Hi all.
I recently bought a mystery blinkenlight panel. Closer inspection reveals it was manufactured by Intel in the early 70?s (1973), and some people on the book of faces suggested it was part of a ?device multiplexer?(?)
I?m 95% confident it?s not strictly a ?computer? blinkenlight panel, but rather an attached device, but that still hasn?t helped me narrow down what exactly it was from.
I?ve not seen any early Intel stuff as rack-mount, so i?m wondering if it was a prototype, or maybe a piece of internal/non-commercial hardware for Intel's own use.
I?m hoping someone here might be able to shed some light on this mystery.
Pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/lD74oSy <https://imgur.com/gallery/lD74oSy>
Thanks in advance.
Josh Rice
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.
/Mattis
Folks,
I think I now have too many 3174 controllers. I have
1 x Rack Mount - Token Ring Card + MFM Disk Emulator
1 x Large Tabletop - Token Card
1 x Large Tabletop - Ethernet Card <=> I am keeping this.
1 x Small Tabletop - Token Ring card but won't run TCPIP code.
If anyone wants one of these I am happy to ship at cost but they are
220/240v and heavy so shipping to USA may be a problem.
I have a selection of floppy drives that can be fitted but I recommend using
a Gotek with FlashFloppy firmware.
I also have the following spares:-
1. working PSU for rack mount
2. non-working PSU for the rackmount systems but I am sure it can be
fixed
3. spare motherboard for rackmount
4. spare token ring card (if I can find it)
5. (I may have memory modules but can't remember where I put them
6. I think I have a 3299 multiplexor some where
Feel free to e-mail off-list with questions.
Dave Wade
G4UGM & EA7KAE
> With Jay retiring, what are the hosting plans for these mailing lists?
Hi Al,
I didn't know about Jay retiring or what that means for the list - i.e. does it need to find new infrastructure, new administraton/management, or both? I'm a relatively background person in the vintage computing scheme of things but I do have an involvement in the data centre / hosting area & so if no better options were to come forward would be very happy to pitch in somehow.
Don't know if anybody much cares, but:
The HDL synthesis aspect of the SMS data gathering / HDL synthesis
application is coming along. I can now handle:
- Oscillators (using a counter divider)
- Delay lines (using a shift register, so limited to a reasonable number
of FPGA clock clock cycles, so, say 200 ns is not unreasonable (20 bit
shift register at 100 MHz).
- Recognition and consolidation of individual signals into a "bus" when
generating groups corresponding to a group of individual ALD sheets.
(The individual ALD sheets use the individual signal names as they
appear on the sheet). A simple database table associates a given
individual signal with a bus, and identifies the bit in the bus that
corresponds to the individual signal.
So, I have not generated the IBM 1410 main oscillator, its main logic
clock and its I Ring - used to control instruction decode. I have
synthesized the logic clock into an FPGA and run it (with a slowed down
1410 oscillator so I could see what was going on.)
Also, a word about VHDL - and the Xilinx Vivado. While GHDL is useful,
I have found that Vivado is not slow at editing and *simulation*. Silly
me - I got in the habit of synthesizing stuff before I tested it under
simulation - partly because I didn't know any better at first. Vivado's
waveform viewer has some advantages (and disadvantages) compared to what
is available for GHDL.
I have also started exploring a piece of "intellectual property" I can
use - MicroBlaze - to allow my generated system to talk to my PC, via
TCP, for things like lights and switches. (Kind of like how the Amdahl
machines used to use first DG Novas, and later little UNIX systems for
their consoles, giving them access to the internals of the machine.)
I knew MicroBlaze existed, but now I have actually played with it a bit
-- still learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBlaze
OK. the keyboard is working properly as far as I can tell, data is going
in and out, and I even swapped it for the keyboard on my VT220 and the
same symptoms persisted.
I just verified all four ROMs on the T11, and the ROM for the 8085,
against the images I found on the MAME site. So far so good.
One interesting finding - two of the lines (DAL3 and DAL1) on the T11 do
change states several times, but once the self-test has crashed, they
stay high with almost one volt of "wiggle". All the other data/address
lines are either high, low or switching between a good 1 and 0.
There are several places that the bus connects, including the ROMs,
1-bit dynamic RAMs and various octal latches & bidirectional buffers. I
connected a 10 ma VOM between each line and ground (to make sure a
low-resistance path (such as in the 'LS245 at E55) wasn't forcing it
high somehow.
All of the DAL15-0 lines requires more than 1.9 ma to bring it to ground
(well, 50 mv burden at 250 mv full scale, anyway).
That leaves the unlikely possibility that one of the octal TTL devices,
or ROMs. has developed a weird internal pathway that only interferes
with DAL3 & 1 on some bit patterns, but not all the time. Seems like a
zebra rather than a horse. The only part that drives multiple low-order
DAL lines at once besides the E19-22 ROMs is the E55 LS245.
The T11 spec sheet says that a good logic 0 (<0.4 volt) should be
possible with up to 3.2 ma sink... So I suspect the T11 has a couple of
bad output pull-down transistors on those lines. Anyone got a spare T11
chip I can buy or borrow? Or send you mine to plug into your board and
see if it fails the same way? :)
thanks.
Add on? solid state memory unit? some semi companies made tjem. For add to Dec and dg?? Dunno. A guess
....?? ed smecc
On Sunday, June 14, 2020 Joshua Rice via cctalk <Rice43 at btinternet.com; cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hi all.
I recently bought a mystery blinkenlight panel. Closer inspection reveals it was manufactured by Intel in the early 70?s (1973), and some people on the book of faces suggested it was part of a ?device multiplexer?(?)
I?m 95% confident it?s not strictly a ?computer? blinkenlight panel, but rather an attached device, but that still hasn?t helped me narrow down what exactly it was from.
I?ve not seen any early Intel stuff as rack-mount, so i?m wondering if it was a prototype, or maybe a piece of internal/non-commercial hardware for Intel's own use.
I?m hoping someone here might be able to shed some light on this mystery.
Pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/lD74oSy <https://imgur.com/gallery/lD74oSy>
Thanks in advance.
Josh Rice
I am getting closer to retirement (although not close enough) and I'm
considering selling off my PDP stuff, especially if I downsize and move.
Everything's working, but I just no longer DO anything with either
system... the adventure was acquiring all the pieces, fixing them and
learning the software :)
Anyhow I have an 8/A with cloned Programmer's Panel (Vince Slyngstad and
I made it around 2006) and limited function panel, 32K RAM board (also
have core), Philipp Hachtmann's USB interface board, RX01 floppy, two
RL02's, and a high-speed (optical) reel-to-reel paper tape reader. OS/8
is up and running. Several spare RL02 packs. It's all in a tall DEC rack
with an H-(something) power control box. The ASR-33 is not included, I'm
keeping that.
Also an 11/23+ (11/03 chassis) in a corporate cabinet with two RL02's, a
16-line serial interface, VT-220 terminal. Also an RQDX3 which is
connected to a loose 3.5" TEAC floppy drive. Have RT-11XM, RT-11SJ and
TSX-Plus 6.50 (all 16 timesharing ports are working too).
So, I am wondering if there's any market for them (preferably as
complete systems). Shipping would be difficult due to the size/weight
(I'm in rural south central Missouri). I'm not looking to give them
away, or to part out, but would entertain reasonable package deals
rather than deal with the "LQQK! RARE!!" bull on ebay.
I can send pics to interested parties. Let me know,
thanks!
Charles
