I have a Victor 9000 I'm restoring here, and I have a few questions:
1. Where do the two plugs for the 5 1/4 drive heads connect? This system
has the Universal bios, a 10MB winchester HDD with DOS 3.1x and the
later 1.44MB GCR/MFM floppy installed, but I can only seem to get one of
the drive heads working (using catweasel on PC to dump a 'formatted'
disk afterwards results in clear data spikes on one side and the other
side blank, and format.exe won't format disks properly unless given the
/1 1-sides flag)
2. The victor 9000 does NOT say anything when I turn it on. I know the
Sirius 1 did, but I'm not sure the Victor does. Is this normal, or does
the system need the HC-55564 delta modulation chip replaced?
3. Does anyone have a schematic or service manual for the victor
9000/sirius 1 anywhere?
I also discovered that both of the victor keyboards I have need
re-foaming between the contact discs and key plungers, which is gonna be
a whole bunch of fun to do.</sarcasm> They also both need new snap-tabs
on them as both of the tabs have the tooth broken off (though they work
fine other than having to hit keys really hard and the cord occasionally
falling out of the computer)
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgevaryahu(@t)hotmail(d0t)com
jzg22(@t)drexel(d0t)edu
P.S. Does anyone have dumps of the older BIOSes for the system? The
universal one is the 'last' one of at least three I know existed. More
than one version of the universal one may exist. The one I have is
labeled 'V9000 UNIV. FE F3F7 13DB' and 'V9000 UNIV. FF F3F7 39FE' with
respective crc32s of 25C7A59F and 496C7467 for each ROM. The sum16s
match the last part of the labels, i.e. 13DB and 39FE.
P.P.S. does anyone have documentation for the winchester disk controller
it used? I'm trying to make a raw binary dump of the hard drive,
preserving partition tables, information, etc. and the only way I can
see of doing it is to use BASICA to poke and peek at the proper memory
addresses to make the disk do its thing.
Hmmm - the MT985 likely uses a polled protocol at RS-485 levels. It wants to
hook up to the B1955 Multi-line controller fer instance. You would hang a
bunch of these on a multi-drop line. The Multi-line would throw-out a poll
sequence and get either an ACK or NACK from each terminal on the line. If
the ACK happens, the terminal is then told to send in a block of data.
If memory serves - it has 3 separate micros in it, and the software running on
it was written in Pascal. These came out around 1981-2.
Steve Wilson (worked on the B1955/B1965 design)
>>Being Burroughs, it may be VERY WEIRD. Sort of somewhere between smart
>> (IBM) and dumb (DEC). It will probably only want to talk to a
>> Burroughs.
>
>Hey, I like weird! But yeah...I'm getting the impression from the
>manual this is not an ordinary serial term (though it does have an EIA
>interface.) I don't think it emulates anything, except maybe other
>Burroughs terms.
It has been almost 20 years since I used that stuff, I did work on
Burroughs on mainframe-PC integration and terminal subsystem stuff for
three years, so I should remember some of it, shouldn't I?
Almost no one was using MT-985 when I got there in 86. We all had ET-1100s
and ET-2000s (a Burroughs PC clone that was also a Burroughs terminal). I
don't recall them having any dumb serial terminal capability.
It was a block mode terminal where the mainframe application would send
down the form (a mix of text and formatting codes) in one chunk and the
terminal would display it, then the use would fill in the fields and send
it back to the application in a block when the user hit the transmit key.
Electrically, we always used a two-wire interface (TDI or Two Wire Direct
Interface). I recall that the connector was a DB-25, but only two pins
were used, but that could just be bad memory.
The protocol used to communicate with the terminals was called Poll/Select.
It was half duplex. The terminal processor (can't remember what those were
called in Burroughs-speak) would go through the terminals attached to it
and query them to see if they had anything to send and, if a terminal did,
it would.
Given how hard it is to find info on Burroughs stuff these days, I wish that
had saved more stuff when I left.
alan
Just checked, all of the files on ftp.berklix.com are gone
Bernd Kopriva is on the list, hopefully he mirrored it.
Dumping the boot proms would be a good thing.
I haven't heard anyone discuss this yet: what causes traces on some old
PCBs to wrinkle and not others? My guess is a combination of suboptimal
glue and wide temperature swings.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
------------------- Original Message:
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:47:36 -0500
From: "Jason T" <silent700 at gmail.com>
Subject: Need docs for Burroughs term
I've just picked up an old Burroughs terminal, model# appears to be
MT-985, and I'm having trouble finding documentation for it. It came
with a manual for the ET-1100 model which provides some clues, but the
key sequences to get into the setup for baud rate, etc appear to be
different.
Anyone have any experience with these? It's a cute little terminal
and the keyboard has a key lock on it - never seen that before.
----------------- Reply:
Can't help with the MT-985, but if it's anything like its TD700/800
predecessors it probably had various interface options; the TD's
could be configured for RS-232/BDI async, sync, IBM bisync or
multipoint, and could also have cassette drives, a mag card reader
and/or a printer attached.
In case anyone has one, I do have tech manuals and some parts
for the TD700 & TD800 terminal series.
mike
I recently came across a stock of what seems to be 16 bit wide memory chips.
But I'm getting nowhere trying to find a data sheet. Can anybody help out?
The parts are UM61M512K-15, 32 pins DIP. The logo is round, world shaped
with 3 vertical and 3 horizontal lines. Date codes are 95 and 96.
The parts were on some mini-486 PCBs.
If these really are 16 bit wide and 32K deep, they would be great for a SBC
I'm building. Especially if the 15 means 15 ns.
Any help for pinouts or data sheet greatly appreciated.
Billy
>From: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca>
>
>dwight elvey wrote:
>>Right now, we are at the power density limits for uP's. We can
>>build smaller ones and put more circuits on a chip but we've
>>hit the limits of power density. We get smaller improvements
>>from lower K insulation on wiring but power is now the wall.
>>Dwight
>
>Does this mean that if we reduce the number of transistors
>we can go faster? Let see a PDP 8/Z(1) with current technology
>would be? :) I think the problem is computer design rather
>than the chip design -- You don't have random access memory
>any more & salesmen push clock speed rather than a usefull
>measure of computing power.
>
No, it means that you need to be more clever with the transistors
that are there. The architectures of today's CPU's are doing several
times as much per clock cycle than your PDP8 did.
The problem is that they are also running out of tricks in a single
CPU. That is why your seeing multi processors becoming more
popular.
I'm not sure where the future methods will go but they are still
holding to Moore's law, just not with increased clock speed as
the driving force any more.
Dwight
_________________________________________________________________
Don't get caught with egg on your face. Play Chicktionary!?
http://club.live.com/chicktionary.aspx?icid=chick_hotmailtextlink2
Did you ever scan the manual for the Intel uScope 820? I have one, and I
have the 8080 pod/probe/cable, and the 6K PRO module, but no documentation
whatsoever. Whatever you have would be appreciated!
If you have a scan of the manual and/or the service manual and can send it
to me I'd be very very happy!
Gary Sloane
SB/US Engineering Inc.
_________________________________________________________________
http://newlivehotmail.com
>
>Subject: Re: Need Data Sheet
> From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:08:19 -0500
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>On 7/9/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>> OTOH, there's a nice 16bit SRAM in some modems, such as the Hayes
>> 28.8K external models. In an 0.300" wide DIP too.
>
>Oooh... that could be fun to play with. I didn't figure that a cache
>SRAM was anything other than 4-bits wide (386/486 era) or 8-bits wide
>(486/Pentium era), especially since I've used a bog standard cache RAM
>on an 1802, but knowing there really are 16-bit-wide SRAMs could be
>fun for, say, a 68000-based board, or even throwing away 4 bits and
>using it as a 12-bit-wide single part for a PDP-8.
>
>Any idea what the part number might be for that RAM chip? Vendor?
It's a 8bit wide part I have a bag of those and similar parts.
FYI they are 15ns and for super fast memory systems as in cache
but for fast systems they are the cats meow.
>
>-ethan
