test-drb December 2011

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

194 participants
247 discussions

by hilpert＠cs.ubc.ca

Just forwarding this to the list in case there might be some interest here. These are old 1950s-era fax machines, not 1990s. Apparently they are similar to the ones I present here (which is why he contacted me): http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/deskfax/index.html They are located in Northern Ireland. Begin forwarded message: > From: "cliff.corderoy" <cliff.corderoy at btinternet.com> > Date: 2011 November 24 5:46:14 AM PST (CA) > To: <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> > Subject: Desk-fax interest ? > > Hello Brent, > I have three Creed Desk-fax machines in my garage and wish to > let them go. Is there any interest in these machines ? > As they are so heavy the transport cost perhaps are higher > than their value ! > regards, > Cliff. ?ham radio callsign Gi4CZW. > 028 66329494.

12 years, 5 months

Unisys "Micro A"

by dfaultersack＠cox.net

Hi, Noticed a very old request about the Micro-A. Still interested? Regards, David Faultersack Micro-A Engineer

12 years, 5 months

IBM something, what is it ?

by fjkraan＠xs4all.nl

On 2011-12-10 19:00, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > Re: IBM something, what is it ? A programming device for some kind of IBM network. You put the floppy into the device only about half way for it to boot and then then you can configure the network with the hand-held terminal part. I have seen one working, but without the appropriate network. Fred Jan

12 years, 5 months

Any documentation / schematics for STEbus interfaces

by rwhyre+cctalk＠picrad.com

This 1980s-era bus supported multiple CPUs, and 20 bits of address space. It was also known as IEEE-1000 (until that standard was withdrawn), and used the DIN 41612 connector common to VMEbus systems of that time. I'm trying to find details on interface circuits, schematics for old boards, etc.

12 years, 5 months

Oscilloscope vector display driver...

by aek＠bitsavers.org

On 12/8/11 5:27 PM, Bill Sudbrink wrote: > too expensive typical here. glad to see your time is worthless.

12 years, 5 months

Docbook for Altair Manuals

by aaronvaldes＠rogers.com

Hello I was just messing around with Docbook to make some documentation. I was also in search of Paul Allen's documentation from his Altair Basic days. Is it alright if I take the content from the manuals on your site and put them in the Docbook format? Aaron

12 years, 5 months

Alpha, VAX available in Sweden

by Arno_1983＠gmx.de

Hi, does anyone consider going for these already? I can offer a home for (also just some of) that stuff in southern Germany if nobody else does, but unfortunately I can not assist with collecting and shipping right now. Anybody able to do a store&forward please contact me. Expenses within reason will be covered. Save The VAXen (...and their ilk)! Yours sincerely, Arno. -----Original Message:----- Subject: Alpha, VAX available in Sweden Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:50:56 +0100 From: Pontus <pontus at update.uu.se> Reply-To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> To: cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Hi If you live close to Gothenburg and can act within a few days I know of some medium sized alpha and small vax machines available for pickup. VT100 and VT520 terminals also. Contact me offlist. Regards, Pontus. Arno Kletzander ...sent from HTC Magician PDA

12 years, 5 months

Oscilloscope vector display driver...

by ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk

> > Hi All, > > I'm thinking of building a "somewhat vintage" two-channel DAC board, > intended to drive an oscilloscope as a vector display. I'm just considering > parts now, unless someone has a really good design already set to build. > By "somewhat vintage" what I mean is that I don't want to just drop in > a modern "super chip" that will have ten (or more) times the power of the > intended host computer which, by the way, is an SWTPc 6800. I figure the > board will have some 8-bit processor on it. I'm leaning towards a Z-80. > It will have an EPROM, some scratch static RAM, some glue logic to manage > the communication with the SS-30 bus... and this is where I get fuzzy... a > 1Kx8 dual ported static RAM and two DACs. These last two elements (the > dual ported SRAM and the DACs) are where I don't have any experience. A > little googling has led me to the IDT7130 for the dual ported SRAM and the > DAC0830 for the DACs. Does anybody in cctalk land have experience with > either or both of these chips? I have a source for the DAC0830, but I don't > have a source for the IDT7130 yet. The basic idea of the design is for the > 6800 to write a vertex list into the dual ported SRAM which the Z-80 then > reads and pushes to the DACs. I'm hoping I can just hang these chips off of > the Z-80 address and data busses like the RAM and EPROM but I need to do > some more reading of the spec sheets. > > Any help greatly appreciated, OK, some thoughts... You first need to decide how you're going to produce the vectors It's obviously importnat that not only do the 2 DAC output voltages get to the right values (that is, the vector ends i nthe right place), but also that they get there along a 'straight line' from where they were. There are 2 basic ways of doing this, the older one (which has a lower transistor count, but is a right pain to get working) is to do it in the analogue circuirty, that is the DACs 'jump' to the new valuse, the analogue circuitry then genreates the appropariate ramnps to mvoe the beam), the other is to do it digitally, calcualting stairsteps along the vector, moving the DAC ouptus one step at a time, and using analogue circuitry to smooth the result. Unless there are good reasons not to, I would recomend the latter approach. You can porduce the stairsteps eitehr using simple logic ICs (take a look at things like the DEC VT11 system) or using a microprocessor. The latter is probably easier. Jaut about any processor would be fine, I see no reason not to use a Z80 Somethign to be acaefule of is the relative speed of drawing differnt length vectotrs. If the beam moves more slowly on some lines than on otehrs, the former will appaer brighter on the screen.Try to keep drawing speed constant. There are then 2 other parts to the project. The first is the DACs themselves. I think you want more than 8 birs of resulution -- 12 bits would seem to be sensibe (12 bit DACs are not that expensive now). Try to get double-buffered DACs, which allow you to load the input regsters from the processor and then later transfer that registers's contents to the DAC iteself. The advantage of that is the processor can output the 4 values (high and low parts of X and Y) and then update both dacs simultaneously. Without that, you might get little glitches on the display. The otehr part is communication to the host. You have suggested dual-port RAM, which is certianly oen way to do it. I would suggest looking at FIFO buffers (each side cna write to a FIFO which si read by the other side. Of even just a pair of ports with handshake flags. SOemthing like this : '374 ----------- 8 | | 8 Data Bus 1 ---/------| D Q |--------/--------Data Bus 2 | | | Clk OE | ----------- | o WrStb/------+--------+ | | +--+-----------+----RdStb/ | | | | o | | --------- +--|\ | | R | | >o---- Ready Flag | +5V--|D Q|o-----------|/ | | | '00 +-------|> | | | --------- E.g part of '74 The ready flag shoud lbe readable by an input port on each processor. The ideea is the processor 1 can write to the '374 latch, when it does so, it sets the D-type at the bottom, maingign the ready flag line go high. Processor 2 can detect this, it will then read from the '374, clearing the D-type and briinging the ready flag low again. Processor 1 can monitor the flag line too to see when processor 2 has read the data. The NAND means that the ready flag will remain high while proecessor 2 is reading (and thus asserting the reset line to the D-type) so proecessor 1 doesn't try to writ at this thime (when it couldn't set the D-type). Take a look at the hP120 schematics to see how a pair of Z80z can communicate using this sort of circuitry. -tony

12 years, 5 months

Mac/Mac Programming/Cocoa/HyperTalk Books free -, Melbourne

by jonas＠otter.se

The bigi difference being that unix wildcards are complicated for a reason - -tjhey let you do poweful things. Predicitve text just gets in the way! In any case, you don't_have_ to use wildcards in unix (you can always type the neames explicitly). On the other hand, I've not found a way to avoid this darn predictive text. -tony Options -> Dictionary -> Dictionary off should do the trick /Jonas

12 years, 5 months

Word Perfect 5.1 Documents?

by brian＠quarterbyte.com

I wrote this note yesterday, but replied to cctalk-request by mistake. (The listserv engine wasn't impressed, by the way). ... If you're using the built-in import or export filters provided with Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, or whatever, for your own documents, check over the results *very carefully* on a computer that does not have the old word processor installed. For documents anything more complex than a grocery list, the conversion tools provided with document processing programs are not quite what you'd hope for. One bit of advice I have is, if you want to convert old documents, do it now. As each new edition of Word or Corel Office comes out, tools for converting the oldest formats either disappear, or they stop working and the vendors aren't doing the QA to know this. (The current version of Quattro Pro crashes trying to open many spreadsheets in the old .WB2 and .WB3 formats, for instance). People in this group may have intermediate, older software versions lying around, but most folks don't. My experience is that both import and export tools do a decent job of getting raw text in and out. Formatting, styling, graphics, equations, cross references and outline numbering schemes? Not so much. But this is where the investment in a document lies. Text is cheap. One way of converting legacy formats is to have printed pages retyped in China or India at under a dollar a page. (This is a real industry.) But formatting is really expensive. Complex documents with drawings, math or tables can cost a business $25 to 100 a page, or more, to have reworked by skilled clerical or technical staff. Word's import filters are *horrible*. The result *might* look ok at first, but it goes downhill fast one you start editing or try to apply a consistent stylesheet. Their treatment of equations and graphics is downright dangerous. The filter that extracts WordPerfect's WPG graphics only converts the basic [0,x] character set for text that appears in labels in graphics. Characters in the other sets turn into spaces. I saw a drawing that used the "1/2" symbol in a label that read something along the lines of "IMPORTANT: TIGHTEN THIS NUT TO 2 1/2 FOOT POUNDS" come out "IMPORTANT: TIGHTEN THIS NUT TO 2 FOOT POUNDS." The equation importer is no better. "grad" (nabla, the upside-down triangle) and "Delta" both come out as an uppercase Delta. Some other symbols are dropped entirely. Many equations simply don't convert at all. This has been the state of the filters since at least Office 97. Microsoft has made no corrections. OpenOffice? I've found it crashy, especially when trying to export or import. Small documents, OK. Big, complex documents, no. Export tools are typically worse than import tools. Vendors aren't really motivated to provide a good tool that you can use to escape from their product line. You can usually get away with *publishing* to another format, but you usually won't get a maintainable *source* document. (By maintainable, I mean a document with cross-references intact, outline numbering organized the way the new environment's native numbering system works, typography governed by a single consistent style sheet, and so on). My experience with exporting things from WordPerfect is that equations are not editable, or are not converted at all. Graphics exported to any vector format (e.g. WMF) still use the proprietary WordPerfect fonts, so again, symbols beyond basic ASCII are a big problem. Once you move the exported document to a system that doesn't have WordPerfect installed, symbols disappear from the graphics. PDFs with embedded fonts get around this, but, PDFs are really bad format for documents that have to be maintained. (A couple of years ago we lost a bid to do a conversion for a major US oil company. They decided to convert a huge archive of refinery operating manuals in-house on the cheap, by making PDFs and then converting the PDFs to Word. They will be losing all automatic cross references and numbering. After a few future edits, "Before opening this valve, see the critical warnings in step 3.32.4 on page 147" will be pointing to the wrong comments on the wrong page because these numbers are now just literal text. Management didn't seem to be at all concerned about this. If I lived next to a refinery on the Gulf Coast, I'd move.) There are a lot of other details that get lost in translation by the native tools that won't matter as much to an individual, but do matter a lot to organizations that have thousands of documents to maintain. My business is there, so I've written converters from scratch. Keeps me employed! Brian =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- _| _| _| Brian Knittel _| _| _| Quarterbyte Systems, Inc. _| _| _| Tel: 1-510-559-7930 _| _| _| http://www.quarterbyte.com

12 years, 5 months

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test-drb December 2011