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
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.
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?
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
>
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
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
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
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
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