Did the PDP14 (or any machine of that era) ever use hand-threaded (by the
end user) core boards as ROM?
tnx.
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
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Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
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Any Amiga geeks out there? I picked up a pair of Amiga A1000 systems a
couple of weeks ago. Both are Revision 6 boards (going by IC dates, one was
likely built in October of '85, the other in January of '86). However,
bigbookofamigahardware.com claims that rev. 6 boards had copper traces and
the later rev A board were tin - but in this case the earlier of my two
boards is tin (while the later one is indeed copper).
Just wondering if I have a bit of an anomaly (and the above site's
correct), of if the reality is that rev. 6 boards routinely appear in both
copper and tin?
s/n on the early system is 6000146, the later one is 1165109; I have no
idea what production numbers were like (anyone?) but I'm assuming that
there's some form of plant number involved in the leading digit(s).
cheers
Jules
OK, long shot. I gave one of these away years ago and I wish I hadn't;
anyone have a Moniterm Viking 2400 monitor they'd part with? This is a
large (24") B&W monitor from the late 80s. I still have the Mac Nubus
card to drive it...
Thanks as always,
Josh
On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 2:54 PM, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote:
> At 11:48 PM 3/31/2015, Josh Dersch wrote:
>>OK, long shot. I gave one of these away years ago and I wish I hadn't; anyone have a Moniterm Viking 2400 monitor they'd part with? This is a large (24") B&W monitor from the late 80s. I still have the Mac Nubus card to drive it...
>
> They were used in the Amiga and Atari markets, too, weren't they,
> with specialized video cards? Or was that only their 19" monitors?
I have the 19" Viking greyscale monitor with the corresponding Amiga
card (1008 x 1008 w/quarter-screen panelized refresh) It was great
for writing code. I don't remember anything larger from the day.
-ethan
> From: John Wilson
> Is there a reason why people don't wear name tags at VCF-E? ... no one
> seems to have them on and I'd feel like a tool bringing my own and
> being the only one.
Bring yours - it won't be the only one! I was planning on bringing one of my
old IETF ones in case there weren't 'official' VCFE ones.
Everyone else, please bring one! (And maybe someone could bring a spool of
those stick-on temporary ones, for those without.) Without them, you'll never
know if you just walked past someone you know well online....
Noel
Big announcement!
Wes Clark is unable to attend VCF East due to health.
Naturally I hit the panic button. Wes, after all, was already our Plan B
after Ted Nelson backed out, also due to personal matters.
But we scrambled really hard in the past two days and landed K. :)
I thought I'd drop a note after visiting the LCM on Saturday. I cannot
endorse this museum enough, I had a complete blast.
I latched onto a tour with a new docent by the name of Aaron who was truly
the nicest chap - so much so we ended up BS'ing for 40 minutes after
the tour. In a manner in which the other person isn't trying to get away,
no less, which is probably novel for most of us.
To be able to monkey about with a multi-rack 8, or a Nova was very
cool. To stand next to a running Sigma9 or in front of a 13-rack KI10... I
highly, highly recommend it to anyone who visits the area.
Also, Rich, I see you:
http://kiwigeek.com/misc/LCM2015/IMG_20150404_150503257.jpg
- JP
It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the switches. Does the card work at all with all the switches in the open position? It would help if you could provide decent pics of both sides of the board.
Hoping to help...
> From: Bill Degnan
> These are best for someone who has experience cleaning a "barn find"
> ...
> * items contains/contained a rodent nest.
Those who missed out on this deal may find this sequel comforting.
There was one aspect of this (which Bill alluded to somewhat eliptically -
perhaps out of delicacy, or perhaps he assumed that anyone who'd done one of
these would already realize the full implications :-), but which didn't
really impress itself upon me until I started the ride home - at which point
I started to get olfactory clues. Yep, some of you know what I'm talking
about.
Animal urine.
Of the three boxes, one (the '11/44' - it was actually just a BA11-K) was
totally sodden inside (those nests are basically giant sponges), and one of
the 11/34's was half-sodden. The thing about animal urine that's really a
problem is not the smell, or the mess - it's that it's _incredibly_ corrosive.
>From the condition of a couple of the cards which had gotten the worst, I
think there was actually some galvanic activity between the copper traces,
and something else - maybe the iron in the chassis? Traces were quite
literally eaten right off the cards. You can see the trace heading towards
one of the gold-plated contact fingers, and then - poof! - it disappears.
Dozens of traces on those two cards have big gaps in them.
Although now that I think about it, it couldn't have been galvanic activity
which dissolved the copper in the traces; if I remember my inorganic chem
correctly, iron is above copper on the galvanic activity scale. But anyway,
Also, totally amazingly, quite a few of the gold-plated contact fingers also
have damage! One is quite bad - although luckily I think there's a patch left
where the contact would be, so that can probably be saved. Whatever was going
on must have eaten the copper out from underneath, and then the gold just
washed away.
So I think all those traces can be repaired, if there's ever a use for that
interface (an RH11). Just a lot of wires to solder in....
The other problem is the backplanes. DEC boxes put the backplanes at the
bottom, so these nests were resting on the backplanes. Having cleaned them off
(well, stage 1 cleaning), I _think_ that, amazingly enough, the contact pins
are OK. (Now that I think about it, they are tin-plated - so there's the other
end of the galvanic activity. Ah, well, better to eat the traces than the
contact pins - those would be almost _impossible_ to repair.)
The real problem is that there's 'grup' (a Dave Clark neologism) in the thin
space between the plastic contact pin housing blocks and the PCB. Needless to
say, one can't take the PCB off to get in there...
So my plan of action is to stick them in water for a couple of days, and
then use a water jet to try and get down in the thin gap between the contact
blocks and the PCB, to clean it out.
Does this sound OK? I can't think of a reason why immersing a backplane in
fresh water for a couple of days would do it any harm, but maybe I'm missing
something?
I just think it's critical to recovering these to get as much out of that
area as I possibly can. If an open develops somehow, well, that can easily be
fixed with a wire. But a short.... you're screwed.
Moral of the story: if you're going to store your antique computers in a barn
- make sure to keep the rodents out!
Noel
> From: Pete Turnbull
>> Technically, that's an 11/83 CPU...
> Nope, it's only 15MHz ... and the MSV11-Q memory isn't PMI, so it's an
> 11/73.
A discussion as to whether the addition of second board can change a first
board from an A to a B would I suspect be non-productive, so I will pass over
that point. :-)
One thing that I am curious about is the 15MHz aspect: what did DEC (if you
recall) call a 15MHz M8190 paired with PMI memory? (Recalling our prior
discussion, which I am too lazy to look up and give a pointer to, about how
all the M8190's can apparently do PMI.) Did they (or would they) have
regarded that as an 11/83, or did only the 18MHz version get the 11/83
moniker? (Too many different configurations - 15/18, PMI/non-PMI - and not
enough names!)
Noel
