test-drb December 2020

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

103 participants
82 discussions

by a.carlini＠ntlworld.com

I have three AlphaServer 2100 systems in storage in the UK (Oxfordshire). The storage, however, is due to be demolished (soon, but no fixed date). I won't have room to store these three systems, so if anyone would be interested in offering them a home, then please get in touch! I can probably get some pictures in the next day or two. These systems were SMP Alphas and could sport as many as 4 CPUs. I'm not sure of the configuration of these systems but I can probably find that out soon. They have not been run since ~2003 so they may be in need of some TLC. OTOH they are not rusted to death so you have a chance of getting them back to life. Just so you know what you might be dealing with these systems are about: 700mm H x 430mm W x 810mm L. I can't find the weight in any of my references right now but they are very heavy. Three people can move them up a slight slope with some effort but you would not successfully lift it into a car (assuming that it would fit). I'm planning to dismantle them to move them (i.e. remove PSU/PSUs etc. until they are light enough to move). A tail-lift would probably be the sane way to go (and is, indeed, how they got to their current location. I'm hoping that someone can step forward and offer one or more of these machines a new home. Please contact me off-list (once you're sure you understand what you are getting into :-)). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini antonio at acarlini.com

2 years, 6 months

H7821 power supply in MicroVAX 3100, SCSI disk enclosures and others

by cctalk＠beyondthepale.ie

The recent discussion on BSC protocol prompted me to dig out my Microvax 3100 with DSH32 synchronous serial interface. It had been idle in storage for several years and it wouldn't power up, only giving a brief flash on the diagnostic LEDs and a quick twitch of the fans. There was a slight smell, like the stale air that comes out of a deflating tyre. I took out the H7821 power supply and found that five identical brown 1800uF 25V electrolytic capacitors on the output side had leaked. The SCSI disk enclosure where the machine's system disk lives required several power cycles to get it to run at all and it died as soon as the disk tried to spin up. It turned out to also contain a H7821 power supply which had a similar issue with the same five brown capacitors, although not as extensive as in the main unit. I found a second disk enclosure which had seen little use and grabbed the power supply out of that to put in the MicroVAX. It worked well enough to test with but there was a ring of goo around the bottom of one of the brown capacitors which was worst affected in the other units. Time to order a batch of replacement capacitors and figure out what else has been damaged. While it is not the worst I have seen, access to these power supplies for repairs is quite difficult and it is really difficult to debug them safely while they are running with the cover off :-( If anyone has anything with H7821 power supplies in them, I suggest checking on these capacitors. If anything with these power supplies is in storage, I suggest ensuring it is stored the normal way up as this should limit the ability of the goo to escape and spread around the power supply. And there I was thought I was being safe enough by removing the nicad battery packs some years ago... Regards, Peter Coghlan.

2 years, 9 months

PDP-11/05 microcode dump?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Mattis Lind > Thanks Noel for sorting this out. Eh, de nada. But thank you. >> I wonder if the ucode in the two versions is identical? The uROM chip >> numbers should give it, (if they are the same on both versions, albeit >> in different locations on the board), but I have yet to check. Does >> anyone happen to know? OK, so the situation here is pretty complicated. To start with / make things worse, that CPU uses lots of PROMs. Lots and lots and lots and lots of PROMs. For the data paths board (M7260), both major versions appear to contain the same PROMs (going by the DEC part numbers), but the chip location (Exx) numbers are all different. For the control board (M7261), the C, E ('early' version) and F ('late' version) etch revisions each contain mostly the same PROMs, but apparently with slight differences between the sets of PROMs in each (as reflected in different DEC part numbers). For details see: http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/05#Control_PROMs to which I have just added all the gory details. As to getting the contents of all of them dumped in machine-readable form - oi vey! >> on the earlier version (prints for that version are in the GT40 prints >> online It turns out that I have hard-copy prints for the "C" etch revision of the M7261, which do not yet appear to be online; the GT40 prints have the "E" etch revision. I will scan the pages for that revision of the board, and put them up 'soon'. (I'm not doing the whole print set, it's about 1" thick, and most of them are for other things anyway, like MM11-L memory, etc.) Noel

3 years, 3 months

Intel Developers' Insight CD-ROM collection archived anywhere?

by glen.slick＠gmail.com

Does anyone have a collection of Intel Developers' Insight CD-ROMs in physical form or as images? The only physical CD-ROMs I have are a two disk set from February 1998. I don't know what time period these were available. Maybe mid or late 1990s to early 2000s? They have a variety of information on them such as datasheets and manuals that might not always be easy to find online anywhere anymore. As one example of something that I was recently unable to find online anywhere is a copy of either of these, which might have been available on some of the Intel Developers' Insight CD-ROMs: 297372 16-Mbit Flash Product Family User?s Manual 297508 FLASHBuilder Design Resource Tool Those are mentioned in various Intel flash memory datasheets and databooks from around the 1995 timeframe. The February 1998 CD-ROMs contain a copy of the Intel Flash SOFTWAREBuilder, which appears to be related to but different from the FLASHBuilder tool.

3 years, 7 months

found it: first speech synthesizer (at least, for S-100 systems)

by couryhouse＠aol.com

Have one filed in somewhere with all the s-100 boards... now I have a reason to dig it out! Yes... memories of Wirt's projects! Ed#?? smecc On Wednesday, December 16, 2020 Bill Degnan via cctalk <billdegnan at gmail.com; cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Very interesting Stan. Thank you for sharing this info Bill Degnan On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 2:43 AM Stan Sieler via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: > Hi, > > Some years back, I was asking if anyone had information about the speech > synthesizer > developed for the Altair 8080 by Wirt Atmar of AICS (in New Mexico). > No "hits". > > Most places on the web claimed the Computalker was first, given the date as > 1976 or 1977. > > (Earlier speech synthesizes existed, but they were external boxes that one > interfaced to, > or were standalone (often with a large/weird keyboard).) > > Today, I stumbled over a fairly bad OCR of Byte magazine from August, 1976 > at > > https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1976-08/1976_08_BYTE_00-12_Speech_… > > It has two articles about speech synthesizers for S-100 bus systems. > > The first is by the Computalker people, who say: > > At the time this article > goes to press, a synthesizer > module incorporating several > detail refinements and im- > provements over the circuits > of this article is being de- > veloped by the author and > associates. > > and > > A detailed user's > guide will be supplied with the > Computalker module > > > Note the future tense! > > The second is by Wirt Atmar, whose product *was already shipping*. > > Near the end of his Byte article, Wirt lists currently available products: > > At the present time, two speech synthesizers > are both commercially available and affordable by > the hobbyist. > > One is the Votrax produced by: > > Vocal Interface Division > > Federal Screw Works > > 500 Stephenson Dr > > Troy Ml 48084 > > Price, approximately $2,000 > > Interfacing: Parallel or Serial (RS-232) > > > The second is the Model 1000 manufactured by: > > Ai Cybernetic Systems > > PO Box 4691 > > University Park NM 88003 > > Price, $425 > > > Wirt had told me (twenty years ago or so) that he thought his was the first > for microcomputers (e.g., a user installed card, not an external box). > Now, I'm sure ... but it was realllly close! > > Wirt demonstrated his product at the earlier MITS World Altair Computer > Conven- > tion, where it won first prize. > > He advertised it poorly/infrequently, since it was mostly a side business. > And, that shows, since history doesn't remember it. > > Stan >

3 years, 8 months

Al Lasher's electronics closing.

by korpela＠ssl.berkeley.edu

One fewer place to obtain old stock components in the NorCal East Bay. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/12/03/lashers-electronics-berkeley-busine… -- Eric Korpela korpela at ssl.berkeley.edu AST:7731^29u18e3

3 years, 8 months

DEC part number system

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

So, DEC part numbers (xx-yyyyy-zz) have a system where the 'xx' says what _kind_ of part it is; e.g. bootstrap PROMs are all 23-xxxxx-yy. I seem to recall reading at some point something which listed all the xx- codes, and what they meant - but now I can't find it. A Web search didn't turn it up, and it's not in the 1974 'engineering handbook'? Does anyone recall seeing it, and if so, where? Obviously, I could look through a bunch of print sets, and reconstruct it (e.g. 90- seems to mean mounting hardware - nuts and bolts, etc) but I'd rather not put the time and energy into reconstructing the wheel, unless there's no other way. Noel

3 years, 8 months

HP 3000, APL\3000, the HP 2641A APL Display Station, and stuff.

by gavin＠learn.bio

As some people here are aware, I have spent probably too much time this summer hacking on J. David Bryan's excellent Classic HP 3000 simulator and trying to build up the ultimate classic 1980s HP 3000 system (virtually speaking). I started with the MPE V/R KIT that's widely available and expanded that into a 5x120MB HP 7925 disc system and configured things like the system directory size and all the system tables to make a fully functional multi-user server. I then set about collecting as much old MPE software as I could find, which included Keven Miller's collection of the old Contributed Software Library tapes which were conveniently available in SIMH format. This is a huge trove of cool stuff including most of the classic mini/mainframe games (Dungeon, Warp, Advent, etc., etc.) and even a little game called DRAGONS that was written in 1980 by a guy named Bruce Nesmith when he was in college and he used it to get a job at TSR and went on to write parts of many classic D&D products and eventually landed at Bethesda where among other things he was the lead designer for another little game called The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I was able to track Bruce down and give him a copy of the system with his 40 year old game running on it. The CSL tapes also include other amazing goodies that people developed and gave away over the years, including a FORTH and LISP, as well as most of the system and utility programs that people used to run their 3000 shops. It's quite fun to explore. I was curious how far we could push the 3000 simulator, so I hacked all the memory bank registers to be six bits instead of four bits, and we now have a simulated HP 3000 Series III that supports 8MB of memory, 4x more than any physical system ever did. I started trying to do the same thing for giant disc drives, but MPE turned out to have too much knowledge of what the supported disc models look like to make it practical. Bummer. Since I met my first HP 3000 in 1980 (40 years ago this month), people would talk about what was probably the most rare and exotic HP software subsystem ever produced, APL\3000. APL on the 3000 was a project started at HP Labs in Palo Alto in the early 1970s. They were likely motivated by the success IBM was having with mainframe APL timesharing services. This would be the first full APL implementation on a "small" (non-mainframe) computer. It would be the first APL with a compiler (and a byte-code virtual machine to execute the compiled code), it would include an additional new language APLGOL (APL with ALGOL like structured control statements), and it managed to support APL workspaces of unlimited size through a clever set of system CPU microcode extensions that provided a flat 32-bit addressing capability (on a 16-bit machine where every other language was limited to a 64KB data segment). Because APL required these extra special CPU instructions that you got as a set of ROM chips when you bought the $15,000 APL\3000, and because APL ultimately failed as a product (another story in itself) and thus HP never implemented these instructions on their later HP 3000 models, I never saw it run on a real HP 3000, but over the years we talked about wouldn't it be cool to find a way to get APL running again. With assistance and moral support from Stan Sieler and Frank McConnell and others, I was ultimately able to reverse-engineer the behavior of the undocumented ten magic APL CPU instructions needed to get it to run and implement them as part of the MPE unimplemented instruction trap and now APL\3000 runs again for the first time in ~35 years. Somewhat ironically, this implementation method could have been used back in 1980 as I didn't actually end up changing the hardware simulation code at all, and it should also run (if a bit slowly) on any physical classic architecture 3000. So that was cool and all, but what is APL without all the weird overstruck characters and whatnot? APL\3000 supports the use of plain ASCII terminals through blecherous trigraphs like "QD for the APL quad character, but this is hardly satisfying. So the quest was on to find a solution. Back in 1976 when APL\3000 was released, there was a companion HP terminal in the 264x line, the HP 2641A APL Display Station, which was basically an HP 2645A with special firmware and APL character set ROMs that supported all the APL special characters as well as overstrikes (the terminal would take X<backspace>Y and lookup to see if it had a character to represent Y overstriking X and if so it would show that on the display, and if that got transmitted to the host it would convert it back into the original three character overstriking sequence). I briefly looked into the idea of hacking QCTerm or Putty or something, but then I found out from Curious Chris that an HP 2645A emulator already existed in the MAME emulator system! Since the '41 is basically just a '45 with modified firmware, and Bitsavers had both the character set ROMs as well as the firmware ROMs from a '41, this sounded like it might be easy! There was a snag however in that the firmware ROM images that were allegedly from a '41 turned out to actually be from an ordinary '45. But we did have the character sets and one of the ROMs from the second CTL PCA. I put out a call on the Vintage HP list to see if anyone might possibly have a lead on an actual HP 2641A, and Kyle Owen responded that not only did he have one he could also dump the ROMs for us. So a few days and a few hacks to F. Ulivi's MAME hp2645 driver later we now have a functioning MAME HP 2641A terminal emulation, so you can experience APL\3000 in all its original glory. I bundled up a somewhat stripped down MAME along with my turnkey 3000 setup so both emulated HP terminals are just a couple clicks away. So that's how I spent my summer vacation (who am I kidding, it's pretty much all vacation these days). It has been a lot of fun revisiting all this old 3000 stuff as well as the numerous people I talked to along the way including some of those who were around at APL\3000's birth (before my time). It was rather a lot of work so I'd like to feel it might be useful to someone in the future who is digging into this part of history. Because of all the usual reasons, I don't plan on hosting it permanently until and unless we maybe someday get the licensing worked out (the 50th anniversary of the HP 3000 will be in a couple years so maybe people will get interested again then) but I will offer it up here to my fellow computer history nuts if you want to help ensure that it doesn't vanish if I get run over by a bus or something :) This is a simulated HP 3000 Series III (circa 1980) running MPE V/R (circa 1986) with 8MB of memory, all the language subsystems (APL, BASIC, BASICOMP, RPG, FORTRAN (66), SPL, PASCAL, COBOL (68), COBOL II (74)), 20 years of users group contributed software, many classic historical computer games, etc. Software archaeologists can get lost in here for years. Oh, and thanks to Dave Elward, the HP 2000 Timesharing BASIC contributed library is even included (kinda sorta converted to MPE BASIC) for good measure. This is a streamlined turnkey edition that's ready to run out of the box with no assembly required (all batteries are included). Currently, I only provide executables for Windows (sorry) but am in the process of getting the 3000 simulator changes (for large memory support) and the new MAME hp2641 driver back upstream. Instructions and further details can be found in the README.txt hint book for this adventure. 94MB Google Drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bmXvHkBLbUeLAid73EJ4H1yQ2uwXQuRu Gavin P.S. I'm giving a talk on the history of APL\3000 and its resurrection to the ACM APLBUG group in a couple weeks. If anyone is interested I can provide more details when I have them.

3 years, 8 months

cc:Mail Router for NT

by tomas＠basun.net

Hi all, I'm using a HP 200LX to connect to a cc:Mail installation, with a null modem cable. It has worked better before, but now I don't seem to be able to connect at all. This is the output from the router, when trying to connect from the 200LX: | C:\CCMAIL\Router>C:\CCMAIL\Router\NTROUTER.EXE C:\CCDATA MODEM/PBX COM1 DIAGNOSTICS/F LOG/C:\CCMAIL\Router\ROUTER.LOG | cc:Mail NT ROUTER Version 6.10.00.4 | Copyright (c) 1986, 1997 by cc:Mail, Inc. [...] | Press Esc to terminate cc:Mail ROUTER program. | Waiting to receive messages... | 23/12/20 13:53:33 Answering call... 2 8 3a 74 68 8 2a 55 22 52 23 | 7d 18 80 from ~????`???f???????? ?`. Data connection not requested. | 23/12/20 13:53:49 Ending connection. | Waiting to receive messages... | 23/12/20 13:53:55 Answering call... 2 8 3a 74 68 8 2a 55 22 52 23 | 7d 18 Data connection lost. | 23/12/20 13:54:36 Ending connection. | Waiting to receive messages... The log files are empty. There are no other error messages anywhere that I can see. Anybody recognises anything? Any ideas about things I can try? Here is the modem file: | [attributes] | MODELS=Null | NULL MODEM=1 | [commands] And another thing is that I only seem to be able to get a response at 1200 baud (the router default) by not specifying a speed when starting the router. If I add the speed to the command line (the first line above), any speed, (and the corresponding setting on the Palmtop) then there is no connection at all. It has worked better earlier. I managed to connect at 9600, but that was a different PC. I am not aware of having changed anything relevant on either PC or Palmtop. Any help appreciated. /Tomas

3 years, 9 months

Ouch, but 2 Perqs out.

by cz＠alembic.crystel.com

This was a long day. Went over to the house and started working on getting the Perqs out of the basement. I've been moving smaller stuff to make room and it was time. First up was a Perq1 chassis that just had the big disk drive in it, side and rear panels. I figured it was lightest and after taking off the sides and top was able to lift it and carry it up steps. Still heavy and bulky, but it made room and a path to get to the second one. The second one was a mess but a lot heavier: It still had the card cage in it and I was not going to be able to lift. So I figured out how to take the sides, top, front, back, and bottom (pounds are made of ounces) and then spottted the screws that hold the card cage and power supply in the box. Bless the people at perq, those two screws out and you can lift the cage out the side of the box. The card cage without cards (took them out to lighten) was heavy but I got it up the steps. Then with a herculean amount of effort I managed to carry the rest of the box up, followed by the sides, top, front, back, and bottom plates. There are still two more Perqs down there. They have heavier front plates (I was able to take them off) with real shielding. They were different designs, so they were not Perq1s and they are not the same as each other. Question: Are there any pictures of other types of Perqs? Unfortunately they are still buried under old Sun gear and a Vaxserver of some sort. So I'll have to think about those, but they will need to come apart as well. Question: Do the card cages and stuff come off the later Perqs as well? Also got two different types of keyboards that say Perq, and a monitor that looks like a big fat white Vetrex and says Three Rivers. Question: What does a Perq mouse look like? At least this stuff will not be junked. I'll take pictures and such tomorrow and throw a tarp over everything tonight because I'm too tired to get it out of the truck. I swore off high-mass hobbies for a reason....

3 years, 9 months

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test-drb December 2020