test-drb October 2017

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

91 participants
94 discussions

by rtomek＠ceti.pl

On Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 03:36:00PM -0700, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: > While it?s still in need of a major update, the DEC Emulation > website now has a new home. It?s now on my server, and > realistically I should have moved it years ago. > > http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/decemu.html Cool, thank you. > Believe it or not, I am planning to update the pages in the near > future, who knows, I might even modernize them a little. When I > started them, one of the design goals was that they be readable with > Lynx. I?m not sure how important that is anymore. :-) I have browsed it just few moments ago with lynx, emacs-w3 and my new textual favourite, elinks (it multitabs!! and shows tables!! and I could play with configuration a lot, so on 256-colors-enabled term it looks a bit nicer to my eyes). In all them, and in some old graphical one, the site looks decently. As of "modernisation"... You know, just MHO and stuff but sometimes when I see modern pages it seems like their creators have had been abducted to some sect and brainwashed clean. I have 1600x1200 and I like to have some other window besides browser (say, an editor, like emacs). So I open such page, and the browser has about 3/5 of estate and I am not going fullscreen, no way. And there is huge menu on the left side, so I can choose. And there is some (expletive0) "top bar", all white and empty, or maybe with page title (I already have one (expletive0) title on a title bar of browser window), then there is (expletive0) bottom bar, all empty. And for a text, there is area left which is about five to ten (expletive0) lines high. There is no (expletive0) way to make those (expletive0) elements go the (subseq (expletive0) 0 4) away. The last resort is to turn styles off, which quite often gives me almost the view that I would like to have, plus (quite often) a parade of (expletive0) leftovers from the leftside menu, which after switch takes more than 90% of (expletive0) web page. I swear I do not make this up. The usable part of the modern webpage is on average the (expletive0) ten percent, as measured by scrollbar - and sometimes even less. The only reason I keep using very old Opera 1x.x is because it: A) does not multithread (so when I load heavily crapped page, it only (subseq (expletive0) 0 4)s with one core of my cpu max, rather then (expletive0) with me fulltime B) is able to show very decently a page with styles turned off; this also sometimes means lowering core usage by half (the usage which is there even when (expletive0) browser is expected to sit on its (expletive1) and do nothing). C) I turned a lot of CSS off by default, but I am not quite sure if this really works (software, trust, does not compute) - and I put fixed/monotype fonts wherever I can see them, because I love the idea that space is same width as "i" and "W". So all the job done to max my pleasure with downloadable fonts is lost, and (expletive0) good for me. I have tried switching to Firefox, but somehow having eighty tabs does not work very nicely there, for me at least. But I launch it when there is something that poor Op cannot render properly. Overally, I have few browsers opened as day goes by, one for Common Lisp docs, another for casual reading, one for sci articles heavy with equations and gfx (mostly up-to date rendering 'gine), few text browsers for interesting stuff, books or longer reads etc. I have recently started to experiment with Dillo - this is very nice piece of (expletive2), recommended to everybody even if it not always shows things, kind of like text browser with graphics (sometimes) and multitabs. Perhaps will also try "old new" Mosaic - the old one got lost during innumerable system upgrades. As I could have observed, plenty of people out there think that "modern" means "optimised for mobile", but what does it mean in practise? The text, i.e. useful part of the page might take 10 kilobytes (optimist, me, always), there might be even useful pictures on it, and then there goes a (expletive2)load of javascript. Megabyte is a, kind of, norm. So, this (expletive2) eats my download/upload quota, for which I pay (in theory, because I never was in such position). And then it starts running and eats from my battery, which can be loaded for peanuts, but who wants to recharge every few hours - this is supposed to give me mobility, but not to/from wallsocket. Which is how I came to brainwashing - the words being used are redefined. Optimised no longer means what it used to mean. Now it just means conformance to some group's standard. Optimised for pats in a back, just not from enduser (some endusers dream of packing boot deep into webdevel's (expletive1) and leaving it there, and the second boot would go to their halfbrained tasteless boss'es (expletive1), only deeper). For me, "optimised for mobile" is something like HTML1.0, or maybe even 3.0 (if this is when tables were defined). And "modern" is unimportant, if a goal is information retrieval. If you (or anybody) plan to upgrade your webpage, please consider doing it like XIX century guy, just barely after computer lessons. Text is everything. Because this is how information is being transmitted. Pictures are few, and if they are there, there must be a purpose (like, they too convey some information somehow related to text). So this is my opinion on modern web design, and mind you, I am not using it on a cell phone, but on something as big as two A4 pages, and the (expletive0) web cannot do very well on such (expletive0) huge area, or significant part of it. What are "they" using for making their creations - a monitor wall? I cannot imagine my state of mind if I started to depend on a cellphone for web reading, but I guess a dictionary of expletives could get few new words. There is no day without cursing the web here, despite all the heavy measures I took to protect myself from poor (i.e. modern) design. Well, maybe I curse the web only every other day, plus every time the page almost loads except one small element (perhaps some JS dependence, and server is down/restarting so I wait minutes because reloading only makes things worse in this case - but perhaps this is my ISP's fault, but then ISP is part of it, too). As of Javascript - sure there is a place for it. I dream of writing a compiler in Javascript. A few have been written. Ok, maybe I do not dream so much to learn Javascript. But the whole "page is an app" is just misunderstanding in best case, or more probably, some kind of crime - crime against reason, for example. This was meant to be short(er), but got long(er). Blame the web. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **

7 years, 2 months

C64 to a good home

by drlegendre＠gmail.com

Hey Kevin. This is all good advice, but there is also another way to go - and it's a bit more future-proof. For about the same cost as the Zoom floppy, you can get a device called an SD2IEC or similar. It's very simple - it connects to the IEC (disk drive) port on the C-64 and accepts a micro or mini SD card. This way you only need copy your C-64 titles to SD card (any way you like) and they will be accessible to the C-64. The device behaves like a 1541 / 1571 drive. I say the SD2IEC is future proof, as it doesn't rely on original 15X1 disk drives or 5-1/2" media, all of which could go away someday. Now _personally_ I use a home-built XM1541 cable with opencbm (free/OSS) to transfer my images to genuine 5-1.4" disk. I only do this as I'm too cheap / broke to buy something else like the SD2IEC. It is exceptionally stable and reliable - once set up, it "just works". Though if you a) run Linux and b) accept a kernel update you will need to c) recompile & re-install opencbm as the module is built specific to the running kernel. This takes only seconds, literally. -Bill On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 7:48 AM, Robert via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > I recently bought a ZoomFloppy from here: http://store.go4retro.com/ > zoomfloppy/ > > I got the version with an IEEE488 conector, for use with a PET, but it > also supports the serial interface used on the C64. > > On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 9:11 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > >> There are some online repositories of C64 software. Having only a little > >> knowledge when it comes to C64_s how do I get a C64 disk > >> image onto a 5 1/4_ floppy? > > > > I use a ZoomFloppy and a real 1541 (actually a 1571). These devices are > > available from many places; Jim Brain built mine, or you can look for any > > xu1541 or xum1541-type device and use OpenCBM to copy that floppy. > > > > -- > > ------------------------------------ personal: > http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- > > Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * > ckaiser at floodgap.com > > -- BOND THEME NOW PLAYING: "Moonraker" ------------------------------ > ---------- >

7 years, 2 months

HP 21mx/whatever processor works with doublesided key... i forgot model#

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

NOPE NOT A BIG RTE PERSON - BUT YES THERE WOULD BE MULTI SERIAL BOARDS IN SOME INCOMING PROCESSORS RAN IT ONCE AND PLAYED WITH IT... BROKE 1000 SYSTEMS DOWN AND SOLD THE PIECES. THE ONLY SYSTEMS THAT WE SUPPORTED SOFTWARE WISE WERE F AND THEN ACCESS THIS 21 WHATEVER IS THE SKINNY ONE! DOUBLE SIDED KEY - AND IF I REMEMBER WILL YANK IT UP OFF THE FLOOR IN MY OFFICE TOMORROW AND SEE THE # BUT SUSPECT 2108 AS ABOUT ALL I REMEMBER LIKING ABOUT IT WAS IT HAD THE BOOT BUILT IN ,GRIN!. WHAT I DID NOT LIKE WAS IT WAS NOT CORE MEMORY. SURE WERE FUN TIMES... ALTHOUGH THERE WAS ALWAYS A FOND SPOT FOR THE 21XX STUFF... I GOT REALLY OCCUPIED WITH THE 3000 AS A COMPUTER THAT I WOULD REALLY USE. IN THE EARLY DAYS OF RUNNING THE ACCESS THOUGH WHAT GREAT FUN AND THE 100 BOARD BBS/MULTI USER CHAT/VOTE AND POL/EMAIL AND MOST GAMES WE DID GOT MOVED TO THE 3000. ED - WHOSE KEYBOARD THINKS IT IS AN ASR 35 TELETYPE SO THAT IS HOW THE REST OF THE MESSAGE GOT FININSHED In a message dated 10/20/2017 7:37:48 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time, jwest at classiccmp.org writes: Ed wrote... ------ HP 21mx/whatever processor works with double sided key... (I forgot model#) ------ Given the way you phrased it, the correct replacement for 'whatever' is M series. E and F never used the double sided key. However, even that is not entirely correct. Older M's used the double sided key. Later M's used the single sided key that is the same as the E and F. And.... ------- It has ... of all things 3 tty boards in it? what is with that? Multi user without a mux? ------- Didn't you sell and support these things in a prior life? It was always far more common to see the 21MX machines with 'discrete' tty boards rather than muxes. There were only two mux boards, the one in 2000/Access which was very uncommon as far as 21mx's go... and the one that RTE commonly used which was also not super common to find in the wild. If you had a mux board, then I would have been a bit surprised. Multiple tty boards? Not surprised, that was the far more common thing.... more often than not, the 21mx's weren't really used/targeted for multiuser (except 2000 TSB of course). RTE did multiuser well, but... still was probably most often used in situations that really didn't require it. Mux's weren't super common. And.... -------- Has 2 memory boards think I remember 64k total. -------- 64kb or 64kw? Remember, the M.E.M. option is required to support more than 32kw. On the M, MEM was optional. I believe it was standard on E & F. And... ------- need to find a paper tape basic to play with. ------- There are plenty of those floating around. Google is your friend... I think MU-BASIC may have been the one I heard people using? See below for a better option.... And... ------ Any other advice? ------ You should probably start by reading an introduction to the 21MX to get some basic background on the machines... Go to: http://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=108 You should start with 02108-90004 followed by 02108-90002 Finally - for you (and anyone else) that has just a cpu or a cpu and minimal peripherals, the best thing you can use to play with the machine is Terry Newtons HP-IPL/OS. See http://www.infionline.net/~wtnewton/oldcomp/hp2100/ and http://newton.freehostia.com/net/hpiplos.html Yes, you can run BASIC like you mention above. But it is a very well done "Forth-like" system that is well developed/flushedout. So in addition to BASIC, you get oh-so-many-wonderful-things. I very highly recommend that anyone messing with 21mx/1000 systems take a good look at HP-IPL/OS. Best, J

7 years, 2 months

CDP1801

by steven.feinsmith＠gmail.com

RCA 1801 disappeared from face of Earth forever... You would be better off to purchase at: http://www.sunrise-ev.com/membershipcard.htm to use 1802. The 1802 was very successful microprocessor that replaced 1801 because it required to have a pair of chips to work together. I believe I saw 1801 was more than 30 years ago. Good luck! Steven On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 9:45 PM, Brad H via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > Hi there, > > > > I just purchased an RCA Microtutor minus the rather important CPU card. I > can recreate the card but I expect locating the 1801 chips will be > difficult. I am just posting this in various forums in case anyone has any > leads on where I might find either the complete card or the required chips > to make a replacement. I'm wondering what, if any devices were built with > the 1801 that I might be able to scrounge from. > > > > Thanks again, > > > > B > >

7 years, 2 months

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test-drb October 2017