Whats the matter with Vintage Computer Forum ?
Its got walls like Mordor
I thought I might register. I filled out their form (tedious) and hit
submit.
It tells me my email address is already in use !
It then offers to change my password and asks for my email address.
It says email sent needless to say there's no email
This site is more confused than I normally am
Anybody know a spell or incantation to get into this closed site.
Rod Smallwood
Our presentation series during VCF-SE events has been recorded from the
1.0 event to the 4.0 event which happened two weeks ago. In the past,
good intentions to get videos edited and posted in a timely manor have
been out-weighed by real-life demands. I'm hoping to break the cycle
starting this year. Below is the first video from the 4.0 event of
Sunday's talk by Bil Herd from early Commodore. He was scheduled in
advance, but due to a scheduling mixup, had to fly in last minute and
give an ad-hoc presentation.
My intention is to edit and post one video every two weeks, starting
with 4.0 videos, until the entire 4, 3, 2, 1.0 backlog is cleared. I
will cross post announcements for new videos as they are posted to AHCS
list, cctalk, and VCF-SE info lists. You can also subscribe to our Vimeo
channel to get push updates as they happen. So here is the link to Bil's
great talk:
https://vimeo.com/161861581 [1]
Alan Hightower
AHCS Treasurer / VCF-SE Minion
alan at alanlee.org
Links:
------
[1] https://vimeo.com/161861581
On Apr 14, 2016 1:34 PM, "Josh Dersch" <JoshD at livingcomputermuseum.org>
wrote:
> So we copy disk images to/from the PDP-11/44 over 3Mbit Ethernet to the
Alto :).
>
> - Josh
>
Quite a hack! So you copy in real time as it were? Direct from packs on a
running Alto to packs on a running 11? Would it be practical to hack it
further to capture the data to an image file so anyone with an 11 / RK
combo could write packs?
I have 6085s and Stars; I'd love an Alto to round out the collection - but
not at $40k! Crazy prices these days; I've never paid more than a couple of
grand for anything - and usually a lot less.
Mike
Hi Guys
All outstanding PDP-8/e A and B front panels have
shipped and should reach US customers
around 20/21 March. Next to go will be 8/f and /m.
I'm building up stock so as to have at least ten of all of the popular
range available.
By some miracle we did manage to same day ship a stock panel order to a
UK customer.
He got it the next day. He nearly had a fit .. He thought we were in
the US!!
Rod (Panelman) Smallwood
> From: Josh Dersch
> we copy disk images to/from the PDP-11/44 over 3Mbit Ethernet to the
> Alto :).
Ah, got it. In the context of the thread, with all the RK05 discussion, I
wrongly assumed that somehow there was an RK05 involved.
> wrote a rough implementation of PUP BSP and the Alto CopyDisk protocol
> on top of all of that. It was fun!
I can imagine! You must be the first person in about 30 years to do a PUP
implementation! :-)
> From: Jerry Weiss
> Not only that, but we used Diablo Drives on RK05 Controllers.
That doesn't surprise me one bit - the RK11-C was designed to drive Diablo
drives, and the controller/drive interface was kept almost identical in the
RK11-D (the only difference being the drive select stuff).
But the drive (either RK05 or Diablo) only provides a bit stream and sector
pulses over that interface, so turning that bit string into a sector is
controller-specific, and it would have been somewhat astonishing if the
PDP-11 and Alto interfaces had used a compatible low-level format. And, as
Josh indicated, in fact, they did not.
Noel
> From: Josh Dersch
>> They are 12 sector 2315 packs. You have to duplicate it on a two drive
>> Alto, since the format is unique.
> we're able to duplicate packs and write new ones out from disk images.
> (At the moment it's kind of cumbersome -- involving a PDP-11/44 with a
> 3mbit Ethernet board, a seriously hacked 2.11BSD kernel and a bit of
> luck
You mean the RK11 controller can write packs that the Alto disk controller
can read? (As in, the low-level format - preamble, sector header, sector
checksum, etc, etc are all identical?)
Wow, I never knew that - that would have been a useful thing to know BITD -
we had both at MIT (we got the Altos as part of the 3-university Xerox
grant), and although I'm not sure we really needed to be able to transfer
bits from one kind of machine to another, it might have been useful for
something or other.
We did send a lot of files over the network to an Alto, but it was the Dover
printer spooler machine - using a disk pack for that function wasn't really an
option! :-)
Noel
http://www.ebay.com/itm/XEROX-ALTO-II-XM-SYSTEM-COMPLETE-MONITOR-KEYBOARD-M…
didn't sell for $40000, so now it's $40005
trying to decide if I should report him for this message I got from him.
New message from: paperonebonaparte (964Purple Star)
photos in internet. please send email for private business and offers.
> From: Dave Wade
> just as a program in virtual memory can be spread across any location
> of physical memory, a "file" on an AS/400 can be spread across any
> number of disk sectors on any drive
Yes, but the same thing is basically true of most conventional file systems,
e.g. various Unix/Linux file systems (although on most of those, files aren't
spread across multiple drives, but there have been file systems that did
that).
> The original AS/400 OS had "single level storage" so basically the
> disks were an extension to ram, or more that RAM is just a temporary
> disk buffer.
But that description is, in some sense, just what classic virtual memory
(paging) does.
The crucial difference is in what the _user sees_: in a normal virtual memory
system, a process' address space is a simple one-dimensional array of
bytes/words. In a single-level-store (sometimes called 'segmentation'), a
process' address space is two dimensional: segment along one axis, address
within segment along the other:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store
Of course, one can have segmentation (in the sense of 'what the process
sees') _without_ virtual memory (either paging, or swapping entire segments),
but most systems that implemented segmentation also did virtual memory too;
Multics, and the family of IBM systems of which the AS/400 is a later member,
both did.
Noel