On 5/11/2010 3:25 PM, dh wrote:
> I will be moving and may need to place it in a new home. It is huge: 6x4x2
> feet with over 2100 lights. Currently in Raleigh, NC, USA. Serious inquiries
> only please. Kind Regards, Daniel
That would be cool. But I am too far away.
Ben wrote:
> I wonder if OS/8 on a PDP-8 will still be around in +200 years?
No, but someone will have a DECTape labelded "Windows 2010 for the PDP-8"
along with a directory listing and an expert witness saying that it's
real.
Tim.
> How do you have MFM drives and nothing else of that vintage around?
I'm not the OP, but by the late 80's my impression was that even the best
of the MFM drives were pretty crappy in terms of reliability. In the
early 90's in the minicomputer surplus streams good SMD and then ESDI drives
and then SCSI became available (not necessarily free but affordable) and
the best of these were built like tanks.
In the mid-90's in the PC-clone surplus streams MFM drives were a dime
a dozen. But most had never been in a 5150, they were from clones
of the early AT era before IDE took over in that market.
While putting a MFM hard drive into a 5150 was possible in any number of
ways and certainly the power users did so, the vast majority of institutional
5150's (ones owned by businesses, hospitals, governments, schools)
I saw were never taken beyond floppy drives. Every so often I'd see one
with no floppies, just the cassette interface :-), those are the ones
I took note of! Probably bought by the "power loser" instead of the "power
user" crowd... the line could be incredibly thin sometimes!
Tim.
Hi everyone,
I'm looking to acquire a system and peripherals for the Grid Compass 1101. I did have a system several years ago and would keenly like to get hold of another one. Good price paid for someone willing to ship to the UK.
Thanks!
Stuart.
I have an ACARD AEC-7720U that I have been using in a VS4000/90 with
good results. I am trying to compare different versions of NetBSD. I
would like to split a 30GB IDE drive into 4 or so logical units. I don't
know much about SCSI really, but I believe that it is possible to divide
some drives into individually addressable logical drives, sort of like
partitions, but at the hardware level.
Can somebody enlighten me on SCSI LUNs, at least as far as they apply to
dividing disks? Does SCSI define how to divide a disk, or is that
proprietary to the drive? Since in my case the bridge is the "drive"
would I need a specific utility from ACARD for this?
-chuck
when you are trying to revive an IBM 5150, that :
- you do not have a single AT powersupply in the house, just 20 ATX PS
- do not have a single PC compatible keyboard, but 10 AT & 10 PS2 keyboards
- at least 50% of your MFM drives have passed away in their sleep.
- you don't remember which is the last DOS version that runs on a standard 5150
Time to grow up I guess.
Jos
Hi, All,
I've been fiddling with PETs lately and have found to my dismay that
my original c. 1978 C2N just doesn't push the tape along as fast as it should.
I opened it up, cleaned some minor funk out of the innards, but the old drive
belt is just a little sloppy and has a kink on it where it sat around the motor
pulley for a number of years between uses. The symptom is that FF and REW
speeds are not uniform, there's no real "grab" when pulling on the belt or
manually spinning different pulleys, and there is visible slackness in the
belt. Loads are spotty, and they mostly fail. The "secret" trick of
holding down
the ">" key when the tape is moving does show that the CPU sees flux
transitions, but it fails to recognize what's on the tape(s) as valid data most
of the time. I know the tapes are good, and a slipping belt explains all the
observed symptoms.
It's an easy enough part to replace, but does anyone know where to
get a proper replacement from? It's a continuous rubber belt, with a
square cross-section just under 1mm on a side, probably about 250mm-
300mm long, give or take a bit (I didn't measure it). It looks entirely
ordinary in the context of 1970s cassette transports.
Thanks,
