test-drb July 2008

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

182 participants
225 discussions

DMS 3F Fox portable computer available for sale/adoption...

by summersigh6teen＠comcast.net

Hello; I have a DMS 3F with the original nylon carry bag for computer and keyboard. Bag is damaged but computer is in excellent shape. Unfortunately no software comes with it. It has the Hi-Net LAN built in. This was my first work computer in 1984-5. I don't want to just throw it away. Please contact me if you are interested. Thanks... Carl M. summersigh6teen at comcast.net

16 years, 4 months

Osborne Vixen prototype?

by tosteve＠yahoo.com

I have this system, but is it an Osborne Vixen prototype or early release? 1. It's all black, instead of white 2. horizontal drives, instead of vertical 3. smaller screen than 'later model' 4. screen says "OCC4 1.01 BIOS - 1984" pictures here: http://members.cox.net/stengel/temp/vixen.html Let me know what you think, know, or think you know.

16 years, 4 months

Capri: The Rule Breaker

by silent700＠gmail.com

As long as the rule is "no smoking in the machine room:" http://www.archive.org/details/tobacco_jmu03f00

16 years, 4 months

Capri: The Rule Breaker

by sellam＠vintagetech.com

Wow, there's something very creepy pornographic about that commercial. Nice find, Jason! -- 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

Floating-point numbers (on the Amiga)

by aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk

Hi, I am trying (and failing) to learn how AMOS Basic (and Amiga's) store floating point numbers. Whilst it is clear that it uses Motorola Fast Floating Point (MFPP) I have been unable to get it to work based on an equation found online (the Amiga RKRM's all say to use the FPP functions in the maths libraries, and also confirm the layout - 24 bit mantissa, 1bit sign, 7bit exponent). Am I doing something wrong with my maths?? Formula: FP result =[(-1)^SIGN] * [2^(EXP - 0x40)] * [MANTISSA / 0x1000000] 0x1000000 = 16,777,216 0x40=64 floating-point variable value=0.5 Binary value of variable=%10000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 Values calculated using formula (above): SIGN=0 (positive) EXPONENT=64 - 64 (bias) = 0 MANTISSA=2.51658 E+07 / 16,777,216 = 1.5 Thus: result = [(-1)^SIGN] * [2^(EXP - 0x40)] * [MANTISSA / 0x1000000] = [(-1)^0]*[2^(0)]*[1.5] = 1*1*1.5 = 1.5! I have uploaded a bitmap image of my maths to my site if it isn't clear from above what I am doing. http://www.geocities.com/aliensrcooluk/public/MFPP_problem.bmp Please help! Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

16 years, 4 months

vintage IBM board?

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

I just spotted this on eBay. Isn't this a very early (pre-S/360) IBM board? eBay item #230231322529 -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

16 years, 4 months

wang network cabling and junction boxes Free >. + shipping

by g-wright＠att.net

This is a repost from a week or so Ago.... did not see it go through I have a box of cable and some junction boxes for a Wang system. Free + shipping. located in the Kent, Wa. area Have not seen any CCtalk traffic in my IN box in a week. hope this is working - Jerry g-wright at att.net

16 years, 4 months

Wang 2200 in Portsmouth, England

by frustum＠pacbell.net

This is a message that I sent out during the classiccmp blackout in early july. I didn't realize at the time that the message wasn't delivered. Here it is again: I received an email today from a gentleman in Portsmouth. He said it was OK to share the message with the list. (begin quote) Hiya im due to pick up a wang 2200 from one of my relatives houses as my grandad has recently passed away and was wondering if you know anyone in the uk either portsmouth or liverpool that might be interested in it. It is a Wang 2200 A which comes with a cassette drive built into the screen/keyboard, a separate CPU, a separate power supply and a separate I/O unit. I have found some manuals. They are a Wang Basic Language Ref Manual, A Wang System 2200 STATS/Engineering General program library & a Matematics general program library. There are also 3 cassette albums each containing about 12 cassettes with various programs and one game. Whether these work or not is unknown. As far as i know it was working before it was put in the loft 12 months ago. Regards malcolm (end quote) I know he would like some money for it, but I'm not sure what his expectations are. I don't think he knows either. :-) It would be hard to set a price on it as these systems appear on ebay rarely, and also he doesn't know whether it is functional. If you are interested, email me and I'll forward his contact information to you (frustum at pacbell.net). I don't want to post his email address for fear of email address bots might pick it up. I don't care if they get mine though. I'll also send along a couple small photos of the system. The 2200 came out in the early 70s and was Wang's first successful general purpose computer. The BASIC interpreter was written in microcode, and systems had from 4KB to 32KB of RAM. You can visit my site, www.wang2200.org, to get more information about this family of computers. Malcolm said that this is a Wang 2200A, which would make it very early, but many of these machines had board upgrades, turning them into later model machines.

16 years, 4 months

Vintage Computing in San Diego

by wayne.smith＠charter.net

You missed a prime opportunity for double geekdom - Comic-con was this weekend. If you attend Comic-con and VCF in the same year you achieve the rare Geek Half-Slam. I am half way there. > Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:08:01 -0400 (EDT) > From: Mike Loewen <mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> > Subject: Vintage Computing in San Diego > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0807251406370.24856 at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed > > > I'm going to be in San Diego during the 3rd week in > August. Are there > any vintage computing sites worth visiting in the general > area? Surplus > dealers? > > > Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us > Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/ >

16 years, 4 months

Best OS for an IBM Butterfly (was: Any ideas on how to clear a BIOS password on a Thinkpad 701C?)

by lproven＠gmail.com

2008/7/25 madodel <madodel at ptdprolog.net>: > Warp should support the 701c. I don't know if the 701c ever came preloaded > with OS/2 though. All the ones I see on eBay have win 3.1 or win95 on them. > But of course you will need the external floppy drive to install it and a > copy of Warp that is on 3.5in floppies. I'll have to get a copy of Warp on > floppies at InfoAge next time I'm there. Or I can build the floppies from > the CD I have here if I can dredge up enough diskettes. Just FYI... I did get Warp 3 working on my Butterfly. I have a SCSI CD-ROM for mine with a PCMCIA SCSI host adaptor; the OS/2 setup disks couldn't see this. I do have a floppy drive, though. So what I did was pull the HD, connect it to a desktop machine, and copy the installation CD to a folder of the same pathname on the HD. The ideal is to have a boot drive, then another partition with the install files on - that way, it /thinks/ it's looking at a CD drive that is [boot drive+1]. I think the way mine was set up was that I had a smallish FAT16 C drive with Win95OSR2 on it, then a logical drive for OS/2, then a 2GB FAT16 data drive to share between them. You need to keep C: in FAT16; the suspend/resume code is part of the BIOS and it reads/writes FAT16 directly, without using an OS. If you use any other filesystem, the BIOS can't read it and you lose suspend/resume. I think it whinges at you each boot, too. This is some 10y ago now - I couldn't swear to it being Warp 3. I think it was. IIRC, it worked OK - it found the PCMCIA slots, it understood power management and sound. However, I never got the screen working. It's only a VGA-res screen but it should run in 32K colours, maybe even truecolour, and it should be able to drive an external monitor at 1024x768 or maybe even 1280x1024. However I could never get OS/2 to recognise the chipset, which is some kind of Cirrus Logic one >from memory. I also tried Linux on mine. Debian was, as ever, a battle, but it did run. SuSE worked fine but was sluggish and barely fit on my ~700M drive. I also ran Win98SE, NT4 and Windows 2000. I cut down Win98 *hard* with 98Lite, removing anything that wasn't absolutely essential, such as Internet Explorer & all the other Internet tools, but it was still notably slower than Win95. A pain since I had to use Laplink to get it on there and it was a slow process. NT4 worked fine and drove both PCMCIA slots, but it can't do plug&play in any useful way and has no power management, so it's not ideal. Win2K worked amazingly well, considering, but was e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y slow. I got power management & PnP, but it was unusable. (FWIW, my Butterfly has 40MB RAM, an unofficial upgrade and the max its planar can recognise. I also replaced its HD with first a 700MB and then a 4GB one. The BIOS displayed this as something like a D92MB drive, lapsing into hex as it didn't expect more than 3 digits, but it worked fine, including suspend-to-disk.) In my experience - which was fairly considerable; this was my main notebook from about 1996 to 2000 or 2001 - Win95B is the best OS for the Butterfly. Performance is good, all the hardware works fine, battery life is decent as power management works, and it's easy to get working. There's a few updates to apply - WinSock 2, DUN 1.3, stuff like that - but it's easy enough to get working. You can keep C: small and efficient - <512MB - and have a nice big FAT32 D: for apps and data. IE5.5 works well but Opera was for most purposes better. Suitable apps are MS Office 95, with the 97 import filters, Acrobat 4 or 5, some lightweight email client - maybe Pegasus or Eudora; I used Ameol (www.ameol.com) - and so on. It even has a good stab at running Doom! The main limitations of W95 are actually fairly few. Don't press it hard and it's quite stable. It can only understand 4 IP addresses; I had a NIC and a modem card, plus the internal modem, and also ran the AOL client for international dial-up, and that maxed out my available IPs. (This is why I tried W98, which does not have this limit, but 98 was too much for a 40MB 486.) W95's PnP is flakey; it took me a *lot* of fiddling to find stable combinations of 2 PCMCIA cards and I had to apply various patches and updates concerning the PCMCIA controller chip to get it working. It was often a case of power down, insert 1 specific card in 1 specific slot, power up, then insert 2nd specific card in 2nd specific slot, that sort of thing. In the end, though, I had it working stably and reliably with either 56K dial-up+SCSI or NIC+SCSI, but it was too much hassle for daily use so I mainly just used a single card at a time. It's a *lot* easier to get Win95 running than OS/2, which was a battle, as it all too often is. I plan to resurrect the machine with a new battery, replace its crashed 4GB hard disk (a large heavy book fell on the machine when it was running; the HD died, the laptop was fine) with a CF card in an adaptor, and try to bring it back to life. I may have another bash at OS/2 - it would feel artistically /right/ to run an IBM OS on this classic IBM machine. -- 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

16 years, 4 months

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test-drb July 2008