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
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.
> 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
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.
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.
All;
I seek a copy (hard or electronic) of the "TMS32010 Assembly Language
Programmer's Guide" (1983).
Paperback : 194 pages
ISBN-10 : 0904047423
ISBN-13 : 978-0904047424
Publisher : Texas Instruments (December 1, 1983)
Item Weight : 1.11 pounds
Language: : English
The "TMS32010 User's Guide" (1985) is readily available. Not so the (more
important!) Programmer's Guide :-{.
I recently obtained a TMS 32010 Evaluation Module (EVM). So I'm motivated
to "learn something" about the details of programming the TMS 32010. My
first hands-on foray into the (early) world of DSP :-}.
I've searched all of the nooks-n-crannies of the web to no avail.
All help in locating/obtaining a copy of this document will be greatly
appreciated.
I do have a copy of "Digital Signal Processing Using TMS32010" (Douglas L.
Jones) on order as a stop-gap measure.
Thank you,
paul
Does anyone know the size/threading of these? I've been searching high and
low and haven't been able to find any approximate or otherwise specs (they
use captive clips, so close is OK) - i've found the PSU mounting screw
sizes and sourced those though.
--
Gary G. Sparkes Jr.
KB3HAG
CHM doesn't seem to have much early DSP stuff in the collection
Does anyone have any of the TMS32010/20/30 or C1x/2x/3x hw/sw kicking around?
Other than the docs I've scanned there doesn't seem to be much on the web either.
> From: Toby Thain
> To get closer I'd need better images of the panels.
Hi, I borrowed a DEC inlay from someone (a KA10 CPU bay) and scanned a chunk
of it (as much as I could fit into my A4 scanner :-) at 200 dpi:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/jpg/KACPUPanel.jpg
I have a TC08 inlay, but it's currently being used in my QSIC display (until
we can get the RKV11-F/RPV11-D inlay done :-), and I didn't want to yank it
out. As far as I can tell, it's the same font on the two of them.
> the closest I know of off the top of my head is Akzidenz Grotesk.
The Akzidenz Grotesk Medium is indeed very, very close (other than the zero).
Do you happen to know if that font available for use in non-commercial
settings?
Thanks!
Noel
one of the white whales.
anyone have OEM documentation for their 5" Elite SMD or IPI drives?
The only thing I've ever been able to find was an installation manual for the SMD verison