On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:56 AM, Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Does Talingent Pink sound familiar? OS/2 was ported to powerPC, and so
> was Netware iirc. The field was quite busy with hopeful Microsoft
> killers. OS/2 was to be morphed into a cross-platform o/s, to wean
> folks from dos/x86..... Then PPC kills the x86 and we all get a decent
> os. That was the plan anyway. I never saw OS2 for PPC or Netware for
> OS/2, thought I know both to have shipped.
Pink was the C++ operating system project at Apple that became Taligent. I know a couple of people who did a developer kitchen for Pink pre-Taligent, and I also know a number of folks who worked on the Taligent system and tools?and have personally seen a demo of the Taligent Application Environment running on AIX.
I?ve even seen a CD set for Taligent Application Environment (TalAE) 1.0 on AIX, and I have a beta developer and user documentation set. Unfortunately my understanding is that the CD sets given to employees to commemorate shipping TalAE were all *blank*?the rumor I?ve heard is that IBM considered it too valuable to give them the actual software that they had worked for years on. (Maybe there were tax implications because of what IBM valued the license at, and the fact that it would have to be considered compensation?)
Taligent itself was only one component of IBM?s Workplace/OS strategy, which was a plan to rebase everything atop Mach so you could run AIX and OS/2 and Taligent all at once on the same hardware without quite using virtual machines for it all. The idea is that Apple would do pretty much the same with Copland and Taligent atop NuKernel rather than Mach.
It would be really great to actually get the shipping Taligent environment and tools archived somewhere. While only bits and pieces of it are still in use?for example, ICU?a lot of important and influential work was done as part of the project. For example, the design of most of the unit testing frameworks today actually comes from *Taligent*, since Kent Beck wrote SUnit to re-create it in Smalltalk, and JUnit and OCUnit were based on SUnit?s design and everything else derived from JUnit?
? Chris
All,
have not yet brought myself to throw away this big box of SCO software. Last call, though.
I?ll pay media rate to get it to you in the US, just let me know that you want it and where to ship it. If you are abroad, email me and we can split postage, depending on total price.
SCO OpenServer (TM)
Development System
Documentation Package
Version 5.0
Part Number: 505-000-101
Model Number: MC105-UX00-5.0
Order Number: 87873506
Big Aqua-colored bocx that says, SCO: It?s Business Critical,. It?s SCO.
- Mark
210-522-6025 office
210-379-4635 cell
>
> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2020 08:57:40 -0500
> From: David Gesswein <djg at pdp8online.com>
> Subject: DEC flat cables
>
> Has anyone found a good method for repairing the DEC flat cables?
> The ones with flat wires with plastic laminated to each side. The glue
> holding the plastic on fails and you end up with two sheets of plastic and
> loose wires.
>
For low speed signals. I just replaced the flexprint with modern ribbon
cable. Seems to work just fine.
--
Michael Thompson
Does anyone have a spare internal or external SCSI cable for the IBM RS/6000 Model 320 with the IBM MCA SCSI-1 card (3-1)? For those who don?t know/remember, this card uses a pair of edge connectors (like MFM/ESDI) rather than an IDC connector to connect to its internal two-drop cable, and its external connector is a **sixty-pin** higher-density Centronics connector.
I can make an IDC cable adapter pretty easily but if anyone knows where to acquire working original cables, that?d be preferable to my relative lack of mechanical skill.
-- Chris
> I've been after a manual for months. There is one up on eBay for $520,
> it's been there for months.? A few weeks ago the seller sent out an
> offer to anyone watching, with an offer of $399, I sent a counter
> offer of $99.? I just bought a copy that turned up yesterday for $20.
> Zane
I see the same thing all the time on Amazon and various other used
booksellers, it's a malfunction of using an automated pricing system.?
My uncle has spent years importing college textbooks and explained it to
me about fifteen years ago, the system is fairly simplistic and sets
prices automatically based on other seller's prices.? The sellers have
no idea what anything is worth, so they trust the automated system
rather than the buyer.? One person comes in and prices an old manual at
some randomized, arbitrary amount in the hundreds of dollars (or a
computer in the thousands), and the entire market adjusts to selling at
that price without any human interaction.? The systems then ignore the
lowball prices set by sellers who run smaller businesses and need to
move inventory or sellers who understand the actual value of the item.
This leads to situations where an old paperback about an obsolete
programming language gets priced at $455 and a half dozen other sellers
under-cut it by pennies.
If you want to see how this same sort of thing affects various other
markets, look into high speed trading firms.
I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in Tucson,
or want to come to Tucson for it, you're invited; email me for the address
and time).
Although the party is Elvis-themed, it's really about boardgaming and
classic videogaming.
So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my
PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a real
terminal.
Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP (which I
have renamed "zterp" for obvious reasons) to 2.11BSD on the PDP-11, and I
also wrote a little utility I call "tmenu" to take a directory (and an
optional command applying to files in the directory) and make a numbered
menu, so that my guests who are not familiar with Actual Bourne Shell can
play games too.
These things are at:
https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp
and
https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/
Both are K&R C, and compile with the 2.11BSD system C compiler.
My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite
Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't
allocate enough memory to start it. Other than that, V5 and below seem to
work mostly fine; V8 is in theory supported but no game that I've tried has
little enough low memory that I can malloc() it using C on 2.11BSD.
Adam
Most of us who collect vintage computers probably have our own stories
like this, but I find this so amusing that I just have to share it.
Last year I did an exhibit on SPARC clones for VCF PNW and wanted to
include a Solbourne in it. Unable to cajole Cameron into loaning me one
:-), I went looking for one to buy on eBay.
There was a seller with, among other Solbourne hardware, a listing for
some number of IDT S4000DXs. They had started with 6 and were down to
4-5 when I started looking. IIRC, the base Buy-It-Now (BIN) price was
around $225, but, when they didn't sell, they were relisted with a
varying discount. In relistings, the BIN was as low as $167.
In a relisting where the discounted price was $195 BIN, I offered $175.
The seller didn't accept and, in the counter offer exchange, eventually
went above the discounted price. I didn't go for that. Then, in the next
relisting, the discounted price was $167. I bought one.
They were being sold with a HDD and a Solbourne frame buffer (Sun frame
buffers don't work in S4000DXs), but no keyboard or mouse (Solbournes
use proprietary keyboards and mice). The one that I got had a dead
Sun0424 (Seagate ST1480N) HDD and, I found out later, a broken frame buffer.
I put in a SD2SCSI and installed OS/MP (Solbourne's version of BSD
SunOS). From the serial console, it worked fine and I included the
system in my VCF PNW exhibit. After the show, I spent some time trying
to make a Solbourne to Sun keyboard adapter, but couldn't get it to
work. I have had it up for sale for a few months (my attention is now
focused on the barn-find Sun 3/260 that I hope to have working for this
year's VCF PNW).
But, back to the seller that I got the S4000DX from ...
The seller is still trying to sell 2 of the original 6 S4000DXs (that at
one point included the one that I have). However, the pricing has
changed. Now, instead of the old base price of around $225, the base
price is now $3060. Yes, $3000. But they are being offered with an 83%
discount, so one can get a S4000DX for the low, low price of just under
$500.
I find this amazing and odd.
alan
Has anyone found a good method for repairing the DEC flat cables?
The ones with flat wires with plastic laminated to each side. The glue
holding the plastic on fails and you end up with two sheets of plastic and
loose wires.
I had some success with contact cement but it only glues the plastic to
the flat wires since it doesn't have any body. I tried one of the rubbery
adhesives but it wouldn't set. I assume the plastic prevented evaporation
of the solvent. I assume the air cure products would have the same issue.
I assume two part or UV cure products if UV makes it through the plastic
might work better since they come thick enough to fill between the wires.
I've never used any of these to know if they may be a better choice.
Desirable would be reasonably quick set.
I have an IBM RS/6000 POWERstation 320 (original 7012-320) with plenty of RAM and SCSI storage. I?d like to install AIX 3.2.5 on it.
Here?s the hardware setup:
- POWERstation 320
- 8MB RAM currently, soon to be 72MB
- Serial port adapter so I can use a terminal
- Correct IBM keyboard (not working at the moment, hence the terminal)
- Correct IBM mouse
- MCA Color Display Adapter (1-1)
- MCA Ethernet Adapter (2-1)
- MCA SCSI-1 Adapter (4-1)
- AIX 3.2.0 floppy images, including boot floppy images
- AIX 3.2.5 CD-ROM images
- External SCSI DAT (DDS-1) and CD-ROM drives
The CD images appear to be ISO-9660 format, containing piles of ?AIX backup/restore format file? archives; the floppy images are also identified as being that format (no filesystems, just archive content). I?ve seen some stuff online that talks about installing from tape using DAT, so it seems like in theory I should be able to just push the CD contents to a tape and go.
Can I use the 3.2.0 boot floppy images with a couple of DDS-1 tapes containing the files from the 3.2.5 CDs to directly install AIX 3.2.5? In what order should the files be put on the tapes? Or do I really need to do a complete install of 3.2.0 first?
Another important question: Will I need some sort of key to use the included AIXwindows and xlc, or should this stuff just work?
Finally, is there a complete set of post-release patches for AIX 3.2.5 online somewhere? I know 3.2.5 itself was primarily a patch roll-up release, I assume that with Y2K remediation and other bug fixes in the mid- and late-2000s there were a few additional patches released over time.
-- Chris
