The Sun building was Ford Aerospace on the Palo Alto side
of San Antonio road.
> Actually, it looks like the abandoned Pabst brewery has more
> interesting electronics in it.
yup, the vt100 was there as part of a supervisory control system
the company I worked for installed in the mid 70's. Industrial 14's
and an 11/34. You don't forget the smell around those brewing kettles
or the fact they served beer in the lunch room.
On Feb 7, 2008 6:16 AM, <cctalk-request at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 19:39:17 +0000
> From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at usap.gov>
> Subject: Re: VAX-11730 (was Any word on OS/2 for PDP-11?)
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Message-ID: <20080206193917.GC17779 at usap.gov>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 08:12:11AM -0800, Bob Armstrong wrote:
> > >Ethan Dicks wrote:
> >
> > >The 11/730 (and 11/725) has an on-board FEP - an 8085. You talk to
> > >it much in the same way as you do to the LSI-11 in an 11/780, except
> > >its console medium is TU58 tape, not RX01 disk. Syntactically, though,
> > >I believe it's similar (I know the KA730 well, but not the KA780).
> >
> > Indeed, the 730 CFE (Console Front End or FEP) was very much like the
> 780
> > - the commands were similar and the 730 even used indirect command files
> for
> > functions like booting and power up loading of microcode. All the
> > microstore on the 730 was RAM; the only ROM was a little EPROM that
> booted
> > the 8085 operating system from the console TU58. Everything else - all
> the
> > CPU microcode, the microcode for the IDC (integrated disk controller)
> the
> > FPA microcode, and VMB - were all loaded from the TU58. Although the
> 8085
> > operating system was some custom thing DEC wrote themselves, the TU58s
> used
> > an RT11 file system (again, just like the 780) and you could easily
> > manipulate them with EXCHANGE or FILEX.
>
> That all sounds familiar.
>
> > The bad news was that TU58s are really, really, slow. With all the
> > microcode and indirect files that had to be read from the TU58, your 730
> > could easily take ten minutes from power on to the point where VMB was
> even
> > ready to start thinking about loading VMS. When working on one, you
> want to
> > do everything you can to avoid turning off the CPU box power:-)
>
> Using the stock console tapes from DEC, that was absolutely true. One of
> the scripts I wrote a while back, built a load-order optimized console
> tape.
> I think the 8085 must cache the directory, since the tape doesn't seek
> back
> to the directory blocks between each file. With the files in the right
> order,
> the file transfer time doesn't change, but the file-to-file time is just
> about
> nil (I think there may be one seek from end-to-end because of how many
> files
> there are to read and the block interleave on the tape).
>
> > Because everything about the KA730 microcode was "soft", it's fairly
> easy
> > to change the CPU microcode, update the console TU58 and reboot to
> change
> > the CPU behavior. I believe DEC even sold a set of microprogramming
> tools
> > for the 730, but I've never seen them and I don't know what's become of
> them
> > today.
>
> Back in the day, I remember occasionally seeing docs on PDP-11
> microcoding,
> but I don't recall seeing anything for any model of VAX.
>
> -ethan
>
To do it on the 11/780 you needed to putchase the optional second WCS
(Writable Control Store) board. The first WCS board was used for patches
for microcode bugs from DEC.
>
> --
> Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 6-Feb-2008 at
> 19:20 Z
> South Pole Station
> PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -48.6 F (-44.8 C) Windchill -75.5 F (-59.7C)
> APO AP 96598 Wind 8.2 kts Grid 50 Barometer 675.4 mb (10802
> ft)
>
> Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov
> http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
>
>
>
--
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com
Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at usap.gov> skrev:
>> Because everything about the KA730 microcode was "soft", it's fairly easy
>> to change the CPU microcode, update the console TU58 and reboot to change
>> the CPU behavior. I believe DEC even sold a set of microprogramming tools
>> for the 730, but I've never seen them and I don't know what's become of them
>> today.
>
> Back in the day, I remember occasionally seeing docs on PDP-11 microcoding,
> but I don't recall seeing anything for any model of VAX.
I have the documentation for the VAX-86x0 micromachines... And I have the hardware.
Want to do something? :-)
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
http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/sun_microsystems.htm
Rows of servers? A heck of a mess, there, and I have no idea what I'm
looking at in terms of any of that equipment...
Thought it might be of interest to some, anyhow.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
> Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:25:07 -0500
> From: Allison
> Maufacturing no. Design yes. back then there was little if any automated
> chip design so anything to save time or transistors on the die was good.
> The redundant moves are simple example of not decoding all possible
> states. Saves transistors at a time when getting things on that much
> silicon was still hard.
My point was "documentation" of these instructions as such was
unnecessary. Had the documentation simply said "---", they wouldn't
have been used, freeing the codes for later exploitation. But once
documented as valid moves, there's no going back.
00H was the only *documented* no-op as such.
But it's all 20-20 hindsight.
Cheers,
Chuck
I recently acquired a Symbolics XL1200 and so my XL1201's been sitting
dormant and I just can't justify letting such a cool piece of hardware
go unused; as such I'm thinking of trading it for something of
approximately equal "coolness value" if anyone's interested...
The XL1201 is the "desktop pizza box" variant of the XL1200 and includes:
- 4MW RAM, FPA, latest IFEP ROMS (allow booting from large SCSI disks,
amongst other things...)
- "Old Style" console w/keyboard & mouse
- External 9gb SCSI drive w/Genera 8.3 & layered products installed
- Genera 8.3 installation media (on CD)
- Printed documentation set (optional if shipping is an issue)
The machine is clean and is in good working order, located in the Puget
Sound area.
I'm mostly interested in old workstation-style hardware, I'd be
interested in trading for the following: (In no particular order. Note
that the realism of some of the following is questionable :)
- Xerox D-Machines
- Early SGI IRIS machines (1000/2000/3000, etc.)
- Other Lisp-based hardware (TI Exploder, etc... kinda want a big
3600-series Symbolics, but I don't know if I have the space :))
- Sun2 hardware
- PDP-11's with blinkenlights (hey, a man can dream, can he not?)
- Transputer-based hardware
- IMSAI 8080 or Altair 8800
- IBM 5100 with APL option (ha ha ha)
If you've got something interesting to trade, let me know...
Thanks,
Josh
Hi,
I'm in the process of restoring a 11/83 back to
health. Its
going OK so far, but I'm in need of some TK50/70 tapes
for
the tape drive and some RX50 5.25" disks.
The RX50 disks - I'm assuming are different to regular
5.25" floppy disks (DSDD) - I do have some of those,
but
I'm told the magnetic composition of the RX50 disks is
different?
Finally, someone has changed one of the RX50 disk
units
for what looks like a standard (PC style) 5.25" disk
drive. I'm just wondering if this was a standard thing
to do, or a bodge?
All the best
Ian.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping
hello,
I need help making backups of my valuable IRIX media. I have heard that you
can use CDRWIN, and i did, which made a decent backup, except I couldnt boot
>from the copy, and CDRWIN wont work properly on my laptop. is there any good
windows based program that would copy and image my IRIX media and keep them
bootable? if none for windows, i do have ubuntu linux loaded, although not
compatible with my network devices so it is rarely used and cant download
things. thanks!!
-Joe
Der Mouse wrote, in response to the spat between me and Dan Gahlinger,
> And, both of you, I don't care who you are and when you were working
> with what; the kind of remarks you've been throwing at one another are,
> in my opinion, way over the top.
When somebody comes here posting way over the top crap, what are
we supposed to do?
The "egging him on" of trying to take his words and correct them so that
they could've been true, thus giving him some credence, is
IMHO is a far worse disservice to computing history. I tried to give
him the benefit of the doubt and he told me I was wrong. I think
that paying him any attention at all was a mistake for all of us -
every iteration he's making up more crap.
Tim.
