------------------------------
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 11:21 AM PST Michael B. Brutman wrote:
>On 2/14/2013 4:36 PM, Chris Tofu wrote:
>>
>> Um yeah. The Peanut was an anemic T1000. It's a fun unit if you can live or partially deal with it's deficiencies. I'm just glad I.wasn't suckered into buying one back then. The Sanyos, Peanut, and T1000 had similar video modes. Must have been a creeping hardware virus anomole.
>>
>
>You have that backwards. The Tandy 1000 line was designed as a clone of
>the PCjr. And in many ways, they did not make the same mistakes that
>IBM made. For example, the location of the expandable video buffer ...
I didn't say the Tandy came before the Peanut. The P* was an anemic T1K, the T* was a P* on steroids, same thing.
Now what might be an interesting project would be to drop the guts of a Jr into a clone case and add functionality that way, instead of endlessly adding side carts. You'd need to piggyback off the 8088 socket in order to provide for ISA slots and other assorted madness. It's truly a pity no one offered such a solution when it would have mattered most...
Hi
Just came across this on eBay and thought it may be of interest to the
list:
WANG VS7150, VS7010, 4 x 3270 terminals - Diskpacks - early 1980s Computing
- Could be useful for Spares, Film Props, Collector, etc?
...
Main processor is a VS7150. This was attached to another large cabinet
which houses three large and heavy hard drives (believed to be 454MB).
There is also a VS7010 and a VS75E, the latter of which seems to be missing
some covers. There are also somewhere between 4 and 6 3270 terminals (see
photo of single unit). There are also a quantity of the removeable
disk-packs, which, if my memory serves me correctly, used to be 300MB.
There is also an old line-printer with acoustic hood and some boxes of the
flowline paper.
...
Current price is GBP 950 and it's available for collection in London (UK) -
seller is also willing to ship it anywhere in the UK.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221183449983
Not affiliated with the seller in any way.
-mj
--
Michael-John Turner
mj at mjturner.net <> http://mjturner.net/
------------------------------
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 11:19 AM PST Michael B. Brutman wrote:
>On 2/14/2013 3:16 PM, Jason McBrien wrote:
>>
>> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <
>> cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:38 PM
>>
>> Subject: Re: Who were the worst of the worst?
>>
>>
>>
>> Some of the Tandy 1000 series were stinkers. Weird proprietary ISA
>> connectors, weird video adapters, weird versions of DOS that were
>> incompatible with most utility programs.
>>
>> Not a clone, but no list would be complete without the PC Jr. IMHO. What an
>> absolutely terrible machine. It was actually *less* PC-5150 compatible than
>> early clones.
>>
>>
>
>You contradict yourself. You say the PCjr was not a clone, and then you complain that it was less PC-5150 compatible than early clones.
>
>Note that the PCjr runs most later software just fine, assuming you have enough memory. I think what broke the Jr has more to do with people coding to specific BIOS locations, which broke any "near" clone. In 1983 when the PCjr was introduced that practice was rampant. By 1985 there were enough other "near clones" with some unique hardware out there so that the practice would break other machines too.
>
>Case in point: Nobody complains about the 5140 Convertible being not compatible enough, yet it has a lot of the same general problems as the PCjr. (Using the NMI for keyboard handling, mapping the keyboard scan codes, etc.)
>
>
>Mike
I'm sure Jason can speak for himself, but...
It would seem his point is since it was offered as a PC substitute, it should have been more "clone" then it was. While nowhere near a clone in the purest sense, an nearly exact copy, like a generic Taiwanese clone, it still should have been a more workable substitute for a PC. The AT for instance, while could be considered something of a steroidal clone, was worlds more compatible then the Jr. And add to that company's willingness to work around the AT's minor incompatibilities you had a ready upgrade solution to the PC.
I'm not that familiar with the JX but something like that should have been the Jr. Or the model 25s. Some expandability, in reality could have been a good secretary's unit (strangely the model 30 seems to have been used more along those lines).
Are there any recomendations for a converter that can take RGB with
sync on GREEN as input and produce a VGA (or HDMI) output suitable for
driving a modern LCD?
I seem to be accumulating numerous older pieces of gear that produce RGB
output and space and reliability of the old tubes to which they connect
is becoming more and more premium. Would like to be able to use an
LCD as an alternative.
A couple DEC VT240 came my way this weekend and they will need some TLC to
restore but the VR240 that came along with them is in even worse shape.
I'll give it my best shot but ability to use an LCD as Plan B would
be nice.
Any recomendations from success?
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist
Hi,
I made some changes in my TCP/IP code to make it behave better when
packets are lost and it has to retransmit. The old code used to wait a
fixed amount of time before retrying, which was painfully slow on a
local connection. The new code is adaptive and should work much better
on a wide range of connections.
If you'd like to help me test it I have my PCjr running the mTCP FTP
server with some old computer pictures, some software, and some text
files. (I'll add more during the day to keep it interesting.) You can
connect by going to the following address:
ftp://96.42.84.69:2021/
That URL should work in most browsers (Firefox, IE and Chrome). Chrome
tends to be a bit of a pig and it tries to preload the content that it
finds, so if you see it going slowly it is probably due to multiple
connections. The poor PCjr is only setup for 9 simultaneous connections.
If you use an FTP client anonymous FTP should work fine. Note the
non-standard control port - 2021. Which also means that if you are using
a real FTP client (and not a browser) you should be using PASSIVE mode.
(Port mode with a non-standard control port confuses most firewalls, and
they won't pick it up. Most browsers use PASSIVE mode by default.)
Uploading is not turned on for this test, but if you are dying to upload
contact me and I'll give you the password.
Fun facts:
- The machine is a PCjr with a jrIDE sidecar, 20GB IDE hard drive,
WD8003 ISA Ethernet adapter, NEC V20 CPU, and an IBM PC 5150 keyboard.
Yes, this is the same machine that was recently maligned on the list. ;-0
- If you want to see how the TCP/IP code is holding up you can get
statistics by using the "SITE STATS" command in a suitable FTP client.
- This is a DOS machine - you have to use DOS filenames and paths,
except for the directory delimiter - that uses the standard forward
slash. (Using the DOS backslash was too difficult for most clients and
browsers.) Also, if you use MGET remember that you have to use *.* and
not just * for a filespec.
Comments and bug reports are welcome. Use good judgement to avoid
cluttering up the list too much ...
Mike
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 1:16 PM PST Jason McBrien wrote:
>>
>> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <
>> cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:38 PM
>>
>> Subject: Re: Who were the worst of the worst?
>>
>
>
>Some of the Tandy 1000 series were stinkers. Weird proprietary ISA
>connectors, weird video adapters, weird versions of DOS that were
>incompatible with most utility programs.
1000s didn't use DMA. O/w compatible afaik. I think there was a card that addedc the 8237 iinm
>Not a clone, but no list would be complete without the PC Jr. IMHO. What an
>absolutely terrible machine. It was actually *less* PC-5150 compatible than
>early clones.
Um yeah. The Peanut was an anemic T1000. It's a fun unit if you can live or partially deal with it's deficiencies. I'm just glad I.wasn't suckered into buying one back then. The Sanyos, Peanut, and T1000 had similar video modes. Must have been a creeping hardware virus anomole.
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 7:17 AM PST Eric Smith wrote:
>Fred Cisin wrote:
>
>> I don't remember what it was. Leading Edge? e-machine? Packard-Bell?
>> Some sort of freebie thrown at him by some company's marketing.
>
>Chris Tofu wrote:
>> O bruther. E-Machines, if even around then, wasn't making no clones. They made Mac video cards and monitors. And I'll have you know my Leading Edge/Sperry Model M runs rings around that Big Pyew. Supports 8" drives even maybe.
>
>I wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure when "then" was, but I think you've confused the company "eMachines" with the older UMAX/Supermac brand. eMachines was from their inception a PC clone company. Through acquisitions, eMachines was most recently an Acer brand, but has just been discontinued recently.
>
>Chris Tofu wrote:
>
>> Nuh uh. The original emachines at least sold mac cards. Check ebay. I still have my old Futura SX video card stuck in a IIcx.
>
>Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the *company* eMachines, which did in fact, as Fred stated, produce PC clones.
In the 1980s??? Please provide proof of that.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
>
> Nice work!
>
> I remember the 1130. What are you doing for a card reader? I recall that the 1130 could only read column-binary--it was up to software to interpret the data into character codes.
>
> Has anyone done an FPGA emulation of the 1620? That one has a soft spot in my heart to the extent that I can still remember the numeric opcodes for many instructions. The 1401 occupies a similar place in my memories. Little IBM boxes were really cute.
>
> --Chuck
At the moment, I use a high speed stream protocol over USB, via the brilliant fpgalink library by Bruce McClelland ( http://www.makestuff.eu/wordpress/software/fpgalink/ ) to a bit of python code on a PC which takes files and sends them as card column signals to my 2501 reader emulation logic in the fpga. I am mapping all the signals from the 2501 to the adapter circuits in the 1130, timing everything and modeling state as close to a real 2501 as I can determine, so that it appears that the photocells are detecting holes at the right time as the card virtually slides through the emulated transport, but the content of the columns that get turned into lights are stuffed into a FIFO by the link from the PC. However, someone has offered a small card reader that I will be gratefully accepting and utilizing. I plan to map the real reader as the 2501 and use my alternate 1442 reader/punch emulation over the fpgalink channels so that I can both read real cards and read files on the PC as virtual cards.
Yes, the 2501 just delivered to the 1130 one bit for each of the 12 card rows, exactly what was punched in that column. The 1130 programmer would convert the Hollerith coded characters into whatever other coding they wanted in their program. Boot mode wired the signals a bit differently to provide a 16 bit result to the 1130 that was usable as initial program load instructions, that is done in the 1130 adapter logic, not in the 2501. Finally, various forms of binary coding were used in the 1130, such as the user program format and a special binary mode used by diagnostic programs, but all of those are just the status of holes in a column sent as 12 bits plus 0000 to form an 1130 word. My python program converts ascii files to Hollerith, as well as delivering binary mode files directly as card hole images.
I don't personally know of any fpga emulations of 1620 machines, but there are excellent simulators available.
Carl
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From: Benjamin Huntsman <BHuntsman at mail2.cu-portland.edu>
>
> Here's an odd one...
> Anyone here ever seen, heard of, or have a Cyclone CVME961 board?
>
>
>
I have. The 961 was a pretty nice i960-based general purpose embedded
controller that got a lot of use in real time systems and, as I understand,
a lot of military stuff. i960CA of various speeds, memory, 2 serial ports
and a mezzanine expansion scheme Cyclone called "Squall" that had a few
options (I know there was an async serial card, think there was a SCSI card
and ethernet card, but can't recall anything else). Not sure what
specifically you want to know, but there is a good bit of info out there
still at Google reach. Unfortunately, I decided i960 wasn't something I
had time to play with, so all of mine are long gone.
BTW...what you really want to find if this sort of thing is your kink is a
CVME-965. 960HA, VME64, private and shared memory and 2 x Squall 2
mezzanine slots. The Squall 2 slots were much more useful, as Cyclone made
all sorts of interesting options for it. I had, at least, SCSI, 2-port
ethernet, various serial cards, some digitial input cards, etc. I
sorta-kinda remember there was an ATM card; I didn't have one. Made
whipping up a router on a card pretty easy, even if the preferred dev
environment was Ada.
