I found a FTI table top reader today, and the only number on it is 2939.
Also a Remex rack mount with 6300BB1, which could be a serial number.
I might have a few more to dig out at some point.
If interested, please contact me off list. Shipping from zip 61853.
Thanks, Paul
Hi everyone,
I downloaded Dave Pitts' SIM990 emulator and the pre-rolled DX10 disk
images available on his site yesterday evening, thinking I'd give it a run.
SIM990 compiled clean; I'm running on Debian 7.7, 32-bit, on an Intel D510
Atom system.
I feel as though this should be plenty of power... I run Hercules on this
same system all the time to fool around with MTS and MVS 3.8J and I find
the performance to be just fine... (way better than on my old Sun Fire
V120s, LOL)
I extracted the DX10 images and I started the emulator on them as directed:
sim990 -msc 12 512K dx10.cfg
For a terminal emulator, I'm using PuTTY; I also tried Procomm Plus (latest
version) with a few different emulations and couldn't make it work, I seem
to get furthest with PuTTY.
I connect using Telnet protocol to port 2000 on the emulation host. I get
the DX10 IPL screen:
* TEXAS INSTRUMENTS * DX10 "SYS3 " SYSTEM IPL * ST01
I hit F10 then "!" and I get a sort of menu-like thing:
****************************
DX10 3.7.0
THIS SYSTEM HAS THE FOLLOWING SUBSYSTEMS INSTALLED:
COBOL
PASCAL
SORTMRG
BASIC
...
*****************************
I don't get a signon prompt but I assume user login has not been enabled on
this basic disk image, however...
I never get the SCI prompt, [], and it seems unresponsive; I've tried
typing i.e. BASIC, COBOL, commands from the DX10 manual, totally random
junk, etc. and I don't get any response; I mean, it seems to be refreshing
the screen every time I hit RETURN; it's not giving me any kind of error
message, but it's not really doing anything either.
Is my emulation just not working right? I tried the DNOS image too and I
was able to get a little further... At IPL it prompts for date and time
which I'm able to fill in, and there is a login stage (l: SYSTEM, p:
SYSTEM) which I can get through, just use the cursor keys to move through
the fields and hit RETURN to push the screen (it seems screen-oriented,
feels reminiscent of an IBM) but once that's done I land at an equally
unresponsive main menu just like I describe occurring with DX10.
Has anyone played with this and found a Telnet client that works well? I
don't see anything on the author's site other than to note that Windows
Telnet won't work. Not clear what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks!
Sean
Time for another trivia question. We will start off the year with an easy
one. This one is related to computers but not exclusive to computers.
What is the significance of the phrase:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
No fair looking it up on the internet.
Doug Ingraham
PDP-8 S/N 1175
Dave Pitts' aforementioned page links to some 990 stuff at bitsavers. The stuff there is largely system level stuff.
People whose interests are closer to chip level might want to have a look at the 9900 Microprocessor Series Family Systems Design Databook available at archive.org, if they're not already aware:
https://archive.org/details/9900MicroprocessorSeriesFamilySystemsDesignData…
A 2 inch thick book that contained pretty much everything you were likely to need to know about the 9900 family.
One of the few other useful 9900 resources I vaguely remember was a 3rd party 9900 book which contained the source for an "instant input assembler" - a tiny line by line assembler which you could add to your PROM-based 9900 debug monitor so you could enter small programs as source rather than hex. Neat. Can't remember name of author or of book, can't quickly find them either.
I worked with 990/4 systems many years ago and there was almost no 9900 family glue logic inside. As far as I remember, the /4 was designed before (most of?) the 99xx support chips came to market. So a serial card in a /4 had a handful of chips doing what a 9902 would eventually do in one. Not sure about the video controller but the same probably applied.
I have a vague recollection that the interweb has some decent writeups of the innards of the 99/4 home computer stuff (sorry, no pointers); from those, it might be possible to work out if the kit of parts on eBay is a plausible match for a 99/4 or similar volume market product.
Have a lot of fun
John Wallace
I have a spare copy of the PET/CBM Personal Computer Guide Second Edition by
Adam Osborne & Carroll S. Donahue published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill
available. If you are interested make me an offer.
David Williams
www.trailingedge.com
I have a Compaq Systempro 486DX2/66 processor board (Spare No. 133825-001)
which I'm trying to repair that is missing some SMD components on the
solder side of the board. Does anyone happen to have one of these in their
collection and would be willing to read the component markings so I can
repair this one? Thankfully Compaq used SMD capacitors with readable codes
on them which indicate their values.
My board is missing R135, C227, C178, and C153.
Looking at the solder side of the board with the card edge connectors
facing towards you, R135 and C227 are towards the top left corner, about
1" from the top and 1.5" from the left. They are opposite U54 which is on
the component side of the board. I /think/ R135 is supposed to be 56 ohms
and C227 0.047uF (based on some similar looking circuitry on the board)
but I have no way to verify if those are the correct values.
C178 is about 1/4" from the top edge of the board and just to the left of
U511 (ATT7C174J). It is opposite U43/U60 which is on the component side of
the board.
C153 is just above the longest card edge connector, about 1" from the
leftmost contacts. It is opposite U32 which is on the component side of
the board.
I salvaged this board out of a scrap bin many years ago and have already
made lots of repairs to it, but I've never quite finished it. I'm about to
order some other SMD parts for other projects, so if I can figure out what
value these parts are supposed to be, I can pick up a few extra reels of
components and finally finish this board.
Today's project was a teardown and photo shoot of a 64700A, which isn't of much
practical use with a 68302 pod on it, and even after 10 years of ignoring them
the prices are still too high and the software to use them unobtanium.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/hp/64700/64700A/photos/
The lack of documentation for the whole 64700 family is pretty sad. I scraped the
Agilent web site back in 2000 and there wasn't much there on the A series back then.
I also pulled most of my Applied Microsystems stuff out and that will be tomorrow's
project.
