Is it possible that you still may have the 200 in 0ne manual for the radio
shack 28-249 electronics kit? I've been searching for a while for this &
would like to turn the kit over to one of the grandchildren but I have no
manual. I realize your post is extremely old but it's worth a shot. regards
Glenn
Hi All,
I'm having a clear out of the loft in the face of an imminent house
move and I need to compress the collection a bit.
On offer are:
1 x Panasonic SCSI LT-7010E Magneto-Optical Drive, no media, hence
never tested but ID'd properly when SCSI hooked up.
1 x Syquest SCSI 5.25 Drive plus 2 x SQ400 44MB cartridges. In working
order when last used.
Both in Chester, UK.
Free if collected. I will investigate shipping costs if anyone is
really keen. MO drive is pretty heavy though.
Cheers,
Pete
--
Pete Edwards
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" - Niels Bohr
On 12 Feb 2010, at 18:00, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:59:49 +0000
> From: Pete Edwards <stimpy.u.idiot at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: The value of assembler language programmers [was RE:
> Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog]
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Message-ID:
> <11c909eb1002120759u37cef5e6x4d7e5470b6678d56 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 12 February 2010 08:00, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
>> On Feb 10, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Roger Holmes wrote:
>>>
>>> the BBC web site. Oh and a couple of weeks ago I posted an old video of it
>>> on U-Tube if anyone is interested the URL is
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsBPuUJPvKg or just Google ICT 1301 and
>>> select video. I hope to post a better one later in the year.
>>
>> ?Man oh MAN that's a beautiful machine.
>>
>> ? ? ? ? -Dave
>>
>
> Seconded! That's an awesome piece of kit Roger.
> I *especially* like the Forbidden Planet noises at the end.
> What is that audio signal derived from?
Thanks to all who responded, I think you will like it even more when you see the new layout with 8 decks in a row, four of which worked at last years open day.
The sound is produced by executing a very small loop of three or four instructions many times which contains a (decimal) multiply instruction, the duration of which varies with one of its operands. Zero takes almost no time, 555555555555 takes longest because for each digit it can either count down for 1,2,3,4 or 5 or count up for 6,7,8 and 9. There is an increment in the loop hence the time varies with each iteration. A conditional branch at the end of the loop flips a bit which drives the speaker.
In the demo software being run in the video there is also a small test for the bottom 2 or 3 digits of incremented value being zero which allows it to branch off and drive the peripherals from time to time. This does no seem to affect the sound too much though it is not quite as pure as the original 'ghost' program. From time to time (but not in the video) it does a bubble sort of a block of data read from tape which produces a more recognisable 'computer' type sound.
I once keyed in a short sequence of jumps activated by some of the switches on the front panel. The longer loops worked fine but there seemed to be a problem with the top note. There happened to be a young lady present and she said she could hear it fine, it seems it was simply beyond the frequency range of my old ears. I think it would flip the bit 1000000 / 12 times a second, so dividing by another 2 that would be 41.666 kHz. The machine has a nominal 1MHz clock derived from a 250kHz timing track recorded on the last drum accessed and the shortest instruction is 12 clock cycles.
As another thread is discussing cats, I have to add that the first time I saw my 1301, there was a cat asleep on the main power stabiliser rack which was stuffed full of 6 inch by 4 inch by 4 inch heat sinks for the GET875 transistors used in parallel to regulate the various voltage DC supplies. It was the rack which was stuffed, not the cat by the way, the cat got up later and played with my host's hands as he tried to operate the main control panel.
> From: Russ Bartlett <arcbe2001 at yahoo.com>
>
> I worked on one of these systems? 400 words IAS , magnet drum, and 4 tape decks .Programming was MPL.? We would use a card sorter (off-line) to save on sort time for a tape sort/merge process.
You've got it, though I didn't know they ever shipped them with just 400 words. I knew it was theoretically possible to have just one 'barn door' but that must have been incredibly restrictive, especially on a tape machine where you need I/O buffers for Data Transfer Unit to do what we now call DMA into/from. Yes it could be programmed in MPL (Mnemonic or machine code or TAS (Thirteen hundred Assembly System) or MAC (Manchester Auto Code) and later there was COBOL and ICT's attempt to make COBOL more bearable, RapidWrite.
Do you mind telling me where this 1300 or 1301 was? I don't suppose you know its serial number do you? I am trying to identify as many machines as I can, especially so I can find out how many were made. Mine is number 6 and I have parts of numbers 58, 75 and 166 but I suspect the number nearly reached 200 but the best remaining official ICT record is incomplete, some pages were lost and it was a marketing document, a list of customers in alphabetical order, and probably made before production ceased anyway as marketing would hardly be interested in an obsolete product.
Your 400 words reflects on another thread where someone said "In the mid 60's only large companies had systems with greater than 16K
memory and disc drives. Mag tape 800 and 1600 bpi if you were lucky was the norm." Taking the middle of the mid 60's, 1965, about a quarter of the machines in the UK were 1300 series with between 400 and 2000 words of Immediate Access Store (core), no discs just usually one 12000 word drum. Those lucky enough to have mag tape (which roughly doubled the cost of the computer as well as requiring air conditioning) were 300 bpi, usually 10 track (4 data + 6 CRC) half inch or for a lucky few, 16 track (8 + 8) one inch wide tape. There were of course scientific machines like ATLAS around but only three? were ever built, most actual data processing was done on much more mundane machines like the 1301. The IBM 360 was announced in 1965 but how many actually got their hands on one in the UK that year? If you only had 400 words (4800 digits) of storage, who would waste it hold 19s. As to using PICTURE XX , I only ever wrote one COBOL program (put me off for life) but I think PICTURE XX means two characters, which means 4 digits so exactly the same storage size as PICTURE 9999.
Roger Holmes.
I have two shelves of pen plotter manuals at work, including many HP ones. Are you after the operators manual or the programmers manual i.e. the command set. I have a DraftMaster (MX plus IIRC) here. Maybe I can answer your questions from memory, if not I can look next week.
Roger Holmes
(Author of MacPlot, a pen plotter driver for Mac which was an application in 1984 but became a chooser level driver after Apple contracted us to change it so they could bundle it with MacProject and what became Claris Draw II).
On 12 Feb 2010, at 18:00, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:24:59 -0500
> From: jthecman at netscape.net
> Subject: Manual Needed
> To: cctech at classiccmp.org
> Message-ID: <8CC79AA1704C4E9-27F8-7F3C at webmail-m063.sysops.aol.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
> Hello
> Does anyone have a copy of the hp Draftmaster II manual for loan, sale,
> can make a copy of it?
>
> Thanks,
> John K
Message: 12
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:44:40 -0800
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
Subject: Re: Hacking a typewriter into a teletype
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID: <4B7514F8.19394.8B6F5 at cclist.sydex.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
On 12 Feb 2010 at 6:36, Christian Liendo wrote:
> I figured some one on this list would find this useful.
>
> http://numist.net/post/2010/project-typewriter.html
Didn't a number of Brother typewriter models have the capability of
also serving as printers--without modifications? I also wonder if it
might not be better to start with a word-processor type of
typewriter.
Mr. Obvious on the web page stated:
"it also revealed that avr-gcc's code generation is very poorly
optimized"
--Chuck
----------------Reply:
There's a genuine Brother computer>typewriter RO interface
for sale right now ($5) on the Vintage Computer auction site.
And if anyone wants to convert an Olivetti typewriter, I still
have a box full of interfaces for several models from the
days when I was involved in their sales and support.
mike
On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 , ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
>
>That sounds more like the Intel 8251 USART. IIRC on that chip you have to
>send the reset command 3 times to ensure it's treated as a command and
>not as data to be loadrd into one of the configuration registers.
>
>-tony
>
Hmm, I must be getting old.
Between about 1983 and about 1990, I wrote a fair amount of software for
a communications board which I designed, and which used an 8088, an
8259, an 8253, 8255s, and, for some reason I cannot remember now, I
think it used 6850s for the serial ports. We started out with all
Motorola peripheral chips but found out that the timer chip wouldn't
work properly together with the Intel bus, so we switched to Intel. I do
have the distinct impression that we kept the 6850s for some reason,
probably price, and, I think, simplicity. We had no need for synchronous
communications so that would have been a reason.
We had an earlier all-Motorola design (6809-based) we got ideas from (I
had never designed any microprocessor circuitry before), and IIRC, I
started out sending a single reset command, which didn't work, and then
I looked at the other design and saw that their software sent 3 resets,
which I then understood the reason for.
I may be wrong, as this was 27 years ago, but it would be easy to test. I
can't, as I have nothing to test on. And Charlie C, had you asked me 27
years ago I could have told you exactly what to do ;-)
Whatever it was I did, it worked well, because we sold a number of those
boards, each of which used 4 serial interfaces. It annoys me that I
can't be sure whether we kept the ACIAs or changed to Intel.
Wh?t I do remember is that the Motorola chips were simple and elegant
compared to the Intel chips.
/Jonas
"Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>
>Fur critters, huh? I'm fighting a running battle with some nutria
>that keep invading my pond, but they are definitely not "cute".
>
They are, however, reasonably tasty when properly prepared, so there's a way to deal with that situation.
KJ
Anyone have a datasheet for the MCM62940 (MCM62940AFN14) static RAM? It's
not strictly off topic, as it's from the 256K level 2 cache of a computer
>from the mid-90s (NuBus PPC Macintoshes).
The usual web searches have failed me. I thought I had downloaded it
years ago, but it turns out I only collected the datasheet for the TAG
SRAM and not for the cache chips.
This is particularly interesting because one can get 4000 of the chips
(soldered to boards) for about $50.
<http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Motorola/CACHE256M500PK/>
I have a couple of projects in mind where they might be useful. On the
other hand, they do take up a lot of board real estate (about .75"
square).
Jeff Walther
This message has been forwarded from Usenet. To reply to the
original author, use the email address from the forwarded message.
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:18:22 -0500
Groups: comp.sys.dec
From: "Tom Lake" <tlake at twcny.rr.com>
Org: albasani.net
Subject: BASIC-Plus-2
Id: <hl4d6a$4vt$1 at news.albasani.net>
========
I'm running RSTS/E on the SIMH PDP-11 emulator and it works fine. It only has
BASIC-Plus,
though. Is there somewhere I can get a disk or tape image of BASIC-Plus-2? Me
ntec was
swallowed up and the new owners don't want to know from PDP-11.
TIA
Tom Lake
Hi! John Monahan and I are making some S-100 home brew PCB projects. The
S-100 backplane, S-100 prototyping board, and S-100 buffered prototyping
board projects are essentially done. I am gathering up those who would like
any of those boards and when there is sufficient interest I'll make a
manufactured PCB order.
We nearly done with the S-100 IDE and S-100 keyboard projects. Both
projects have been prototyped, manufactured PCBs made, and are demonstrated
working. However, there are a few minor issues we'd like to clear up on
both projects and are considering respins of those PCBs. If anyone is
interested in those projects please let me know so I can make an order. The
PCBs typically are in the $20-$30 range depending on quantity.
There is an S-100 SRAM/EPROM prototype PCB in the build and test phase and
an S-100 Front Panel in design phase. No estimate on when either of those
will be done but it will be quite a while since we are making local
prototype PCBs first before ordering manufactured PCBs.
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
