A company has made some replica 8/E handles and has excess they are
willing to sell at $1.50 per handle. I think they have around 25 of each
color left. Due to the company not wanting to deal with a bunch of small
orders I may need to be an intermediary.
Pictures of the switch handles next to my 8/E handles and two 8/M handles
sitting on top at URL below. It also has a picture of the panel they made.
They said ok to share the picture but I can't say why they made them.
http://www.pdp8online.com/ftp/misc/switches/
The color of one matches my 8/E pretty well but the other doesn't. You can
also see for one of the colors my 8/E doesn't match my 8/M that well either.
If interested email me with how many you are wanting of which color.
Hi,
Friends of mine have an old, not that much DEC compatible PDP11 like
machine that they (and me) would get working again.
The machine is located at the German Chemical Museum in Merseburg.
http://www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm?/html/computer/k1600.htm
Scroll down to the K1630. The Machine was rescued from the old power plant
in Thierbach before.
It is an PDP11 build out of some east german 8 Bit Bitslice CPU's and has
248K Ram. They used an unusual BUS, an Z80 Sio for The console (this is really
ugly) und Bus communication controllers on each peripheral board that must
be configured before the first use of that board, this means the IO Adress,
DMA Registers, Modes and Vector addresses are set in Software before the
Processor can talk to them like in a PDP11, so every DEC-OS must be patched to
work on this thing. It is a slow machine too :-)
We now have some CPTP Dumps of BRU Backup Tapes of the Operating System
OMOS for this machine (old version of RSX11)
I have a copy here http://www.tiffe.de/Robotron/K1630
There are 2 Versions omos-sys.tape.gz is the original type file in CPTP
Format, omossys.tap.gz is the same thing converted with taput to simh tape
format. Same with the dok tape, the docs are in german...
My friend Oleg told me that the tape files are broken, may be this is the
fault of taput (http://www.mrynet.com/hp2000/taput/index.html).
My question is if somebody can verify what is going on with the files and
if an opensource utility exists that can read BRU files on unix (like my
FreeBSD here)....
I think the OMOS-SYS Tape is the only real chance to boot this thing
sometime again..
Kind 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
Message: 20 Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:29:09 -0700 From: Jeff Woolsey
<jlw at jlw.com> To: cctech at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Pertec interface
Message-ID: <4F7803C5.1050404 at jlw.com> Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=ISO-8859-1
SimH also describes bad blocks, which have the high-bit set in the
length but otherwise look normal. Except that most tape drives, without
heroics, will not give you any data for an unrecoverable read error
(both that and a tapemark read as 0-length blocks; some gymnastics are
needed to tell them apart), except that such a block cannot be empty.
So what to put in it, if we're noting them at all? I'm playing with
ANSI-style labels for this.
Some history is at:
http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.computers/20001209_New_Tape_Con…
, though in there it is asserted that tape blocks cannot be longer than
64K, implying that only two bytes are required for the length. However,
I have a tape someone else wrote (HDR2 even says so) with 65536-byte
blocks (not every O/S today can handle that--16-bit signed
comparisons). To represent that along with 0-byte tapemarks requires 17
bits. Elsewhere someone asserted that a tape block can be as long as
the entire tape, which seems unlikely and wouldn't always fit in three
bytes.
I think most Pertec formatted drives will not give you the bad block,
but I could be wrong. Of course if it is really bad, even the block
length can't be determined. Most PDP-11 and VAX tape controllers, both
DEC and third-party could handle 65536 byte blocks. Of course, on a
PDP-11, that could be the entire memory in a single tape block! So, it
really only made sense on Q-22 systems. Tapes with insanely long blocks
are not a good idea, even on hardware that can handle it. I'm guessing
1401 and similar machines could do crazy stuff like that due to their
stream of digits architecture. But, having an entire tape with only one
LRCC and CRC byte would lead to undetected errors and difficult to
recover files. The greatest feature of GCR is that the redundancy data
is added periodically within the block, making the likelihood of
recovering small dropouts much better. Jon
Attention!
For sale: Looks like a warehouse of IBM, WANG, DIGITAL, NCR in Bangor, Maine.
See pics here:
http://66.147.242.85/~oldcompu/maine/
Also some TRS-80, Apple, Compaq, etc.
I have no connection, just passing on the info.
Contact Penny at:
peifen196 at yahoo.com
Enjoy!
http://www.tiffe.de/images/Unbenannt.JPG
This is one of the things in Dortmund, anyone know what this could be?
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
>Dave McGuire mcguire at neurotica.com
>On 03/25/2012 02:50 PM, James Gessling wrote:
>> Isn't this just a piece of plastic with a logo embossed in it? And
>> why does anyone think Red's Dream is so great anyway? I'm not
>> bidding.
>
> The whole computer would've been much more interesting. If the
>starting price weren't so high, I'd have placed a bid just out of
>sympathy for someone with such a wife.
>
> -Dave
I thought that the RICM had one of these. It turns out that we have
two PII-9 systems that they were made after the Viacom Systems buyout
so it doesn't say Pixar on the die-cast front cover. I will add more
pictures and details shortly.
http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/pixar-image-computer
--
Michael Thompson
Well, I did the bit reversal TWICE, so of course the end result was wrong!
Fixed that, fixed up a little bug in resetting the file mark detection
flag in
the wrong place, and I now have a rough program that maps the files
structure
of a tape.
here's a snip of what I got.
VOL1RT1101
DD%% 1
HDR1SAMBR .CTL RT110100010001000100 00000 00000
000000RT11
file 0 had 2 blocks 0 errors 0 timeouts blocksize was 512
HDR1SAMBR .BAK RT110100010001000100 00000 00000
000000RT11
file 1 had 2 blocks 0 errors 0 timeouts blocksize was 512
HDR1SAMBR .FOR RT110100010001000100 00000 00000
000000RT11
file 2 had 4 blocks 0 errors 0 timeouts blocksize was 512
and so on.
(Note the RT11 header labels above. I sort of thought this tape would
have been
>from RSX-11M, but it must have been made before we switched. Whew,
that's going
BACK a ways, about 1976 or 77 when we went to RSX. The actual tape I'm
reading
was a 6250 BPI copy of the original tape (probably 1600 BPI) from back
then. This copy
was probably made 15 years ago, though.)
I'm now working on a program to move the entire tape to a single disk file
with pretty much verbatim bytes from the tape. It will have a 32-bit
header for each record of file mark, showing the record size or file mark.
Then I can write programs at my leisure to extract files without having to
listen to the wail of the Gast vane pump in the keystone tape drive.
Oh, the performance seems to be pretty good. it was streaming fairly well
at either 25 or 75 IPS in 6250, I suspect it will certainly stream at 75 IPS
with a 1600 BPI tape.
Jon
In fact those guys at the LHC Were going to do just that. By directing the beam at a block of chrystilan silicon
( nice square latice) and then
Stepping the beam deflection in integer increments. A physical Erathones sieve can be created for large numbers. Essentially blasting away nonprimes.
Detecting the remaining primes is then
A radiation problem similar to that used in Genetic screening.
Regards, Jim
*Dear Rod,*
**
*Feeling nostaligic, I googled 'Arcturus Minicomputer', and your letter
below was the only reference I found. I know the letter is from 2007. I
hope the email address is still in use.*
**
*I programmed an Arcturus minicomputer at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in
Wimbledon from 1973 to 1976. It was used to do image processing on pictures
>from the first CT scanner in the world, which was located in that hospital.*
**
*All the programming I did on the machine was in assembler. The computer
did not have a disk operating system. Every action involved first loading
the program you need from paper tape, then the data, etc.*
**
*The first thing I did was to write a very rudimentary disk operating
system. It took 6 weeks, but it worked.*
**
*I knew that Arcturus had installed the monitor system in Gatwick.*
**
*Best Wishes,*
**
**
*Jon Griver*
**
**
**
*Fri Mar 30 02:45:49 CDT 2007*
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------------------------------
Hi All
Whilst sitting on the plane on the way back from Newcastle
yesterday. It reminded me of a system I saw at Gatwick airport in the
early 1970's. I'm pretty sure it was run by a mini computer called an
'Arcturus'. I can clearly remember the grey rack mounted box with its
row of toggle switches and lamps. I was there to install a VDU
(sometimes referred to as a glass teletype). The big teletype they drove
it from made the whole place shake and the VDU I fitted of course did
not.
It drove the departure / arrival TV monitors. The way it generated the
characters was curious to say the least. It had a large number of
circuits which generated parts of characters. One did a vertical bar,
another produced a whole circle whilst others output parts of a circle,
forty-five degree bars and so on. For each character cell the component
parts of the required character were selected summed and added to a TV
raster. Does anybody remember the Arcturus?
Rod Smallwood
