Does anyone know the policy of govliquidation.com is on partial auction
disposal?
One small item I want is in a lot with 700 pounds of stuff I definitely
don't want (pipe fittings, valves, etc.). If I bid on the lot and win, I'm
guessing I need to take it all though and pay to have the metal junk
shipped. Anyone delt with this before? Does govliquidation allow you to say
"please throw the rest away" or do I need to approach the shipper? If
someone has done this before, I guess the shipper would charge a disposal
fee to cart off the unwanted stuff? Suggestions?
Thanks!
Jay West
On 3 Jul, 2007, at 18:09, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> From: "Andy Holt" <andyh at andyh-rayleigh.freeserve.co.uk>
> Initially most were printing terminals with
> lights inside, not Teletypes, can't remember the maker's name.
> <<<
> Probably Trend
Maybe, though it doesn't ring any bells in my head.
>
>>>>
> There was also just two CRT terminals, on which you typed a load of
> lines
> and told the computer to read it.
> <<<
> Could well have been "genuine" ICL block-mode terminals
Yes they we ICL badged IIRC, I think the two shared a box on the
floor with the character generator in it.
>
>>>>
> Do you think the drum got kicked out when we went over to the 4S?
> <<<
> Probably when they went to a dual '4S configuration -
> they really tried to have a resilient system - each 4S had its own
> motor-generator set and _all_ the peripherals were "Y"-switched.
>
> The flaw in the configuration only appeared when the power-supply
> to the Y switches failed :-(
>
> [actually, they could have kept running even then, but the Engineers
> naturally refused to work on that without turning the power off]
Seems reasonable. I remember one day the 1900 at QMC went down and we
users were getting annoyed at the delay and we asked what was up, and
were told the air conditioning system had failed and under the raised
floor they had found nearly a foot of water. This was on the fifth
floor! Thinking about it now it's not feasible. The false floor had
ramps up from the normal floor at the computer room entrance, so the
water would have flowed out under the ramp and down the stair well
and lift shaft. Still, the story kept us quiet for a while.
>
>
>>>>
> Was it really that slow! We really put up with a lot back then.
> <<<
>
> I've still got the timings from the acceptance benchmarks and
> have run the same benchmarks on many machines since.
> ** the most important of these benchmarks was the original "Whetstone"
> benchmark - Fortran carefully crafted to not be optimisable*1 - in
> fact
> in ran slower on the optimising compiler than on the standard one.
>
> *1 eventually (20 years later) compiler technology did manage to
> optimise away much of the code.
As an ex-compiler writer (Coral 66) working for a computer
manufacturer, I can say that we considered running the program up to
the first input/output at compile time and starting execution from
there. We figured the resulting benchmark timings would get us called
cheats. Could have calculated the real runtime and halved it I suppose.
My 1301 simulator now runs faster than real time so I'm thinking
about yielding the CPU whenever simulated time gets ahead of real time.
>
>> (I think they were still, however, written in engineers assembler
>> which used
>> numeric op-codes rather than the mnemonics of PLAN or GIN5).
>
>>>>
> Interesting. Maybe it was like my school maths teachers who forced us
> to use fountain pens instead of ball points because it slowed us down
> so we thought more about what we were doing and so made less
> mistakes.
> <<<
> No - it was that the engineers _knew_ the ciruit diagram of the
> processor
> and "000 3 100" was more meaningful to them than "LDX 3 base", say.
I see. I had to write a microprogram assembler once and that was
similar. The words were 72 bits wide and most of the bits just
directly controlled gates in the processor. There was an address
field for jump instructions though, which was more traditional, and I
gave them the facility to define macros for any field, so they could
have defined their own mnemonics for commonly occurring patterns. For
instance some of the bits selected the function in some AMD2900 bit
slices, which could have used the names assigned by AMD.
>>>>
>
> Very difficult. I had always assumed the executive lived at a fixed
> position in memory. Maybe it used relativisers, 1300 style, where
> every instruction could specify what block start address should be
> added to it, but maybe that would slow down loading the overlays too
> much.
> <<<
> The fixed part of Exec loaded at 0 - but the overlays could be on any
> 64-word boundary.(actually, probably 128 word - but the code would
> have
> worked
> on a 54 word boundary)
>
>>>>
> I wonder if any of the concepts in the 1302 executive got re-
> used on 1900.
> <<<
> I don't know, but I doubt it - wasn't the 1300 series a Stevenage
> design,
> while the earliest 1900s came from West Gorton (well, actually the
> earliest 1900 was the Canadian FP6000).
> Different parts of ICL had very much a "not invented here" attitude
> and
> the previous West Gorton product was Atlas.
1300/1301 was designed by Raymond Bird who worked for British
Tabulating Machines at Letchworth (starting with adapting someone
else's design to make the HEC / ICT200 series), then presumably moved
to the joint BTM / GEC subsidiary Computer Developments Ltd at Kenton
where he did the 1300/1301 design. I am not sure who/where adapted it
to make the multi-programmed 1302 (maximum 4 programs at once). Am I
right in thinking Atlas did not have an executive?
>
>>>>
> Maybe ICL had been bumping up the maintenance charges for old kit
> they really did not want to support any more.
> <<<
> That wouldn't have affected us - we had our own engineers and did
> our own maintenance. I suspect we were the only none-MOD site
> in that position. I wish I had saved more of the engineering
> documentation -
> 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?
Can you run George 3 without an executive? I only got involved as a
user (Maximop/George 2 at QMC and IIRC, George 4 at RAE Fanrborough)
so know almost nothing about operating the machine. Odd facts did
trickle down though, switch 9 was used to disable the overflow
exception, and SWON 9 and SWOFF 9 in software around the place where
I was packing characters into a word would make my program run. Funny
how the most trivial things stick in your head for decades.
Just received this - I have no idea where the machines are
located, nor any other information not present in the quote
below:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I have 8 apple IIe computers, plus power strips, cards, and software
that are headed for the dumpster. Do you know anyone who would like
to have them? Iknow this stuff sells on e-bay but I don't want to
bother. Please call me (530) XXX XXXX. I don't have e-mail at home
and am no longer at this school site. I hope to hear from you about
possible options. Thank you. Toni
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I have sufficient IIe's - if anyone else wants to follow this up,
please contact me off-list and I will forward the phone number.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
> 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.
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
> a secret lab in Palo Alto
> Overall the story the web page tells is pretty entertaining.
uh huh..
No one who wanted to stay anonymous would say "first exposure to a Tixo during grad school".
There only was ONE TX-0 and it was at MIT, so it is "Tixo" or "the Tixo" not "a Tixo". Even
if it was a typo, the grad students who used TX-0 and were living near Palo Alto in the
mid-80's is pretty small. I can actually only think of one person, but I doubt he was
involved with this :-)
Besides:
How do you build a "secret" 5 story underground facility in Palo Alto with and
1) have the right number of cars in the parking lot and
2) not hit the water table. The industrial parts of PA are either
in the flats next to 101 and the SF Bay or are near Foothill Expressway where
almost all of the industrial parks are owned by Stanford.
>From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
---snip---
>
> 1) The hard disk (Shugart SA4008) drive belt seems to have a habit of
>running 1mm or so out of line at startup, resulting in it rubbing against
>the chassis beneath the spindle pulley. Once it picks up speed it sorts
>itself out, but I was wondering whether there's any adjustment in either
>the spindle pulley or drive motor in order to get it to run a little
>better?
>
Hi
This is an indication that the belt is slipping. Three things. Either
the belt is loose, it has dust on it or the belt has taken a set
>from the crown.
You should try cleaning first. If the drive doesn't retract the
heads, be vary careful to not rotate the disk pull backwards.
If you do, it will trash the disk if the head is on the disk.
The motor is usually on a slotted mount to adjust tension.
The belt can be flipped over if it shows too much deforming
>from the crowned pulley.
Dwight
_________________________________________________________________
http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migrati…
>>> Sun Carrera Memory
>>
>> What on earth is a "Sun Carrera"?
>
> "Carrera" is the Sun 3/100 CPU, sold in systems as the 3/75,
> 3/140, 3/150, 3/160, and 3/180 depending on the chassis it's plugged
> into. It's built around a 68020 at 16MHz, and has 4MB of RAM onboard.
>
> -Dave
This is just the memory expansion board- 2 or 4 MB (not sure right now)
with the proper P2 wiring to expand a "Carrera" CPU (or the 3/110 CPU,
I think.)
I can ship some stuff if I need to, but for now it looks like the Sun
stuff (sans SS5) and the Diablo are claimed (not sure if the Diablo
desirer is local or not, it's a bit big.).
> The DOMAIN OS sources were released outside of Apollo to certain
> favored customers (we had a copy of it at our university).
If you are still in contact with the sysadmins, ask if they have archived
copies. It may actually be easier to ask permission for an old archived
copy than to try to dig it up internally from an aquired HP product line.
Spent a fun morning messing around with a PERQ 1, which is the first time I've
ever got the chance to actually sit in front of a working example...
A few questions:
1) The hard disk (Shugart SA4008) drive belt seems to have a habit of
running 1mm or so out of line at startup, resulting in it rubbing against the
chassis beneath the spindle pulley. Once it picks up speed it sorts itself
out, but I was wondering whether there's any adjustment in either the spindle
pulley or drive motor in order to get it to run a little better?
2) From PNX, Is there an official way of logging out a user on the console
other than ^Z? (^D, logout, exit etc. don't work)
3) Shutdown procedure - is 'bye' sufficient or do I need to be doing
something else first? The manual's a little ambiguous on this (and 'bye' alone
executes so unbelievably quickly that it made me worry it wasn't correctly
flushing files, parking heads etc.)
(I seriously love that hard disk - it's got a wonderful backyard-engineering
made-from-washing-machine-parts feel to it :-)
cheers
Jules
