test-drb March 2008

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

209 participants
369 discussions

by Watzman＠neo.rr.com

Re: "I just found a box of about 15: 8 inch floppies 32 sectors (hard sectored) Double Sided Single Density. Some are TDK F1-H. Any takers?" These are used in the Processor Technology Helios disk system (intended for, but not really specific to, the SOL-20 computer). I have what might be the last two such operational systems in existence, and I have to say that carefully because they have not been powered since 2004, when they were working and booting PT-DOS. However I have several boxes of the diskettes and don't really need more.

16 years, 4 months

Morrow documentation

by Watzman＠neo.rr.com

Re: "CHM received a bunch of George Morrow's engineering documentation yesterday. Is there anything in particular from MD that hasn't already been scanned that people are looking for?" Yes; there are some Morrow / Thinker Toys memory boards that have never appeared anywhere, not even Herb has them in his files (and the boards do exist, I have some of these). Because they are "Thinker Toys", I'm not sure if they would be in what you received or not.

16 years, 4 months

Massive lot of vintage hard drives

by sellam＠vintagetech.com

The Great Vintage Disk Drive Jubilee!! I have a friend in town (Shrikant Desai, some of you may have seen his talk at VCFX last year) who has a huge collection of vintage to modern disk drives, including floppy and hard, magnetic and optical, 14", 8", 5.25", 3.5", 2", etc. His collection of drives numbers in the hundreds, possibly breaking the 1,000 barrier (everytime I turn a corner at his house I find a new stash, and he has other stashes around town). His informal goal was to create a comprehensive archive of every drive ever made. He thinks he has attained about 60% of that goal. There is definitely overlap and duplicate units.B Alas, Shrikant is getting on in years and no longer has the time or energy to maintain the collection. We had been trying to jointly start a computer museum in town to feature a conglomeration of my and his collections, but because of time and budgetary constraints we reluctantly abandoned the idea (for now at least). So Shrikant has decided to divest himself of his drive collection. The collection was a typical pack-rat pursuit, borne out of intellectual curiosity as well as an inherent urge to archive stuff for posterity. Shrikant has worked for almost every disk drive manufacturer from the 1960s through to current day in one form or another. For example, back in the 1970s and 1980s he was Directory of Technology Development at Shugart. The Computer History Museum already came out and took a few boxes of materials away (mostly documentation) so we're left with a huge pile of metal. Shrikant asked me to help disburse the remainder. At first I was thinking purely scrap, as my mindset these days is hued by my electronic recycling business (don't worry, nothing vintage/classic gets scrapped) and a great majority of the collection is modernish drives (MFM and IDE) but then I started to realize these are drives that other collectors may find useful to get or keep their vintage systems running, especially the older and rarer ones. If it hadn't been for the trouble I had trying to find a working ST-225 for an IBM PC 5150 I put together recently for a project I may not have given this the consideration it deserves. I came to the realization that it's hard to find working vintage hard drives these days, which is kind of a "duh" realization since that's pretty much a given. So, in the interest of helping both Shrikant and fellow collectors, I decided it would serve everyone's interest to offer the drives up for sale. I've set up a special request form here: http://www.vintage.org/special/2008/diskdrive.php On this form you are asked to enter your name, e-mail address, the drive(s) you are seeking, and the price you are willing to pay. The way this will work is we will give time for people to submit requests, say a couple weeks, then we're going to start going through the drives and identifying ones that have been requested. We'll try to determine if the drive is good or not using simple tests (i.e. visual inspection, shaking, and other highly technical considerations), but this will by no means guarantee the drive is working. This will be an "as-is" sale, so make your offer accordingly. We are not seeking huge sums here, just enough to cover time. If you want a known good drive, please note this in the request and make sure your offer takes into consideration the time and skill required to find a proper host machine, hook everything together, then run diagnostics, etc. It took me 22 hours to build the 5150 referenced above, a large portion of which was spent locating, testing, and troubleshooting a working ST-225. If you want to pay only $20 for a known working hard drive, that's not going to fly. Really, all I want to do is find the drive you're looking for, package it, then ship it to you. If you want a known good drive, we will have to discuss it as a consulting project, and I'm not cheap (and niether is Shrikant). Also, between you, I, and the mailing list, Shrikant could really use the money right now. Shipping costs (actual, via Fedex Ground) will be added to your offer. We will need to collect from you before we ship out the drive. PayPal is best, checks sent to me are fine. We'll discuss the details further when the time comes. The reason I want you to use the form and not to e-mail me a request is because my inbox already has 1,500 mostly unanswered e-mails in it and I tend to "lose" messages amid the deluge (I periodically try to knock down the backlog and at one point had it down to less than 1,200 but it has gained on me in recent weeks). So it would behoove you to use the form to make your request since that will be easier for me to manage and track. Do feel free to e-mail me directly if you have a question that can't be entered into the form but please keep in mind that I'm so busy these days I might not be able to respond right away. PLEASE NOTE: I do not follow the CC list regularly. I am subscribed but have delivery turned off. I scan the archives periodically to see what's being discussed but don't have time to actively participate. That being said, please send any relevant replies or inquiries to me directly, not to the list, or else there's a good chance I won't read it. Lastly, I'm sure I'm missing some details or something, so I'll follow up once I've had a number of people e-mail me asking me for obvious information that I've neglected to include here. Thanks! -- 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 ]

16 years, 4 months

Cardboard Computer: Cardiac! New-Old-Stock

by tpeters＠mixcom.com

Imagine my delight upon learning that there is NOS available of CARDIAC: Cardboard Illustrated Aid to Computing, the Bell Labs fold-flat computer that taught me so much about assembly language computing. Hurrah! In 1961, Bell introduced four kits to aid science education at the high school level. In 1968, they made a fifth kit available, called CARDIAC. Get 'em while their hot-- stock won't last long. I don't think these prices are accurate anymore, there's an email address for inquiries, since the company is going out of business. CARDIAC, $19.29, and Vu-Graph for CARDIAC $22.95. I have no idea what a VuGraph might be and don't think I've ever seen one. But I still have my trusty CARDIAC, given to me by my 5th grade teacher at the end of the year. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/11/newold-stock-of-bell.html http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_kits.html ----- 189. [Commentary] "Television has changed the American child from in irresistible force into an immovable object." --Laurence J. Peter --... ...-- -.. . -. ----. --.- --.- -... tpeters at nospam.mixcom.com (remove "nospam") N9QQB (amateur radio) "HEY YOU" (loud shouting) WEB: http://www.mixweb.com/tpeters 43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W, Elevation 815', Grid Square EN53wc WAN/LAN/Telcom Analyst, Tech Writer, MCP, CCNA, Registered Linux User 385531

16 years, 4 months

of the early French computer SEREL ODP-505 (germanium CPU)

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

> > From: "pichotjm" <pichotjm at free.fr> > > I spent my week-end to write a report on the restoration of the > early French > computer ODP-505. This computer is built with germanium transistors > and has > a core memory. Thank you that is very interesting. I have looked on the 'Big List' to find the date it was first sold but could not find it. Google only brings up pages in the French language. Could you please give us the year? It is tiny compared with my Germanium machine (ICT 1301) which weighs five tons. It has the same clock speed but is quite a bit slower, so I guess it is earlier than mine. But maybe the emphasis of the design was miniaturisation and the designers traded speed for size. Roger Holmes (Kent, England)

16 years, 4 months

RL01 Terminator

by doug＠stillhq.com

Hi list, I am the extremely proud owner (As much as one can own a piece of history.. More like current custodian, curator, or caretaker) of a wonderful PDP11/04 and RL01 drive. I am looking for either; 1) Two RL01/02 terminators, or 2) The schematic diagram for what is in a terminator (and possibly a faulty cable to use the connectors from) Having trawled the web, I can't find the appropriate schematic :-( Doug

16 years, 4 months

Intel hex file loader in asm80

by jefferwin＠gmail.com

Ok, ok, I know I can just sit down and write one, but I know that a zillion of these have been written over time. I need an asm80 simple program loader that will take in the ascii stream >from an intel hex file, parse it, convert the data to binary and put it in memory. The source doesn't matter, the loader portion can be from a floppy driver, paper tape reader or whatever, I can easily change the source, I would just like to not have to write all of the parsing stuff for the hex format. Anyone have any asm80 source that might include the loader portion? Jeff Erwin

16 years, 4 months

RSTS/E DECNET installation guides / pointers / tips?

by glen.slick＠gmail.com

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: > > It took me a year or two to even get DECnet/E working on my PDP-11/73 > under RSTS/E 10.1, the trick finally turned out to be I *HAD* to > install from a TK50, it seems to be the one thing that can't be > installed from a 4mm DAT tape. I haven't tried a 4mm DAT tape yet, but I was able to install DECnet/E 4.1 from an 8mm tape using an EXB-8200 SCSI tape drive connected to a TTi (Transitional Technology Inc) QTS-3 SCSI TMSCP controller to verify that that drive and controller combination works with real DEC software. I initially thought that drive and / or controller combination was not working correctly as I could never get 2.11BSD installed using it. Now I think it is something in the 2.11BSD installation tape 'boot' binary that probably has some TMSCP assumptions that are not always true on all controllers. I had the same problem with 2.11BSD using a CQD-200/T (aka MTI QTS30) controller, while a CMD CQD-220/TM worked fine.

16 years, 4 months

In which I further expose my ignorance: What is this electronic component?

by derschjo＠msu.edu

So I'm cleaning out the Ergo 201 terminal I mentioned earlier (and preparing to do a cap kit on it since it needs it) and I've run across something that looks kind of like an electrolytic capacitor on a diet. I'm unable to identify it and I feel like an idiot :). At any rate, it appears to be leaking something so I'd like to replace it, once I can figure out what it is. Wish I had a schematic for this thing. Here's a couple of pictures of it: http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/mystery-1.jpg http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/mystery-2.jpg Any ideas? The only markings on it are: 1019 8320 TWN on one side, and C-H-L TDK on the other. The positive terminal is labeled (which is the opposite of most capacitors I've seen...) Any thoughts? As always, thanks... - Josh

16 years, 4 months

TI-74 S calculator

by elromano1989＠wp.pl

Hello !!! I've got a calculator TI-74 S, and I don't have a instruction of this calculator. So, can You sent in my mail all about TI-74 S???

16 years, 4 months

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test-drb March 2008