test-drb May 2011

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

162 participants
224 discussions

by jhfinedp3k＠compsys.to

After 20 years, I need to use my TK25 again. I now remember why I switched to the TK70. I takes about 4 minutes every time I need to change a tape. Now there is a hardware problem. When I insert a different tape, the tension cycle shows a flashing (left side of the front panel) green light until the cycle is complete. I am confident that the light changed to solid green in the past, but now the light stays unlit and the unit is not ready. At first, I tried to boot RT-11, but no luck. By accident, I needed to turn off the power, and then turn it back on. The TK25 power was left on and as soon as the PDP-11 started the boot cycle, the green light on the TK25 turned solid green. After RT-11 had booted from the hard drive, the TK25 is ready and everything works. Any suggestions? Controller? Drive? Cable? Since it takes 4 minutes for the tension cycle, having to boot again (less than a minute) is not a deal breaker. Also, now just a boot turns the green light on. Thank you in advance for any suggestions? Jerome Fine

13 years, 1 month

Collection is cleaned out, gone...

by trash3＠splab.cas.neu.edu

Hi all, Thanks for all the responses and offers. William Donzelli took everything, including all the manuals and handbooks. Quite a haul. My thanks to Will for keeping this stuff from the dump. If there was somehting particular you were looking for, you might want to send him a note. Joe Heck

13 years, 1 month

D 17A FRONT PANEL CONSOLE

by rlaag＠pacbell.net

I HAVE A FRONT PANEL CONSOLE FOR A D 17A IF ANYONE NEEDS A PICTURE...

13 years, 1 month

FS: Sony SDT-S9000 DDS3 External SCSI, also 2 CR-ROM caddies

by jtp＠chinalake.com

Sony SDT-S9000 DDS3 External SCSI drive Pulled from storage where it was bagged with desiccant. Clean, no dings/dents/fading I have a few cleaning tapes somewhere, all real media was shredded. Comes with a passive term (AMP type, DIGITAL logo). $30USD OBO Metro-west Boston, MA. Will ship from 01888 (~6lbs packed) Probably have a cable around if needed. Also have two CD-ROM caddies. Clean, usual tan, clear top w/ metal centre cap. Few bucks + shipping would be nice. -Jim (jtp at chinalake.com)

13 years, 1 month

Tunne machine video

by csquared3＠tx.rr.com

For those interested, there is a new Tunne code breaker machine video available. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13566878 Enjoy, Charlie Carothers

13 years, 1 month

program for authoring ASCII animations?

by legalize＠xmission.com

Is anyone aware of an open source program for authoring ASCII animations and playing them back on different terminals at different baud rates with maximum fidelity? Ideally it would be something that stores the animation as meta data and not as raw escape codes for the terminal on which the animation was authored. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

13 years, 1 month

Debugging styles (was 'scopes)

by mark.kahrs＠gmail.com

You know, it all depends on the person. Personally, I call the logic analyzer the "tool of last resort" or "the dreaded logic analyzer". When you need it, you need it and nothing else will do. But often you can get a long way with a 'scope and a logic probe (in the ancient days when strobes were easily accessible). When you're debugging a 32 bit bus and you've got probes hanging all over the place, then you know you are deep in hell --- one of the circles that Dante didn't describe.

13 years, 1 month

Loading software onto a real PDP11

by doug＠doughq.com

Hi everybody, I am sure that this has been solved, but I can't see a single cohesive way of doing it so I thought I would ask. I have a PDP11/04, with a RL01 disk drive. Ther are real physical hardware (about 40Kg each....) The hardware now operates - I can boot the custom software that is on one of the RL01 disk packs. It boots and displays "SYS5 READY~" then hangs - The system was used for a race track display board, so some of the custom hardware is not there. There are a couple of other packs that I have verified that don't boot, so what I would love to do is to load some useful software (RT11 or Basic or Forth....). I can not figure out how to actually do that - I have simulated images for SIMH, and can get SIMH to actually boot RT11, but I can't figure out how to actually move the data onto the nice, big, physical disk... Can somebody provide some advice? Doug (In sunny Canberra, Australia)

13 years, 1 month

program for authoring ASCII animations?

by tshoppa＠wmata.com

Back in the early 80's we created such animations by writing Fortran codes that had hardcoded strings to set up the static parts and used DO loops to emit the escape characters to do the animation on the terminals of the time (first VT52 then VT100). As necessary for regulating the speed of playback, NUL's and other "do nothings" would get inserted along the way in the DO loops. In my circle it was, by definition, being done on a DEC machine (either a -11 or a VAX, sometimes taking advantage of easy portability of the Fortrans). Some guys did this on PDP-10's but the Hollerith strings were not so portable between -10's and the -11/VAX platforms. There wasn't really much abstraction going on in those programs. Fortran was great for do loops etc. but a little bit ugly when it came to emitting character strings. It was often a kludgey combination of Hollerith strings stored in integer variables or arrays, format statements, and (where we had F77 later on) CHARACTER datatypes. We had absolutely no inhibition at using a 4-byte integer to store an escape sequence and then through the ugliness of equivalence statements making one of those bytes be the index of a do loop, and emitting it as a Hollerith string. Usually we did whatever was easiest so it was very common to see multiple approaches mixed together often inside the same format statement :). After making a file containing the escape sequences for an animation it was "released" by putting it in a public directory and/or copying it from site to site via DECNET. VMS Mail could (for a while) be used to send ASCII animations in the body of the message but most sysadmins eventually disabled control characters in message bodies (details of this... oooh I used to know but it escapes me now.) After my time (e.g. by the late 80's and early 90's) the animations were done by younger guys who knew C and some of them even used termcap libraries.

13 years, 1 month

Edusystem-25 BASIC (was Re: PDP-11/03)

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: > On 5/25/11 9:34 AM, Jerome H. Fine wrote: >> >> You are either unaware of Multi-User Basic under RT-11 >> or you may have not remembered. > > ?About MU-Basic, another listmember just sent me a copy. ?I've not seen it > in about twenty years, and never on one of my own systems. ?I know what I'll > be doing this afternoon! :-) This thread got me looking for the PDP-8 equivalent (thinking back to Dave Ahl's original (pre-MSBASIC) edition of "101 BASIC Computer Games") and I found this... http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp8/papertapeImages/russ.ucs.indiana.edu… ... but every copy I've found has what looks like some corruption halfway through (just below the label "FOGO2"). Has anyone ever gotten a working version of this? The comments up top suggest a rare but not-impossible-to-assemble set of hardware requirements (especially in emulation)... /EDUSYSTEM 25 BASIC IS FOR THE PDP-8/E, -8/F, -8/M, -8/I, -8/L WITH /12K OR MORE MEMORY AND EITHER THE DC02 OR PT08(KL8E) OPTION /AND TC08 DECTAPE CONTROLLER WITH TU56 OR TWO TU55 TRANSPORT(S) /NOTE: START ADDRESS IS 15200. A bit of brief reading of the code suggests that it could handle up to 8 terminals. I don't happen to have a TC08 (only a TD8E), so it's unlikely I'll ever take it any farther than emulation, presuming an intact version of it is still floating around out there. -ethan

13 years, 1 month

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test-drb May 2011