test-drb January 2016

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

172 participants
198 discussions

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

8 years, 8 months

Any word on the Multics revival front?

by madcrow.maxwell＠gmail.com

When Multics was officially released as free software a couple of years ago, there was a flurry of activity aimed at getting some sort of emulator up and running to run it. Did anything ever come of that or did folks just lose interest (or find out that the needed GE/Honeywell hardware was too poorly-documented to write an emulator of) Mike

8 years, 9 months

Unidentified DEC gear available, NSW-AU

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

DEC Gear available. Unlike most dec gear, I must admit that I can't identify exactly what this is. Several racks, I was guessing AFT or Instrumentation Testing. Looks like one or more cpu or expansion cabinets in some of the racks, and some DEC AD/DA interface stuff. I was left with the impression that there may be one or more racks that are not shown in the pictures provided. I was told that racks are in "several different buildings on the estate" (residential). The first rack looks to be in very bad shape (perhaps a power supply), but the other racks don't look so bad. I am not sure that I can get more pictures from the owner, but will try. I think that in order to get pictures of the fronts (what we all probably want to see), the owner would have to move stuff (and them) and would rather not. The equipment is located in NSW, Australia. It sound like they just want it to go to a good home. If someone is local to NSW Australia and wants to spearhead going onsite to take a closer look for others and/or pick up the gear themselves, let me know offlist and I'll give you the contact info. To those on the list that aren't down under - any ideas what this is? Pics are temporarily at http://www.ezwind.net/nsw-au Best, J

8 years, 9 months

IBM 3101-12 ASCII terminal - need fuse holder

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

Hello, all, I was just gifted with an IBM 3101-12 ASCII terminal that happens to be missing the fuse and fuse holder. Unlike a lot of 1960s and 1970s gear, it's not round. It's square. Is this a standard IBM thing from the 70s/80s? Anyone know where I could get one? It seems to snap in and probably fell out at some point under its previous owner. Also, I found only a little info on it from Googling. Later IBM ASCII terminals emulated ANSI command or Wyse-50 or something. I couldn't find anything on the 3101. Is it a glass TTY or does it respond to any cursor positioning, etc. commands? Thanks for any tips and info. Worst case, I can bodge in a fuse on the inside, but if I can find a replacement holder, I'd like that more. Thanks, -ethan

8 years, 10 months

11/73 into 11/03 chassis?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jacob Ritorto > Would you happen to have notes or references about how to do it? It's not too hard; basically, one has to wire pins BC1, BD1, BE1 and BF1 (BDAL 18-BDAL21, respectively) on all _QBUS_ slots together into a bus. So wire BC1 on slot 1 to BC1 on slot 2, slot 3, etc, etc. A couple of notes: First, I said '_QBUS_' because if you have a Q/CD backplane, clearly one doesn't run the extra BDAL lines to the CD slots, only the QBUS slots (which run down the left-hand side, when facing the backplane). Second, for optimal analog behaviour, the 'out' slot on the backplane should be the last slot you wire to, so that there are no branches in the transmission line for BDAL18-BDAL21 (which can produce reflections - aka noise - on the transmission lines). How to do this efficiently (in terms of the wiring) can be a bit tricky, depending on the backplane configuration. E.g. if one has the standard 'serpentine' backplane, i.e. one with the slots in the following kind of order (facing the backplane from the board side): 1-2 4-3 5-6 8-7 9-10 etc., one might naively think one has to run the extra bus lines back and forth to match. However, only the _grant_ lines have to follow this pattern (and they are already there); the added lines don't have to follow the same pattern, as long as there are no branches. So, for the example 5-slot backplane above, one could/would wire: 1-4-5-8-9--2-3-6-7-10 i.e. a single vertical run on the left hand side, a single diagonal from 9 back to 2 (shown with "--"), and then another vertical run on the right hand side. Much simpler than wiring back and forth in slot order; there are no branches; and the last slot is the 'out' slot. For backplane with an _even_ number of layers, e.g.: 1-2 4-3 5-6 8-7 it's a little more complicated: a single vertical run on each side cannot be connected in such a way as to have the 'out' slot (8) be the last slot. One has to do something a little more complex: 1-4-5--2-3-6-7--8 with a vertical run on the left side, stopping short of the last slot; then a vertical run on the right side, then a lateral back across on the last layer. Obviously one _could_ run the wires back and forth, in slot order, but that will take a lot more wire, which at the very least is more work (especially on backplanes which don't have full wire-wrap pins, just the little stubby pins that have to have the wires soldered to); whether it also increases the delay down those transmission lines enough to be noticeable is something I don't know the answer to. All the obvious caveats apply: make sure not to get confused by the mirror pin and slot numbers on the front and back sides (you'll be wiring on the back, whereas the diagrams above are on the front), etc. Noel

8 years, 10 months

2.9.1 BSD on 11/34 + sc21-bm + fujitsu m2333k

by jacob.ritorto＠gmail.com

Exciting stuff for a Friday night, right? Here's a visual aid in case you're needing further inspiration: https://www.instagram.com/p/_K-zHhHvLn78Qu5ijWqMf-HBem1LKMLaEdI1c0/ The M2333K is the smaller one on the left with the green and yellow lights on. I'm booting from rl0, which contains the tuhs 2.9.1 rl02 image I wrote with vtserver earlier. I want to use my nice, roomy smd disk so I can pull in all the sources and recompile stuff and I've managed to get this *so* close to working but I'm getting xp0a: hard error bn xxxx cs2=1100 <MXF, IR> er1=0 on every single block when I try to mkfs /dev/xp0a 4800 This disk was working fine years ago via MSCP attached to the 11/73 (before I lost the Micro/11 power supply). Anyway, I referred to http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/emulex/SC2151001-CC_SC21tech_Jan87.p… to set the emulation on the Emulex card for two rm03s and they're showing up in xxdp's zrmlb1 formatter, though they won't format there, screensful of errors. I think I set the m2333k to 32 sectors, per this manual: http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/antonio/chrisq/B03P-4760-0101A_-_M23… Because XXDP is reputed to be really strict, I figured that was normal and then tried the Emulex on-board formatting procedure against both xp0 and xp4 and they formatted perfectly without error. Guess the Emulex on-board stuff doesn't bother verifying much? So I think that maybe I've misunderstood the hard sectoring / sector sizing thing. Does anyone remember the gist of it and would you be able to describe? Do you see any other mistakes? thx jake

8 years, 10 months

Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

by bqt＠softjar.se

Well, about two weeks since my last announcement, but I figured I should do another one. I've cut a new release of TCP/IP for RSX, and I encourage everyone to update to this latest release. A short list of changes since my last release: Documentation: . I've worked some on the documentation, and filled out some parts that were previously TBD. TCP: . Performance improvements. In general, I've improved file transfer performance by about 20% by tuning when TCP ACK messages as well as window updates are sent. On links where packets are dropped from time to time, the performance improvements can be significantly higher. . Bugfix. Retry counter were incorrectly reset under some circumstances. . Bugfix. TCP did not resend an ACK if the same data was received twice. . Bugfix. TCP sockets could erronously be left in a closed state with no task. However, looking at the socket, it looked like a task was associated. FTP: . Size calculation for stream type files in RSX mode was done incorrectly. Applications: . I've included a precompiled version of PCL.TSK As usual, the distribution is available from: ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

8 years, 10 months

Oddball floppies for trade - 8", HS (outer edge), weird cutout

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

I have two "flippy organizers" (that's around 20 floppies each) full of these oddball floppies. Picture at https://www.flickr.com/photos/131070638 at N02/22020178558/in/dateposted/ They are 8", hard sectored, and the sectors are on the outer edge rather than the hub, and there is an odd cutout on one edge that goes inside the drive. I know I don't have a machine that uses these, so they are available for trade. J

8 years, 10 months

NeXTstation booting, NetInfo, and NTP

by pete＠dunnington.plus.com

Yesterday I dug out my NexTstation (68040 25MHz slab with 32MB of 100ns SIMMs) which has OpenStep 4.2 for Mach installed. The lithium battery was flat and it wouldn't boot so I've ordered a replacement and temporarily kludged a pair of alkaline AAs to get it going. So far, so good, though it thinks today is September 6 2001 :-) Then I used SimpleNetworkStarter, set to "Use the network, but don't share administrative data". I've also edited /etc/hostconfig and reslv.conf to sensible values (eg TIME=-NO-) so it now boots quite quickly. Is there a way to disable NetInfo completely, and if so will things like DNS lookups still work? Is there an easy way to make it get its time/date settings from my NTP server? During startup it does claim to start netinfo, lookupd, ntpd (see below), then inetd, I have an SGI running IRIX which is my DHCP, DNS, and NTP server, and I plan to set up the NexT to use DHCP to get its IP address etc (it's static ATM). -- Pete

8 years, 10 months

Can Windows 98SE run on an Intel I7 with SATA hard drives?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: CuriousMarc > Needless to say, you'd only boot to this Windows 98 for retro-computing > purposes. BTW, are you indicating that Win 98SE _in general_ should only be used for retro-computing, or only Win 98SE _in the particular configration you described_ should only be used that way? Because, if the latter, I happily use Win 98SE on most of my machines, for the vast majority of my work! Of course, I don't need to run the latest and greatest uSloth bloatware^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H applications, so they fact that they probably won't run on the older Windows (What a shock! You don't think they would by any chance want to encourage people to pay them a large pile of dineros for the latest and 'greatest' version of their OS, do you?) is not a problem for me. The biggest issue, actually, for me, is that the latest Adobe Reader which will run under Win 98SE is 6.0, and that doesn't support some of the latest PDF's (in particular, encrypted ones). Noel

8 years, 10 months

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test-drb January 2016