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101090 discussions

Friendly reminder to any 5620 / BLIT owners...

by ian.finder＠gmail.com

The battery in the teletype DMD 5620 is mounted in a very fatal position, and does indeed leak, as I learned this weekend. If you have not removed it, I would get on that now. In fact, if you still have batteries in anything, you might be doing it wrong... ;) Cheers, - Ian -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com

10 years, 10 months

SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Hey, I'll take the offer, I am interested in both. Marc > Jay Jaeger wrote: > If anyone is interested, I have code for a Linux SCSI tape to > AWSTAPE program, and a program that translates aws format to a raw > byte stream. Not sure if I have one that translates to the SimH .tap > format, though. GNU C. > Chuck Guzis wrote: > I've got a Linux utility to translate SIMH .tap to raw binary, if that's > interesting to anyone. I would have thought that such utilities existed > already.

10 years, 10 months

PDP-12 Restoration at the RICM

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

We found a shorted diode in one of the rectifiers in the +/-42VDC supply in the VR14 that was causing the main fuse to blow. The donor of the PDP-12 gave us a spare so that was an easy fix. We reinstalled the VR14 in the PDP-12 and ran the display diags. The VR14 display actually works! We found a open trimpot for the gain on the vertical flip-chip. We swapped the horizontal and vertical flip-chips, adjusted the gain trimpot, removed the flip-chip, and added a fixed resistor with the same value for now. The display when running the diags looks very nice and crisp. We booted LAP6-DIAL and could display a listing of the files on the tape on the VR14 monitor. After about 20 minutes of running nicely, the TC12 went back into the mode where it could not find blocks. Oh well, more debugging to do. -- Michael Thompson

10 years, 10 months

Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Wow. I'll never complain again that it takes too long to boot Windows...

10 years, 10 months

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Eric Christopherson > people who like to program in languages or language implementations or > libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. > From: Sean Conner > My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an > operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and > specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get > custom system calls to use. > ... > [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did some stuff. There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene did that. Noel

10 years, 10 months

MTS

by lyndon＠orthanc.ca

There have been a few references to MTS over the past couple of months that led me to suspect people are running it under Hercules. I did some poking around a while back and managed to find some tape images (bitsaver, I think), and did some cursory reading of the release notes. I think there might be enough there to IPL and perform a basic installation, but what immediately caught my attention was the mention that sites had to purchase ASMH from IBM, which leads me to believe the public distributions don't contain an assembler. I cut my teeth on *real* computers on the U of Alberta's Amdahl running MTS, and I can't possibly imagine using it without an assembler. So my first question is: is anyone running MTS under Hercules from these public images? And if yes, question 2 is: which languages are included? One of the main reasons I would like to get MTS running would be to play around with the scheduler code. I remember some changes that were introduced circa 1981 that - I thought - destroyed the interactive response time of the system. E.g. APL went from being a joy to practically un-usable, IMO. I've always wanted to poke around in there and see if I couldn't fix it. And to get thoroughly esoteric and obscure, what are the odds that someone out there squirreled away an archive of SHOW:? from UQV-MTS? --lyndon

10 years, 10 months

Adding a Hard Drive to an Original IBM PC Using a Raspberry Pi

by fozztexx＠fozztexx.com

One of my favorite old computers to tinker with is a rev B IBM PC. I recently moved it out into my living room to hopefully inspire me to mess with it more, but I still didn?t want to mess with having to put everything on 360k floppies. With all the slots occupied I had to find another solution for mass storage. Raspberry Pi to the rescue! I was able to use XTIDE and a Pi to emulate a hard drive over the RS232 port. All the details are here on my blog post: http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/244 -- Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com

10 years, 10 months

SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by cclist＠sydex.com

A couple of weeks ago, I offered to share the source and executable for a SCSI tape-to-SIMH .TAP file utility for MSDOS. To run it, you'll need an ASPI driver for your SCSI adapter. It was compiled using MSC 8.00C. Find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6qiudlpyitgxom/STP2T02.ZIP?dl=0 Enjoy, Chuck ------------------------------------------------------------- "The first thing we do, let's kill all the spammers."

10 years, 10 months

FOR SALE: HP 700/92 green screen monitor

by shawn-gordon＠cox.net

Excellent condition, $100 plus shipping or best offer.

10 years, 10 months

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Algol 60, that is. It was used as the inspiration by just about > everything that followed I've just remembered that the Algol (probably Algol-60, but the manual doesn't say) interpreter used for the programming languages course at MIT was adapted from the Delphi (a homebrew PDP-11 OS used at MIT) version, to a version that would run under Unix V6. So it should be runnable under any PDP-11 emulator. I _think_ I have that on those backup tapes I'm trying to get read, so maybe someday (it's a pity none of that MIT Unix stuff seems to have escaped into preservation, at least, so far) it will be widely available. They had a BCPL compiler for the PDP-11 that ran under Unix, too. Ditto about 'on the tape'. > From: Phil Budne > Mostly I write SNOBOL4 throw away programs for textual transformations. Huh, that's what Regex-Replace is for! ;-) Noel

10 years, 10 months

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