I have a bunch of Power7 720's I would like to get running, and I'm have a
tough time tracking down any VIOS newer than 2.1. Does someone here have
some 2.2.6 or later CD's they would like to sell me?
Thanks!
--
Hi all --
I'm working on a PDP-8/A I picked up at VCF West last summer. After a lot
of cleaning and some power supply repair it's showing signs of life (CPU
seems to be at least minimally functional, core memory is going to need
some debugging.)
The transformer in the power supply is humming quite loudly, however, and
I'm curious if this is normal for the 8/A (or is typical for an 8/A of this
vintage). I'm used to the supplies in various other DEC machines not being
exactly silent but this is a rather severe 60Hz buzz that you can clearly
hear over the fans when the machine is in operation.
Thanks,
Josh
Hello,
I'm looking for Cobalt Qube cases, preferably in North America.
I would prefer non working Qubes as I don't want to deprive anyone of
working ones. Doesn't matter whether it's a 1, 2 or 3. I'm looking to
repurpose the cases.
Thanks!
> Is there anyone that has already built a tool to dump TU58-tapes on a Linux
> machine? I have the drive of course.
>
> There is PUTR. But it is DOS only and is written in assembler so it cannot
> be ported easily. The other option is running RT11 on a PDP-11, but then
> there is the hassle of getting the dumps off the RT11 file system.
>
>
> It is probably not too difficult to use relevant parts of the various TU58
> Unix implementations out there to do something quickly, but if someone has
> already done it, it would be great to not reinvent the wheel.
>
> I have approximately 80 11/730 and 11/750 console and diag tapes that
> need reading.
Just a thought - if the TU58 connects via serial, then what about running
SIMH and giving it a serial device which is connected to the TU58? That
could fix both problems - how to talk to the device, and how to deal with
the data on the tapes.
John
Liam Proven wrote:
> I don't know. There is a huge amount of tradition and culture in
> computing now, and as a result, few people seem to have informed,
> relatively unbiased opinions. There hasn't been much real diversity in
> decades.
>
> 25 or 30y ago, people discussed the merits of Smalltalk or Prolog or
> Forth; now most people have never seen or heard of them, and it's just
> which curly-bracket language you favour, or does your preferred
> language run in a VM or is it compiled to a native binary.
Agreed. While I'm much more favorably disposed towards C than you are,
the increasing homogeneity of almost all modern languages is
discouraging and, I think, detrimental to the field as a whole. Forth
and Smalltalk alike were eye-openers when I discovered them (and
Smalltalk in particular was a breath of fresh air, after I'd spent
years failing to ever really grok OOP with the likes of C++ and Java,)
because both presented genuinely *different* and beautifully
consistent ways to think about structuring and specifying a computer
program. These days, though, outside of deliberately jokey
ultra-esoteric languages, it's pretty much just a bunch of
domain-specific Java/Javascript knockoffs from horizon to horizon.
> I am just surprised that this (to me) rather inelegant design survived
> and got to market, given what you've said about the same company's
> ruthless drive for cost-cutting removed one PCB trace even though it
> killed floppy-disk performance, or wouldn't use an extra ROM chip
> because it was too expensive.
>
> It seems inconsistent.
It's marketing - consistency there is a non-consideration, if not
actively striven against. The whole saga with CP/M on CBM was a
boondoggle - the CP/M cart existed because business customers wanted a
CP/M add-in to run their spreadsheets and their whatnot, but it didn't
end up being a good fit for reasons already stated (slow CPU, slow
disk, 40-column only.) The 128 improved on those points, but not
nearly enough to become competitive with the advancements CP/M
machines had made in that time, and in the process wasted precious
man-hours and drove up the cost and complexity of the unit - and all
the while CP/M had been losing ground to MS-DOS in the business market
for years! But marketing promised it, so it had to happen... :/
Tuesday night I was reading up to see what it might take to revive either of my Amiga 1200?s. As it happens, both appear to have fairly common failure modes. In reading up on the dead video, I learned that it?s often on the Composite Out, but not the monitor. I bought these two systems around ?97/98. I plugged the one with the dead video into the Monitor I?m using, and proceeded to use it for about an hour and a half. It works great with the Gotek floppy emulator.
On a whim, earlier today, when I placed the order with AmigaKit for A3000 batteries, I included the hardware needed to put a IDE-to-CF interface in both the A600 & an A1200, PLUS, a second Gotek. :-) It looks like I?m going to need them. :-)
Zane
Funny how wetware memory works. I have that issue of Popular
Electronics somewhere in my collection and would have seen the
article as I would read it cover to cover after it arrived in mail.
While looking at the issue again, remembered reading next article on
PLL's so probably read the Cyclops article, decided that $25 was way
too much for one chip and never bothered. However, I do have a lot
of old RAM chips so might give it a try some day. What I do recall
about that era that a 1024 bit SRAM cost about $10 in Canada. (That
was in days when we made a profit selling beer for $0.25 at TGIF).
Boris Gimbarzevsky
>I think a Stanford AI lab has one in a display case. Any others out there?
>
>It was supposedly "commercial" but I don't even remember ever seeing
>an ad for the Cyclops from Cromemco and I had a really good stash of
>Cromemco literature and hardware.
>
>I do remember the BYTE article where you pop the top off of a DRAM
>chip to make a Camera but that was 1983-ish, nearly a decade after
>the Cromemco Cyclops was supposedly "commercial". In the discussions
>I had in the 80's none of us seemed to know about the Cromemco
>Cyclops having preceded it.
>
>Tim N3QE
Bill, thanks in particular for the reference to the August 1976 Cromemco catalog. I definitely remember the Dazzler graphics on the cover but somehow had lost memory of the camera on the second to last page.
Tim
