Man, these things are annoying.
All of the bands are bad, and they leave residue on the spools.
There are no EOT BOT holes on the HP tape, and the drive locks
the cartridge until you 'unload' it, which spins to the EOT soft
region. Well, guess what, they leave the tape in a position where
the residue ends up near the last block on the track, so it will
read track 1 (4mb), or maybe 1-3 (12mb), then fail when it hits
the gunk.
You DON'T want to bake that gunk on! It is possible to remove it
but DO NOT EVER USE ALCOHOL ON A QIC TAPE! It instantly takes off
the binder. Water-based cleaner (like whiteboard cleaner) seems to
work but it is extremely difficult to work with the tape and not
damage it.
My sympathies to anyone having to deal with recovery of this media.
Hello all - I have created a mailing list for VCF Midwest news and
announcements. You may already get your show news here or on the
forums, but it will be useful to us in the future to have as many
interested people as possible listed in one place. So, if you'd care
to take a moment to drop an email (name optional) in the bucket, it
would be most helpful. Mail volume will be low and of course, we will
not sell or share your email with anyone. Here is the link:
http://eepurl.com/dyuzub
(Many of you may find yourselves already on the list - that is either
because you've attended before, signed the paper sign-in sheet at the
show, or have otherwise made yourselves known. The list site will
tell you whether you're already signed up).
Thank you and hope to see you in September,
-j
I've discovered a SuperBrain manual and two floppy disks in my basement.
Anyone want them? Free to a good home.
Diane
--
- db at FreeBSD.org db at db.nethttp://www.db.net/~db
Hi folks,
Tonight I got my imaging PC to successfully read some of the 8? disks from my CPT8500 word processor using one of its own Tandon TM848-01 drives, sadly it seems the boot disk is toast but I?ve been able to dump some of the data disks as well as the Utilities. Since I have a box of unused disks I thought I?d try writing back an image but got a lot of CRC errors. Closer inspection of the disk itself shows this - http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/8inchFloppyImaging-7.jpg <http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/8inchFloppyImaging-7.jpg> - which looks like damp.
Is it actually the magnetic coating breaking down? Dare I attempt cleaning?
Just for another test I tried reading some of my DEC diagnostic floppies since I hoped they were RX01 format, but they error constantly so they must be RX02s.
Still, it was good to see the drive spring into life :)
--
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk
The two main issues with the CHWiki (non-logged in users not seeing the most
recent versions of pages, and image uploads not working) have been dealt with.
Noel
On Sun, Jun 17, 2018, at 5:52 PM, Seth Morabito wrote:
> I'm trying desperately to remember an anecdote I remember reading not
> too long ago about programming ITS using DDT.
> [...]
Replying to myself here, because I found it! Thanks to Rainer Joswig on Twitter for posting it.
I will quote it here:
"By way of Joe Marshall in comp.lang.lisp:
Here's an anecdote I heard once about Minsky. He was showing a student how to use ITS to write a program. ITS was an unusual operating system in that the 'shell' was the DDT debugger. You ran programs by loading them into memory and jumping to the entry point. But you can also just start writing assembly code directly into memory from the DDT prompt. Minsky started with the null program. Obviously, it needs an entry point, so he defined a label for that. He then told the debugger to jump to that label. This immediately raised an error of there being no code at the jump target. So he wrote a few lines of code and restarted the jump instruction. This time it succeeded and the first few instructions were executed. When the debugger again halted, he looked at the register contents and wrote a few more lines. Again proceeding from where he left off he watched the program run the few more instructions. He developed the entire program by 'debugging' the null program."
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
web at loomcom.com
https://www.elecshopper.com/model-m-keyboards/?___store=rwd
I know there are no products under some categories, and no stock under
others, but does this help to make it easier to find things? Click on the
links to see the products.
Cindy Croxton
Electronics Plus
1613 Water Street
Kerrville, TX 78028
830-370-3239 cell
sales at elecplus.com
---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
