On 2015-Aug-04, at 6:32 PM, Bill Sudbrink wrote:
> Subject pretty much says it all, except that I need the
> ceramic package with the metal lid.
Not that it's a help, but I have a Wang calculator that uses an array of MK4008's. Ceramic & lidded but the gold-plated pins rotted on one or two of them - recovered by soldering new pins onto the side. Could do with spares but they're not common.
Would your interest in the specific form be for image sensor experiments?
I was looking at a couple of documents describing the Pertec tape interface; the manual for my Kennedy 9610 tape drive, and a nice reference by a fellow with a rather familiar name:
http://www.sydex.com/pertec.html
According to my Kennedy manual, issuing a read command causes the drive to return one block of data. I can see how that would be used in block-oriented applications in which blocks may be randomly read, written and re-written on the tape. But most of my magtape experience has been using the tapes in a streaming mode, such as when reading/writing one or more tar archives separated by file marks.
When writing a tar archive on a magtape from a Unix system, is the archive written as a sequence of fixed-size blocks? Or is the entire tar archive effectively written as one continuous block which must be streamed with no repositioning?
I'm curious because I'm daydreaming about how to build a tape drive interface controller, and I wonder whether it might need to potentially stream an entire tape in one go vs. being able to safely assume some maximal block size.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
I've been given a small board that I believe is a Corvus Omninet adapter
for TRS-80 Mod 3 or 4. I _think_ it's intended to support a product
called "Network 4" that appears on a few old Tandy price lists and ad
brochures.
I'd love to find out more about the environment it's intended for and, if
possible, get my hands on the technical documentation and system software.
Is this familiar to anyone on the list?
Steve
--
I don't know how many of you were familiar with the
Addressograph-Multigraph (AM) Varityper phototypesetting systems.
Basically small computers with floppy drives and a (very nice)
terminal--and a big box that held quite a number of photo "font" disks.
Basically worked by shining a light through a specific disk and
character onto light-sensitive paper. Produced gorgeous print ready
copy. Compugraphic and Mergenthaler had similar systems and I think
there were also several other competitors as well.
At any rate, a pile of 8" HS floppies will be landing here in the near
future. Does anyone have any leads on Varityper service manuals or
anything might help me with the task of figuring out what on the disks?
(The disks themselves do not come from a country that uses the Latin
alphabet).
Thanks for any leads...
--Chuck
-------------------------------------------------------------
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the spammers."
> From: Chuck Guzis
> BTW, what do you use to read UNIX v7 tar files? Linux/BSD modern tar
> seem not to like the old archive format
I have a very slightly hacked version of the V7 tar, which runs under Windows
(under Cygwin). It read all the older TAR files which the newer TARs barfed
on. Is that of any use to you?
Noel
A faded semi-nude 4x6 photo of a woman on a beach inside an IBM PC-XT that I found in a thrift shop many years ago. How or why it was in there is anyone's guess.
-Rick
Hi,
I recently got a very nice HP 9816 with a 9121 drive unit from Earl
Baugh (thanks Earl!). The computer worked fine but the primary drive
of the 9121 refused to read the disk and made a continuous beating
noise. After I cleaned it on the outside I opened it to see what is
wrong with it. And I found this piece inside the drive itself:
http://imgur.com/dlqOexX (floppy added for size comparison).
After carefully removing it, the drive actually worked like a charm
and I was able to boot from it. I was pleasantly impressed that the
drive head has not been damaged bumping in the leather piece all the
time. I am not sure how that got there, I assume a child pushed it in
by mistake? I am not sure what it is either, the leather triangles
sewn together by hand it seem.
What other strange pieces did you find when you opened up classic computers?
Vlad.
