> he has not enough web space for
> anywhere near the amount of data which needs to be published.
I'd be happy to include the data on bitsavers.
ICT/ICL documents and software are quite rare in the US.
Yo,
I need about 50 UV erasable 27c256 for a project. Anyone have a stash
they'd be willing to part with reasonably priced?
--
Steve Robertson
steerex [at] ccvn [dot] com
I have at long last sold one of my two ICT 1301 computers, built in
1962.
I will soon want to supply the purchaser with original manuals,
technical drawings, software listings, tapes, punched cards etc, some
of which are now unique.
Before doing this I would like to put these into modern machine
readable form so they can be published on the web.
I am interested in how I can go about this for each of the different
types of information, which varies from hand written coding sheets
(which include the comments which were never punched onto the cards)
through 80 column cards in BCD code extended in a non IBM way (not
EBDIC), to drawings about A1 size (US 'D' size or 22" by 34" approx)
which are too big to scan and stitch together and too frail for a drum
scanner.
The punched cards include columns representing all the number 0 to 15
plus 1/4, 1/2, 3/4. I even have some 160 column cards, same as 80
column cards but with two round hole positions in each normal
rectangular hole position. I can read the 80 column cards but not the
160 column ones.
Though I have been aware of, and used Bitsavers for some time, I
thought their aim was mainly archiving the microprocessor era until I
deleted the tail of URL of a page and looked at the home page with a
description of the project. It seems that the information I have is
part of exactly what they are seeking to archive.
I estimate I have 300-400 drawings, 90,000 punched cards, 50 manuals,
3000 coding sheets and 1000 sheets specifying source, destination and
route of every signal in the computer. There are also 300 off 1/2 inch
magnetic tapes but these are 10 track (Ampex TM4) tapes and I think
only my 1301 will be able to read them.
I am in the south eastern corner of England if that makes a difference.
Your thoughts on how to do this in an efficient manner, what formats
to use, sources of help and equipment to do the job and anything else
you would like to throw in.
> Strangely, bitsavers doesn't have the Monitor II-D reference.
I've not had time to scan any of the 1620 material in CHM's collection.
The 1620 cards at CHM were read and indexed a while ago, and I read
some more from Doug Martin recently.
I hadn't looked at Dave Babcock's 1620 web site in a long time, looks like
nothing much was ever filled in for it. That's sad, since we have quite a
bit of information on the machine.
http://www.computerhistory.org/projects/ibm_1620/
and
http://jowsey.com/java/sim1620/
> Why don't they just send the tapes to CHM? They have a wall of 729 tape drives
There is no good reason for them to be considering a 729, other than apparently they
couldn't find another 7-track drive in Oz.
Off-line conversations from several people have strongly suggested to them not
to attempt recovery using a 40+ year old tape drive.
I *may* soon be acquiring a NeXT slab. Snag is, while it has mouse,
keyboard etc., it has no monitor.
Does anyone know about what kind of connector I'd need to connect a
plain ol' VGA type monitor to it?
I don't yet know if it's a colour or a mono slab. If it's a mono one,
I have an old Sun 19" mono monitor I could use (13W3, I think?), and
indeed an old Viking II Mac 19" mono (DB9, IIRC) and a colour 21" that
always swaps green and red over, on both Macs and PCs, for no reason I
can determine (It has a Mac lead, and I've tried on both Macs and PCs
thru' a Mac-PC convertor). Any chance of connecting any of them to it?
I've only been in this hobby for a quarter of a century or so and the
first 5-10y it was either a TV set or CGA. I know nothing about all
these older monitor connections... :?(
--
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 don't know if it's enough to keep us from now seeing
> 20 planes filtering out onto ebay...
Unlikely. "posthuman" buys a lot.
Sadly, it will not be part of the CHM collection.
> Look at what Al Kossow has managed to do with bitsavers. Yup, a lot of
> "collectible" documents have undergone spine-ectomies, but had he simply
> rented a warehouse and shelved everything, I'd guess that none of us
> would have heard, much less benefited from, bitsavers.
> In the real world "good enough" trumps "ideally."
Exactly. You can collect paper of marginal historical
value faster and with greater volume than you can afford to store it.
There is absolutely no way that I can afford to keep the paper that I
currently have, and have been working on triage and recycling for several
years now. Bitsavers is just under 100gb right now. That is a LOT of linear
feet of paper!
I've been scanning hundreds of magazine dups at CHM for the past two months
just to OCR and index the text for research on the exhibit we are building.
I'm not concerned about the images of the ads (including the WPS ones). We
approached other institutions, and they were not interested in the paper.
The spines were cut, and have been scanned using a high speed sheet feeder.
They are worth more to researchers as indexed bits than as pallets of dead
trees.
Newsprint is an even worse problem.
