test-drb November 2018

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

150 participants
133 discussions

Re: 34 pin Card Edge “Male to Male” Connector

by w9gb＠icloud.com

Card Edge Connectors are PC Board to Wire Connectors. The 34-pin version was popular for control board on 5-1/4? floppy drives in 1980s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_connector I have not seen commercial PC board widgets used as an interconnect. gb == Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 14:56:18 -0500 From: "William Sudbrink" <wh.sudbrink at verizon.net> To: cctalk Subject: 34 pin card edge male to male biscuit (wafer? adapter?) Hi, Before I go to the bother of making up a gerber, and putting in a cheap Chinese PCB order, does anyone know of any place that has them for sale?

6 years

Zapata Tormenta ISA card

by kylevowen＠gmail.com

Does anyone have a Zapata Tormenta card that they'd be willing to sell? Thanks, Kyle

6 years

Chaosnet for SIMH

by lars＠nocrew.org

Hello, I have added a Unibus CH11 Chaosnet interface to SIMH. I have tested it with 4.1BSD running on the vax780 simulator, and MINITS running on the pdp11 simulator.

6 years

Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev (off-list)

by cctalk＠gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net

Hi Bob, On 11/28/2018 11:30 AM, Robert Feldman wrote: > FYI, your symbols do not make it through to the list digest -- they just > come through as question marks, the same as Ed Sharp's extra spaces. Thank you for letting me know. Here's a screen shot from the copy I received from the mailing list: Link - grant-symbols - https://dotfiles.tnetconsulting.net/images/grant-symbols.png I know that they did come through the normal non-digest messages from the mailing list. Would you mind forwarding me a copy (directly) of the raw digest? I'm curious what happened to them and I don't currently subscribe to the digested feed. Depending on what I see, I may bring the issue up on the Mailman mailing list. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

6 years

NVRAM resuscitation (Was Re: SPARCstation 20 with SCSI2SD)

by technoid6502＠gmail.com

When I bought that Sparcstation 4/330 at Computer Parts Barn, the 48T02 was one of the problems with it. The chip looks like a piggieback rom encapsulated in epoxy. I was not reinventing the wheel at the time, I think, because it was the year 2000 or so, but I looked for a replacement and found them hard to come by. So, knowing the battery was most likely the fault, I went about fixing that bit. The battery accounts for the high profile. You do not have to cut the entire doggone batter off, the terminals are at one side, iirc, the right-hand side if the notch is to your left. It is high on the epoxy, so all you need do is cut down an eighth of an inch in that region, just shave that top edge until you expose the battery terminals. I forget how I determined the polarity of them, perhaps I plugged it into the board after and tested the terminals for power, but all you do once you've exposed the terminals is solder a power and a ground wire to them and attach a 3volt battery. I used a pack with two AA's, in a case so they are user-replaceable. They are probably STILL keeping time in that machine, wherever DHS took it and my MEGA ST4 and DG MV4000/dc... That's another story. So refurbishing these chips is a cakewalk, takes 15 minutes (the second time 'round), and will work til' doomsday. Best regards, Jeff

6 years

cctalk/cctech

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

I thought cctalk was supposed to be a complete superset of cctech, but looking at the cctech archives, I see a lot of posts that didn't make it to cctalk. Does one need to do both to see everything? Noel

6 years

FixMeStick

by epmajden＠shaw.ca

Hello group: Has anyone used a FixMeStick to fix computer issues like virus problems and key tracking hacking? Does it really fix such problems or create new ones? Thanx for any comments that are posted. Ed

6 years

34 pin card edge male to male biscut (wafer? adapter?)

by wh.sudbrink＠verizon.net

Hi, Before I go to the bother of making up a gerber, and putting in a cheap Chinese PCB order, does anyone know of any place that has them for sale? I bought a stack of them for about a buck a piece, a number of years ago, but I can't seem to find them for sale anymore. They are very useful when you want to preserve the original cables on machines where the CPU and drive chassis are "permanently" joined but you want the ease of being able to separate them. Ohio Scientific machines are a good example of this. They are also useful to provide test points in the CPU to drive signals. Over the years, I've lost a few and given a few away and now I need some more. Thanks, Bill S. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

6 years

Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

by guykd＠optusnet.com.au

At 10:52 PM 25/11/2018 -0700, you wrote: >> Then adds a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure. > >I don't think it's adding a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure. >Looking at the source of the message, I see =C2=A0, which is the UTF-8 >representation followed by the space. My MUA that understands UTF-8 >shows that "=C2=A0 " translates to " ". Further, "=C2=A0 =C2=A0" >translates to " ". I was speaking poetically. Perhaps "the mail software he uses was written by morons" is clearer. >Some of the reading that I did indicates that many things, HTML >included, use white space compaction (by default), which means that >multiple white space characters are reduced to a single white space >character. Oh yes, tell me about the html 'there is no such thing as hard formatting and you can't have any even when you want it' concept. Thank you Tim Berners Lee. http://everist.org/NobLog/20130904_Retarded_ideas_in_comp_sci.htm http://everist.org/NobLog/20140427_p-term_is_retarded.htm > So, when Ed wants multiple white spaces, his MUA has to do >something to state that two consecutive spaces can't be compacted. >Hence the non-breaking space. Except that 'non-breaking space' is mostly about inhibiting line wrap at that word gap. But anyway, there's little point trying to psychoanalyze the writers of that software. Probably involved pointy-headed bosses. >As stated in another reply, I don't think ASCII was ever trying to be >the Babel fish. (Thank you Douglas Adams.) Of course not. It was for American English only. This is one of the major points of failure in the history of information processing. >> Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough. I don't know how you got the idea >> people might miss seeing a single space, and so you need to type two or >> more. > >I wondered if it wasn't a typo or keyboard sensitivity issue. I >remember I had to really slow down the double click speed for my grandpa >(R.I.P.) so that he could use the mouse. Maybe some users actuate keys >slowly enough that the computer thinks that it's repeated keys. ??\_(???)_/?? Well now he's flaunting it in his latest posts. Never mind. :) >> And since plain ASCII is hard-formatted, extra spaces are NOT ignored >> and make for wider spacing between words. > >It seems as if you made an assumption. Just because the underlying >character set is ASCII (per RFC 821 & 822, et al) does not mean that the >data that they are carrying is also ASCII. As is evident by the >Content-Type: header stating the character set of UTF-8. Containing extended Unicode character sets via UTF-8, doesn't make it a non-hard-formatted medium. In ASCII a space is a space, and multi-spaces DON'T collapse. White space collapse is a feature of html, and whether an email is html or not is determined by the sending utility. >Especially when textual white space compression does exactly that, >ignore extra white spaces. > >> Which looks very odd, even if your mail utility didn't try to >> do something 'special' with your unusual user input. As you see, this IS NOT HTML, since those extra spaces and your diagram below would have collapsed if it was html. Also saving it as text and opening in a plain text ed or hex editor absolutely reveals what it is. >I frequently use multiple spaces with ASCII diagrams. > >+------+ >| This | >| is | >| a | >| box | >+------+ >> Btw, I changed the subject line, because this is a wider topic. I've been >> meaning to start a conversation about the original evolution of ASCII, >> and various extensions. Related to a side project of mine. > >I'm curious to know more about your side project. Hmm... the problem is it's intended to be serious, but is still far from exposure-ready. So if I talk about it now, I risk having specific terms I've coined in the doco (including the project name) getting meme-jammed or trademarked by others. The plan is to release it all in one go, eventually. Definitely will be years before that happens, if ever. However, here's a cut-n-paste (in plain text) of a section of the Introduction (html with diags.) ---------- Almost always, a first attempt at some unfamiliar, complex task produces a less than optimal result. Only with the knowledge gained from actually doing a new thing, can one look back and see the mistakes made. It usually takes at least one more cycle of doing it over from scratch to produce something that is optimal for the needs of the situation. Sometimes, especially where deep and subtle conceptual innovations are involved, it takes many iterations. Human development of computing science (including information coding schemes) has been effectively a 'first time effort', since we kept on developing new stuff built on top of earlier work. We almost never went back to the roots and rebuilt everything, applying insights gained from the many mistakes made. In reviewing the evolution of information coding schemes since very early stages such as the Morse code, telegraph signal recording, typewriters, etc, through early computing systems, mass data storage and file systems, computer languages from Assembler through Compilers and Interpreters, and so on, several points can be identified at which early (inadequate) concepts became embedded then used as foundations for further developments. This made the original concepts seem like fundamentals, difficult to question (because they are underlying principles for much more complex later work), and virtually impossible to alter (due to the vast amounts of code dependent on them.) And yet, when viewed in hindsight many of the early concepts are seriously flawed. They effectively hobbled all later work dependent on them. Examples of these pivotal conceptual errors: Defects in the ASCII code table. This was a great improvement at the time, but fails to implement several utterly essential concepts. The lack of these concepts in the character coding scheme underlying virtually all information processing since the 1960s, was unfortunate. Just one (of many) bad consequences has been the proliferation of 'patch-up' text coding schemes such as proprietry document formats (MS Word for eg), postscript, pdf, html (and its even more nutty academia-gone-mad variants like XML), UTF-8, unicode and so on. [pic] This is a scan from the 'Recommended USA Standard Code for Information Interchange (USASCII) X3.4 - 1967' The Hex A-F on rows 10-15, added here. Hexadecimal notation was not commonly in use in the 1960s. Fig. ___ The original ASCII definition table. ASCII's limitations were so severe that even the text (ie ASCII) program code source files used by programmers to develop literally everything else in computing science, had major shortcomings and inconveniences. A few specific examples of ASCII's flaws: Missing concept of control vs data channel separation. And so we needed the "< >" syntax of html, etc. Inability to embed meta-data about the text in standard programatically accessible form. Absense of anything related to text adornments, ie italics, underline and bold. The most basic essentials of expressive text, completely ignored. Absense of any provision for creative typography. No awareness of fonts, type sizes, kerning, etc. Lack of logical 'new line', 'new paragraph' and 'new page' codes. Inadequate support of basic formatting elements such as tabular columns, text blocks, etc. Even the extremely fundamental and essential concept of 'tab columns' is impropperly implemented in ASCII, hence almost completely dysfunctional. No concept of general extensible-typed functional blocks within text, with the necessary opening and closing delimiters. Missing symmetry of quote characters. (A consequence of the absense of typed functional blocks.) No provision for code commenting. Hence the gaggle of comment delimiting styles in every coding language since. (Another consequence of the absense of typed functional blocks.) No awareness of programatic operations such as Inclusion, Variable substitution, Macros, Indirection, Introspection, Linking, Selection, etc. No facility for embedding of multi-byte character and binary code sequences. Missing an informational equivalent to the pure 'zero' symbol of number systems. A specific "There is no information here" symbol. (The NUL symbol has other meanings.) This lack has very profound implications. No facility to embed multiple data object types within text streams. No facility to correlate coded text elements to associated visual typographical elements within digital images, AV files, and other representational constructs. This has crippled efforts to digitize the cultural heritage of humankind. Non-configurable geometry of text flow, when representing the text in 2D planes. (Or 3D space for that matter.) Many of the 32 'control codes' (characters 0x00 to 0x1F) were allocated to hardware-specific uses that have since become obsolete and fallen into disuse. Leaving those codes as a wasted resource. ASCII defined only a 7-bit (128 codes) space, rather than the full 8-bit (256 codes) space available with byte sized architectures. This left the 'upper' 128 code page open to multiple chaotic, conflicting usage interpretations. For example the IBM PC code page symbol sets (multiple languages and graphics symbols, in pre-Unicode days) and the UTF-8 character bit-size extensions. Inability to create files which encapsulate the entirety of the visual appearance of the physical object or text which the file represents, without dependence on any external information. Even plain ASCII text files depend on the external definition of the character glyphs that the character codes represent. This can be a problem if files are intended to serve as long term historical records, potentially for geological timescales. This problem became much worse with the advent of the vast Unicode glyph set, and typset formats such as PDF. The PDF 'archival' format (in which all referenced fonts must be defined in the file) is a step in the right direction ? except that format standard is still proprietary and not available for free. ---------- Sorry to be a tease. Soon I'd like to have a discussion about the functional evolution of the various ASCII control codes, and how they are used (or disused) now. But am a bit too busy atm to give it adequate attention. Guy

6 years

Working Ardent Titan on Youtube

by camiel.vanderhoeven＠vmssoftware.com

Now that my mousepad problem has been solved, and I have a fully working Ardent Titan with some interesting software on it ? the bundled version of MATLAB, and BIOGRAF, a molecular modeling application ? I decided to make a short video about this system in which I show the hardware and demonstrate some of the software: https://youtu.be/tMSnnt3iFz0 For those who haven?t heard of the system; the 1987 Ardent Titan (later renamed the Stardent 1500) was the first system that combined vector processors (as in a Cray-like architecture) and a graphics engine on the same backplane, and was the highest-performing graphics supercomputer for a short while. In the end, however, a longer than planned time to market and a forced merger with Stellar Computer caused the premature demise of the company. Cleve Moler, the inventor of MATLAB, worked at Ardent for three years, which is one of the reasons the Titan was the only computer ever to come with MATLAB as part of its bundled software. As I found out later ? after creating this video ? the version of MATLAB on the Titan was unique, because it included a ?render? command, which would plot a 3D surface using the Dor? graphics library. On other platforms, MATLAB could only render mesh plots. It wasn?t until 1992 that the mainstream version of MATLAB gained 3D surface rendering. Cleve wrote a number of articles on his blog about the Titan, one of which (https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/12/09/the-ardent-titan-part-2/) describes how the Titan was used to create a video of a vibrating L-shaped membrane. With a little help from Cleve, I?m trying to recreate this video. A first effort ? which isn?t quite right yet ? can be seen here: https://youtu.be/-XeabDqRAG8 I hope some of you enjoy these! Camiel

6 years

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test-drb November 2018