Mainframes and other stuff
Recycle center in NC is willing to save out "stuff" for people.
No, no one can go in the back and scrounge.
No, he does not want a lot of emails from people.
Yes, he gets big blue and orange and beige 6 foot tall OLD mainframes in all
the time. They squash them at the moment.
Yes, he will package small orders, and will properly palletize larger
orders.
Local pick up will be available after the new year.
So, if u can send me a picture with description and some part numbers, along
with what you want to pay, I will consolidate things and make arrangements.
Please don't ask for specific boards from DEC; they don't want to go into
that much detail.
QBUS will mean nothing to him.
Big orange cabinet that says xxxxx is much more likely to get saved.
They are moving to new warehouse 1st of the month, so all this will start
happening after the 1st of the year.
Cindy Croxton
Electronics Plus
1613 Water Street
Kerrville, TX 78028
830-792-3400 phone
830-792-3404 fax
sales at elecplus.com
AOL IM elcpls
About six months ago I struck a deal with a place down in California for
four Documation M1000's that I've been able to tell so far they all work but
I really don't have space for more than one. I've been trying to sell them
at a loss for months now over on the Vintage Computer Forums and Nekochan
(if you got here you'll find pictures) but no bites. I swear there were
people out there that were looking. Where did you folks go? Might anyone
here be interested? I absolutely refuse to put them on the curb.
-John
Hello.
I have a VAX730 with both TU58 drives destroyed (capstan melted, need
replacements).
I also have a bunch of cassettes, but unfortunately all seem to have
problems with the bend and/or bad spots on the tape.
Possibly I would try to replace the broken bands (if I find a source)
and/or replace the magnetic tape when damaged (I was thinking to try
with audio cassette tape, don' t know if metal oxide high density tape
could be good for it).
Anybody has some information about the coercivity of original DEC TU58 tape?
One problem indeed is the need of reformatting the tape, but: if I can
emulate the TU58 drive using a serial, would it be possible to send
raw commands to the drive using the serial and a PC?
Andrea
PS-If possible, some good-condition cassette would be very useful to
me too. I'm located in Italy.
This has probably been asked before, but does anyone have the software
package that came with the HP-IB/RS232 HP10342 bus pre-processor for the
HP1650 series Logic Analyzer (actually I have a 1670G)? It should have a
config file and an inverse assembler file. I'm interested in the HP-IB
files. Can't find it anywhere.
- Marc
An interesting 3 hours on PBS last night:
- 'Steve Jobs - One Last Thing': No description necessary.
- 'Long Distance Warrior': McGowan/MCI's David & Goliath battle with AT&T
and disastrous merger with Worldcom.
- 'Digital Man/Digital World': Ken Olsen/DEC's growth and ultimate decline.
(No doubt everyone here except myself had already seen this one ;-)
Interesting comparison of the different styles and personalities of three
men who profoundly influenced the tech world of today and their companies.
Thoroughly enjoyed it.
m
Hi, All,
A friend of mine just returned a modem he got from me decades ago, a
Ventel MD212-plus. It's an early-1980s non-AT-command-set
autodialling modem. The settings are adjusted via a pair of 10-pin
DIP switches accessible from the back. I've checked the web and
bitsavers. So far, all I've found is some old Usenet articles and a
couple of pictures, but no manual or jumper guide.
One "feature" is that it lacks a modular jack to plug into the phone
system. Fortunately, my friend kept the proprietary DA15 cable. I've
never seen that choice of connectors on any other modem.
Does anyone have any Ventel docs?
Thanks,
-ethan
I do a regular contest on RetroBattlestations called BASIC Week which is a sort of tribute to the days when it was common for programs to be published in books and magazines and people would type them into their computers. One of the neat things about distributing software through type-in listings is that there?s no need for working disk drives or tape drives, or to do complicated things like get a serial connection working and find a way to transfer files. If a computer has built-in BASIC just turn it on and start typing!
Past programs have displayed vector graphics, silly text screen animations, and a couple of games. This time around the program is called Winchester Drive and the concept is to explore a mansion to see what you can find. I decided this time around to try out true sprites and made a version for both the Apple II and Commodore 128.
I wanted to do a Commodore 64 version but couldn't find any line drawing routines written in assembly anywhere! I thought for sure in the last 33 years some book or magazine somewhere would have written a couple of simple routines to clear the graphics screen and draw some lines that you could POKE in and then call with SYS. Oh well, I will leave the C64 version to someone else. :-)
The challenge is more about honor and glory and getting an excuse to show off old computers and/or skills with porting, but I do give out vinyl decals & stickers for prizes (http://imgur.com/a/iAS5T).
I know that the TI-99/4A, Atari 400/800, Coleco Adam, MSX, and maybe some others also had sprites. Sprites aren?t really needed for porting to other systems, they?re just an easy way to move the player around the screen. The program could definitely be ported to systems that use simple character graphics or even plain text screens.
The complete source code has been posted to github, and you can see the full rules and check out other submissions here:
https://redd.it/3ko0nd
--
Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx
Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com
Many of us maintain large collections of bits that we'd like to preserve over a long time, and distribute, replicate, and migrate via unreliable storage media and networks. As disk sizes (and archive sizes) have increased, the probability of corruption undetected or uncorrected by the mechanisms normally built into disk drives, network protocols, and filesystems has increased to a level that warrants great concern.
I would be interested to know if there exists an archive format that has the following desirable properties:
1) It is well-documented, and relatively simple, to facilitate its implementation on many platforms present and future.
2) It supports some degree of incremental updating, but need not be particularly efficient about it. An explicit compaction operation is preferable to an overly complex format. It is adequate to use append-only strategies appropriate for write-once media.
3) Insertion and extraction of files, copying of the archives, and other archive-manipulation utilities support end-to-end verification that identical bits have been stably recorded to the media, bypassing or defeating platform-level or hardware-level caching mechanisms. Where this is not possible, the limits must be carefully delineated, with some basis for determining the properties of the platform and certifying reliability
properties where possible.
4) The format should provide for superior error detection capability, designed to avoid common failure modes with mechanisms typically used in hardware. For example, use a document-level cryptographic checksum rather than a block-level CRC.
5) The format should include a high degree of internal redundancy and recoverability, say, along the lines of a virtual RAID-array.
Just as biological organisms constantly correct DNA transcription errors,
the idea is to have a format that is robust across long-term exposure to
imperfect copying and transmission channels.
Does anything like this exist?
--Bill
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for the images of ROMs installed on the IOC (I/O controller)
board of Intel MDS-2 development systems. In particular I'm looking for
the content of the character generator ROM (A19-2708) and of firmware
ROMs (A50 to A53-4x2716). So far I had no success in googling them.
My goal would be to contribute a good emulation of MDS systems to MESS,
especially for what regards the look of the video terminal. Well, this
is the plan, when "real-life" is not inteferring too much...
Thanks a lot.
-- F.Ulivi