Today I received a PDP-11 instruction video on a laser disk, part 3 & 4.
The disk partno. is EY-5537E-V2-0001, the title says
'Introduction to the PDP-11, Internal use Only, (c) 1988'
Besides that, no indication if the video stream is NTSC or PAL.
Anybody have a clou?
I want to have the disk read and put the video on youtube eventually.
Ed
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Ik email, dus ik besta.
I posted this originally on the ArmyRadios mailing list, but I think it's just computery enough that it may be of interest here, too. And maybe somebody here even has the answers to my questions!
I just got an AN/UGC-144 communications terminal. It looks unused, and it came with cables and manuals (-12 and -30, but not including schematic diagrams or component-level details). It powers up, but fails to boot from its internal hard drive. The screen has some bad rows and columns, and the gas spring that supports the display needs to be replaced. I shared a bunch of pictures on Twitter today as I unpacked it and started playing with it, in this thread:
https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/980174491673178112
Here are direct links to some of the more interesting pictures in that long thread:
https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/980198067767947264https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/980202029766230016https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/980263764325941249https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/980302909165338624
I haven't found very much about the terminal online yet, and I expect that I have a long road ahead of me as I try to fix the display and see if anything can be recovered from the hard drive. If the original software isn't present on the hard drive and recoverable, then this may be a great big doorstop! But it may also be a fun reverse-engineering project. I haven't dug into it deeply enough yet to determine whether it's built around an embedded PC-clone architecture or is something completely custom. In any case, I'll naturally want to try to dump and disassemble any ROMs I find inside of it. The CAGE code is for Sypris Electronics, and the boot screen shows a Honeywell copyright notice. I found that it tried to access a blank floppy diskette at boot time in the right drive, but I didn't have an MS-DOS boot diskette handy at the moment to see if it could boot from it. I'll give that a try when I have a chance... but probably after Easter.
Have any software diskettes, programs, disk images, etc. for this terminal made it out into the wild? I presume that there were boot and installation diskettes that were used for hard drive formatting and software installation, and I would really love to get my hands on anything like that... especially if it turns out the the hard drive in my terminal is blank and/or dead. I'll be satisfied if I can use this rig as a dumb terminal for RTTY use, and even happier if I can do anything fancier with it.
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Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
Hi, All,
Watching some of the recent traffic about what newer Qbus boards will
and won't work with 2.11BSD, I've remembered a thing I was once
looking for. Back when I did DEC hardware for a living, we stopped
buying new stuff after we got a MicroVAX-II. As such, I have plenty
of LSI-11 to KA630 parts but very little from after that era. I do
happen to have 2-3 boards with S-box handles including a KDF-11 CPU
and a SCSI card, a great start to a system. What I don't have is the
enclosure.
I have a BA123 "World Box" and it's great. I know a BA213 is roughly
the same size, but I've never had one. The BA215 looks more
interesting to me as a match for size and power requirements (1 PSU
and 6 slots, half the BA213) but I've never even seen a BA215.
Anyone here have much experience with the BA215? Any "gotchas"? So
far, from my looking on eBay, I think I spotted one loaded as a VAX.
I'm more interested in setting mine up as a PDP-11, so the VAX end of
one is not exactly a selling point to me. An empty box would do just
as nicely.
I'd say 80% of my Qbus work has been with two boxes, the BA-11N and
the BA-23, thus all the S-box questions.
Thanks for any tips, tidbits and stories.
-ethan
