test-drb June 2016

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

196 participants
290 discussions

Tektronix terminals and terminals in general (Re: CDC 6600 - Why so aweso...

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

Heh! Especially if an upper case only terminal I can just imagine the cry arising from the little whiners! QUIT SHOUTING QUIT SHOUTING! (as they stamp their feet and rent their clothing....) In a message dated 6/24/2016 7:50:46 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, emu at e-bbes.com writes: On 2016-06-24 08:23, Swift Griggs wrote: > However, I think most folks these days would faint if they were forced to > work on a terminal. Just don't tell them, that they do ;-) If you really think about it, the terminals just got faster and got more colors. (and you call them smartphone, thin clinet, tablet, win PC, ...) Otherwise: a.) most data is somewhere in the cloud (before it was called mainframe) b.) a lot of applications are running in the cloud (before, mainframe) c.) you connect now via wireless internet (before: modem) d.) ... So, just Emperor's new clothes ;-)

8 years

CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

by swiftgriggs＠gmail.com

To my sorrow, I'd never heard of the CDC 6600 and I barely knew who Control Data was (whippersnapper, I know). I see a lot of traffic about them on the list and I went out to discover "why so cool?" Wikipedia and other spots talk about the features, but I'm trying to understand from folks who put hands to the metal, why they liked them so much. I'm a total igmo concerning this bit of kit. Is this about right? - It has dual "calligraphic" displays. Geeze! Very freakin' cool - It was RISC nearly before folks could even articulate the concept - It had some wicked cool "demos", to cop a C64 term. (ADC, PAC, EYE) - It wasn't DEC and it wasn't IBM and it was faster than both when it hit the street? - It has a cool OS? Dunno. Not much info on "SCOPE" - Made in the USA baby! Back when we actually made things. - It used odd sized (by todays standards) register, instruction, and bus sizes. 60 bit machine with 15/30 bit instructions. But, didn't it cause a bunch of alignment issues for you ? I dug into the CPU instructions for about 20 minutes and it was actually pretty straightforward. The so-called "COMPASS" ASM code was oh-so-cool. I can't believe they had so many of the features now considered "modern" or "clever" (at least by me) in the 1960s! This code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS/Sample_Code ... Is super-readable, in fact, probably a bit more than several much-newer dialects on different platforms. There was one instruction "PROTECT" I found pretty interesting, too. Was that similar to noodling with the control registers CR0, CR2, CR3, and CR4 on x86 to mark memory protection from segmentation violations? I remember that being the protection mechanism on my 386 SX/16 (and I remember it being a PITA), however the COMPASS "way" looks much easier/cooler and must have some hardware assistance to do that so easily. -Swift

8 years

LINC-8 and PDP-8 manuals

by mattislind＠gmail.com

I have been going through our library of documentation and found some items that are duplicates. There are a LINC-8 programming manual, PDP-8 DecTape programming manual, PDP-8/L maintenance manual, PDP-8/e maintenance manual volume I and volume III. http://i.imgur.com/YEAdnZV.jpg?1 http://i.imgur.com/pvsypvY.jpg?1 Trade for something interesting! Other things that is also for trade: http://www.datormuseum.se/available /Mattis

8 years

Forth for RSTS

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

> On Jan 3, 2016, at 4:56 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote: > > ... > This Forth implementation is a port of Fig-FORTH by John S. James, with some RSTS-specific magic added. I just realized the file header says that it is in the public domain, so I suppose I should post the source... Done. Thanks to Al Kossow, it now lives on Bitsavers, in bits/DEC/pdp11/forth/forth.mac This is the RSTS run-time system, from V9.6 and later. I haven't tried building it on older versions; the comments say it works back to V7.2. I don't remember why that version is mentioned. Run time systems existed before then, though a few details did change over time. The original version was for RSX and RT-11. I did the RSTS port, and Kevin Herbert added some more stuff to it later on. The biggest change is to make the vocabulary machinery match the ANSI Forth 83 standard, which allows for lots of separate vocabularies and arranging their search order. This was needed to allow SDA to define a set of 32 bit replacements for the standard (16 bit) arithmetic operators of native Forth, without getting itself all confused. Build instructions are in the comments near the top of the file. There's very little to it. Enjoy. paul

8 years

PDP-11/40 modified to be a PDP-11/23

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

now, there is a 11/23 I could love! ---Ed# In a message dated 6/22/2016 9:44:20 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, glen.slick at gmail.com writes: BACKPLANE", > so the operation is not so mysterious. I had never seen a hex-wide Q-bus > backplane before this. > > There are some pictures of the system and the Q-Bus to 11/40 front panel > interface here: http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/dec-pdp-1140 >

8 years, 1 month

How do they make Verilog code for unknown ICs?

by swiftgriggs＠gmail.com

In my recent studies of electronics (I'm a noob for all practical purposes) I keep seeing folks refer to Verilog almost as a verb. I read about it in Wikipedia and it sounds pretty interesting. It's basically described as a coding scheme for electronics, similar to programming but with extras like signal strength and propagation included. Hey, cool! Why are folks referring to "Verilogging" and "doing a verilog" on older chips. Is there some way you can stuff an IC into a socket or alligator clip a bunch of tiny leads onto it and then "map" it somehow into Verilog? Is that what folks who write emulators do? Ie.. they exhaustively dump Verilog code for all the chips then figure out how to implement that in some computer programming language like C ? What do folks do for ROM chips and PLCs? I'd think they must dump the code and disassemble it. No? I'm just curious and this is a tough question to answer with Google since I'm pretty clueless and don't know the right words to search for. I notice people talk about correcting their Verilog code, so it must be somewhat of a manual process. I'm just wondering how someone even gets started with a process like that. -Swift

8 years, 1 month

where to find DEC ECO's for KB11-A?

by fritzm＠fritzm.org

Are DEC ECO's available online anywhere? I have not seem them in the usual places e.g. bitsavers... I am particularly interested in ECO's related to the KB11-A (11/45). thanks, --FritzM.

8 years, 1 month

PDP-11/40 modified to be a PDP-11/23

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM, Michael Thompson < michael.99.thompson at gmail.com> wrote: > The RICM just picked up a PDP-11/40 chassis that was modified to accept a > PDP-11/23 board set. It also contains a custom board to interface the > PDP-11/23 to the original PDP-11/40 front panel. It is quite an > accomplishment to get the Q-Bus board set working in the Unibus chassis. > I looked at the backplane pictures that I took after the rescue. I assumed that the hex-wide 8-slot backplane in the front of the card cage was the original 11/40 processor backplane. On the back it says "LSI 11 BACKPLANE", so the operation is not so mysterious. I had never seen a hex-wide Q-bus backplane before this. There are some pictures of the system and the Q-Bus to 11/40 front panel interface here: http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/dec-pdp-1140 -- Michael Thompson

8 years, 1 month

CYBER-171

by bryan＠bceassociates.com

Wondering if anyone out there has such a machine running. It was literally the first computer system I used (at Indiana State University back in the 70's). I had some real fun doing FORTRAN and Pascal programming on that thing. Thanks, Bryan

8 years, 1 month

Programming for the Alto's Mesa

by paul＠mcjones.org

> I just looked in some boxes I haven't opened in decades. I have "Mesa > Language Manual, Version 5.0, April 1979". If the people with the Alto > need this, let me know. It?s been scanned: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/mesa/5.0_1979/documentation/CSL_79-3_Mes… > ... Mesa was a hard-compiled language, but it had concurrency, > monitors, co-routines ("ports", similar to Go channels), strong type > safety, and a sane way to pass arrays around. ... The designers of the concurrency mechanisms (Butler Lampson and Dave Redell) wrote an excellent paper, which can be downloaded from Lampson?s web site: http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/23-ProcessesInMe… > Anyone here know or remember Mesa? I'd like to hear more about it. Thanks to the foresight of Al Kossow and others, the Computer History Museum has a repository of Alto source code online, including the Mesa system and some applications such as the Laurel electronic mail client and the Grapevine distributed mail transport and name service. (The repository also includes a lot of BCPL and a small amount of Smalltalk.) The repository is here: http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org Probably better to start here: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/ http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html Paul McJones

8 years, 1 month

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test-drb June 2016