test-drb February 2012

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

158 participants
158 discussions

by evan＠snarc.net

West-coasters -- check out the post by Dave Nuding here: http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/01/15/ibm-129-card-data-recorder/ Not affiliated with me, just passing it on.

12 years, 10 months

Returned mail: see transcript for details (fwd)

by cisin＠xenosoft.com

Can somebody explain what happened? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:43:19 -0600 (CST) From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON at billy.ezwind.net> To: cisin at xenosoft.com Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details The original message was received at Thu, 9 Feb 2012 16:35:35 -0600 (CST) >from shell.lmi.net [66.117.140.246] ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- <cctalk at classiccmp.org> ----- Transcript of session follows ----- <cctalk at classiccmp.org>... Deferred: huey.classiccmp.org.: Host huey.classiccmp.org. is down Message could not be delivered for 5 days Message will be deleted from queue On Thu, 9 Feb 2012, Ray Arachelian wrote: > No, that was for a new, working Lisa 1, and it's around what a working > Lisa 1 would fetch today. I like the idea that a vintage computer is worth the same as its original new price! Apple I $666 TRS80 $599 5150 $1325 (bare) Who's got a complete pricelist?

12 years, 10 months

two more P112 kits left

by dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu

I have two more P112 kits left. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu

12 years, 10 months

Vintage DEC/SUN/HP/MACINTOSH workstations/servers for sale

by janprunk＠gmail.com

Hello ! I am releasing my collection of old computer stuff. I prefer personal pickup in Slovenia. Will ship to European countries, but the shipping wont be less than 40 EUR/piece. For USA or Asia shipping, you better forget it ! The equipment consists of : ### DEC ### 1 x DEC VAXstation 4000/200 - 300 EUR 1 x Digital DEC 3000 - 100 EUR 1 x Digital DEC 2000 Alpha - 100 EUR ### SUN ### 2 x SUN Sparcstation 4 - 50 EUR/each ### HP ### 3 x Hewlett Packard Appollo 9000 712/60 - 50 EUR/each 1 x Hewlett Packard PC 9000 PC-308 (XT) - 50 EUR 1 x Hewlett Packard 9000 E35 - 50 EUR ### Macintosh ### 1 x Power Macintosh 7500/100 - 50 EUR All computers were operational the last time, I checked them, but I am selling them in "AS-IS" condition, since many collect dust for some time now. So please DONT ask me either I can TEST the machines for you or provide any system/boot logs and other stuff, that requires my time. I am selling the equipment without any warranty. Its Vintage gear, what do you expect !? Please for any queries contact me directly to my E-mail address janprunk at gmail.com I don't follow the mailing list regularly. Regards, Jan

12 years, 10 months

VAX for running old version of VMS

by tpresence＠hotmail.com

I have a license for VMS 5.2 and was considering buying a working system to run it on. My microvax I finally gave up the ghost, and I would rather spend time learning than going through repair at the moment.I have many of the parts below from the uvax 1, but who knows whats working and whats not, I need to test. I have a good configuration for the MicroVAX II to build on, but I was looking at the MicroVAX 3900 since the price disparity is not too significant. Unfortunately, I don't have a good hardware build plan for the 3900. I am hoping I can get some good guidance here. My largest concern is that the hardware is supported by the OS more than anything else.I want to stick with QBUS.I need to have more than 4 async serial ports with modem control (so I can hook it up to other systems) considering the DHV11I need ethernet, thinking DEQNAIm considering the TK50 tape (I would go tk70 if I knew it was backward compat, I'm just not sure)I dont know which disk controllers to get. I'm guessing it should be in the KDA50 with RA82 disks, but I have no idea, just guessing.The standard RX50 floppy.Looking at the VCB02 for video, just as a nicety.And then 64Mb ram. I have never dealt with the 3900 hardware at all, and I have the hobby funds to procure something that works.Guessing that I can do it for less than $2k even if I had to buy all "new" parts. Obviously I want to limit cost as much as possible, but I would also like to be able to run netbsd on the hardware at a later date if it was interesting to do so. I understand that the 3900 can be converted to a microvax III+ with some upgrades, but will it run VMS 5.2? Any recommendations?Kevin

12 years, 10 months

Who is interested in double sized PDP11/QBUS universal boards?

by holm＠freibergnet.de

Since prices for origianl (old) double size QBUS Boards are exploding now and my friends and me wanting to play anyways, we decided to make our own Experimental Board now: http://www.robotrontechnik.de/html/forum/thwb/showtopic.php?threadid=8008 Prices are heavyly depending on the number of boards made, so I anyone want's one or mor, please mail me or my friend redhead.kc85 at t-online.de. Planned is gold plating and solder stop laquer and signal description on the Bus pins. Boards where mady in germany, not the lowest prices but quality is guaranteed. We don't have the DEC DC00* Chips, so here are on your own, sorry. Regards, Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Freiberger Stra?e 42, 09600 Obersch?na, USt-Id: DE253710583 www.tsht.de, info at tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741

12 years, 10 months

VAX for running old version of VMS

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2012-02-09 02:26, allison<ajp166 at verizon.net> wrote: > > Using a SCSI controller is the way out but watch for dives over 1GB for > the boot drive. > I forget if that affected only the older 3100s or also the uVAX-II boot > as well. The 1MB limit is a restriction in the SCSI commands of the boot monitor of the 3100. As such, this issue never have any bearing on any MSCP controller, since you don't speak SCSI commands to those. And since the uVAX-II talks MSCP, and not SCSI, it therefore is not a problem. 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

12 years, 10 months

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

by lproven＠gmail.com

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html For the HTTP-impaired: Rob Landley rob at landley.net Thu Dec 9 15:45:39 UTC 2010 Previous message: Applet for detecting the filesystem type. Next message: Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] On Tuesday 30 November 2010 15:58:00 David Collier wrote: > I see that busybox spreads it's links over these 4 directories. > > Is there a simple rule which decides which directory each link lives > in..... > > For instance I see kill is in /bin and killall in /usr/bin.... I don't > have a grip on what might be the logic for that. You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969? Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage. When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!). Of course they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up enough to be able to mount the second disk on /usr, so don't put things like the mount command /usr/bin or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing the system up." Fairly straightforward. Also fairly specific to v6 unix of 35 years ago. The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a 1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by bureaucrats who never question _why_ they're doing things. It stopped making any sense before Linux was ever invented, for multiple reasons: 1) Early system bringup is the provice of initrd and initramfs, which deals with the "this file is needed before that file" issues. We've already _got_ a temporary system that boots the main system. 2) shared libraries (introduced by the Berkeley guys) prevent you from independently upgrading the /lib and /usr/bin parts. They two partitions have to _match_ or they won't work. This wasn't the case in 1974, back then they had a certain level of independence because everything was statically linked. 3) Cheap retail hard drives passed the 100 megabyte mark around 1990, and partition resizing software showed up somewhere around there (partition magic 3.0 shipped in 1997). Of course once the split existed, some people made other rules to justify it. Root was for the OS stuff you got from upstream and /usr was for your site- local files. Then / was for the stuff you got from AT&T and /usr was for the stuff that your distro like IBM AIX or Dec Ultrix or SGI Irix added to it, and /usr/local was for your specific installation's files. Then somebody decided /usr/local wasn't a good place to install new packages, so let's add /opt! I'm still waiting for /opt/local to show up... Of course given 30 years to fester, this split made some interesting distro- specific rules show up and go away again, such as "/tmp is cleared between reboots but /usr/tmp isn't". (Of course on Ubuntu /usr/tmp doesn't exist and on Gentoo /usr/tmp is a symlink to /var/tmp which now has the "not cleared between reboots" rule. Yes all this predated tmpfs. It has to do with read- only root filesystems, /usr is always going to be read only in that case and /var is where your writable space is, / is _mostly_ read only except for bits of /etc which they tried to move to /var but really symlinking /etc to /var/etc happens more often than not...) Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation (which consumed the Free Standards Group in its' ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand why it was there in the first place. 'Ken and Dennis leaked their OS into the equivalent of home because an RK05 disk pack on the PDP-11 was too small" goes whoosh over their heads. I'm pretty sure the busybox install just puts binaries wherever other versions of those binaries have historically gone. There's no actual REASON for any of it anymore. Personally, I symlink /bin /sbin and /lib to their /usr equivalents on systems I put together. Embedded guys try to understand and simplify... Rob -- GPLv3: as worthy a successor as The Phantom Menace, as timely as Duke Nukem Forever, and as welcome as New Coke. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

12 years, 10 months

PDP-8 stuff

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2012-02-07 14.03, ben <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: > On 2/6/2012 7:00 PM, David Griffith wrote: >> > On Mon, 6 Feb 2012, Eric Smith wrote: >> > >>> >> Ray Arachelian wrote: >>>> >>> (Waiting for the guys that ran real UNIX on a PDP-8 to show up and >>>> >>> say they rode T-Rex's to school.) >>> >> No, the PDP-8 Unix is one of the modern ones. Only the guys that ran >>> >> really early Unix rode T-Rexes. >> > > No No No ... that was T-nix followed later with U when the programers could > club meat, build fire and recite most of the Alphabet*. :-) There is no Unix for the PDP-8. There are, however, several timesharing OSes, and yes, people did use PDP-8s in such environments. > You seem to have a few 6502 unix style systems hacked together on the web. Crazy, if true. >> > So, does anyone have a record for oldest or weakest computer running >> > Unix? The Z80 definitely did it. Maybe the 8080 could. I don't think the >> > PDP-8 could. I've been trying to figure out if the PDP-8 could handle C, >> > and the answers I get range from "I don't know" to "Definitely not". >> > Something I'd really like to see is a Z-machine running on the PDP-8. > That came up a few years ago, the pdp8 does not have ample memory to handle > Z-code. > Ben. > * No, not in Octal. I'm sure I could do it. A Z-machine implementation really does not need *that* much memory. You'll need a field, possibly two, for the Z-machine itself. After that, the rest of the memory can be used for the storage inside the Z-machine, and then cache for the code, which needs to be paged from secondary storage. No different than any Z-machine for any micro in the 80s. As for PDP-8 handling C. I'm not sure I understand the question. You can definitely have a C compiler that generates code that will execute on a PDP-8. Having a C-compiler running on the PDP-8 would be quite an effort, however. But it can be done. You just need to split the process up into many passes, with careful design. And it might take a very long time to ever compile a single file. Johnny

12 years, 10 months

native code versus interpreters

by nigel.d.williams＠gmail.com

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: > That's precisely the point--the program starts out in 6502 native > mode. ?It calls (via JSR) a subroutine (SWEET16) that goes through > the argument list (follows the JSR) until the end. The PDP-11 FORTRAN-IV compiler generated code this way, it was called "threaded code", and the resultant binaries straddle the boundary between "native code" and interpreted code. RBK Dewar (ACM 1975) makes the distinction between indirect and direct threaded code, noting that the PDP-11 FORTRAN-IV compiler generated direct-threaded code - "linear list of addresses of routines to be executed". I feel a strict definition of native code is complicated since it is necessary to place it in time as well as extent; microcoding, writable control stores, extensible instruction sets complicate the definition.

12 years, 10 months

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test-drb February 2012