> a digital microvax ][
I assume you man a MicroVAXII, only apple used the ][.
> it's big. i thought a ps2 model 80 was big, but this eclipses it. not test
> yet, but i need info on what it is, what it did, and is it worth keeping?
Ba23, ba123 or ba213 box? There were also the 1cuft vaxen (vs2000).
IF you think the vax was big the 21" color monitor dwarfed it!
> being used to the pc world i didnt see monitor/keyb connections. should i
> an ascii terminal to conenct to it to use it? it has a door on the front w
> something behind it (tape?) but it's locked down. if anyone can point me t
> faq id be grateful.
Around back of the unit. Depending on version it was terminal
(vt100/220/320...) or vr290/320 monitor mouse and keyboard.
Allison
> I have a book about marketing, written by a Tandy VP which has a large
> chapter on the birh of the TRS-80. He mentioned the day of the first
> produced unit, (sept 15th I think) and game totals for the first months
> or two (It seemed they only managed 3 computer a day for the first week
> or two).
The august/september was the dates!. Also the first few months were a
learning experience for TANDY ftworth as they didn't know how to properly
handle mos devices, inline QC and do testing non destructively. The early
yeilds were horrendously low! The dry air and mishandling ment most of the
mos and much ttl were no good by time the were in the board or were killed
on the board. I vaguly remember saying when I saw the way things were beign
done "you have got to be kidding!" and several people stated investigating
ESD procedure and manufacturing QC.
Allison
> A microVAX or any of the VAXEN is NOT a home computer. I know that PC's
> were not the first ones to do it and never claimed it, and what I am talki
Define home computer? In the early days of PCs(xt class) pro350s, PDP11
with color graphics and hard disk. These were single user multitasking
systems in the same price range asna loaded xt.
> about is the person who still uses his apple ][, and has never touched
> anything else, saying everything else is junk. sure a Mini workstation ca
> do it, no question about it, but I *KNOW* that a kaypro, apple ][+ C=64,
> coleco ADAM, 8 bit Ataris and other HOME computers of that era CAN'T handl
Thein lies my point. These were the low end of the spectrum, low cost and
performance at the low end of the spectrum for what the cpu used could do.
Though the apple was one of the better ones.
Really, an ADAM and interestig machine uses a z80 it was slow compared to
many due to how it was implemented. Same for many others. C64s/128 are
fast machines... throttled to slow by a slow serial link to the disk. Every
one of those machines were interesting but crippled perfomance wise.
Granted often it was done for cost reasons. Even the kaypro, while fairly
fast has the slowest screen on the planet. I say that lovingly as I have one
but while it can transfer files at 9600 if it writes to screen 2400 may be
too fast.
This is not an inditement of their collectability or other interesting ideas
they brought forward. It is a cold assessment of their performance when
measured against their respective CPU standards (1980 z80-4mhz, 6502-2mhz,
6800-2mhz, 6809-2mhz, ti9900-3.3mhz, 8086/8-5mhz...) and what they could do
when run at that performance level. So when you say the ti99/4a was to slow
to do real IP or multiuser(acceptably) it was the TI99/4a not the 9900 cpu
or other 9900 designs which could.
Allison
> lynx is nice, as I use it for fast FTP, but when I read about a PDP11, it
> nice to see a picture of one, rather just text.
Most people were running altairs and the like in 78... I was a friend
started with one in '76. But in 78 he decided a H-11 bas a better deal.
H-11 was a DEC LSI-11 cpu card with heathkit made boards around them that
were DEC look alikes and a OS that was RT-11 look alike. All of a sudden
minies weren't too big or out of range.
> everyone forgets is that having limited memory is a pain,
> and TCP/IP alone uses 64K in ONE SOCKET ALONE as a buffer.
That was true even of most PDP-11s. What the -11 (most minies) had
were more efficient IO even if it was floppies.
> You have a good point there, and it would work sorta, but patience runs th
> after awhile, as decoding images at 1 MHZ does take 1 min, times that wit
> 10 or so inlines you will find at every web page, and waiting 10 mins for
This is a problem for me with the 486dx/50 and 33.6 modem. Most fo the
images unless compressed really do not require much processing (GIFs).
> its not about apps, its about efficincy, and operator comfort. VGA or SVG
> is worth it becuse it prevents eyestrain, and you can use your system for
> longer amounts of time. I used color TV's before when I got started, and
> serious word processing was painful to the eyes. RGB's are better, but no
I've been using h-19s, vt100s for years to get past the TV displays that
generally are low res.
> by much. also its about speed. The ability to cut and paste is underrated
> as in serious work, it saves gobs of time. I love command line interfaces
I could cut and past using editors for cp/m back in '80. Cut and past is an
editing feature not a system capability. PCs running windows make it latent
on the screen all of the time, thats the difference.
When some one said a home machine in say...'80 it was appleII, trs80, S100
or SS50(6800/6809). At that time people that had PDP-8s, -11s, DG novas
were scarce. By '86 most of the minies were old and getting accessable
cheap and not all were large either!. Move to 1990, people are collecting
vaxes (the 780 was new in '78) as most of the 7xx series systems were going
to junk. the 730s/750s though slow were small enough to consider for a
home. What's forgotten is by 1990 a lot of stuff was over 5-10 years old.
Now in 1997, microvaxes (ca 1986-7) are for dumpster diving and these little
gems are not slow nor are they under powered and they had VGA or better
capabilities and they are collectable.
Now what you said is true of many systems. I'd never try to run a modem
program on my TI99 at faster than 1200 as it will not keep up. Then again
it was by the standards of the time very very slow! It was neat. My systems
for the late '70s were s100 for flexibility and speed. I found myself
looking at canned systems like TRS80, apple and felt most fo the time like I
was running a fuel dragster compared to that. But I was running networks
and the like in '81 because I knew of them and could design my own to save a
buck (they existed for home computers but were expensive). I got my first
PDP-11 in '83 for FREE because the lsi-11 boards and memory were old! It
was my first save! The -11 introduced me to small minies, and big
performance. Some required a scope and series debugging to get them going
but the cost offset that (free). It would be years (1991) before PCs would
eclipse the power of the various PDP-11s (many of the 11/23 design) and the
software maturity behind it.
Many computer consumers knew they wanted performance. It was minies
where more could be found. I'd point out that many of the minies were
disguised. Alpha Microsystems(ca 1977) had the same chip set as the LSI-11
with a slightly different instruction set modification and was s100, still
the same capability. There was the Western Digital Pascal Microengine,
Marinechip (PDP-11 in s100), pdt-11/150, Pro350 to name a few that were
either pre-pc or on the PC introduction cusp.While home computing was
commodores and apples and trs80 they were the appliance machines for many.
There was always a core of those that felt they were nice and had good
ideas but, they wanted more.
Allison
Well, I see some rumblings in the group about archiving (among other
things) EPROMs and other such chips.
I think it's a great idea! I will assist as much as I can, considering
that I certainly have the equipment for it (Data I/O UniSite, current rev).
I can read or program just about anything that comes in a DIP package that
is programmable to begin with (including PALs if the security fuse isn't
blown).
In other news... A Scrounging I Will Go! I'm off to the Bay Area as of
Saturday next week (the 5th) for a major see-what's-changed trip, to say
nothing of hitting two swap meets (Livermore and Foothill) and seeing what
other kinds of trouble I can get into.
Sam, watch for an E-mail. I'd like to get in touch with you when I hit the
area. For those who have visited my web page, I'll be giving the scrounging
section a major facelift and update after I get back.
Caveat Emperor!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Sysop, The Dragon's Cave BBS (Fidonet 1:343/272)
(Hamateur: WD6EOS) (E-mail: kyrrin(a)wizards.net)
http://www.wizards.net/technoid
"Our science can only describe an object, event, or living thing in our own
human terms. It cannot, in any way, define any of them..."
i need some help on what i found this weekend.
a trs80 model III 48k. came with trsdos disk, but i havent tested it yet.
can anyone point to a source of software. now i need a model ][ to fill in
the blanks!
a digital microvax ][
it's big. i thought a ps2 model 80 was big, but this eclipses it. not tested
yet, but i need info on what it is, what it did, and is it worth keeping?
being used to the pc world i didnt see monitor/keyb connections. should i get
an ascii terminal to conenct to it to use it? it has a door on the front with
something behind it (tape?) but it's locked down. if anyone can point me to a
faq id be grateful.
there was plenty of xt's and the old pc peripheral expansion unit i might get
also.
total cost <$20.
david
Recently I got a SyQuest SQ555 Removable drive (44mb/SCSI) for free. I
have been looking for cartridges that fir this drive but so far no luck.
(Well, I did find one place that still sold them but they wanted $40 a
piece for 'em). If anyone knows of a cheap(er) place to get these babies,
please let me know!
Thanks,
les
more(a)crazy.rutgers.edu
> going for a while. I don't know that Dr. Shoppa using all that classic
> DEC machinery at his Canadian university qualifies as doing "ordinary hom
> applications", although I'm delighted to hear that the old junk is still
> providing useful service (heck, at Hughes here, we have PDP-11s running
I have six all operational two get regular use. BEsides my CP/M systems
>from before the flood.
> >modern MAC or PC, they have NO idea what is bieng missed. web pages in fu
> >photo quality color, realistic games, PPP connections, Realaudio etc. I a
Well, much of this I used to do back around '85 using microvax in color with
a 1280x1024 19" screen! Asa to much of the other stuff it's all hardware
much of which saw it origins on s100, Q and other busses.
Allison
At 12:00 AM 6/28/97 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> also about enough ram space...NOT!
>> I have some software for the C=64 that plays back digital sound files. wit
>> the stock 64K of ram, I can hold a 6 second clip. with the 1764 ram
>> expansion with 512K of ram, I can hold a 60 second clip, but no longer tha
>
>Funny my s100 crate can playback easily 8mb and using a modified os 32mb
>of sound. In this case a well designed hard disk system (circa 1982)
>easily keeps up without eating ram. On a z80 at 4mhz. Oh, the disk size
>was limited by budget! Even in 1982 hard disks were plenty fast enough to
>support fast DACs or audio.
>
>Allison
That is because the software you run want work well enough at 1 MHZ... and
if you want to edit, that is where the heap requirement goes up.
At 06:20 PM 6/27/97 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Well, much of this I used to do back around '85 using microvax in color with
^^^^^^^
>a 1280x1024 19" screen! Asa to much of the other stuff it's all hardware
>much of which saw it origins on s100, Q and other busses.
>
>Allison
A microVAX or any of the VAXEN is NOT a home computer. I know that PC's
were not the first ones to do it and never claimed it, and what I am talking
about is the person who still uses his apple ][, and has never touched
anything else, saying everything else is junk. sure a Mini workstation can
do it, no question about it, but I *KNOW* that a kaypro, apple ][+ C=64,
coleco ADAM, 8 bit Ataris and other HOME computers of that era CAN'T handle it.
