At 10:41 AM 11/22/2010, Rich Alderson wrote:
> He received a telegram from the
>home office asking him to visit a customer in Texarkana who was having trouble
>with one of their products. He telegraphed back that they should send someone
>from Chicago, since they were much closer to the customer.
Even today, Google Maps says the difference in Chicago's favor is
13 hours 9 minutes versus 13 hours 32 minutes, but I bet you can drive
at a higher speed from El Paso than you can from Chicago.
- John
A friend just called to tell me he was wandering through Tanner
Electronics' store in Texas, and had spotted some bins of ics sorted by
type, including a variety of floppy controller chips. I've added
them to my mental list of possible sources of older ics, and figured
others might be interested as well.
De
> From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
>
> A while back, part of an AMD 2900 development
> system showed up on eBay. My copies of the software
> surfaced today, so the .imd images are up under
> http://bitsavers.org/bits/AMD
>
> They are CP/M 1.4, as I recall.
Thank you. Might be extremely useful some time if I get around to using my similar system. On the other hand I might sell it, in which case having the image available on BitSavers has got to make the system more viable for someone. Just too busy with my 1301 in the summer and with my 1301 gate level simulator in the winter at the moment. Perhaps I should do a 2900 based computer with the 1301 architecture. Maybe an ICL 1900 and/or an Elliott 920.. The 920 ATC actually was 2900 based but I doubt the microcode has survived, though the early 920s would be simple as they only had 16 instructions - before they ballooned for CISC and then were reduced again for RISC. I suppose with a writable control store I could do anything from a Babbage Analytical engine or a Turing machine to the latest systems, though maybe not at full speed. Some of the more interesting machines (to me) like the ICT 1302 would be impossible because alas no full documentation of the instruction set survives. I have marketing information on it which amazingly actually lists some of the extra instructions but its far from complete and omits most of the actual function codes. Maybe I should ask the designer of the 1301 if he knows what his successors did.
Enough rambling, at least it was on topic.
Roger Holmes.
Technical Director, Microspot Ltd
Developers of CAD and Graphic software for the Apple Macintosh
Paxton writes:
> I really tried to search out used computer places in Vancouver BC with
> vintage equipment when I visit.
If you build a wayback machine that will take you to the 1990's, the UBC
SERF sales were way above excellent. Everything from mass spectrometers
to near-complete working -11 and -8 systems.
I'm told they don't happen anymore :-(.
Tim.
I've followed Tony's advice and went step by step, one board no chips,
chips loaded, second board no chips, measuring at each step. Finally
all seemed fine, I fired it up and now I've got RAM from 0000 all the
way to 7FFF :)
Next essential thing is the Load routine (from audio) that doesn't seem
to work. I wrote a routine to read bytes from the ACIA just like the
JBUG load routine does and simply quits when the first byte is read. It
loops until I start to play the audio file, so it actually detects that.
However when I make it loop until it finds a non zero data byte, it
never stops. So I thought all the analog stuff is working up to the ACIA
and the latter must be broken. Tried replacing it with no success so
far. Anyway, the kit is so well documented that I should have no excuse
of not being able to pinpoint the problem, learning a lot along the way...
Also, what are the best tools to encode/decode KCS audio ? From the ones
mentioned on the wikipedia KCS page I had success only with the perl
script, but that's only one direction.
Wim.
> Same guy posted to the VCF Forum about this. He wont ebay, craigslist is
> full of "scummy people" and "advertising costs money" so in other words he
> will pay to junk it. Could be wrong but somewhere in there he stated it was
> purchased for $4500 or something? Why do people blow that kind of money
> without a plan to profit? Sure there are some units in there worth selling,
> but that is if they are complete, cleaned up, and working otherwise they
> will go for nothing to somebody looking for parts or a project.
"Plan to profit"?
More typically it's a passion that simply has gone sour or has just faded away.
After it fades away the time, money, storage costs seem different than when
the passion was strong and the acquisition was the main thing - but then
real life intervened and he wants something back. That something might
be identified as money and I will agree that something's missing, but it is
not actually money.
Tim.
Sorry Tony, I "misspoke" --- the Alto memory Refresh task must run
otherwise the memory will wilt. The precharge is generated via chip
select and a carefully chosen inverter delay line.
Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. said:
> I know this isn't old... but I'm trying to rescue an Omnitech 16878-US
> GPS from the recycling bin.....
>
> [snip]
>
> Anybody have one of these ?
I have one.
As is my usual habit when I get a gadget with accessible storage, I
imaged the SD card immediately right out of the box. Restoring that
image (about 978MB) should get things back to factory condition,
software-wise.
Contact me off-line.
-- Jared
It's been a decade, and with a recent request for scans from Al, and
hearing of others who've found Teraks, I thought I'd refresh my page.
Notable additions include:
- Pictures from inside the Terak building circa 1980
- Terak user group newsletters
- Terak user group software lists
I think I have a few items up there that Bitsavers doesn't have,
so feel free to grab a copy.
- John
