test-drb July 2020

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

148 participants
104 discussions

by healyzh＠avanthar.com

Out of curiosity, does anyone know anything about this publisher? They apparently existed in the late 70?s and early 80?s. They were apparently located in Beaverton, Oregon in the same business park, on Nimbus, where Norvac Electronics was. They obviously published some very strange computer books, including what looks to be a teen romance. I find myself with an embarrassingly nice little collection of the books, that my Dad apparently had. Considering I think he touched a computer twice in his life, they?re something of a mystery. Best title, ?Nailing Jelly to a Tree?, which is apparently a book on Software. The publisher sounds vaguely familiar, and I think I might have one or two other books from them in my collection. Zane

3 years, 9 months

Gotek Floppy Drive Emulators in general and as RX50/RX33 replacements

by bobsmithofd＠gmail.com

Two questions, 1. If anyone is using these devices, which firmware/software do you use in the device and why did you choose it? 2/ Is anyone specifically using one as a replacement or adjunct or and RX50 et al on a Pro, pdp11, uVax, DecMate, or Pro box, and same question set as 1? Yes, i picked up one, and looking at the capabilities, documentation first, and considering reflashing the beast to give more control of formats. TIA bob smith

3 years, 9 months

Microfiche reader spotted in Longmont, CO thrift store

by cruff＠ruffspot.net

If anyone along the northern Colorado Front Range is in need of a microfiche reader, it was reported to me that a Micro Design model 4010 is sitting in the Longmont Community Thrift store. My source didn't notice a price. The condition is unknown, but it appears to be reasonably intact, and a cell phone picture from the front is available if you send me a message.

3 years, 9 months

CDC CYBER 170 Consoles

by ccth6600＠gmail.com

I have been working on CDC CYBER 170 mainframes between 1977 and 1988. In 2002 I wrote an open-source emulator for the CDC 6000 and CYBER series (see my website http://www.control-data.info/). In 2013 I also developed the open-source VHDL firmware emulating the console controller for these systems. The firmware runs on a Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA on a PCI Express (PCIe) board. The off-the shelf Xilinx board carries a small custom "piggy-back" board with 4 DACs and 4 op-amps to interface to a DD60or CC545 console. This PCIe board was used by Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum (LCM) in Seattle from 2013 onward in a PC running my 6000/CYBER series emulator to drive a real DD60 console. The CC545 has a very similar interface and my emulated controller would work with it too. For many years I have been trying to find one of these vector drawn CC545 consoles to use with my emulator but I haven't been able to find one. Recently I decided to build a clone of it myself. Bitsavers has a hardware manual with schematics: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/cyber/cyber_170/62952600L_CYBER_170_Displa… The CC545 console achieved unusually fast deflection with an electromagnetically deflected CRT. I am trying to understand the tricks they used to get these high speeds. Part of the magic is a dual-yoke which provided gross positioning within 2 microseconds to anywhere on the screen using the first yoke (this is VERY fast) and then painted the character using a second yoke around that base position with 0.1 microsecond per stroke (this is VERY fast too). The two yokes work in an additive manner. The reason there are two yokes is that you need quite low inductivity/impedance to be able to drive the symbol vectors at 0.1 microsecond per vector with up to 24 vectors making up one character. The gross position yoke needs to create a large enough magnetic field to sweep across the entire screen so has a higher inductivity/impedance but the magnetic field has 2 microseconds to stabilise. The older DD60 console used electrostatic deflection which is much faster by its very nature. Traditional CRT oscilloscopes were all electrostatically deflected because of the speed advantage over electromagnetic deflection. The CC545 manual on Bitsavers has a good description of the circuits and schematics, but unfortunately Section 8 with the "Parts Data" has not been scanned. I really would like to know the types of transistors used in the 4 deflection amplifiers as well as the details of the dual-yoke and possibly the CRT data. It would also be very useful to see details of the design of the dual-yoke and possibly the inductivity of each of the coils. This dual-yoke is most unusual and very different from what is used in TVs, CRT monitors and even vector drawn games like Vectrex or early vector drawn Atari arcade games. Could somebody please help? Thanks Tom Hunter

3 years, 9 months

cray unicos cds sold on ebay in 2016

by plamenspam＠afterpeople.com

Any clue who won this auction: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/cray-research-unicos-operating-syste… ?

3 years, 9 months

A tool many of you may make find useful!

by dave.dunfield＠gmail.com

Continuing to let you all know about developments, I do expect that many of you are facing a similar problem - trying to condense and preserve a lifetime of "collecting digital stuff". The DFF utility has been very helpful, however once I started organizing my files, I realized that although there are a lot of duplication, much of it is was downloaded at different times and/or from different sites making much of it different, many vendors don't go out of their way to make file content/purpose obvious in the names, and many files are dependent on other files - so manually reorganizing the data is NOT always easy. The best solution I have come up with so far is to invent a new archive format designed to eliminate duplicate data but capable of recreating the entire original directory trees (or parts thereof). To that end I created the two utilities described below (now included in the web archive). -- yeah, I do seem to have a fair bit of spare time on my hands these days... ;=BDA - Build Dave's Archive ;=EDA - Extract Dave's Archive Dave's Archives contain the smallest possible representation of a complete directory tree: - Only one copy of the data for duplicate files is stored. - Duplicate filenames are stored only once. - Path information is stored only once per directory, and only additions to a path are stored (adding/removing from last path). eg: Starting with a large DIR of support files for one of my systems. This has duplicates and a lot of pre-compressed install files: 314 dirs, 930 files using 3,762,691,033 bytes. Just "ZIP"ing it I get: SysSupt.zip 3,352,081,951 bytes 7zip does a bit better: SysSupt.7z 3,245,871,362 bytes Running BDA, I get: SysSupt.DA1 9,404 bytes and SysSupt.DA2 1,912,855,711 bytes Big improvement, but no compression yet, using ZIP and 7zip I get: SysSupt.zip 1,636,965,417 bytes and SysSupt.7z 1,609,663,862 bytes And YES, using ZIP/7zip to extract the .DA's, then EDA gives me a directory with exactly the same content that I started with. Like my other tools, these can deal with BIG directory trees, and the output file format is well documented should you ever want to recover the files by other means. Sorry if I've not responded to messages here, tend not to follow the list directly much these days due to the high content, but you can always reach me through the link on my site - might take me a few days to respond, but I do get to it from time to time... Dave -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Personal site: http://dunfield.maknonsolutions.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3 years, 9 months

TM848 repair?

by brain＠jbrain.com

Anyone on list repair or rehab Tandon TM848 drives?? I have a 4 or so of the slimline drives from some Tandy Model 12/16b units that don't seem to spin at all, and I've hooked them up to the same PSU that a TM848E successfully runs on, so I am guessing it's not a PSU issue. (Though, my understanding of 8" drives is extremely minimal, so...) If I could get just 2 of them working, that'd put a few 12/16b units back in operation. Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com

3 years, 9 months

Sun E250, NVRAM edit? (Serial Speeds, no console, etc)

by ethan＠757.org

Hello, I have an E250 Sun that belonged to a friend that passed away around 2008. It was colocated at a colocation office I had running in Virginia Beach. I pulled it out of storage, and would like to check if his public website is archived on it. Archive.org only has bits of it. Odds are low since it wasn't the main server, but worth a shot. I tried the usual Serial port A, but all I get is garbage. Tried all the common baud rates I could think of. If it's switched to diag mode, the diag stuff comes across in 9600bps. I tried the RSC port, it wants a password. Don't know it, didn't see anywhere online on how to reset it. I tried hooking up a console. Finally get the power brick in for the Samsung 770TFT LCD monitor I've held onto (it has 13w3.) At first it wasn't working. Tried both Type 5 and type 6 keyboards attached. No console. I found by removing the NVRAM, it will finally throw console. But no keyboard input. Stop-A, nothing. If I shove the NVRAM back in while it's running it immediatley goes black. Anyone know if the NVRAM strings are stored in plaintext in the NVRAM IC? If I were to dig out all the hardware that should be able to dump that chip is it something that is human readable / editable? I've done the coin cell hack on them before, but from memory the keyboard worked and it wasn't a big deal to do program in replacement MAC. But this is different, I need options removed. I'm thinking this thing has values in the NVRAM that are turning off the console and doing something funky to the serial baud rate. Or perhaps the baud rate in Solaris is set to something funky. - Ethan

3 years, 9 months

Lear Siegler ADM-2?

by jacksonharrington22＠gmail.com

Hi everyone, I?m currently looking for a Lear Siegler ADM-2 terminal to purchase from someone for use in a future short film I?m creating. Afterwards I?d house it in my personal museum. If anyone has one or you know someone who owns one and could be interested in selling, let me know. I?d pay very well. I could also do a trade, I have quite a few rare terminals in my own collection. I?m familiar with old computers and know how to work around them, it could be in any condition. It would be in good hands. You can also Email me at jacksonharrington22 at gmail.com Thanks.

3 years, 9 months

HP 16C Badge (logo)

by wh.sudbrink＠verizon.net

This is not exactly vintage computer, but it is very close. A friend just gave me an HP 16C calculator in excellent, working condition, EXCEPT the 16C badge (or logo if you prefer) is missing. I seem to recall that, some years ago, someone on this list knew of a source for replacements but I can't find it in the archive. So, I'll ask, does anyone know where to get a replacement 16C badge? Thanks, Bill S. -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

3 years, 9 months

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test-drb July 2020