test-drb November 2009

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

175 participants
194 discussions

by aek＠bitsavers.org

just ran across this http://www.arstech.com/cat--ssi2.html if you want to run ISA/PCMCIA/PCI cards off of a laptop OS X support was interesting.

14 years, 5 months

Tek t2xx mainframe with 7D01 plugin : still worthwhile ?

by jdr_use＠bluewin.ch

Is it worthwhile to rescue a Tek 7xxx scope system with a 7d01 logic analyzer plugin ? It looks nice, but after reading the manual the usefullness seems limited.... jos

14 years, 5 months

Epson HPIL interface

by ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk

I am trying to find something to put my latest E-bay purchase in. Note I am not saying that I am trying to find somewhere to put it, I have that problem whne I uy a complete computer system. This is just one PCB about 5" * 4" Let me start with some backgrounf information. Everybody rememebrs the Epson dot-matrix printes of the 1980s, things like the MX80, FX80 and so on. They had a standard Centronics interface on a 36 pin Blue Ribbon connector. What is less well knwon is that these printers have an 2*13 socket on the main PCB. 25 pins are used ,the other is a locating hey. This conenctor carries most of the Centronics signals, power lines, and a few others. It was designed for optional inteface PCBs, there is a blanking plate in the top case to allow access to a connector on such a PCB. For example, Epson made a couple of different serial interface PCBs. One was a bit-banger -- if a particular pin (P/S-) on the connector is pulled lwo, then data line D8 becomes a bit-banged serial input and the other 7 data lines are used to set the serial interface parameters. The other was a serail-parallel converter using a microcontroller with buffer memory. It jhad a parallel inteface to the printer. Now HP sold a couple of printers called the HP82905 and HP82906. These were based on Epson models -- in fact they _were_ Epson printers with different firmware to handle the HP command set. They were fitted with an Epson HPIB interface card as standard. But there was also a fairly rare HPIL interace card, made by HP. And that is what I have just bought. It's a PCB 82905-60001. It contains 2 chips, a 1LB3 (HPIL interface) and MK3870 (mask-programmed microcontorller) with the obvious support components. Since it just uses the stnadarsd parallel interface to the rwst of the printer, it should work in any Epson printer with that connector, no matter what firmeare is present (at least for printing text). After getting in on E-bay, but before it arrived, I remembered I had the Epson HPIB card somewhere. I could even rememebr were. I dug it out, and found it was missing a jackpost from the HPIB connector. 2 hours later, I had one fitted. No, it didn't take me that amount of time to find one, I just graed some brass ron and turned one. FWIW, the screw thread on the connecto that it screws into is 4-40 UNC, an odd choice (USA HPIB jackposts have a 6-32 thread on that end, and the Japanese normally use metric threads, so I would have expected either 6-32 UNC or M3 here). This board contains 16 TTL chips so should be triival to repair if it needs it. Anyway, the problem is that I am short of Epson printers. I have one. I thought it would be triivial to find such devices, but alas not. So questions 1) Does anyobody know which Epson models have this internal connector and which therefore could be used with the interfaces 2) Anyone know for sure what models the HP82905 and 82906 are based on? 3) Anyone in the London (England) area got any such printes that they want to sell cheaply? I suspect shipping them would be rather expensive, hense the 'London area' criterion. Obviously the HP models would be fine too, as would IBM5152 grapghics printers (the TechRef shows the connector I am talking about). Thanks in advance -tony

14 years, 5 months

HPEMU

by spedraja＠ono.com

Just curious... What happened with this project ? There is a *broken* link in www.hp1000.org pointing to www.classiccmp.org Regards Sergio

14 years, 5 months

Odds and Ends questions

by brain＠jbrain.com

1. I have a need for a DE9 female connector without the metal housing, something like (http://www.robotshop.ca/Images/small/en/parallax-basic-stamp-1-serial-adapt…). I need quite a few of them, so I'd rather not buy DE-9s and rip off the shielded housing manually. Anyone have ideas? 2. Anyone on list have any experience with MAX 7032A Altera CPLDs? I'm working on a VIC-20 MIDI interface for a friend in Toronto, and I'd love to use a small CPLD to make it more cost effective to produce the MIDI cart. I've found TQFP 7032A units for $.31/piece, but I've never done CPLD. I want to learn, and thought if I at least knew someone could help me though the first few bits (and help with the programming cable, etc., it'd be much easier. 3. I'm making the journey to Toronto for the World of Commodore 2009 show Dec 5. I'd love to meet list members in the area, and there'll be some vintage CBM stuff present, if you're into that sort of machine. 4. Anyone have a source for 28AWG 2 conductor twisted wire? 5. If so, do they make it in 3 conductor? Those who care about the CBM machines on-list have no doubt heard all of this, and I don't want to be accused of spamming, but I thought I'd point out I ran a batch of MOS 6540 adapter PCBs, and I have created a small FLASH replacement for the 2364 and 23128/23256 DIP ROMs. Some of those might be of use on other 80's era machines. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

14 years, 5 months

Power Macs and PC Compatibility Cards

by alhartman＠yahoo.com

I have a 500 series card (don't remember which, I'd have to pull it out and look) with a manual. No cable or software. It was a pull from a batch of 7200's we won at auction years ago. ? If anyone would like it, make me an offer off-list. ? Also, I have a couple of 7200's that are available for free, if someone lives in the Philadelphia area and wants to pick one/both up. I also have a 7200 logic board that is a pull from one of the units I upgraded with a 7300 board, if someone wants a spare. I might even have more than one. ? I also have a Mac 512k Shell with tube and logic board, but nothing else if someone wants that to make a Macquarium out of, or to complete into a working unit. ? I'm moving in two months, and I'd like to get rid of some excess stuff. But, not to a landfill. ? Al

14 years, 5 months

Ten Year Rule

by trag＠io.com

> > Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:44:57 +0000 (GMT) > From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) > I would really hate it if this list became a mostly old PC (or Mac) list. > IMHO there are better places to discuss such machines (no, I don't know > hwere said places are). The two best places for discussion of old Macs are probably the Low End Mac (lowendmac.com) lists (includes "Vintage Macs" (68K) and "1st-PowerMacs" (NuBus PPC)) which are now hosted on Google, and the 68K Macintosh Liberation Army Forum at 68kmla.net. Applefritter.com is also nice but does not get as much traffic as 68kmla.net. This list is probably as good as anywhere these days for Apple Network Server information, because Cameron K. is here, unless he knows of an active forum for them. The last one I knew about is long gone. Not so many years ago the best place for Mac stuff was the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy. Sigh. And you could buy and sell stuff in comp.sys.mac.wanted without paying Ebay fees... Jeff Walther

14 years, 5 months

Ten Year Rule

by dm561＠torfree.net

Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:02:57 -0600 From: "Michael B. Brutman" <mbbrutman-cctalk at brutman.com> Subject: Re: Ten Year Rule Pontus Pihlgren wrote: >> Well, without the newbs the community will slowly die away. I like to >> see young people getting interested in what I'm interested in. Let them >> talk about their "vintage" Pentium and hope they discover the cool stuff >> in the "Minis and Mainframes" section. <snip> >> I'm in both and I also visit http://forums.nekochan.net/ for my daily >> dose of SGI. >> >> Kind regards, >> Pontus. >Hi Pontus, >We need the newbs, and we need to be gentle to them. But newbs can get >annoying when they just babble endlessly and refuse to do basic >research. The good news is that we can try to moderate or filter a lot >of that out. <snip> >Regards, >Mike --------------------- ...and moderators can be annoying when they're patronizing and condescending and think that people who think P1s are antiques are a "problem" on a forum like Erik's which is mostly about exactly that, folks helping each other restoring and modifying their old Intel boxes (but also more esoteric stuff, in case I'm giving the wrong impression). Meanwhile, here we can spend a week discussing and reading about arcane camera stuff, but woe to anyone who might mention Windows 3.1... And now of course we have to have the tedious "what is vintage" discussion yet once again... has this been a problem? Have we been overwhelmed with Vista questions? Did someone use the word 'anal'...? m

14 years, 5 months

isa 486 computer-on-a-board type things

by PeksaDO＠cardiff.ac.uk

I have a HM (Hotel Microsystems) Server with an eight slot backplane and can choose from a selection of '386' and '486' computer-on-a-board cards that I have. I also have one 'IBM Blue Lighting' card. Six of the other slots are filled with Sundance ISA transputer cards (5 are 20MHz, 8Mb, 1 is 20MHz, 4Mb - I'm still half-looking (not in any real hurry) for 32 1Mbit memory chips to fully populate the final card). In their day, they were the system of choice at Cardiff University for a few years, and they came as a very small desktop with a three (or was it four?) slot backplane, or as the server. The server I have was the 'demonstration' model sent for evaluation. The side panels are perspex. It looks really nice with all those full length transputer cards in there, blinking away. Doug.

14 years, 5 months

DEC VT100 character generator

by jzg22＠drexel.edu

------------------------------ Message: 20 Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:50:31 +0000 From: Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> Subject: DEC VT100 character generator To: ClassicCmp <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <4B0B11B7.4020304 at dunnington.plus.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Several months ago, someone was looking for an image of the 23-018E2 character generator ROM for a VT100. A generous reader has given me an image, which I've uploaded to my website at http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/DECROMs/ Better late than never, I hope! -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York ------------------------------ Pete, That matches the rom I typed from the vt100 tech manual datasheet for MESS. Are you sure someone dumped it from a real chip and didn't just submit the rom I typed up (which is now floating around the 'net)? The rom is marked as a 'bad dump' in MESS, because I was almost sure the typed one is very slightly wrong due to the fact that the sum16 of the one I typed does not end with "00", which seems to have been standard DEC practice for roms at the time. Hence I was hoping someone with a working or scrap vt1xx series board would dump the real thing. The trouble with most people dumping the original chip seems to be that: A. it is soldered to the vt1xx board B. it has uninverted CE (I think...) and a few other pinout oddities (see schematic on bitsavers) P.S. the second optional character rom (only selectable if you have an AVO board installed, or a VT102/VT131 which has AVO builtin), labeled 23-094e2 is also not dumped. This one, fortunately, is socketed on systems which have it, and I believe has a normal pinout. I think it contains european characters and formatting/word processing characters. It might also contain some or all of the technical font used on the later vt3xx+ systems as shown here: http://vt100.net/charsets/technical.html P.P.S. the main cpu roms from a vt1xx with the word processing romset installed are also not dumped. I have no idea what the numbering on these is though. Two of the CE pins alternate in binary form for the chips to allow them to be 'self decoding' and inserted in the four sockets in any order! cute, but makes dumping them a bit harder. -- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu(@t)hotmail(d0t)com jzg22(@t)drexel(d0t)edu

14 years, 5 months

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test-drb November 2009