test-drb July 2009

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

181 participants
245 discussions

Do not call them PCMCIA Cards (was "An interesting eBay find ....)

by roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk

>> oh ya... and why are they "VAXen"? > > Ox/Oxen -> VAX/VAXen is the straight answer (there are a few joke > answers from back in the day like "why isn't it box/boxen?") > > http://dictionary.babylon.com/VAXen > >> ?Are there "PDP 11/44en" too? I've >> got a couple Rainbowen here... > > Not in English you don't. At issue is the plural of English words > ending in 'x' (which I'm sure goes back to Anglo-Saxon or something. > The rule from Latin would be something like the plurals ending in 'es' > since that's typical of third declension nouns). So are photocopiers of a certain brand Xeroxen? Are helmsmen coxen? If I receive one fax then another are they faxen? If I apply one fix to my program and then another are they fixen? How about a dog fox and a vixen, are they foxen? One mix plus another are mixen? Small pox and chicken pox are poxen? One sax plus another saxen? Male and female sexen? Do your pay your taxes or your taxen? Surely in 90% of cases the norm is to add es. Adding en sometimes makes a noun in to an adjective, flaxen, waxen for example. Apart form oxen (a.k.a. bullocks), I could not think of one other example of plural xen. There may well be more but it was quite easy to come up my list which should all be xes.

14 years, 10 months

seeking documentation for the LC8-P M8365 LA180 Printer Control card for the PDP-8

by nigel.d.williams＠gmail.com

I am hoping to get a PDP-8/E soon so I grabbed the LC8-P off eBay with the idea it might provide an easy way to get a simple I/O capability for the PDP-8. I expect it could be quite similar to the LC8-E but it would help to have the schematic and description to be sure. thanks, nigel.

14 years, 10 months

More thinning of the herd

by Alan.Perry＠Sun.COM

The NeXT slab and the DEC power supply is now in good hands. The Canon BJ-10e is still available. It is the printer and power supply, the user manual and the programmers manual. It worked the last time that I used it, but that was some ago. CentreCOM MR820TR 8-port 10baseT hub with AUI and 10base2. Comes with the manual as well. Sun Ultra 1/200 Creator 3D with 20" Sun CRT monitor (the one with the remote control for adjusting the display). 384M memory. 18G SCA SCSI. CD drive (I think, may have DVD). Will reinstall OS (Solaris 7, *BSD or Linux). Local delivery only. NeXTSTEP 3.1 User and Developer for Black (NeXT) hardware. Includes box and manuals. Trades considered, but I am mostly in purge mode right now. I am looking for: - a copy of OpenSTEP that will run on SPARC - replacements for the fluorescent tubes that illuminate the LCD the display in a SPARCstation Voyager - 13W3 (computer end) to VGA or DVI (display end) adapter Located in the Seattle area.

14 years, 10 months

TK50 tribulations

by steve＠cosam.org

Hi all, I recently dug out a TK50 I was tinkering with before and am having some trouble diagnosing what's up with it. It arrived with a tape stuck in it, but I've since managed to persuade that out and a good clean up had it loading and ejecting properly. Now any read or write just results in a bit of shoeshining, whereafter it goes into its light-show routine. Yes, I should probably just admit defeat and keep it for parts, but it seems so close to working I thought I'd take another stab. The technical manual lists all manner of error codes which should narrow things down. I'm however at a loss as to how one should extract them from the drive/controller. I've had it hooked up to a PDP-11 and XXDP said nothing more than that the drive was faulty. I also have a MicroVAX II (where it actually came from) but I've not been able to run diagnostics on there due to lack of a floppy drive. I did experiment with an RX33, some RX50 images and a PC to write them, but the MicroVAX doesn't want to boot them. Any ideas? Cheers, -- Steve Maddison http://www.cosam.org/

14 years, 10 months

source code available for Apollo Guidance Computer

by nigel.d.williams＠gmail.com

blog entry with announcement: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/07/apollo-11-missions-40th-anniversary-… Example of subroutines to lift-off LM from the moon: http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Luminary131/BURN_BA… # Filename: BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.s and it contains interesting French phrases; anyone care to suggest its meaning in this context? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense): # THE MASTER IGNITION ROUTINE WAS CONCEIVED AND EXECUTED, AND (NOTA BENE) IS MAINTAINED BY ADLER AND EYLES. # # HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE And as expected storage is at a premium, see this comment: # MOD NO. -- 0 TO COMPLETELY REWRITE THE DOWN TELEMETRY PROGRAM AND DOWNLINK ERASABLE DUMP PROGRAM FOR THE # PURPOSE OF SAVING APPROXIMATELY 150 WORDS OF CORE STORAGE. Acknowledgments: # This source code has been transcribed or otherwise adapted from digitized # images of a hardcopy from the MIT Museum. The digitization was performed # by Paul Fjeld, and arranged for by Deborah Douglas of the Museum. Many # thanks to both.

14 years, 10 months

Microscience HH612 hard drive = value?

by tosteve＠yahoo.com

Mike Young <phillymopedman at yahoo.com> has a 'new in the box' Microscience HH612 hard drive that he wishes to sell (10MB 5.25"/HH MFM ST412) - any takers? Contact him at: phillymopedman at yahoo.com

14 years, 10 months

Write-only backup media and big archives

by mailman＠trailing-edge.com

Not really a mechanical or procedural thing, but a little more philosophical as I think about data storage not just at home for classic computing, but at work: In the 90's the CD-R and soon after the DVD-R looked pretty ideal for making "write only" backups of what was then considered large amounts of data. While not archival in the centuries sense, it seemed a pretty safe bet that readers would be readily available for the next 10 or 20 years and I think this bet has turned out well. I was willing to spend an afternoon buring a dozen or two CD-R's because they felt "real". But today, a "large amount of data" is not a few gigabytes, but terabytes. Tape libraries with these sorts of capacities do exist but aren't available at the corner store and I have a nagging mistrust of tapes that causes me to refer to them as "write only memory". (I never really ever trusted anything denser than 1600BPI 9-track!). Burning 2000 CD-R's or even 500 DVD-R's doesn't seem like a reasonable or useful task to backup a terabyte hard drive (which today is a fraction the price of the 9 Gig drives of the mid-90's that was "big storage".) At the same time, the ubiquitous and available-at-the-corner-store terabyte-sized USB drives don't feel awfully reliable either. They are way more convenient and cheap though, and that's my prefered backup media today. I think I'm falling into the trap of confusing the price of storage with the value of the information recorded onto the storage. It's ironic that as disk space has become cheaper and cheaper, we regard the contents as less worthy of the effort of backup onto reliable media. OK, philosophy mode off. The NTSB is gonna be asking me for a few gigabytes of data next week and that seems easy compared to the terabytes at home. Tim.

14 years, 10 months

DEC H207 Core Memory Boards

by ajp166＠bellatlantic.net

There wass never ECC memory as the logic for that likely exceeds that of the PDP-8. There was 13bit Parity memory (I don't mean the oddball 13bit rom /ram mix device). Allison > >Subject: Re: DEC H207 Core Memory Boards > From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> > Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:43:52 -0400 > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > >On 7/10/09, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote: >> While the use of the H207 has apparently been determined, out of curiousity was >> there ever any ECC core memory for the PDP-8?, it might have have had a width >> of 16 or 17 bits. > >I have never seen ECC core for any DEC machine (but don't take that as >the definitive answer). The PDP-8/L, though, was commonly shipped >with parity (there's space in the CPU chassis that's pre-wired for the >parity support cards and the slots for the core sense/inhibit wires >are wired for 13 bits). It might also be supported in the -8/i, but >I'd have to look that up (I know about the -8/L for certain because >one of mine arrived with that option populated). > >-ethan

14 years, 10 months

Apollo Guidance Computer on the BBC - (photos of)

by billdeg＠degnanco.com

Photos of the Apollo Guidance Computer for those without easy access to USA http://vintagecomputer.net/vcf3/apollo_guidence_module_a.jpg http://vintagecomputer.net/vcf3/apollo_guidence_modules_b.jpg http://vintagecomputer.net/vcf3/apollo_guidence_modules.jpg > > Rik, > > We have had people come to VCF East from as far as Germany. The UK would > be somewhat a shorter trip. > > Jim > > Rik Bos wrote: > > > > > Yep, but a bit of a travel for us in the old world ;-) > > So anyone with a private jet who's going from this side of the big water ? > > > > -Rik > >

14 years, 10 months

OMNIBUS prototype boards

by toby＠coreware.co.uk

A few months there was some discussion about prototyping boards for OMNIBUS, UNIBUS and QBUS. I seem to recall that someone provided a link to a manufacturer who still produces some. I've searched hard to try to find the original post but I've drawn a blank. I don't suppose anyone can remember the url? Many thanks, Toby -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

14 years, 10 months

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test-drb July 2009