I'm looking to buy a SPARCstation 5, 10, or 20. I'd also be interested in
one of those Sun PS/2 adapters, if anyone has any. I'm located in St.
George, UT (about 2 hrs Northeast of Las Vegas) so if you're close by, I'd
be doubly interested! Let me know.
--
Thanks,
Kevin
Hello everybody,
I've always wanted to own a minicomputer, at least, ever since I learned what a minicomputer was in my computer architecture class. Something about the user interface was wonderfully refreshing, of course all we had was SIMH, which is awesome in its own right, but wasn't the same. Anyway, last month I was finally able to pick up a minicomputer (I could afford) off eBay, the HP 1000E/2113E.
It wasn't in the best shape, but I've been able to fix the fans, bring the power supply back into spec, and design replacements for the irreplaceable front panel buttons (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:330821). As much fun as I'm having assembling and toggling in trivial programs, I'm looking to get a complete system up and running, something I can run a more-or-less useful operating system on. This brings me to my current problem:
It looks like the original system peripherals are very few and far between, and when they do show up for sale, they are astronomically priced. My plan is to put together a system with whatever inexpensive contemporaneous parts I can find, regardless of how sacrilegious it is.
I got a hold of two mostly working DEC RL02 disk drives, along with a SCSI 9-track tape drive, and my (pipe) dream is to interface this all to the HP using an FPGA and HP True In/Out card (i.e. HP Bizarro-Bus to TTL converter). As for software, I'm looking towards writing a backend for GCC (understatement x1000) and running FreeRTOS (because I'm familiar with it, I don't need runtime application loading, and I'm going to need to write drivers anyway).
Believe it or not, the RL02 interface is probably the easiest part of this project. I've already started working on a design in Verilog that should be able to provide the necessary functionality over a wishbone interface, and I've gotten the drive to spin up and do some simple tasks with just the FPGA controller connected. (Before anyone asks, yes, I suppose one could make the RL02 a really stationary USB thumbdrive.)
At this point my question is, has anybody tried something like this before and succeeded (or not)? Are there any helpful lessons to be imparted about the HP 1000 or RL02s or working on this type of project in general? I think I have everything segmented off into a monstrous series of small tasks, but I would love to hear from anyone who has already learned from the mistakes I'm about to repeat.
Thanks,
Christopher Parish
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I have many used but clean 1000 ( ~17mb?) & 2400 (40Mb) ft data tapes avail
for late 70's early 80's DEC drives. Some DEC branded, some Control Data.
I guess you'd use with a TU80 and probably more than just DEC. Pics posted
if there is interest.
Reasonable offer + ship from Landenberg, PA. Pickup welcome.
Contact me via vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm
1. which type
2. how many
3. your address
4. questions
$15 for one, $30 for 3, $60 for 8, $100 for 15; make offer along those
lines.
Bill
CORRECTION to earlier post tapes PLUS pdp 11/44 for sale.
http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/PDP11-44/
I have many used but clean 1000 ( ~17mb?) & 2400 (40Mb) ft data tapes avail
for late 70's early 80's DEC drives. Some DEC branded, some Control Data.
I guess you'd use with a TU80 and probably more than just DEC. Pics posted
if there is interest.
Reasonable offer + ship from Landenberg, PA. Pickup welcome.
Contact me via vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm
1. which type
2. how many
3. your address
4. questions
$15 for one, $30 for 3, $60 for 8, $100 for 15; make offer along those
lines.
PDP 11/44 - $350 if you pick up. $450 +ship if you need mailed.
Bill
**************************************
I've got a few MAGSAV-format 9-track tapes here and need to retrieve
files from them. Since I'm after ASCII data, I assume that I can simply
check each file for strings of high-order bit-set ASCII and use that to
extract (I am aware that PRIME used space/blank compression) the data.
Still, the metadata that goes along with each file would be valuable.
Does anyone here have layout or other information of MAGSAV tapes? The
customer would be unwilling to spring $3K for the Unix MAGRST utility,
so that's out even if it's still available.
Thanks in advance,
Chuck
I've been trying to contact Vince Briel of brielcomputers.com for a few
weeks and haven't been able to get a response. I put down money for a
micro-altair kit and ramdisk back in September 2013. I got an
acknowledgement shortly after that, but then nothing. He hasn't responded
to any of my emails or PMs. Does anyone know a reliable means of
contacting him?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
I recently acquired 3 RK05j's that seem to have spent time in a barn as
well as having been used by a heavy smoker. I thoroughly cleaned and
de-gray-foamed them as well as putting in new absolute filters.
The first one came up after cleaning with no issues. Works great.
Number two spins up but the initial seek emits a sickening "klang" as the
voice coil drives hard to the limit (yes, the graticule lamp is working).
Any ideas?
The third drive initially had really ugly heads that never cleaned up to my
liking. I loaded a disk anyway and for about 5 seconds after the initial
head load all was okay. Then I heard the sound of the top head scouring
the disk.
So I'm thinking of buying replacement heads off of eBay. Apparently these
are the heads but not the steel tongues that they mount on.
So I have some questions for anyone on the list who may have changed their
heads.
1. How hard is it to mount the head in the tongue? Looks like just 2
screws.
2. How hard is it to remove/replace the tongue assembly? Looks like it
mounts with a couple of allen screws.
3. How hard is it to align the heads? I don't have a CE pack so I'll just
have to use a pack that works okay on the other drive.
4. Any sage advice or whatever?
Thanks for any and all help.
Marc
> From: Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 12:45:32 -0600
> Subject: Scicards and Valid graphics terminals (was: VAX-11/7xx Electronic CAD Software?)
> "auringer tds.net" <auringer at tds.net> writes:
>
>> For schematic capture, we had a trio of Valid Scaldstation minis that
>> served several green screen graphics terminals each. Each terminal was a
>> ~19" tube attached to a dedicated table with a built in digitizer. [..]
The RICM has a Valid SCALD ("Structured Computer-Aided Logic Design") system.
http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/valid-scaldsystem
I don't think that we have ever powered it on.
--
Michael Thompson