This appeared on the cbm-hackers list today. Anyone have a thought on it?
Addresses redacted.
----- Forwarded message from William Levak -----
Subject: re: Anyone know what type of plastic Commodore computers are
manufactured from?
I have looked at the retr0brite website, and gone throgh all the
information there.
It is my opinion that this procedure has not been adequately tested, and
there is a possibility that this procedure may cause long term damage to
the plastic.
I am a chemist and have some experience testing resins.
The retr0brite information mentions a white "bloom" on the plastic from
over treatment. This condition is permanent. It also represents chemical
damage to the plastic.
A common procedure to determine the chemical resistance of polymers, is to
put various reactive chemicals on the surface and determine whether, and
how much time it takes for noticeable chemical damage to occur. This
usually shows up as a white "bloom", but this is not the only damage.
Polymers can also suffer damage that is not visible, but causes the
polymer to lose its strength and prematurely "age".
The retr0brite information says that you should be careful not to over use
the chemicals so that the white "bloom" does not occur. But this does not
necessarily mean that chemical damage has not occured. If it takes x
amount of time to create the white "bloom", then using it for half that
time probably means that half the damage has occured. Whether the damage
is visible is not the real question here.
It would take aging tests to determine whether the plastic is damaged from
the retr0brite procedure. I do not see any indication that retr0brite
treated plastics have been subjected to aging tests.
-------- Original Message --------
>> From: "Stingray"
>> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2010 10:37 PM
>> Subject: Anyone know what type of plastic Commodore computers are
> manufactured from?
>>
>> Anyone know specifically what plastic the C64 and C64C are manufactured
> from?
>>
>> I have been wondering how to stop plastic Commodore gear from fading.
>> I found a really good link on this (also explains why some of the keys
>> on your C64C are faded and some aren't).
>> http://www.vintagecomputing.co...chives/189 [ this was truncated in the
original message for some reason ]
>>
>> Does anyone have any of their own tips on maintaining plastic
>> Commodore equipment?
>>
>> Regards,
>> Stingray
>>
Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list
----- End of forwarded message from William Levak -----
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- We shoulda bought a squirrel. -- "Rat Race" --------------------------------
...
> > IBM had DASD (anyone pronouce it?); CDC had RMS. Crossing between
> > the two cultures could be very confusing.
>
> I say "dazzdee". I've never heard anyone say "Dee Ay Ess Dee".
It's mostly been Dazz Dee for me;
however, occasionally I have heard or said Dee Ay Ess Dee
How about IBM's CKD - always "See Kay Dee"?
BTW, did anyone else use CKD (other than PCMs), perhaps RCA (who arguably
was a PCM+)?
And was the 3390-3 the last CKD DASD?
Tom
Walter F.J. Mueller <W.F.J.Mueller at gsi.de> wrote on 21 Jun 2010 21:02:18 +0200
> I'm in the middle of homogenizing some internal interfaces and of some
> code cleanup, also the backend handler needs a re-write in C++ (currently
> perl). When that's done I'll make the whole package (VHDL sources, test
> benches, backend) available on 'OpenCores'.
The PDP-11/70 core is now available at OpenCores, see
http://opencores.org/project,w11
The documentation is admittedly still rudimentary. The backend handler is
still in perl. This and many other things on the TODO list for the future.
Walter
At 07:48 PM 8/2/2010, Jason T wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Phill Harvey-Smith
><afra at aurigae.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> corrupted text screen it would be described as "my screen was full of ASCII
>> characters" Well duuuhhh what do you think the normal ones are(1).
Really? How could you be sure? Once they're on the screen,
don't they look the same?
>When my friends want to shop for "organic" vegetables, I ask them
>where the silicon-based ones are...
In the same aisle as the organic mineral supplements.
- John
I have been fortunate in acquiring and restoring a Tek 4051 recently.
I had used one of these back in '77 to '82 and I still have some
documentation, and I found other manuals on bitsavers.org but have not
located any software. Do you know of any source on-line? I found
references on this site (Feb. 2009) from other users talking about
building an archive of software for the 4051.
I have keyed in a few short programs to test the vector graphics, but it
would be nice to have the original standard pack tape programs. Even
printouts would be helpful. I recall when I last used a 4051 back in
the early '80's we had the ability to dump & load programs using the
serial port, and the ability to un-secret the programs. If I can find
this information again I would be glad to provide it to help build a
software library for this fantastic system.
Thanks,
C. Archer
At 22:17 -0500 8/2/10, Tim wrote:
>Tim "Excessive force in the apprehension of abused acronyms has been
>approved" Shoppa.
Ah! a quote from one of my favorites - "The Big Blues Brothers"
:-)
--
- 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.
Philip Pemberton <classiccmp at philpem.me.uk> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm building some hardware that spits out debug info on a regular basis,
> and I figured it'd be useful to have this data graphed on-screen. Making
> it keep track of the last "N" samples and draw them wouldn't be hard,
> except adding an LCD display is out of the question (takes up too many
> I/O pins).
>
> On the other hand, I have a perfectly good serial port which runs at a
> decent rate of speed (115200 baud), and Xterm can emulate a Tektronix
> 4014 vector terminal. Perfect... except I can't see an easy way to tie
> Xterm to a serial port instead of having it run an application.
xterm -e kermit
However, this also begs the question, what is plotting the the data, if
you just output debug information? Some application I would assume...?
Why not have that application written on your linux system, and run it
inside an xterm, and have the application read the data from the serial
port, and then output the approriate stuff to control the window?
> There's nothing in the manpage (admittedly I haven't read it all, just
> grepped it for a few obvious terms) and 'apropos' isn't finding anything
> useful. I've been told that tip(1) on BSD will do what I want, I just
> can't find anything similar on Linux...
tip probably don't exist on Linux, but all you need to know is that tip
is a program to connect yourself out on a serial port. Any other program
that do the same thing works equally well. And I have yet to see any
program that works better for this kind of thing than kermit.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Jason T <silent700 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Surely covered on this list before, but I will re-open the box:
>
> SQL.
>
> I say "ess kyu ell." I rarely hear "sickle," although that makes
> some sense. I *always* hear "sequel," which requires some more
> imagination. It's only a hunch, but I suspect this originated from
> the dark halls of Redmond.
Nowadays, with wikipedia and all, one would think that people would
actually check things up... :-)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql, under the history section...
I'd say "sequel" is almost more correct than "ess kyu ell". :-)
But of course everyone is free to pronounce it any way they see fit.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
> Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:28:27 -0700
> From: Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com>
> Tony wrote:
>>> One thing to watch for are the little 20-way Apple ribbon cables that
>>> link these drives to the mainboard. They are not what they seem -- in
>>> particlar 1 ro 2 wries are not wires at all, but solid plastic, so
>>> those
>>> pins of the connectors are not linked. If they are, then all sorts of
>>> odd
>>> things happen (Eject motor runs continuously???)
>>>
>>> I beelive there are at least 2 versions of the calbe (for double sided
>>> and high density drives>?, with different coloured pin 1 tracers. A Mac
>>> enthusiast may know more.
>>>
> Jeff wrote:
>> I don't remember all the details. I do remember that there is a cable
>> with a yellow stripe on pin 1 and another version of the cable with a
>> red stripe. If you install the wrong cable (can't remember whether
>> it's red for yellow or yellow for red) the eject motor does indeed run
>> continuously.
>>
>> It doesn't seem to damage the drive; I never let it run more than a few
>> seconds. So it's easy enough to identify and correct.
>>
> There's a dedicated eject signal on the 800K and FDHD that will cause
> the drive to eject. IIRC it is active low, and replaced a ground. The
> internal drive connectors in the Mac are not wired for that eject signal.
>
> The dedicated eject signal is probably used in the external drive
> enclosure for the eject button. Software can tell the drive to disable
> the manual eject and poll the button instead. Or something like that.
Hmmm. I may be remembering what happens when one tries to install an
auto-inject floppy drive into a later model Mac which expects a manual
inject drive. In which case it has nothing to do with the cable, although
I have seen both red and yellow striped.
Anyway, I know I was building a system out of bits and pieces and saw that
behaviour from the floppy, but maybe it was auto-inject in later model Mac
rather than wrong cable. I hadn't started keeping a lab notebook yet, at
the time.
I know I've built floppy cables for PCI PowerMacs and manual inject
floppies using standard ribbon cable and crimp on IDCs (connectors, is
that redundant with IDC?).
Jeff Walther
