A recent basement re-arrange has left me with no room for a rack
cabinet I wasn't using that much anyway. I hate to get rid of it,
because I'll want one again someday, but for now it's got to go.
It's beige/brown color, unknown manufacturer. About 6' high with
sides but no front or back doors. It does *not* have the standard
front-mounting 19" screw rails except for a movable section of about
18" which bolts into side-facing rails. I think these adapters can
be purchased online.
What it does have is 9 sets (2 aluminum, the rest heavy steel) of "L"
brackets that run the depth of the rack and mount anywhere on the
inward-facing screw holes. The steel ones are very strong and could
hold a rackmount server, 9-track drive or other heavy items.
The rack is large but pretty light; I moved it down to the basement
myself. It has no wheels but I've built a wheel-dolly for it.
I'm asking $150 for it, or trade for something cool (and smaller!) I
was going to put it on ebay as pickup-only, but thought I'd offer it
here first. Obviously it would be for pick-up (Palatine, IL, NW of
Chicago) only here as well.
-j
On 6 Jul, 2007, at 18:07, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> From: "Andy Holt" <andyh at andyh-rayleigh.freeserve.co.uk>
>
>>>>
> Back to the original post, does anyone know if there is a difference
> between the "operators Exec for a 1900" and the executive used by
> engineers and recorded on 7 track mag tape? Would this be of any use?
> <<<
>
> Does that imply that you - or someone you know has such a tape???
Whilst working on my 1301, I was chatting to a friend who was an ICT/
ICL field engineer and later manager into the Fujitsu years. I told
him that all copies of 1900 executive have been lost and he said that
he might have a copy tucked away but that, if he had it at all it was
on 7 track tape and we don't have a deck to read it, but maybe
someone somewhere has a way of reading a tape which has not been
touched for many years.
I will let you know if he finds it, but don't hold your breath, like
me he has a lot of buildings and does not go in some of them for long
periods.
With the 1301 we have a copy of 'Initial Orders' on the drum, a
numeric dump of a slightly different version from another machine and
also (dyleine?) copies of the original manuscript. Its only two drum
bands (so less than 800 instructions), but it is the nearest thing to
an operating system that the 1301 had.
The 1302 Exec has not survived, nor even details of all the extra
instructions in the machine, we know everything about a few, sketchy
details from sales literature for others and there are probably a few
we know nothing about. A recent documentary series "The Trap, What
Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom" had clips of old footage, and in
one there was a chap with a book open at a page showing what I
immediately recognised as a 1300 instruction summary, the only
coloured page in the 1300 programming manual. On freeze framing it
and comparing with the 1300/1301 version, I see the arrangement is
quite a bit different, and I think it must be a 1302 manual, but of
course the image resolution, even on the original 16mm film would
probably not allow it to be read, and certainly not off the video now
on YouTube.
>
> anyhow, to answer the question - "it all depends"
>
> I've only limited knowledge of the Engineers test programs tho' I
> think I
> have some notes somewhere.
> So some of what follows may not be precisely correct.
>
> Most test programs were normally run under operators exec and were
> stored on
> a normal program library tape
> (these were tapes with a search program (#TAPE) at the start and
> the rest of
> the programs in any order following.)
>
> The engineers (raw machine) test tape would have started with a
> minimal
> exec-mode bootstrappable search program at the
> start (really only a program loader - not a full exec). This would
> have been
> followed by the exec-mode test programs which
> were presumably in a bootstrap format. Our engineers usually ran
> such basic
> test programs from paper tape - this may have been
> because that process relied on less of the system being operational
> that the
> process of finding and loading one from MT.
Well, when and if he finds it, maybe what's written on the spool will
give us a clue to if its any use or not.
>
> Of course, as always!, the system faults that one remembers were not
> detected by the test programs ...
> (On the 1905E one time odd things happened with the Limit register
> - that
> took some locating;
> On the Honeywell dual-processor, one of the two processors started
> giving
> some wrong results in floating-point -
> and as it was (almost) SMP this had effectively random results that
> took
> some locating)
We've had some weird ones with Flossie too. We found a fault three
weeks ago, all the read-modify-write instructions were randomly
causing a subsequent instruction to fail, about once a minute. This
is just long enough to get from the console to the oscilloscope, so
you start a program and it seems like the machine is being a bitch
and waiting for you to NEARLY get to find out what is wrong, but not
quite letting you do it. At the heart of the machine is a shift
register which is supposed to have exactly one '1' in it at all
times. The duration of the instruction is controlled by how far along
the register the '1' gets. With two of us working on the fault, I was
probing various signals and eventually we traced the fault to the
shift register when my friend shouted over that the fault had seemed
to have disappeared. I found that the impedence/resistance of the
scope probe on one of 25 pins on one of 4000 cards seemed to make the
fault disappear (and reappear when removed). We think we were getting
two '1's in the shift register, but anyway, we changed that PCB and
all has been well since.
Roger.
Zane,
A few months ago, I came across Flying Buffalo ( http://www.flyingbuffalo.com ), an old PBM company founded in 1970 that is still running. I contacted the owner who still had records of my account from 30 years ago! He says I have 95 cents left in my account, though I didn't ask if that was in 1976 dollars.
Kinda pulling this back on-topic, when I played back in the late 1970's, every 2-weeks or so I would receive the new game status on yellow teletype paper!
He says, ( http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/history.htm ) they first rented time on a CDC 3300, then later bought a Raytheon 704 minicomputer- over $30,000 total. "Sigh. And it only had 4K of memory!". From there they bought a Poly 88 computer kit, a North Star Horizon and then IBM clones.
He also told of a letter from "The Avalon Hill Game Company saying they weren't going to print my ad
for "computer moderated pbm" in the classified ads of "The General" (a wargaming magazine) until
I sent them a letter of permission from whoever owned the computer that
I was using(!)". He also ran into trouble with the zoning inspector: "if you wanted to have a home business, you couldn't have anything that
a normal person wouldn't have in their home, and normal people didn't
have a computer in their living room."
Today he's still using older methods for game play (snail mail, email, fax) but says using the web for entering game play is the next step.
Scott
----- Original Message ----
From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com>
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 9:51:15 PM
Subject: Re: A little levity: "computerized FRPG"
...
These sound more like the old PBM strategy games rather than a RPG.
I think you'd send in your move for the turn, as would everyone else,
and then you'd get the results back.
...
I've no idea the state of such games, I suspect they're all dead. How
many people are going to spend a few dollars per turn, with what was
probably a couple week, at least, turn around. This would actually
be an interesting area of study from both the gaming standpoint, and
the classic computer standpoint. I'd love to see some of the
software that was used to control these games, however, I'd guess
that most were written by the person running the game, and most of
the software has been lost.
I do know that many gamers play online, either via email, or other solutions.
...
Zane
____________________________________________________________________________________
Pinpoint customers who are looking for what you sell.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
I've aquired one of these...
I found a great archive of information at:
http://www.berklix.org/symmetric/
However the ftp link to the software archive is no good.
There doesn't seem to be a way to contact this person other than by an
international
call.
Anyone know Julian Stacey or have a copy of the Symmetric 375 software ?
Haven't tried to boot the unit yet... it does have a hard drive.
So... any other Symmetric 375 owners out there ?
-- Curt
From a Craigslist ad (I am not affiliated with the seller, all
correspondence should go to the sellers email):
http://austin.craigslist.org/sys/367449526.html
Body of the ad:
I have several old i486 systems, drives, monitors,Keyboards, mouse,
modems, ethernet and other cards, vintage software, and guides for mac,
apple, basic, etc...
Also search user KRLMFL on Ebay for other vintage computers and books!
Have 1984 HP 150 touchscreen stack computer system!
Looking for anything specific?
I have loads of stuff, all from '93 and beyond...
Raybob13 at windstream.net
On 3 Jul, 2007, at 23:35, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
> From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
>>> I probably have enough to make a very close approximation on a FPGA,
>>> but there doesn't seem to be a survivng operators Exec for a 1900,
>>> only George 3 stuff.
>>
>> Oh, from which I presume there are no surviving 1900s?
>
> There looks to be one at the Science Museum's Wroughton facility
> (and a 1500)
> - trouble is it's hard to judge from the asset listing how complete
> it/they
> are. And of course, even if they are complete, how many years of
> effort it
> would take to make operational. And of course, what software they
> have even
> assuming the hardware could be made to run. :-(
I should of course said operational 1900s. Nice to know the hardware
is around anyway. I never came across a 1500, though there is a
description of one in the programming notices folder I got with my
1301. I understand they were ICL badged RCA machines and that RCA and
ICL used the same 'standard' interface so presumably 1302, 1500
series, 1900 series and modified 1301s could all use the same
peripherals, if they had suitable driving software of course.
Back to the original post, does anyone know if there is a difference
between the "operators Exec for a 1900" and the executive used by
engineers and recorded on 7 track mag tape? Would this be of any use?
Roger.
Hi all.
anybody near Manchester want to take a risk?
My ex-wife has posted on the local freecycle list a "pile of
electronic gubbins". Unfortunately we're not speaking, and she's not
going to let me within a mile of the place. But from the posting, a
message passed by a friend, and reading between the lines, it looks
like it's going to be everything I ended up leaving behind when I
left, about 8 years ago (and which I'd subsequently been told had been
disposed of).
It therefore /may/ include:
complete act sirius 1 and external hard disc
apricot xen and external isa expansion chassis
microfive 8088 based multi-user system
amstrad pc512 in bits
SUN 600Mb external scsi drive (was huge!)
composite colour monitor
plus the usual pc junk, but probably nothing under 10 years old!
and it may incude none of those... she's insistant on an
all-or-nothing pickup as she's moving, and knows nothing of whats
there and cant describe it.
However if anybody is nearby and fancies taking a chance on getting
some classic kit, let me know and I'll pass on contact details. I
don't know how much interest she'll get from the freecycle list direct
so best be quick...
Rob
>Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 10:02:19 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com>
>Subject: Nice - SCSI to IDE converter (eBay Australia)
>http://cgi.ebay.com/SCSI-to-IDE-converter_W0QQitemZ170126238112QQihZ007QQca…
>
>are these hard to come by (or make even!). Seems like
>a darned handy thing to have around.
They are fairly easy to get, but the list price on the ones with
which I am familiar is in the neighborhood of $70. It kind of guts
the economy of putting affordable IDE devices on your SCSI chain.
Acard makes a variety of adapters, with the variation being different
flavors of SCSI. The narrow ultra-SCSI adapter is the AEC-7220U.
If you visit Acard's website you will find that their price on it is
$69, but I think they ship from Taiwan or some such. It is better
to find the US distributers and buy from them (if you're in the USA).
IIRC the USA distributers are getlaptop.com and microlandusa.com.
Newegg sells some Acard products, but I don't know if they carry the
SCSI to IDE adapters.
The Acard models have (?) extended LBA support or whatever it is
called when disks larger than 137 GB are supported. It might be
kind of funny to put a 500 GB IDE drive ($90 w/ free shipping at
Frys.com; Seagate 5yr warranty) on some machine from the late 80's
with an unenhanced SCSI port. How long would it take to write the
whole disk at 3 MB/s?
Jeff Walther
[keywords: unibus, pdp-11, disk controller emulation]
If anyone has an interest in low level unibus, I scanned in some screen
shots from my simple HP1650 and updated my udisk page. Nothing exotic,
just basic register reads, npr & br5.
http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/udisk/index.html
I finally put the async cpld aside and started debugging the simple
synchronous state machine. The sync version works much better and is
(as you'd expect) much faster. I have some more debugging to do but
basic register i/o and dma work well and the cpu can now easily keep up.
I hope to prove out the prototype this summer and do a spin modulo
work load.
(last week all 3 of my 'real jobs' stalled simultaneously - woo hoo!
this week i have a pcb board stuck in customs in boston, so my fun
work is getting a time slot or two :-)
-brad
