No connection with this listing. Looks like an interesting item.
Symbolics 3640 Artificial Intelligence Work Station Complete and Functional
http://www.ebay.com/itm/221152106364
End time: Nov 17, 2012 7:03:55 PM
After a long delay (it's hard to make big release-worthy improvements after
19 years of development), Ersatz-11 V6.1 is done.
The free demo/hobby version is at:
http://www.dbit.com/demo.html
This release's additions are mostly about weird LSI-11-based microcomputers:
- Terak 8510/a. This is a desktop machine with a standard LSI-11 CPU card
and non-standard everything else. The highlight is the 320x240 graphics
display. Runs RT-11/85 and UCSD p-System. Works in the DOS, Win32, OS/2,
and stand-alone versions of E11, but not Linux (due to linker problems).
Probably has plenty of rough edges since I've never even seen a Terak
machine in real life. For one thing it only works with QX:-bootable disks
(no QB: FDC emulation yet).
- DEC PDT-11/130. LSI-11 chipset in a busless machine built into a modified
VT100, with two TU58 tape units below the monitor. Runs RT11 SJ or FB,
with more free memory than other MMU-less machines since it has a reduced
I/O page (so 60 KB of main memory instead of 56 KB), and the guts of the
TU58 driver are in ROM. DEC's PD.SYS driver is very small since it's just
a shim. A reimplementation of the ROM code is supplied (since the original
is copyrighted by DEC).
- DEC PDT-11/150. As above but in a big desktop cube with two RX01s for
storage. Again, comes with replacement ROM code to make PD.SYS work.
The manual has an appendix that shows how to write "E11.INI" config files
for all three of these micros.
There's also a new built-in text editor; see the EDIT command in the
manual. This was kind of an insane amount of work for just one new page
of documentation! You already know how to use it (press PF2 for the keypad
help screen if there isn't already a hardcopy scotch-taped to your monitor).
It's mainly for editing your E11.INI w/o having to leave the emulation
(or boot an OS in stand-alone E11), but it's an adequate basic text editor
(it's a VT100ified 32-bit port of the DOS editor I've used for everything
since 1983, including writing E11 itself).
Another new feature that's just a rough cut is that the SET THROTTLE
DELAY=d INTERVAL=i command can now take FILE=foo[.TIM] instead of DELAY=d.
This way you can feed it a file (e.g. foo.tim) which contains 65536
little-endian 32-bit longwords, each of which is the average execution
time of the corresponding PDP-11 opcode in nanoseconds. So now instead
of adding a fixed d-microsecond delay every i instructions, E11 maintains
a running total of execution time, and every i instructions it checks
the actual current time and delays as needed to match. There's a lot
of overhead in banging on the timer chip so often though, so for now the
execution speed comes out slower than it should. The main fetch/dispatch
loop is recompiled at runtime when the SET THROTTLE command is issued,
so at least the overhead from this code vanishes when it's not enabled.
Other new stuff: ASSIGN xxx /MAC:aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff works for *all*
Ethernet devices (was just UDP:) so you can override the real port's default
MAC address. And there's a new keyscript command that should have been
there eons ago: "LASTSIMILARYEARBEFORE 2000" (you can use other years but
why would you?) converts the current year captured by GETTIME to the last
one before 2000 that had all the same days of the week, so you can kludge
your way around non-Y2K-compliant PDP-11 OSes (this is for entering the
current time/date with one keystroke at boot time if that's not obvious).
John Wilson
D Bit
Hi Folks,
As part of my ongoing attempt to de-clutter my life, I am purging my
antique IC collection. I have a whole pile of 10K ECL chips left over from
a project a number of years back and am wondering if anyone has any use for
such. If so, let me know and I'll make a list. I KNOW I'll never use them
again.
Thanks,
Pat
I wanted to buy an equipment cart to house the huge HP 16700A logic
analyzer I bought, and I couldn't find one that would suit my needs.
So I built it:
http://www.techtravels.org/new_la_cart.jpg
Specs were roughly
* 2x2 solid wood Poplar frame construction
* (3) 2'x2' shelves
* Birch-Veneered 3/4" plywood
* 2" casters
* Monitor on left is floating above the top project area on flexible arm
* anti-static mat
* Surge protector for connecting equipment
* sliding keyboard shelf
* Ergonomically designed heights for keyboard/monitor
It's far from perfect and weighs a ton, but it's pretty solid and I'm
happy with it.
Thought I'd share.....
Thanks,
Keith
At 05:53 PM 12/10/2012, you wrote:
>> I find that last statement farily hard ot beleive. The HP9880 awas
>> introduced in 1974, video tape recording, while possible, was not common
>> then. Are we talking about the same machine?
--- HP had an early and innovative television operation. They used it to offer an extensive library of training programs to customers, as well as their own personnel. If I recall correctly, it helped communicate the "HP Way" to their far-flung divisions, around the World. In the 1972 catalog, they already had a whole library of video tape training programs. A photo there shows what looks like a Sony 1/2" reel-to-reel video recorder, like the ones which I remember seeing in my college days. Of course, the original Hewlett Packard company was very different from the modern day HP computer company. Much of the original operation was spun off as Agilent Technologies in 1999. No doubt, that is where the ghosts of Bill and Dave prefer to hang out, these days :)
Sorry to go on about this side-topic but their innovative commitment to television content production is one of the (many) things which always struck me as making HP special.
Steve L.
-------------- Original Message:
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 00:59:51 -0600
From: Adrian Stoness <tdk.knight at gmail.com>
> got this thing kicking around picked it up in the spring for 20 bucks
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7250/7547228432_e981da5a28_b.jpg
> curious if theres a way to hook it up?
-------------- Reply:
I've still got a couple of those drives from a Redactron WP, a dual-drive
version of IBM's MC/ST; have never tried to do anything with them and
certainly don't know anything about the IBM interface or protocol, but the
drive itself is kind of like a floppy, only linear.
The usual read/write heads, a solenoid (12V IIRC) to step from track to
track, and a motor drive to actually move the card in and out to read/write
it. Should make an interesting project; you could even put in some
photocells and turn it into a punched or mark sense card reader...
m
interesting indeed i'm guna have to look into this
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:09 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> At 5:24 PM -0500 12/10/12, steve shumaker wrote:
>
>> On 12/10/2012 3:24 AM, Joost van de Griek wrote:
>>
>>> Sorry, Youtube's mobile site gave me a convoluted link on the iPhone, my
>>> manual cleanup must've mangled it. I meant this:
>>>
>>> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=svdsXGqjWEg<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svdsXGqjWEg>
>>> >
>>>
>>> Point is, I wet scan directly on the flatbed, no (flimsy) film holders.
>>> Excellent results. Not drum-scanning level results, but good enough for
>>> home scanning.
>>>
>>> There is some experimentation involved with getting the best focus.
>>> Flipping the film and adding or subtracting mylar sheets until the image
>>> plane is in near-perfect focus.
>>>
>>> .tsooJ
>>>
>>> cool! Now I see what you meant.
>>
>> steve
>>
>
> That is pretty cool, while I'm familiar with wet scanning, I've not heard
> of adjusting the focus via mylar sheets.
>
>
> Zane
>
>
>
> --
> | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
> | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
> | | Photographer |
> +-----------------------------**-----+------------------------**----+
> | My flickr Photostream |
> | http://www.flickr.com/photos/**33848088 at N03/<http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/> |
> | My Photography Website |
> | http://www.zanesphotography.**com<http://www.zanesphotography.com> |
>
>
