondered why a British submarine used a WW2 type torpedo to sink the big Argentinian Cruiser? My theory is that they were too worried about the modern torpedoes coming back and blowing themselves up, so they used one they trusted to go where it was pointed. Hopefully 25 years on, they've sorted out the terrible guidance system. Not related, but apparently the programmers were in a quandary as to what the program should do after it had issued the order to detonate. Like the old TV series 'Waiting for God'. The first machine which ICT introduced with core memory was in 1962, though physically large, the 1300 was a medium power machine, seen more as a versatile tabulator for accounts rather than scientific work, though it had a structural frame analysis package and even PERT, though I suppose that is just up market accounting in a way. Customers did all sorts of other work on it too, helping to design 'planes and even playing music on the built in speaker. There's a wonderful program called Ghost, only a half a dozen instructions, which uses the variable length of the multiply instruction to make a ghostly sound on the speaker. Its a good test of the CPU too, and can be keyed in through the control panel if need be in a minute or so. Also has drums - each one 12000 words x 48 bits run by a 3/4 horsepower motor and occupying 2ft x 2ft x 5 ft. Compared to the 8GB SDHC card for my 12MP camera which is about an inch by an inch by a sixteenth and stores 100,000 times as much in about 1 / 500,000 times the volume. And the core store is one sixth the capacity of the drum in a greater volume.

16 years, 9 months

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test-drb June 2007