test-drb April 2016

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

203 participants
299 discussions

PAL on CDU-700 / 710 Unibus disk controllers

by glen.slick＠gmail.com

On Apr 26, 2016 2:35 PM, "Ian Finder" <ian.finder at gmail.com> wrote: > > Does anyone out there have one of these controllers? > > There is an unprotected PAL- the address decoder- and I really need a dump of it. Many programmers, particularly the BP technologies ones, can read it Curious how you know it is not a protected PAL? The PALs are protected on all of the CMD CQD adapters I have looked at. I can't remember if I bothered checking the PAL on my CDU-720/M

8 years, 7 months

Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

Jon was always helpful always cheerful and never snarky this issad.... very sad indeed we have lost an ally. Ed Sharpe archivist for SMECC In a message dated 4/27/2016 10:09:08 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, curiousmarc3 at gmail.com writes: Oh, what a terrible news. His website is such a tremendous resource for HP collectors. Researched, organized, encyclopedic. I don?t know how many times I used it just to get accurate history and technical information on what I was acquiring, and then for the ensuing restorations. And he linked back to every single one of my resulting restoration videos or demos. I hope the museum and site survives his passing and passion. Marc From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Rik Bos <hp-fix at xs4all.nl> Organization: CCE Reply-To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 at 2:48 AM To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/father-of-three-jon-johnston-died- in-tibet-during-a-trek-in-the-himalayas/news-story/501c804577a833b0964016bae 87fd318

8 years, 7 months

The Ivory Tower saga was Re: strangest systems I've sent email

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Wed, 4/27/16, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: > > The bracketed note in the second paragraph of content on > > http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html is exactly the sort of > > thing I'm talking about here; ESR taught himself TeX by the simple > > expedient of reading the TeXBook. > > ? You mean not everybody does this? Alas, no, but that's really the point I was getting at with the comment about knowing multiple languages. It wasn't about the languages themselves or what value the variety itself brings. I pulled the half dozen number out of the air just because if I look back over any 6 to 12 month period of my career, I've used a good half dozen during that period. What's important to me isn't the effect on the candidate's programming; it's the independence, self-motivation, and curiosity that learning many languages represents. I also like to see evidence that the candidate recognizes that no skilled artisan's toolbox contains only a single tool. My biggest complaint about new grads is the view that all the world's a nail, because the only tool in their toolbox is a hammer. BLS

8 years, 7 months

Mac "Workgroup Server" (or "network server") hardware & AIX

by swiftgriggs＠gmail.com

Has anyone ever seen either A/UX or AIX running on an Apple Network Server or Apple Workgroup Server? I had several hundred AIX machines running in a server farm for a while, but even the oldest was POWER4 based, and I've only done a bit of legacy support for PPC60x-based RS/6000 systems. I don't belive I've ever seen an ANS or AWS IRL. I'm curious what the last version of AIX that will run on them. I'm guessing 4.x. I'm also curious if there is one machine that can run A/UX, AIX, MacOS, and NetBSD. Here's a fun fact to know and tell. In addition to an SGI Irix screen running the "fsn" tool in the movie Jurassic Park, there were several screenshots of a workstation in that same room/scene running A/UX. -Swift

8 years, 7 months

strangest systems I've sent email from

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Mon, 4/25/16, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: > So, the point is that the masses > don't often pick "great" languages to fixate on.? IMHO, Just > because I point that out, doesn't make me "foolish, ignorant, narrow > minded, or short-sighted" I usually try to stay out of such discussions, but I think it's important to draw some distinctions here. First, it's not pointing out which languages/techniques are popular that's narrow- minded and short-sighted. It's the view that popularity and "commercial viability" is the primary consideration of value in education that's narrow-minded and short-sighted. Second, it's the perspective that's narrow-minded and short-sighted, not the person who expresses that perspective. Many people fail to appreciate the distinction between training and education and as a result see the primary purpose of the university to be job preparation. That so many people misunderstand the purpose of the university isn't a reflection on their individual intelligence or priorities. It's a reflection on the misplaced priorities of the secondary education system and of society as a whole. It's the same misplaced priorities that lead so many students to be so obsessed by the most meaningless part of the system: grades. BLS

8 years, 7 months

strangest systems I've sent email from

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

{Several replies packaged together to minimize list bandwidth use..} > From: John Willis > the real promise of the Internet as envisioned by Cerf, Postel, et. al. > was in the purity of the end-to-end networking connectivity, where your > personal machine is a node equal in stature to minis, mid, and > mainframes also participating We don't have peer-peer at the packet level, true, but a lot of the philosophical goals many people had back then (which were unspoken, of course) were in fact met. i) Information is much more accesible now (and not just Wikipedia, but government information, etc - stuff you used to legally have access to, but it required real effort and physical presence to get to). ii) Information is much more democratic - the 'New Media'. No more three national TV channels (in the US, replace '3' in other countries.) Yes, there are issues, but on balance, I think I still prefer post-Internet to pre-Internet. > the vapidity of online exchanges quickly reached fever pitch as more > and more blockheads flooded the network. This is kind of a corollary to Sturgeon's Law. x% of the world are ^%&-heads; if you have something that includes the entire population, you'll _necessarily_ have a lot of ^%&-heads. > From: Swift Griggs > The Internet is a large, but still textbook case of what happens when > you let business-weasels in on something good. They "monetize" it and > turn it into a combination strip-mall, casino, theatre, porn-shop. "In a democracy, people generally get the kind of government they deserve." Real world strip malls, Walmart, etc exist because of _demand_. If people didn't want that stuff, it wouldn't exist. You want better? Educate people's tastes. > I even cringed when I saw Geocities dying. Yeah it was a cheesy service > but, for example, I have a friend who is a master gunsmith and put all > kinds of excellent info on a site he made. Now it's gone Some was saved: http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html Interesting story... >> Of course, if class A and B address blocks weren't handed out like >> candy to children in the early days, IPv4 might have lasted longer. > I still hate Network Solutions and all the NICs for that, too. Uhh, by the time we got to that stage, the taps were long turned off. All the 'space handed out freely' stuff happened back when you went to Postel for numbers - and a lot of the class A's went i) before the Internet was a going concern, and ii) in the earliest days, there were _only_ class A's. > Nowadays, folks create viruses that encrypt and/or destroy the target > for ransom the minute they can write 3 lines of code in Visual Basic. > The level of malice and thuggery have gone way up. See previous Sturgeon's Law comment... Noel

8 years, 7 months

Fast Unibus Sync Serial?

by seefriek＠gmail.com

From: Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> > > HDLC is ok so far as it goes, but DDCMP is superior in every respect. The only reason > to use HDLC is that you need to talk something that can't be made to speak DDCMP. > Like a Cisco router without the DECnet feature set? Or pretty much anything that doesn't speak DECnet? KJ

8 years, 7 months

R: Re: Mac "Workgroup Server" (or "network server") hardware & AIX

by supervinx＠libero.it

http://www.supervinx.com/OnlineMuseum/Apple/Quadra/950/ Scroll down and you'll find many A/UX pictures

8 years, 7 months

Fast Unibus Sync Serial?

by seefriek＠gmail.com

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> > > DUP-11? Will that do what you need? > Not sure, Ethan. I'm been looking at the doco and it's not clear yet if it's suitable for what I'm trying to do. Thanks for the pointer. KJ

8 years, 7 months

Mini Map Array Processor - What in tarnation?

by wdonzelli＠gmail.com

Yes, the CSPI box is mounted inside a standard DEC cabinet. I have one of these things in a VAX, originally part of some sort of chemical analysis tool. -- Will On Apr 26, 2016 9:44 PM, "Jon Elson" <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote: On 04/26/2016 07:59 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: > Seriously, > > http://tinyurl.com/j46jg4p > > http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102743645 > > What in the world is this thing? Some kind of early parallel or vector > processor? > We got a CSPI 6410 and had it hooked to a VAX 11/780. It was probably a bigger brother to the machine you link to. There was a big math library that came with it. If you had really regular matrix operations, such as FFTs, matrix multiplies and similar classic operations, it could do them quite fast, in the several MFLOP range. The bigger the matrix (as long as it fit in the memory of the unit) the better, as the library just set up all the registers, loaded the data and turned it loose. If you had a bunch of small matrices, it was a lot less efficient, as it had the same setup overhead for every task. Yes, it is a vector processor, with a floating-point multiplier and adder, some address arithmetic logic and a sequencer. Jon

8 years, 7 months

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test-drb April 2016