>
> Date: Sat, 23 May 2020 07:07:52 -0700
> From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
> Subject: Early Nubus history
>
> Did anyone ever do any research into the early history of Nubus, wrt
> Western Digital, TI or Steve Ward/MIT/Numachine?
>
I was a member of the IEEE-1196 committee that wrote the NuBus standard and
IEEE-1101 committee that wrote the mechanical standard for the NuBus. Eike
Waltz and I did a lot of the mechanical standards work.
The members of the IEEE-1196 committee were George White (Chairman) R.
Gordon Cook, Mark Garetz(CompuPro and IEEE-696), Richard Greenblatt(MIT AI
Lab, LMI Founder), Ron Hochsprung(Apple), Richard Kalish, Rikki Kirzner(
Dataquest), Gerry Laws(TI), Rae Mclellan(Bell Labs), Gregory
Papadopoulos(MIT), Dan Schneider, Dave Stewart, Michael Thompson(me), Jim
Truchard(Founder National Instruments), Eike Waltz, *Steve Ward*(MIT), and
Fritz Whittington.
George White went from MIT->Computer Automation->Western
Digital->TI->Corollary->Intel. Corollary's cache technology was licensed by
DEC and many others.
My memories of this committee are a little vague after 40 years, other than
being very impressed with the other members. I will see if I kept any notes
>from the meetings.
--
Michael Thompson
Here's my conclusion to the H960 stabiliser feet thread from a while ago where I was after measurements of
the originals. And thanks for all the help from cctalk (especially Noel) who supplied dimensions and photos.
I finished these last year but moved on to other projects and hadn't returned to the list to discuss them,
so I am doing that now. I made a pair each for my two H960's.
The feet consist of welded steel load-bearing frames with a C-profile that fits snugly onto the H960
base, a lower leg from a shelf bracket and a support strut. The leg is located by a steel bolt. The
bolt has the head machined to a disc, I was going to turn the taper and machine the slot but I lost
the photo of the original bolt that a listmember had posted so I left them at that. They could do with
nickel electroplating sometime. The frame is super strong, although I have not physically loaded them
to any great extent.
The outer end has a threaded adjustable pad the same size (AFAIK) as the originals, which are still
available. I found some correct size el-cheapo ones at the hardware store that did the job just fine.
The frame is threaded for the pad post and a nut on the pad then locks the pad from turning.
The outside aesthetics are taken care of with a 3D printed hollow shell modelled from the measurements
of the original casting. It slides onto the leg and is secured by the bolt. The shell CAD model still
needs some work to get the fit and front holes right, and a few other things but overall they look
fine and obey the 6 foot rule. A few coats of satin black enamel helps hide the print layering a bit.
Photo showing the frame (spray finished in silver epoxy primer, what I had at hand), the other frame
inside a shell, and some of the test shells:
http://www.surfacezero.com/g503/data/500/Stabiliser_feet_01.png
As attached to one of the H960s. (I have yet to do the kick panel, may laser cut that sometime):
http://www.surfacezero.com/g503/data/500/Stabiliser_feet_02.png
Steve.
With the 11/83 running pretty well I decided it was time to derack it
and try putting in a TK50 tape drive. I have two and a TQK70 controller
(which should work with a TK50) so I popped it in and started to test.
On the first unit the tape was already loaded and "stuck". Cleaned the
head by lifting it up, cleaning with isopropyl alcohol on clean no-lint
swabs and it unloaded properly. Now loads and unloads with no issues on
two tapes.
Second unit was a bit more interesting, even with a clean head it would
not unload. It would spin the tape, get to the point where the leader
was on the way through the head system then it would blink endlessly.
Took it out and moved the tape with a screwdriver through the hole and
found the problem:
The leader tongue had bent backwards a bit and as a result it was
getting caught in the head slot when rewinding. The TK50 controller must
be smart enough to detect the increased torque and stopped before
ripping the tongue through. I took it off, bent it back to straight, put
it in and now the tape loads and unloads properly.
I wonder if later model LTO tape units have the same tongue and leader
and can be swapped into a TK50.
Another question: Under RT11 what device is a TK50? Is it MQ or
something else? And is there a utility to allow a TK50 to be written
>from a SIMh image to real tape like PDP11GUI?
Thanks!
Chris
As I wrote in my last post, but write here for use as a separate thread:
I'd be interesting in hearing from folks what toolsets they have used
for HDL (VHDL in particular). I started with Xilinx ISE and then
graduated to Vivado for later chipsets - unfortunately, Vivado seems to
be something of a dog, in terms of time to compile HDL and synthesize logic.
JRJ
> From: Fred Cisin
> we can start by considering the 4004. 1971. ... Then came the 8008,
> with EIGHT bit data bus, and 14 bit address bus (16K of RAM) ... It is
> important to note that each Intel chip consisted of "minor" modifications to
> the previous one.
I know you didn't _say_ the 8008 was based on the 4004, but your text
can give that impression.
"The [8008] was commissioned by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) to
implement an instruction set of their design for their Datapoint 2200
programmable terminal. As the chip was delayed and did not meet CTC's
performance goals, the 2200 ended up using CTC's own TTL-based CPU instead."
The 8008 was started before the 4004, but wound up coming out after it. (See
Lamont Wood, "Datapoint", pg. 73.) This is confirmed by its original name,
1201 - the 4004 was going to be named the 1202, until Faggin convinced
Intel to name it the 4004.
Noel
Hi,
Every now and again I have a bit of time to mess with old computers - and usually for whatever reason - its Sun machines for me.
I?ve had loads over the years, played with them and passed them on.
Does anyone have anything old Sun wise available in the UK? I?d love to find an old VME bus machine but anything old or interesting. I can travel
to pick stuff up etc, social distancing observed of course :D
Anyway - PM me if you have anything that?s restorable :)
Cheers
Ian
https://www.vecmar.com/products/search.asp
Type in keyboard
The first result allows a terminal keyboard to be used on a PS/2 port.
The second result allows a PS/2 keyboard to be used on a terminal.
Not affiliated with seller, etc.
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
As some here probably know, I have been working the last couple of years
working towards an FGPA gate-authentic replica of the IBM 1410 - the
larger cousin to the IBM 1401.
In 2018 I developed an application for gathering information of of ALDs
and stuffing it into a MySQL database, then spent the rest of the year
entering the information from the ALDs into the system, but I did not
share that application or the data.
Then I took a year off - it had been a grind.
This year I took up the torch again. I put the application up on
github, gave it the requisite GPL attributions, and started tracking my
bugs, fixes and enhancements there, even though I am working alone. I
fixed some of the warts, generalized it some, fixed a few bugs, added
some database checking reports and data checking reports, and so on.
I also spent quite a bit of time generalizing it, so that it will
hopefully be usable (perhaps with some more fixes / enhancements /
generalizing for most any SMS machine (IBM 1620, IBM 709x, IBM 1401 etc.
etc. etc.)
The application is available on github at:
https://github.com/cube1us/IBM1410SMS
The actual "root" source control is on my system at home using
subversion. I use "git svn" to keep a git version in sync, and then
push that to github.
The application was/is developed in C# under Visual Studio 2017 to run
under Windows, primarily because I was interested in trying out C#. I
would expect it to build in VS 2019 with little or no change, but have
not tried it. I could have used a more basic tool setup (say, C or C++
and a non-windows presentation layer), but I figured not all that many
people would be interested in the thing, and the VS environment eased
development quite a bit. I suspect it would work OK under WINE, but I
have not tried doing so.
There are also a couple of tools, one in Perl for generating database
related classes from the database, and one in Python for checking for
database referential integrity. ( was curious about Python, and this
seemed a good candidate for an evaluation of it. It did, however
reinforce my dislike for many things about Python.
The application is comprised of two Visual Studio projects, one for the
data gather app itself, the other a very very light weight database
interface, that ought to make it not too hard to port it to a different
DBMS.
github also has a copy of the database, the MySQL Workbench data model
(and a PDF print) and documentation in MS Word (and a PDF print).
The code is not good. There, I said it. It is not truly OO at all. I
didn't do much refactoring even when I saw common code or saw
considerable potential to consolidate code. The downside of that is
that there is lots of duplicate code. The upside is that you don't have
to go umpteen layers deep in OO design to figure out what the darn thing
does. Doesn't even use database views, though they probably would have
been helpful. Just a bunch of tables. Lots of tables in a close but
not fully relational model.
The data gathered by the application in the database comprises about:
917 ALD (Automated Logic Diagram) 11" x 17" pages
10596 Logic Blocks on those pages (so average of 11.5 per page)
1281 DOT functions (Wired OR / AND)
14021 Inter-sheet signals (which appear on multiple sheets)
4222 Distinct inter-sheet signals
32746 Connections between the above items
That connection number makes me shake my head - I had to enter each and
every one of the darn things. Yeesh.
Capturing all of that was between something like 600 and 1000 hours,
maybe more (but not 2000 hours), after maybe 200 hours on the initial
version of the application.
My next phase is working hard on the part of the project that generates
HDL for FPGA synthesis. I expect that to take many months as I
synthesize, simulate with the tool set and figure stuff out.
I'd be interesting in hearing from folks what toolsets they have used
for HDL (VHDL in particular). I started with Xilinx ISE and then
graduated to Vivado for later chipsets - unfortunately, Vivado seems to
be something of a dog, in terms of time to compile HDL and synthesize logic.
If folks find this interesting, and especially if they want to use it,
I'd love to know about it. I intend to keep this a single-person
effort, git-wise, but folks can feel free to fork (if anyone wants to
bother ;) ), and let me know if they find anything seriously wrong.
For what it's worth, my IBM 1410 cycle-level simulator for the IBM 1410
is also available, at: https://github.com/cube1us/1410
