test-drb October 2015

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

195 participants
329 discussions

Interlisp-D (Medley) "display font" disks for the 1186?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Josh Dersch > a currently non-working 1186 with an installation of the Lyric release > of Interlisp-D installed on the drive > ... > I have made a disk image of the ad-hoc font disk I created Might be a good idea to make an image of the entire Lyric hard drive, in case that drive fails, we won't lose the bits. Noel

10 years, 1 month

Troubleshooting a 286.. oscope level!

by ethan＠757.org

Hello everyone, I'm working to troubleshoot a 286 laptop style computer. I've kind of hit the end of my knowledge and wondering if anyone has any insight. The computer in question I've never seen run. So I don't know normal behavior. There were a few caps inside that were leaking electrolyte, I cleaned it all up and replaced them. A few traces look a little bit corroded but test fine. First thing I'm thinking, is did the BIOS eproms loose a bit or two of data from age? Bit rot? I did read off the two BIOS chips (high and low pair I assume.) I can see text like Copyright Pheonix Technologies 1988, but I can see that for instance the first character of the text Copyright is wrong, it's a P in one file and 9A in the other. Second thing I hooked up Oscope and cut on computer. It never does a floppy seek. When I poke around the 27c256 EPROM I see constant activity on all address lines, and all datalines. This includes the OE pin as well. Would a normal runnng computer hit the BIOS that much? Any thoughts appreciated! -- Ethan O'Toole

10 years, 1 month

This is sad...

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

hmmm.... be careful of that core..... may contain launch codes <grin!> Ed# In a message dated 10/3/2015 10:02:45 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, linimon at lonesome.com writes: On Sat, Oct 03, 2015 at 07:09:04PM -0400, Sean Caron wrote: > Software preservation is definitely important remember that with the latest US laws, that certain data (e.g. hard drives, magnetic media) *must* be destroyed on the supposition that they contain sensitive personal data. If you don't do so, you can create yourself a legal liability. (do NOT ask me about equipment sold by someone in South Austin who is now out of business, who should have been wiping drives.) mcl

10 years, 1 month

This is sad...

by mattislind＠gmail.com

http://www.ebay.com/itm/111410385883 10 left 27 sold. Once they could have been used by someone. Now they can only be used as a conversation piece hanged on the wall.

10 years, 1 month

Writing SCSI 9-Track Mag Tapes from Windows/DOS

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Thanks, this looks perfect. And indeed my tape is ID 5 (brainwaves anyone?). Can you elaborate on the differences between E11 and SIMH? When is it the same, when will it not be compatible? Marc ================================ Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 02:52:36 -0400 From: John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> My "ST.EXE" program (available from http://www.dbit.com/pub/ibmpc/util/ including source) runs on real DOS (not Windows) and can write from an E11-format .TAP file (which SIMH uses a garbled version of, but they're interchangeable for *even* record lengths which are 99% of the universe) to a real tape. It works on my HP 88780, and my Qualstar 1260S and even a DEC TZ30 or TK50Z-GA (which aren't quite full SCSI-1). Not picky at all. "st wput foo.tap" should write your image out. You need a DOS ASPI driver for your SCSI card, and you'll need to use something like "-f scsi5:" on the command line (or set the TAPE environment variable) so ST will know which SCSI ID (etc.) to use. John Wilson D Bit ===============================

10 years, 1 month

Troubleshooting a 286.. oscope level!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Fred Cisin > Do you get any POST codes? How about beep codes? (A lot of machines give them out when things are too effed up to even display anything.) Noel

10 years, 1 month

IBM terminals update 2

by sales＠elecplus.com

Without taking the skids apart, rough counts are , terminals - 57 keyboards - 77 printers - 4 line printer - 1 servers - 3 misc parts - 1 skid replacement bases ect all of the equipment is nice and white not yellowed so it looks good He wants to move it as a lot. He does not give a price point. Located in WI. Cindy Croxton --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

10 years, 1 month

A new Lisp-based OS that hearkens back to the old days of comprehensible computers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Liam Proven I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that modern computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire computer turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.) I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more complex than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality. However, one thing I am going to quibble with: > This is a nice explanatory quote: > The main reasons TempleOS is simple and beautiful are because it's > ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ... > It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't have > bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code complicated. Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable system in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs in the local machine. To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably the worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's _potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box... Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine, it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas. You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people - effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine. (And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial strength ones like Multics.) Noel

10 years, 1 month

Looking for RRD40 caddy

by jpw＠chocolatejollis.net

Hello all, I am looking for a CD caddy that is compatible with the DEC RRD40. Willing to pay for the caddy + shipping; haven't had any luck with eBay et. al. Thanks, JP Willis

10 years, 1 month

Thoughts on manual database design?

by mark＠markesystems.com

>> Not sure why you have VARCHARs for primary keys, why not use the >> conventional auto-increment int so you can dispense with >> the LastGeneratedArtifactID table. >> > Because my artifact ID's are not always just numbers. In some cases > they may already be marked on an artifact (though typically not for > manuals - but this is just the first of a set of such projects, and they > *are* marked on many of my computer boards). You can still force the artifact ID VARCHARS to be unique, and index them as well, of course. There are at least a couple of reasons to have primary keys that are independent of the "visible" key. First, if the user-visible key ever changes (what if the inventory tag falls off and is lost?), that will break all the links that refer to that record (or else you'll need extra code to handle this). Also, there have been many times when some aspect of a key that's directly tied to an external bit of information needs to change format - numeric to character, or length change, or... This too will break things. > No, I don't need made up primary keys. The other tables have the keys > they need to guarantee uniqueness - in some cases the PK is made of up > two or more columns. I seriously dislike the current fad of inventing > such keys when they are not needed. I too used to develop new databases this way, figuring that since a certain bit of information is guaranteed to be unique (or that I want to guarantee its uniqueness), I'd use that for the primary key. After getting bitten more times than not, I now almost always create an auto-number key whose only purpose may be for internal linkage. (I recently developed a project using Zoho Creator, which was a learning experience to say the least. It's worth noting that an explicit ID field is part of *every* data table that you can create there - there's no way around it. And, it turned out that it was pretty darn helpful a lot of the time, too.) >> Another thing, although MySQL is fine but for this I think SQLite might >> be a better choice of db. Its access methods are all in-process ie. no >> external >> dbms service to bother with, just a library to link in and the physical >> database is a disk file (.s3db extension). It has a much 'lighter' db >> footprint. >> > As I mentioned in another response, I truly dislike SQLite, based on my > experience with it on my Garmin GPS. I'm still not sure why - my experience has been very good. What bad experiences have you had? ~~ Mark Moulding

10 years, 1 month

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test-drb October 2015