Hi,
Apologies that my first post to this list for a while is one requesting
assistance, but my unjustified faith in hard drive technology has bitten
me... The Seagate drive in my VAXstation 4000/90 (running OpenVMS 7.3)
failed recently and it hadn't been backed up for quite a while. We had a
power surge which tripped the main circuit breaker, and when I reset the
breaker and turned the box back on the drive failed to spin up. The
drive is recognized by the firmware, except that the capacity column
shows ... instead of a figure. An LED on the controller circuit board
lights a couple of times reinforcing that the drive electronics are
talking across the SCSI bus, but as I say the drive refuses to spin up.
The box was running a website dedicated to HECNet (it was at
http://www.hecnet.eu) using the WASD webserver and was able to report on
issues with the network and current HECnet nodes.
My (limited) diagnostic skills would point towards a drive motor
controller failure, or less likely sticking heads. Given that the drive
has been powered down and up on a number of occasions without issue I'm
thinking it is probably a controller failure rather than a head problem,
but I'm open to alternative opinions.
Does anyone have a Seagate ST39173N drive they would be prepared to part
with for a reasonable amount of money? At the moment the only drives I
can find are in the region of $150 which is more than I can comfortably
part with on the off chance that swapping the controller board might
give the drive new life.
Many thanks for the help.
Mark.
I have more calculators accumulated over 30+ years than I'll ever
play with, so would like to find new homes for a few.
http://i1181.photobucket.com/albums/x426/DrCharlesMorris/PA030021.jpg
>From left to right:
-RadioShack EC-220 (Cat No 65-604). Working.
-Unitrex "Memory-8". Missing battery compartment cover. Working.
-Commodore MM2 "Minuteman 2". Not working. Comes with wall wart.
-TI SR-51-II. Not working. Several years ago I put new nicads in
the battery pack and it worked then. With case, wart & manual.
-Unknown mfg. "4-banger" with LCD display and incandescent
backlight. Works but has air bubble partially obscuring LSD's 2/3.
This one was written up in "73 Magazine" in the late '70's or
early '80's and was available from Meshna, Poly Paks or a similar
surplus place.
Would like to get $10 for all five, plus shipping from US zip
65775.
At 5:34 -0500 10/12/10, Mark D. wrote:
>If Al could send me the guidelines, I'll happily see what I can do.
At 5:34 -0500 10/12/10, Alexandre quoted Dave:
> > I for one would thank you wholeheartedly.
>
> Make that two :)
...three!
--
- Mark 210-379-4635
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Large Asteroids headed toward planets
inhabited by beings that don't have
technology adequate to stop them:
Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.
Hi,
VTL stands for Vendor Transitor Logic.
I (finally) found it in a S/34 hardware manual.
VTL is Texas Instrument TTL chips with IBM part numbers.
Henk
www.ibmsystem3.nl
Can anyone suggest URLs, etc that give the wiring of RJ45 sockets. in
telecom applications. Not 10bse<n> (which from what I understand are not
strictly RJ45's anyway), or ISDN, but older telecoms.
The web pages I've found soe far give the wiring for up to 4 POTS lines
on an RJ45, which is, again, not what I am looking for...
In particular :
What pins would I expect to find a normal 'switched' telephone line on (4
and 5, I think?)
What about a 2-wire leased line ('private circuit')? Or a 4-wire one?
Why would there be a resistor of about 866 ohms connected between pins 7
and 8?
Why would pins 3 anf 6 be shorted together?
In case anyone's wondering, I've bought a non-working telephone line
simulator, and am trying to make sense of the numerous relays connected
to the telephone connectors, which are RJ45s (genuine RJ45s, with the
extra polarisation notch).
Books on US telcoms practicce are few and far between over here...
Thanks in advance for any help...
-tony
Hi,
John S <john_a_s2004 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> I recently obtained a Microwriter with an LCD display.
>>>
>>> Else it may be faulty
>>> I found Tony's post from 2009 asking for a 'good' EPROM image maybe
>>> mine is failing in a similar way.
>
>Tony wrote:
>> FWIW, I am still stuck... I am pretty sure the Firmware EPROM in mine is
>> corrupted, some 'chords' do not produce the characters I would expect
>My one can generate all the letters, numbers and punctuation marks so fingers crossed the EPROM is>OK.
>> IIRC, the EPROM is a 25C64 (which is slightly different to the more common
>> 27C64). If you have a programmer capable of reading out that device, it
>> would be interesting to compare the ROM in mine with it.
>OK, I'll try and read the EPROM. This might take me some time, but I am keen to
>do it as there is very little technical stuff about the MW4 on line.
I've finally made an adapter to read the 2564 on my programmer (which can only read the 2764). There were about 5 pins to rewire, I'll write some notes later on the differences.
I've upload the ROM image to:
http://www.vintagecomputers.btinternet.co.uk/mw4/mw4.zip
The file looks OK, but there are a lot of FF bytes on the ROM, which hopefully imply that the whole 8K bytes weren't needed rather than the ROM is faulty. Hopefully Tony can compare this with his ROM and come back with any further tips or questions.
>I might try and disassemble the code too
Not yet tried DASMx <http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/pclare/DASMx/> (thanks for the link Phil), maybe one day.
Regards,
John
Interesting read since I haven't played with GEOs for a couple of years now.
I know people who still used GEOs for the C64, but the PC version has been in limbo for a while
http://www.osnews.com/story/23882/The_Death_of_GEOS_
Does anyone know of a good history, online or in print, regarding the
Monrobot computers? I found some technical info at Bitsavers and on Ed
Thelen's site, but I'm looking for info about the people behind the
company in the 1950s.
Greetings;
I'm delving deeply into the manuals that came with my IBM System/34 and in
the Core section it mentions that the logic is "VTL and Dutchess". TTL,
ECL, CMOS sure... but I've never heard of VTL or Dutchess, and Google
doesn't seem to be providing (although forest/trees problem exists).
Is this just another footnote in our history, does it go by another name,
or am I missing something important here?
Thanks all;
- JP
Just recently acquired an Altair 8800b (turnkey model)! Came with
case, power supply, back-plane and the front control board, but no other
cards. Anyone have any cards for the altair 8800b (cpu, ram, serial,
parallel) they are willing to sell or trade?
nick dot allen at comcast dot net
