test-drb July 2012

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

196 participants
250 discussions

by rickb＠bensene.com

Hello, all, While not exactly on-topic for classic computers, it is indirectly related due to electronic calculators being an enabling technology for the first microprocessors. On Friday, 20-July, Robert "Bob" Ragen, the father of the Friden EC-130 calculator (arguably the first all-solid-state electronic calculator) passed away with his family around him. He was 83 years old, just three days short of his 84th birthday. Ragen was responsible for bringing Friden into the electronic age with the design of the EC-130, and a number of follow on calculators, including the EC-132, and the 1150 and 1160-series calculators. He was a prolific inventor, with over 80 patents to his name. The EC-130 exhibit in the Old Calculator Museum has been permanently dedicated to this calculator pioneer. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com

12 years, 4 months

TU58 emulator

by iamcamiel＠gmail.com

Hi Everyone, I'm thinking of a way to move as many of the PDP11 systems I have into my attic office to a) get them going, and then b) run them occasionally. I've stripped the two low corporate racks to the chassis, and if I can find a helping hand, I'm sure I can get them into the attic, then put the tabletop of my electronics workbench on top of it (I'm a little short on space). I'm thinking of bolting two pieces of rack profile to one side of each rack, which would turn them into a single unit comprising three racks. That way, I should be able to mount 6 10.5" PDP's and 6 5.25" PDP's, and have them conveniently close to my oscilloscope and logic analyzer to work on them. Now for storage... I have some RL02 drives, but I'm a bit reluctant to drag those upstairs. I have Emulex scsi controllers for three of the PDP's (2 x UC18, 1 x UC08), but the rest is without mass storage. I read about the TU58 emulator that runs on Linux, and I'm thinking of putting a DECserver into the rack with the PDP11's, and use virtual TTY's on a Linux box that connect to the PDP11's over the DECserver, then run multiple instances of the emulator so each PDP has one or more emulated TU58's. I know the "real" TU58 tapes can hold something like 256K of data. Are the operating systems aware of this limit, or could you get by with emulating a larger tape? Thanks for any insight you may have to offer. Warnings like "That's a really bad idea, because..." are also very welcome. Cheers, Camiel

12 years, 4 months

DR11-W and DRV11-WA ... related?

by holm＠freibergnet.de

As you already know I got this Tek 611 Thing working lately and now I think about connecting that Beast to one of the PDP11 systems I have. They all are QBUS 11's, (12,53,83). Joachim gave me the hint to use a DRV11 or an DRV11-WA to connect the needed D/A Converters to supply the Tek611. I do have both DRV11 Variants. Now I'm looked in the 2.11BSDs sources and found a driver for DR11 boards, which looks like a similar parallel interface for the UNIbus. (I'm a Unix guy, and using BSD may be the fastest way for me to get this to work). How similar are the 3 interaces to each other? Is is worth to begin with the DR11 driver..? I've don't looked deep in the DR11 Manual and I dont even have one for the DRV11 Boards (...has someone a Hardware/Programming Manual?) so I'm primarely asking here for some experiences from other people.. 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

12 years, 4 months

Defcon XX

by ian.finder＠gmail.com

I'll be there... Landing Thursday. Might bring a sparcbook... Sent from my MicroVAX II

12 years, 5 months

need to replace some NEC APC circuit boards

by rampaginggreenhulk＠yahoo.com

?In a mad fit I think I tossed a few. The cpu card for one, probably the disk controller also. Somehow the video cards and something else, and my Butler Flats Associates 5 1/4" disk controller board were spared. I have the chassis/card cage. I would like to replace what's missing. In the event you have an APC laying about, don't know what to do w/it, maybe you can help me out. ?I am _not_ looking to have an entire APC shipped to me though.

12 years, 5 months

AT&T/Western Electric Transmission Module available

by fraveydank＠gmail.com

(apologies for long lines; posting from phone) Is anyone interested in the above mentioned machine, chock full of DS0 modules and a few other things? My employer is moving office and is looking to offload it. It's in the Germantown, MD area (near Washington, DC). I have pictures which I can post publicly once I'm back at an actual computer. If you're interested, you'll probably need to get it by the end of the month, since that's when the old lease is done. Feel free to contact me off-list. - Dave

12 years, 5 months

Looking for DEC VK100 'GIGI' Maintenance print sheets

by jgevaryahu＠gmail.com

> On 7/23/12 1:12 PM, Richard wrote: >> In article<500BAEE9.2090102 at gmail.com>, >> Jonathan Gevaryahu<jgevaryahu at gmail.com> writes: >> >>> The Tech manual on bitsavers ( >>> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/gigi/EK-VK100-TM-001_VK100_Techni… >> l_Manual_Apr82.pdf >>> ) is missing a lot of information I need, and is also rife with errors! >> It would be good to have an errata to the technical manual. Can you >> email up a list of the errors you've spotted so far? > that would be a good thing > > GIGI documentation is very hard to find. Ok here's a quick rundown of the errata so far (there's probably a lot more I haven't noticed), some stuff might need to be done as images/drawings due to errors in some figures: page 4-19 subheading 4.4.4.1: Omission: PEEK(address) is perfectly valid code and isn't in the list of valid basic operators. (Tested on emulation and 10 print peek(0256) then run does print 194 (0xC2 appears at offset 0x100 in address space).) page 5-3 figure 5-2: Error/Omission: the "DIP SELECTION" box next to "SYSTAT A" should have a second arrow pointing to it from the address bus (since DIP selection is based on the low 3 bits of the address (offsets 0x40-0x47)) page 5-10: Error: the rom 3 extends from 6000-67ff, not 6000-63ff as listed. The chip contains 6000-6fff but the area between 6800 and 6fff is blank, 0x00s. page 5-14: Table 5-3 I/O Register Addresses: Error: the write register decode for address 0x47 does not have the read bit set to 1 (this is an obvious typo) Error: The KYBDW write register is listed as if it is at offset 0x78; it is actually at offset 0x68. Error/Omission: the read register for SYSTAT A is listed as 0x40; it is actually mirrored to 0x40-0x47 but the dipswitch bit read to d2 for each of those addresses is different. (the switches read for each of the addresses from 0x40 to 0x47 in d2 is, base-0, so switch 1 is 0, 2 is 1, etc: 1,3,5,7,6,4,2,0 ) page 5-15: Table 5-4 Program RAM addresses: Omission: the c000-ffff ram area is not populated on the vk100 board, though ram is refreshed as if it was there. (it may have been intended as an expansion kit by DEC but was never sold as far as I'm aware) Error: Table 5-5 I/O ROM Microcode Address: the address for the row read/column drive mapping of the keyboard ranges >from 7000-700F, not 700. (actually it mirrors to the whole 7000-7fff area every 16 bytes, and the firmware reads it at 7ff0-7fff) page 5-27: Figure 5-17: the "translator input" left side of this figure has some major row/column offset/duplication issues. The correct contents should be: 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 (000) TA200 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (001) TA200 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 (002) TA200 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 (003) TA200 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 --------------------------- (004) TA201 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 (005) TA201 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 (006) TA201 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 (007) TA201 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 --------------------------- (010) TA202 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 (011) TA202 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 (012) TA202 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 (013) TA202 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 --------------------------- (014) TA203 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 (015) TA203 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 (016) TA203 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 (017) TA203 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 --------------------------- The right table in the figure is correct. Page 5-29, Table 5-7: Error: The equation for "Overlay" should be M=AT(P+N) instead of M=A+(P+N) Page 5-30, Figure 5-19: Error: The labels on the two lines coming from the "SOPS" block are transposed; The top one should be "WHAT COLOR IS THE SCREEN" and the bottom one regarding the bit 0 reverse video bit. Omission: the line which SHOULD be "what color is the screen" (the one going to input B on the MUX) should have a note on the line noting that it is 4 bits wide, not one bit as is implied by the figure. The "What color is the data" line should have such a marking as well. Page 5-32 Figure 5-21: Error: the clock source for the down counter is NOT the "CHAR CLK" as listed, but the "DOT CLK". (This had me confused for a good 15 minutes before I spotted the error) Page 5-35: Omission/Ambiguity: The description of the "Screen Options (SOPS)" register is missing the bit numbers for each part of the described functions, and there are FOUR functions, not three. This could be better written as: 1. Blink Control/Mask (bit 3) 2. Background Color + Blink (bits 7,6,5,4) 3. I/O port control (EIA, 20 mA, hardcopy and self-test) (bits 2,1) 4. Normal/Reverse Video (bit 0) Page 5-38, Figure 5-23 Arbitrary Waveform Timing: Error: The Vector rom addresses listed at the top have address 23 missing and 33 duplicated twice; the correct pattern from left to right should be: 34 23 22 21 20 25 24 33 32 31 30 35 34 23 22 21 20 25 24 33 32 31 30 35 Page 5-42, Figure 5-26: Error/Ambiguity: the lines from "SOPS" to "I/O PORT SELECTOR" are labeled SL1 and SL0; the actual bits in the SOPS register these represent are bits d2 and d1. Page 5-53, Figure 5-33 and Table 5-10: the same ambiguity with SOPS bit labels SL1 and SL0 appears here. Nowhere in the tech reference does it mention they are bits d2 and d1. Page 5-57 Figure 5-37: Omission: the line from "ADDRESS LATCH" to "DECODER" (which is labeled A6-A0) is missing its (70<subscript>16</subscript>) marking; on figure 5-36 on the previous page (page 5-56) the marking is present. Page 5-62: Omission/Ambiguity: the description of SYSTAT A does not note anywhere in the tech reference that the bits read appear in SYSTAT A bits 6,5,4,3 for bits 3,2,1,0 of the nybble the current X and Y registers point to in VRAM. One possible error (I need to test this more), which appears on two successive pages: Page 5-66 Figure 5-42: *POSSIBLE* (Needs verify with keyboard and meter) the pins for SHIFT and CAPS LOCK are reversed; capslock should be pin 35 and shift pin 33 Page 5-67 Figure 5-43: *POSSIBLE* the KBD-R latch implies that capslock is D6 and shift is D7, when in reality they are the other way round. Hope that helps, If I run into more I'll send to the list as well. -- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu at gmail.com jgevaryahu at hotmail.com

12 years, 5 months

Transitional Technolgies Tape Drive Info

by craig.henry＠yale.edu

I have a couple of those drives with some functionality. Did you ever find any doco on them? -Craig Henry Yale Astronomy Systems Admin

12 years, 5 months

prototype floppy media

by tom94022＠comcast.net

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251110295055 looks to me like a prototype cartridge for the IBM 0341 Four-Inch Diskette Drive (aka 3.9-inch) which was announced by IBM in 1983 but shortly thereafter withdrawn in favor of the MIC (Microfloppy Industry Consortium) adaptation of the Sony 3.5-inch design. I don't think any production units ever shipped but evaluation units may have shipped. FWIW, it was a single sided 358 kilobyte FM zone recorded device. The media spec is at bitsavers and promotional material is at the CHM. I have a drive photo in my files Tom

12 years, 5 months

Zenith Minisports revelations

by rampaginggreenhulk＠yahoo.com

someone kindly sent me a picture of the power supplies diagram/sticker. the connector has 9vdc output, 6vdc charge, a grounded shield, and a 5 v signal. what is the "5 v signal"? It's not labeled as an output, nor ac or dc. Is it a pin by which the p/s reads the voltage of the battery, so as to know when to stop charging? The specs state "Output 9V, 2 A max at supply, 6V, 1 A max at charging". ?Anyone have a spare that's surplus to their needs?

12 years, 5 months

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test-drb July 2012