I have sitting here in front of me a book, "Assembler for COBOL Programmers",
by one Hank Murphy. "MVS" and "VM" also appear on the cover. Copyright date
is 1991. ISBN and other whatnot or more details available on request.
I have *no* interest in this at all. Cover my postage and maybe a little
extra would be nice, and you can take it off my hands.
Feel free to forward this post to other places where there might be some
interest...
--
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
> I found some on Bitsavers.
There are MANY others (Bendix G15, and WISC for example).
I have been trying to dig out these sorts of things from the CHM archives as I can
find them, since there is much less information available on the actual implementation
details available on how first generation computers were actually built. They were often
very careful to minimize the number of active devices, since tubes are big and consume
lots of power.
This also helps explain why so many machines performed arithmetic serially.
Hello,
I came across a post you made from 2005 about a Stellar GS-1000 that you
were giving away. I've been collecting vintage machines that I've
encountered over the years and I'm curious if you disposed of it or by some
rare chance you still have it.
Thanks!
-Tom
> I found some on Bitsavers.
>
> "Illiac design techniques" (under univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILLIAC)
> describes the basic logic elements, which are then just hooked
> together as building blocks (And, Or, Not, and flip-flop).
Those are very useful. Thanks.
> Under ibm/sage there's a documents list -- only one of the documents
> is actually there but a lot more are listed, including circuit
> diagrams.? Maybe those are available...
The two I?d _really_ love to see even if they didn?t have info I could actually use are:
31P2-2FSQ7-142 Maintenance Techniques and Procedures of Central Computer for AN/FSQ-7, Combat Direction Central
31P2-2FSQ7-212 Schematics for Central Computer of AN/FSQ-7, Combat Direction Central
Unfortunately, they aren?t on Bitsavers. I wonder if these were classified TOs.
> I'm not about to dig mine out and paw through it, but I think the
> "bible" of tube design, the "Radiotron Designer's Handbook" might be
> a bit too early to provide guidance on logic circuits.? Anyone know
> offhand?
Unfortunately, according to the TOC available at the link below, it doesn?t have anything specific about tube logic circuits, but it certainly does look like a goldmine of electron tube technical data:
http://www.pmillett.com/Books/intro_RDH4.pdf
> There are MANY others (Bendix G15, and WISC for example).
Thanks. I found some complete circuits for the G15 there, but I haven?t found the circuits for many of the logic gate symbols used in most of the Bendix diagrams. The WISC thesis contains no diagrams whatsoever which is interesting considering its content. I guess the author didn?t like to draw. ;-)
> DIY digital projects using vacuum tubes were extremely rare, mostly
> due to cost.
I think you?ve probably hit the main problem there. Tube receivers, transmitters, audio amps, etc., actually did something useful to justify their expense whereas affordable logic circuits would have only been technical novelties with no practical use.
bfranchuk wrote:
> I want to cry out ... Real hardware I want It.
> Can new bit slice version of the hardware be built?
The real problem is building an authentic Lilith with today's hardware.
For example, I can't yet track down a supplier of a 2901 - AMD don't make
them, Signetics don't, Cypress semiconductor don't seem to. Does anyone
still make them?
So, then you're left with 3 choices:
* Build a Lilith out of TTL.
* Build a Lilith using an FPGA.
* Build it using a Microcontroller.
The TTL solution is crazy - even ETH didn't have to do that.
The FPGA solution isn't bad, you could probably do it with a
smallish FPGA to handle the micromachine and some Flash chips for
the Microprogram (2x8-bitx128K would have sufficient bandwidth).
But it won't feel very authentic looking at a single chip with
200+ pins.
So you might as well do a firmware emulation using a humble MCU.
An Arm-based one would be fast enough and could drive a display in
real-time.
> Also did any of the 'Wirth' languages have plans
> for 32 bit data and adresses?
Yes. The Ceres-1, 2 and 3 workstations were 32-bit. Personally I find
16-bit more interesting, more of a challenge. And it's surprising how
hard it would be to create a 16-bit self-hosted computer today.
16-bit compilers seem to be MIA or too big to be run on a 16-bit CPU.
Even Bill-Buzbee's Magic-1 doesn't self-host.
That's one of the other interesting features of Lilith, its Modula-2
compiler is powerful enough to develop entire systems
and it *can* self-host.
In theory you could expand a Lilith to cope with, say, 16Mb of code,
just by extending its base registers (F, G, L, H etc) to 256b
boundaries (that wouldn't help much with data access though, since
Lilith shares a single 64KW address space amongst all processes and
programs).
-cheers from Julz @P
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
>Sent 8/20/2008 9:48:12 PM
>To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts cctalk at classiccmp.org
>Subject: UI (Was: OT: Microsoft crazy academic deal>
>
>On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, David Griffith wrote:
> Around that time just to prove that "Bob" was a piece of junk, someone
> created "Bubba". As I recall, it seemed to work better than the Microsoft
> product. I think this is it:
> http://www.crummy.com/warren/files/picks/bubba.zip
>
>Thank you for the topic drift!
>
>Is that the same one as:
>http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-13624-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=269221&m…
>
>
I dunno - calling Bob a UI is kinda' insulting to UI's - that was just a POS.
Does anyone actually KNOW of anyone who bought it?
Tony
William Blair asks:
> I have in the past found plenty of relay-based logic circuits on-line
> but am having a really tough time finding any binary tube circuits with component values.
The HP AC-4 counter modules (each can do a decade and they are occasionally re-wired to do other count sequences) came in several different speed grades, with different component values to accomodate the speed requirements. Different speeds had different DC biases and speedup capacitors and in some cases slightly different logic configs.
(Yes, I believe that "speedup capacitor" is indeed the technical term).
They use 5963's or 6211's which are computer/industrial-rated 12AU7's (constructed using materials to avoid cathode poisoning if biased off for a long time).
They were designed to be true modules and have good interface descriptions.
I have used 12AU7 SPICE models floating around the net to play with component selection etc. and the HP schematics are pretty optimal in design. I've built them from scratch on breadboards and they really do work.
The HP units are cool because they use neon bulbs as both display decoders and as display elements.
Berkeley Nucleonics and others built very similar modules.
Some schematics and really good technical manuals on the web for these counters:
http://www.hparchive.com/Manuals/HP-AC-4A-4B-Manual.pdfhttp://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/edte/HP520/index.htmlhttp://www.nixiebunny.com/hpac4/index.html
Tim.
