Has anyone here bought Apple 2gs stuff from 16sector.com? Playing with an
emulator got me thinking about pulling out the actual hardware and hopping
it up to what I craved the first time round. They have an 8M memory
expander and an IDE interface, among other things. Someone else,
a2retrosystems.com, has ethernet interfaces now and then.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Hi.
Just received one ONTEL (not Intel) 8" floppy disc drives cabinet from the
UK.
* Reasonable good external aspect.
* The drives appear to be Shugart.
* The power supply has good aspect in a first visual inspection.
* The fuse in the cabinet rear and the fuse cover are lost. I must check for
one valid cover.
The most interesting thing is the output interface. Every disc unit plugs in
a circuit in the cabinet rear. The circuit have the holes needed to put the
usual 50-pin interface. BUT the interface really installed is one similar to
parallel or DB25.
Sure that I can try to install the 50-pin interface. And I shall do more
investigations, but any help in all these aspects would be welcome.
Regards
Sergio
Probably from an Ontel OP-1 system in the late 70's or very early 80's.
The OP-1 was somewhere between a configurable terminal and a dedicated word processor depending on firmware and peripherals installed. Peripherals did include 8" floppies in the high end, I saw this being used in car dealerships back in the early 80's as the front end to a central-office PDP-11 system.
There are at least a few other manufacturers that used 8" floppies on a DB25 cable. E.g. the RX01 cabinet kit for a WPS-8 system. I would not expect to find any of them using compatible pinouts or even "interface concepts". E.g. the RX01 is a dedicated serial bus with some smarts (or at least a state machine) at the drives. The DSD-440 line used a different dedicated serial bus (26 pin ribbon cable IDC's usually but I think I saw it routed over a DB-25 at least once) and a microprocessor in the drive. I'm guessing your board that sits between 50-pin Shugart and 25-pin connectors, doesn't have much smarts, it probably just drops the many unused signal lines and consolidates many of the grounds.
I just got a box of 8" media which included some boxes with Fairchild
Camera logos I usually see on high speed camera equipment I collect.
There is something called a Fairchild Series 70 with what appear to be
floppies labeled for such a system in one box. There were probably
more, but they are full of Tarbell media, which I need as well.
Any idea what this is? I will try to rig something or find someone with
the means to digitize it and donate it to Bitsavers, of course.
I'm in the LA area (California) if there is anyone around. I have a
DiscFerret from Phil P. if someone has a clean working 8" setup and some
time to get it all running. I have 8" drives, but they are in unknown
working condition.
For what it's worth, it looks like the person with the Tarbell media had
the same problems I had and most other did as there are a number of
floppies labeled as to where they were written, since Tarbell controller
were notorious about reading a lot of media, but writing media only
Tarbell could read.
I also have a box with a Dysan reference floppy as well if needed in the
same lot.
Thanks
Jim
Multitech MPF-PC
http://elazzerini.interfree.it/MP-PC/index-en.htm
What I NEED to make this system alive are boot disks: they are special
because they contain the DIOS loader that sits between the hardware and the
operating system itself to allow the complete management of the motherboard.
Regards
Enrico
Hi.
I have one TU-58. Doing a resume:
* The components work at 115 volts, even when you can change the PS current
to 220-240 volts.
* In appeareance the Current flows by the main board of the device (the RED
led indicates so)
* The wire wrapping is the stablished in factory (TU-58 manuals, Bitsavers)
* It has not stablished the 'boot' wire wrap for LSI-11
* I have one DEC console serial cable
* I have too a couple of Dectape II cartridges
With all these stuff, I should like to connect the TU-58 to the Serial Port
of my Laptop and manage the TU-58. The objective is:
* To put a virtual image in the Dectape II from the Laptop
* To dump the content of one Dectape II in the Laptop
The unique option similar to this that I want is one MS-DOS driver in
SpareTime Gizmos, but to use the TU58 as one MS-DOS storage unit. But, what
I have in mind is similar but different at the same time. I want to manage
the TU-58 contents in DEC native format.
I know, in addition, of the existence of some TU-58 emulators, and in fact I
use them from time to time. And I'm not sure if one of these (TU58EM) has
this option available, but sure that someone in the list knows it.
I suppose then that some analysis of the STGiz MS-DOS driver plus the
diverse emulators of the TU-58 would be sufficient to begin to construct
some kind of software for this purpose.
But it's almost sure that someone has encountered this problem in the past
years and encountered one solution for it. Probably even with only one
communications software, a good knowledge of the RSP protocol, an one binary
image.
In the other hand, I am almost sure too that I need a modification (or
better a modified plug) of the Serial Port in the Laptop (9-pin) as the
realized in the SLUs of the PDP-11 to allow the correct manage of the TU-58
>from the laptop. I have the documentation of modifications to do in the SLUs
of the PDP-11, and in fact I did a couple of modified SLUs some time ago. In
the cas of the laptop it would be neccesary to one male-to-female plug.
The problem is the correct cabling inside it. I assume that I can do the
well-known probe-an-error but sure that exists some contrasted information
about the cable.
Thanks !
SPc.
Doc writes:
>> Save! They run Linux/m68k, NetBSD, etc, quite nicely - or System 7, of
>> course.
> You forgot A/UX....
As a "68K Mac" that can run old Mac OS's back to pre-Multifinder as well as newer stuff, the IIci is pretty sweet.
But having tried A/UX on it 20 years ago, it seemed like the slowest dog ever. I can't believe A/UX would be considered usable for example on the slower and smaller SE/30.
Tim.
Does anyone have a copy of Motorola Application Note AN-859 regarding
the MC6829 MMU? There used to be a copy at dynapic.com, but it's gone
and apparently so is the copy I had saved.
There are plenty of copies of National Semiconductor AN-859 and Analog
Devices AN-859 online, but those are NOT useful to me.
Thanks!
Eric
