test-drb February 2008

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

236 participants
373 discussions

Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator

by brian＠quarterbyte.com

Ooooh! That's really cool. My high school had one of these around 1975 or 1976, we used it before we talked them into buying an Altair. The punch card unit was pretty spiffy, I think it used 8 of the row bits? And IIRC there were instructions you could punch that were not available from the keyboard. The cards were the votamatic type: hanging chad and all. It was a lot of fun to program, and pretty interesting and complex for a calculator. I'd love to know what the memory technology was inside -- acoustic delay, static RAM, or what? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- _| _| _| Brian Knittel _| _| _| Quarterbyte Systems, Inc. _| _| _| Tel: 1-510-559-7930 _| _| _| http://www.quarterbyte.com

17 years, 1 month

DEC stuff available

by dm561＠torfree.net

Passing this on from another list. Contact Tony at: tonym AT compusource DOT net if interested. mike ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've tried to subscribe to CCTalk like 3-4 times - never got a response at ALL. Wonder what the heck is/was going on... I got a buddy in GA who has some DEC stuff available: (see below) Can you pass that along to CCList for me? T -- Friend of mine in GA has a DEC Pro 380 for sale. $125 shipped/obo This is for main unit + LK201 keyboard, and it has a hard disk and a floppy drive. No monitor is included, so you'll have to scrounge for that... let me know, and I'll relay if anyone is interested. -- Here's more of what he has available. Let me know if any interests you. COMPUTERS 1 DEC 2000 Alpha AXP w/128 Meg 2-6G HD, 2.88 Floppy, CD Rom, 3 SCSI cards, Network Card, Fiber Optic Card, EISA w/ Configuration Disk, Keys, Works Mod #PB223-CA Ser. KA431BZEV5 1 DEC 2000 Alpha AXP w/128 Meg 2-6G HD, 2.88 Floppy, CD Rom 2 SCSI cards, Network Card, Fiber Optic Card, EISA w/ Configuration Disk, Keys, Works Mod #PB22B Ser KA352FYMZO MONITOR 1 17" Digital PCXAX-VZ KEYBOARDS 1 DEC 2000 KB 1 Digital RT-101 4 Compaq 101 5 Digital LK 201 BA MONITOR CABLES 4 3-BNC to Large 15 Pin Female 1 3-BNC to 3 Pin MotherBoard 1 5-BNC to Small 15 Pin Male 2 Large 15 Pin Female to Large 15 Pin Female Extension 3 Large 15 Pin Female to Small 15 Pin Female Extension 1 Large 15 Pin Female to Large 15 Pin Male Extension MANUALS 1 VT 330/VT 340 Programmer Reference Manual, Vol 1 Text Programming 1 VT 330/VT 340 Programmer Reference Manual, Vol 2 Graphics Program 1 VT 330/VT 340 Installing and Using - Video Terminal (The above are all new in shrink Wrap) 1 VT 420 Installing and Using the VT 420 Terminal (NEW) 1 LA 50 Programmer Refwerence Manual 1 Installing and Using the LA 50 Printer 1 LA 120 User Guide 1 DecMate II System Managers Guide to Easy Com DEC Equip 3 Digital CD ROM 1 2.88 Floppy 10 CD Carrier SCSI Cables of all kinds.

17 years, 1 month

Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator

by brian＠quarterbyte.com

Ooooh! That's really cool. My high school had one of these, used it before we talked them into buying an Altair. The punch card unit was pretty spiffy, I think it used 8 of the row bits? And there were instructions you could punch that were not available from the keyboard. The cards were the punchamatic type: hanging chad and all. When I was 15 it was a lot of fun to program. I'd love to know what the memory technology was inside -- acoustic delay, static RAM, or what?

17 years, 1 month

cctalk Digest, Vol 54, Issue 62

by geoffb＠vigilan.com

Front panels for modern day computers/microprocessors are somewhat problematic. The cache(s) maintained internally allow for local instruction execution without making references to the external memory buses, and the prefetch mechanisms internal could also indicate memory activity even if no instruction or data item were actually fetched! Status information is not as directly available, and if it were it would probably not reflect status in "real time" that is occurring at the same time of viewing on the panel. Nevertheless, memory bus activity could be monitored, and what limited status information is available could be produced. The point though is the information displayed, say on minicomputer panels, is not readily available now due to higher levels of integration on the chip itself. On the note of the CDC 6600 machines, et al., There was a peripheral processor which was used to boot the mainframe, and it had many rows of toggle switches, in groups of 18 or 36 if I remember right, which either contained the boot code or controlled the boot. The peripheral processor was a computer in its own right by any standards. Hope this helps. --Geoff > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:33:28 -0800 > From: "John Floren" <slawmaster at gmail.com> > Subject: front panel display for a modern PC > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > I'd really like to have something like one of the old > mainframe/minicomputer control panels for my PC, but I'm just not sure > how to implement it. Anybody here tried something like that? Ideally, > you could power it on, see registers, toggle stuff into memory, have > lights for interrupts, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know, as soon as I > bring up an operating system, the ability to toggle things into memory > would be rather dangerous, but I just can't resist the charm of the > idea :) > So... doable? Impossible? Improbable? > > John >

17 years, 1 month

Ebay grrrr #743

by dm561＠torfree.net

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 02:07:53PM +0100, Ade Vickers wrote: > A nice-looking CBM Pet 2001 with chicklet keyboard (Item #300199788685), > described as: > > "The computer powers up fine as you can see from the pictures, but it is > only half way through the booting up process.... a simple problem to fix... Don't forget the "from what I've seen on the net" part... > > Erm, yes. Very simple to fix, if you happen to have a spare of the part (or > parts) that have failed. Otherwise, a complete bastard (pardon my Francais) > of a job.... and well beyond your average ePayer, I'd warrant. ------------- Boy, tough crowd... Repairing a PET is often as simple as reseating a memory chip; worst case is probably a bad ROM in which case you just replace all the RAM/ROM chips with one of the modern 64K RAM/ROM adapters and sell the working old ones. Half the fun of buying something like this is gambling on it being a simple fix. As Ethan says, if you buy a non-working old computer and don't know (or have a friend who knows) anything about repairing them, well... Looks like an up-front description of a non-working system to me; hope he/she appreciates your advertising the listing here. m

17 years, 1 month

1st stage loader for IMSAI - need ascii to binary

by aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk

Yes, but many sites play music and video via flash controlled webpages which don't always give you that flexibility. I am well aware of the ability to download flash video's to my harddrive. I have about 500 myself (of which about 1% would be considered on-topic). With more and more webpages being filled with flash and javascript content, it's getting harder to find sites that are actually viewable on Amiga's, C64's and other retro computers/games consoles (... trying to drive it back on topic). Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk PS. Does anyone have Jay's email address at hand? Almost every time I reply to a message via my yahoo web-mail account it get's bounced back with the following error message: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>: Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 time travel between hops [BODY]PPS. This is 3rd attempt. First two attempts (Yahoo web-mail) failedso I am now trying via Outlook Express. John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: At 11:43 PM 2/27/2008, Patrick Finnegan wrote: >"Streaming" tends to imply no disk cache copy, more like listening to a >radio station... Browsers and other players might cache in order to give you the ability to rewind and replay, for example. There are many ways these days to save a YouTube video and convert to another format (browser plugins particularly for Firefox, sites like keepvid.com, etc.) - John

17 years, 1 month

Monroe Programmable Electronic Calculator

by tponsford＠rnsmte.com

Hi All, I picked up two interesting machines at the auction this week. The first is a Monroe Electric Programmable Scientific Calculator model #1785(circa 1971) alas, it is missing the optional punch card reader although the machine itself seems to work fine. Also came with some instructional books! The second is a Zenith LF-171 portable, which is a re-badged Morrow Pivot, complete with power supply and the black canvas carrying case. An 8088 (80C88) with an LCD screen!! All in all, a good take! Cheers! TOM

17 years, 1 month

Article about Seattle schools still running a VAX

by tiggerlasv＠aim.com

Not being from the Vax world, I wonder difficult it would be for them to move them over to SIMH or CHARON emulators? The savings in power & air conditioning alone would probably pay for the new equipment in the first year. ;-) T

17 years, 1 month

SAGE console replica

by legalize＠xmission.com

If anyone is interested in collaborating (long-term, probably not completed for a few years) in creating a replica of the SAGE consoles (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SAGE_console.jpeg>) please contact me off-list. I want one, but feel the likelihood of me ever getting a real one is vanishingly small. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

17 years, 1 month

TTL CPU Re: IMSAI style C&K 7101 switches

by jam＠magic.com

Grant, > On a side note, who here would be interested in ultra high resolution > scans of old computer PCBs? I'm scanning all PCBs at 3200dpi for > archival. Photoshop won't save jpegs that large, but a 1600dpi scan is > only 50MB or so. Some day I plan to release my whole archive. You mentioned JPEGs. If you are archiving the scans in JPEG format, try zooming in on bunches of traces or text on the board. JPEG creates a lot of artifacts. It may very well be case that a 600dpi scan using lossless compression will be much cleaner and usable than a 3200dpi scan using heavy JPEG compression. Even with 6 mil traces, 600dpi gives you more than 3 pixels per trace. I've tried a few of my boards using 1200dpi, 8-bit color, and GIF/TIFF, with results that seemed acceptable. James Markevitch

17 years, 1 month

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test-drb February 2008