Hi Folks,
As many of you know, the venerable Mike Quinn Electronics in San
Leandro, CA (down by the Oakland Airport) closed last Saturday with
virtually no advance notice. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area,
you know Mike Quinn is the one of the very last of the nitty gritty
electronics salvage shops left, with an emphasis on gritty.
I stopped by today, and mentioned to Maurice, the owner, that a lot
of people would have liked to have had one last shot at a visit. So,
he has extented an invitation to y'all to visit next week, Tuesday
through Friday February 7-10, 2006, during normal business hours, for
one last shopping spree. He is trying to find a buyer for the stock
in the store. This is almost certainly the last chance to visit. If
you can, it's worth doing whatever you have to do to make the
pilgrimage. Buy some stuff to thank Maurice for keeping it going all
this time.
There are zillions of connectors and components, heaps of
transformers and power supplies, scads of cables and keyboards and
monitors and other PC junk, a jet fighter console or two, a couple of
early 80's HP desktop computers (the ones with built-in BASIC, can't
recall the model numbers), lots of relays, and much more, all
arranged in an archaeologically interesting and un-seismically-safe
way. If you need it, they have it, and they might even be able to
find it.
Mike Quinn Electronics
401 McCormick Street (at the corner of Adams and McCormick)
San Leandro, CA 94577
Brian
Vince Briel's Micro-KIM workshop at VCFX is now open for registration:
http://www.vintage.org/2007/main/workshop.php
$99 which includes the kit and personal instruction from the man, the
myth, the legend himself!
Space is limited and Vince's workshops sell out fast, so get in while you
can.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
-----------------Original Message:
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:48:55 +1000
From: Doug Jackson <doug at stillhq.com>
Subject: Re: 2708 EPROM progreammer - old magazines designs
John S wrote:
> > As 2708s are obsolete few moern programmers support them, apart from a few
> > that cost many $100s. So I thought why not try and build one? I've found
> > references to the following classic magazines, and I would be willing to pay
> > a small fee for photocopies or scans of the articles:
> >
> > Program your next EROM in BASIC. Schematic for a 2708 erasable read only
> > memory reader and programmer which uses parallel IO ports to set data and
> > address. The software to drive the programmer is written in BASIC.
> > Byte - March 1978 page 84 on (main article)
> > Byte - April 1978 page 62 (Byte Bugs)
>
I have a programmer designed by Steve Ciarcia from BYTE - It uses an
8051AH-Basic (The 8051 with basic embedded) as the controller - and
still works a treat - to this day. - Standalone board, interface via
serial. It was fun to see peoples faces when you shipped a ^C down the
serial line, and dropped through to a READY prompt.
I can find the doco for yo, but it is a high end solution to a simple
problem.
Alternately, I'm more than happy to read an eprom for you, and email
contents - I'm in Oz though. Perhaps there is somebody in the US who
could do the same.
Doug
-----------------Reply:
I have one of those as well; alas, it does NOT do 2708's.
To the OP:
I can scan the KB article for you, but the 2708 programmer is
intended to work with a Motorola MEK6800-D2, and consists of
nothing more than 3 transistors to switch the 27V (and a couple
of switches and a socket for the EPROM). It's all done in software.
mike
Does anyone have docs for this beastie? it's an apple-II on a card that
goes into an XT... or does anyone have any interest in it? it's been
sitting on my shelf for ~ 12 years now...
Hey folks...I don't know if there are any Atari hackers around
here; I may be alone...but I wanted to let any interested parties
know that I've located a source for the proprietary connectors that
Atari used for their "SIO" bus, which is used to connect nearly all
of their peripherals in a daisy-chain configuration.
http://www.connectworld.net/cgi-bin/iec/fullpic?AZndUfrS;AT13F;6
I've purchased a connector from the page referenced above, and it
is indeed the right thing.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Farewell Ophelia, 9/22/1991 - 7/25/2007
There's what appears to be a very nice Olivetti Programma 101 up on
eBay, with a little over a day to go and no bids. It's in the Netherlands.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8801280590&sspagename=AD…
The Programma 101 was a very advanced programmable calculator,
introduced in 1965. Discrete transistors, delay-line memory, magnetic
card I/O.
I've exchanged a little bit of email with the seller. He says its been
in storage for a long time, and a couple of rubber belts inside have
turned gooey, but looks to be complete and in otherwise good shape.
If you want a little bit of discrete-transistor goodness, I doubt you
can find it in any smaller package than this (Ok, so a 9100A/B has both
discrete transistors *and* core memory, but the Programma 101 was
earlier.) I don't have any relation to the seller, I just decided that
I wasn't going to bid on this, so I'd make sure the list saw the listing
-- this is a very desirable machine and I figure someone, maybe one of
the UK folks, would go for it.
--Bill
Well, last night, I went and collected my first ever DEC box. It's a
VAXstation 3100/38, bought on eBay for 99p (UK?0.99).
It will be a few weeks until I get it home, and currently, it has no
hard disks, but I'm hoping to rectify that.
I plan to put 2 or 3 old SCSI disks in it - whatever I can find that
will fit. I am sure they'll all be well under 1GB, as I believe that
is a limitation for boot disks. I think I have a couple of 80MB ones
around and maybe a 150MB or so.
The two problems I don't currently have answers for are these.
[1] I don't have a suitable monitor cable. I have a keyboard, 3 mice,
and a DEC 17" mono monitor with a single BNC connector on the back. I
also have a monitor cable, but it's an RGB one - one end is 3
colour-coded BNC connectors, the other is a D plug with three large
shrouded sockets - like the larger connectors in a YB13 monitor cable
but without the standard pins. On the back of the VAX is a monitor out
port, but it's a D connector. Alas the machine is currently 15mi away
or so, so I can't check, but I think it has about 20 pins. Again, a D
connector.
What sort of monitors will a VAXstation drive? I have an old Mac 21"
monitor with a YB13 connector, which syncs happily enough to both PCs
and Macs at around 1024x768, 1280x1024 (at a refresh rate of about
twice a minute) and some Mac res in between - 1152x870 or so. Where on
earth can I find a VAXstation video cable in 2007?
[2] Friends have commented to me that a VAX of this age won't be able
to boot from CD-ROM. Somewhere, I have a hobbyist VMS CD, if I can
find it. It's been suggested to me that the easiest way to install
would be to install VMS onto SIMH on my PC, netboot the VAXstation off
the simulated VAX and install from one to the other. This sounds
moderately hairy to me. I'm not a VMS virgin but I've not used it in
15y or so and I've never installed a machine from scratch - I just did
day-to-day sysop duties.
Is this likely to be correct? That a 3100/38 won't be able to boot
>from CD? If it can, what sort of CD-ROM drive will I need? Do I need
the special 512KB block support that SPARCstations are supposed to
need? I have an old external Apple drive (CD300, I think) that I hope
will do, if I can come up with the right permutations of SCSI cables
to connect it...
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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
I've unearthed a Xerox 820-II, the original boot disk to which has gone
bad. Is there someone here who can create a copy of the original 8" boot
disk and whatever else was shipped with the Xerox 820-II? I have blanks,
but no means to write to them.
--
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?
(Sortof starting a new thread)
There have been a discussion about the ineffectiveness of MSCP recently,
especially compared to a dumb controller interface.
To make a few comments on this; yes the MSCP controller is much more
intelligent. But noone have yet talked about what this means.
The overhead for playing with the MSCP controller is way much more than for a
simple, and stupid controller. However, there is also a big speed gain in some
situations.
Jerome Fines observations are correct. Under a single-user system such as RT-11
(especially of the software acts in a naive way) much of the advantages of MSCP
is lost. The fact that it can deal with large disks (or disks with different
sizes) can hardle be called "intelligent". That's really primitive.
Things that the MSCP protocol do handle, however, and where the HD: driver will
suffer and loose, is when we get into more advanced stuff.
The MSCP controller can have many I/O requests outstanding at the same time.
Once one operation is completed, it can immediately start the next one. You
actually have a zero setup time with MSCP. So if you're doing several I/O
operations in sequence, a good driver, in combination with a good program, will
be able to get more performance out of the MSCP controller than the HD: driver,
which each new operation can only be programmed once the previous operation is
completed.
The MSCP controller can also complete several I/O requests with just one
interrupt. No need for one interrupt for each I/O operation that completes.
The MSCP controller can also reorder I/O operations for better efficiency. If
you have three requests, jumping back and forth over the disk, it makes sense to
actually do the two operations on one end, before doing the operation at the
other end. This can be implemented in software by the HD: controller, but then
we now have more software that must run before each I/O request is issued.
The MSCP controller handles bad block replacement without the involvement of the
software. It always present a disk without bad blocks. In real life, all disks
have bad blocks, so somewhere this always needs to be handled. Now, if you have
a simulated PDP-11, the disk is actually a file on that OS, so the underlaying
OS will handle bad blocks for you, so it isn't necceasry for the PDP-11
controller to do this anymore, but MSCP was designed for raw disks, not emulated
systems. Dealing with bad blocks on the HD: driver would cost a lot.
The MSCP controller can do I/O to several disks in parallel. In real life,
controllers like the HD: driver pretends to talk to exists as well. One problem
with these are that if you have several disks, you can only do I/O to one disk
at a time. Some of these controllers could allow you to do seeks on other disks
while I/O was performed on one disk. However, things started getting complicated
with this.
The MSCP controller have pretty advanced error detection and handling. Including
extensive reports to the software on problems.
Now, those things are why it's more intelligent. And more intelligent means it
also takes more software to talk to it. :-)
MSCP is really like serial SCSI (or serial ATA), only done 20 years earlier.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
This is directed primarily at those in or near the Puget Sound region.
Fellow techies,
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I have learned that Boeing Surplus's retail store will be closing permanently at the end of this year. The last day for retail operations will be Friday, December 21st. This decision was revealed to the employees on July 13th. Boeing has, for unknown reasons, made no apparent effort to publicize it.
The news left me in shock when I first heard. Boeing's been operating that store for at least 30 years, and it has become something of a local icon for the region.
I have spoken with some contacts I still have inside the company, and have been told that the "official" word is that it was costing more to run the store than it was bringing in. I'm not at all certain I believe this -- If true, I think it would have happened a lot earlier on, and certainly with more frequency. The surplus store is cyclical, just like the manufacturing side, and I don't see how its possible that they could run into a perpetual downward trend.
The excuse was also made that the volume and variety of equipment going through the retail level was falling too far off to justify maintaining the store. There is, to my mind, a simple answer for that -- Simply route more equipment through retail, rather than selling it off in bulk to the big-dollar wholesalers! This is especially true where test gear is concerned.
In short: I don't believe that this is a smart move by Boeing. Quite the contrary! I think it's the dumbest stunt they've pulled since selling off their commercial avionics unit to BAE.They have a very loyal customer base, and a large core of 'regulars' for the surplus store, myself included, and I for one do not intend to let this issue simply die off without a fight.
If you agree, and you want to make your voice heard on this issue, I ask that you do two things.
(1) SPREAD THE WORD!!!! I have no clue why Boeing hasn't made this more public, but my speculation is that they know, full well, how loyal a following the store has and they're trying to avoid a public backlash. If that is the case, I would like nothing better than to see that plan backfire!
(2) Make a POLITE contact with the office of Mr. Tim Copes, president of Boeing's Shared Services Group (they're in charge of all surplus programs, companywide), and ask that the decision to close the store be reversed.
Mr. Copes' office can be contacted at: (425) 865-7501
If you wish to mail a letter, you can do so to this address:
Mr. Tim Copes
Boeing Shared Services Group
Mailstop 6R7-01
PO Box 3707
Seattle, WA 98124
Will it work, if enough noise is made? Who knows? Honestly, I don't think there's much chance of saving the current store in its current form, given the time it has left.
HOWEVER -- If enough voices are raised, it may convince the company to provide a meaningful alternative, or perhaps even open another store down the road a stretch.
Thanks for reading.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com
kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with surreal ports?"
