The silence may have led you to believe that it was all over. Oh no...
The 10th Vintage Computer Festival is a GO!
Bigger, bolder, nerdier than ever, a wonderful way to tack on our
second digit, VCFMW10 will be held August 29-30 at the Holiday Inn
Chicago-Elk Grove Village. A remarkable convergence of amenities and
price have come together in this spot. Among the features:
- A single 4550 sqft banquet hall - at long last, VCFMW and ECCC shall
truly be one!
- First-floor facilities - no more elevator rides or Level of Discharge!
- 11'x12' loading doors that open direct to the parking lot - you
could drive a truck right into the ballroom, but don't!
- A separate room for talks, videos, quiet time, etc - like we're a
real conference or something!
- No (known) conflicts with holidays, wives' birthdays or other local events!
- The quaint, vaguely Blade Runner-esque surroundings of industrial
parks, truck depots and factories - just the way we like it!
- An on-site restaurant, pool, exercise room, outdoor firepit/smoking
area, shuttle buses to/from the airport and Woodfield mall, close
proximity to fast-food and the two greatest Chicago eateries,
Portillo's and Lou Malnati's! (Seriously, those two alone are reason
enough to attend.)
I have updated the http://vcfmw.org web page and FAQ with most of the
information we have so far. Please give them a read before posting
questions. Hotel room rates will be slightly higher than last year's
$79 at the Fairfield Inn; I am still negotiating the block rate. Due
to the restaurant being on-site, there will be no continental
breakfast. Sorry :(
Now the hard sell: all of this geek-luxury does not come without a
price. Some of you know that the deal we had at the Heron Point was
extraordinary and unheard-of in the event hosting business. Since the
HP no longer rents to the public, we were faced with the choice of
resting on our successful nine-year record or figuring out a way for
the show to go on. And go on it shall...with your help. Without
getting into specifics, the cost of putting on VCFMW has more than
doubled - and we are getting a bargain if our comparison shopping is
to be trusted.
Donation links have been set up on the main VCFMW page for PayPal and
GoFundMe sites. Please use the GFM only if you do not have a PayPal
account, as GFM charges us a fee. If you'd prefer to donate in
person, contact me directly. I will get you a receipt (sorry, we're
not a 501.3c yet, so it won't be tax-free.) The main site features
our non-patented Donate-o-Meter which will (more-or-less) track our
progress. We have a lot of time to reach our goal as payment is not
due until the day of the show.
Extra money raised will be either spent on bonus features for the show
(more space, pizza bar, etc.) or put into a fund for next year. We
will engange with the community as much as possible before making any
decsion regarding extra funds.
There will be much to do between now and August - a new floor plan to
design, tables to allocate, speakers to recruit. But our first big
task is one where everyone can help: let's get the word out! Many of
you are on forums that I am not, so spread the news: the show will go
on!
-j
>
> On Dec 17, 2014, at 7:35 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>
> > I should have one, somewhere.. Bear or Earl probably have one as well.
>
> Apparently I don't have an XY472, or at least one doesn't show in
> inventory. I was totally ready to jump in and save the day, too!
>
> ok
> bear.
I'll try to check tonight when I get home... spreadsheet says I have 8
Xylogics SMD controllers... have to see if any is an XY472.
Earl the Squirrel
CHM was able to obtain volumes 18-20 of the IBM 2050 drawings, which are
the microcode charts and ROS dump. I got them scanned and uploaded yesterday
to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/fe/2050
This was one of the things that I had been trying to locate for a while now.
Hey all --
Last summer I picked up a Ridge 32/330 that became available locally.
This is a fairly obscure early RISC machine intended to be a competitor
to the VAX, it uses a 32-bit CPU at 12.5Mhz built from discrete
components (spanning three large PCBs). Mine's outfitted with 8mb of
ECC memory, Pertec, SMD and SCSI QIC controllers, and Ethernet.
You can see some pictures of this beast at:
https://plus.google.com/117997069161125071032/posts/JtsR3BokUxp?pid=6063976…
I got it running late last year after rebuilding the QIC tape drive and
dealing with some intermittent failures due to a couple of low-quality
DIP sockets. I now have a set of dedicated 20A circuits installed in my
basement so I can run it for longer periods of time without worrying
about burning my house down, so I'll be running it for the next couple
of weeks just for fun to keep the basement warm and run up my electrical
bill :).
It's currently running RX/V 1.1 (Ridge's UNIX variant) and it's on the
Internet (indirectly, since exposing a 25-year old UNIX directly to the
'net seems like a bad idea). I thought maybe some people here might be
interested in checking it out since it's pretty obscure, if you want an
account to play around, drop me a line and I can hook you up. I don't
know of any other Ridge machines out there (running or not) -- if you
have one let me know, there's very little information out there on these
things.
I'll add that I'm looking for an external SMD cabinet and cabling so
that I can image the original SMD disk that was in the Ridge when I got
it; it looks like it contains a valid partition table, but it will not
boot. I didn't want to wipe it so the Ridge is currently running off of
a spare drive -- I'd like to hook it up externally to dump an image from
the running RX/V system. If anyone has one to loan (preferably within
driving distance of Seattle) let me know.
Once that's done, it's time to figure out how to get the Eagle that came
with it running again...
And a huge thanks to Al Kossow for archiving the OS media that's on
Bitsavers, without which this machine would be a very large boat anchor
taking up many cubic feet in my basement. (If anyone has any media or
docs for this that aren't on Bitsavers, let me know -- I'm in particular
looking for an ROS distribution on QIC media...)
- Josh
I spent the last week trying to document some of my analyzers and ICEs. There
are tons of photos, firmware dumps and some new manuals on bitsavers under
appliedMicrosystems, biomation, hmi, futuredata, hp/te hp/64000 and hp/64700.
The HMI-200-68000 manual that arrived today had the 68K DOS software in the
binder, zipped and up now under bits/HuntsvilleMicrosystems
Has anyone ever noticed a pattern to the numbering on the underside of MMI PALs?
It would be nice not to have to lift the labels off them. The ones I indentified
were
B7304 14L4
B7320 16L8
B7321 16R4
B7830 20S10
B7840 20L8
Most are protected. Every once and a while I found one that wasn't.
I'd be interested in other AMC ICE firmware dumps to add to the archive. I've made
some progress identifying the buses and what the various chunks of firmware are for.
Next thing to do is trace the pinouts and see if the house-marked 6809 memory mapper
is a MC6829.
From looking at the manual, the HMI-200 is kind of interesting in that it can run
without a target. The Applied Microsystems units require a 'null target' board.
> From: Roe Peterson
> There are very likely lead bars in the bottom rear of the rack
I recall finding one in some machine (don't remember what, now); they are
so the thing won't fall over when something is extended/swung out.
Noel
Amongst other things, I picked up a SGI Indigo2 system yesterday. It turned
out that it had the original packaging, and that it's an Impact 10000 machine.
For graphics however it has a four-board set; does anyone know what this
might be? Wikipedia talks about a three-board set for the Maximum Impact,
and fewer cards for lesser options, but I've not seen mention anywhere of a
machine using four (unless they're just not counting the analog output
board as part of the three?)
I'm not sure what it has for RAM; all of the sockets are filled. Someone
had scribbled 32MB and 1GB of disk on the box, but it has 2 x 4GB drives
fitted, so that's not necessarily correct.
I need to clean the dust out before I try powering up, but does anyone know
what a minimum config would be? Can I power up with no disks and
framebuffer, and expect to get a serial console? I'd like to not stress the
PSU (or risk the framebuffer cards) initially if possible - the previous
owner said they never ran it, although it was supposedly working when they
got it.
cheers
Jules
Today I mailed off a couple HP 2100A/S front panel keys (they are the round
tubular "security key" type) to a fellow listmember in need. I thought I had
a whole box of them, but it turned out virtually all of those were DEC keys.
So I had 3 copies of the key made today (two for the listmember, one extra
for me). When I tested them before dropping them in the mail, 2 worked and 1
did not (of course, I sent off the 2 that worked to the listmember).
Since I have to go back to the locksmith to get the 1 key redone, I thought
I'd offer to get keys for the 2100A/S made for anyone that wants them. I
guess it is possible that your 2100A/S may use a different key, but at least
every 2100 I've come across uses the same key. The locksmith charges $8 per
key, and figure $2 bucks for shipping. I'll probably head back to the
locksmith Monday so if anyone is in need, let me know.
Please note - the keys for HP 1000 aka 21MX M/E/F are completely different
and not what I'm talking about here. Just the 2100A or 2100S. But I guess if
anyone needs keys for those, I can get some made as well. If it's for a 1000
or MX key, let me know if it's a M series (dual edge key, switch has standby
position) or E/F (single edge key, not a switch just a front door latch).
Best,
J
Hi all --
Picked up a Tektronix 4014-1 terminal. It's in pretty good shape, nice
and clean and it's in nearly-working condition except that the storage
behavior isn't quite right.
On power-up, write-through doesn't. (That is, characters don't get
stored to the tube.) Clearing the display via the RESET/PAGE key clears
a roughly elliptical region in the center of the display but leaves the
outer edges a mess. The cleared region stores characters properly. You
can see the overall effect here:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/tek4014/clear.jpg
After a 2-3 minutes of warming up the area cleared by RESET/PAGE
increases. I haven't run the terminal long enough to see if it
eventually completely erases the screen (while the power supply appears
to be within tolerances, I still need to rebuild/reform it so I'm not
going to run it too long yet).
So far everything else seems to be functioning properly, the cursor
appears properly (and does not write through), input is accepted from
the keyboard, etc. I've been reading through the service manual on
Bitsavers and it describes a very in-depth alignment procedure which I'm
prepared to go through (once I've got the power supplies rebuilt) but I
thought I'd ask here if this problem rings any bells and if there's
anything I should immediately suspect or adjust. You guys know
everything :).
Thanks as always for the advice,
Josh
