I'm getting a little tired of replacing old dried-out foam blocks to
hold down the ends of 1/2" tapes. Worse, some of the ones I've fished
out have utterly crumbled over the years, leaving bits of themselves
inside the reel.
One thing that I recall is that many tape manufacturers used a blue,
sort of "sticky silicon" tape to hold ends in place. This stuff never
seems to degrade.
Does anyone know what the stuff is and where one might get a roll of it?
--Chuck
To act as a diffuser we use two strips of semi translucent tape across
the clear areas where the lamps/LED's shine through.
However DEC lamps / LEDs are not noted for their brilliance. So unless
requested we will leave them off.
Rod Smallwood
I finally got the excellent AK6DN tu58em emulator working as my VAX-11/730's console drive, as discussed on VCF. The trouble appears to have been a simple timing issue: tu58em includes some time delays which run afoul of the 730 console's very aggressive timeout checking. After patching in a command line flag to disable them, my 730 console seems to be happy with tu58em running on my MacBook Air over an FTDI USB/RS-232 converter. I've also tweaked the FTDI's driver settings to make sure that latency is minimized, but I'm not sure if I changed it significantly from the default. But the console appears to time out if the tape drive takes 20ms or more to respond to the initialization sequence, so every millisecond might impact reliability.
With the console working and loading up a version 57 11/730 console tape image that I found online, I've been trying to boot the machine up. When I try to boot from either the R80 or RL02, I get error message "%BOOT-F-Unexpected Machine Check". Does that error message mean anything to the VAX experts out there?
This machine was believe to be working before time + transport, and I'm trying to bring it up for the first time since I got it. I still have a lot of learning curve to climb, but I'm excited to have made more progress.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
never owned an auto load drive.... nor do I want to!
always afraid of anything autoload....things getting eaten!
Ed#
In a message dated 6/9/2015 2:54:36 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
drb at msu.edu writes:
> foam blocks ... hated the things we just tucked one end of the tape
> under the tape ring and snapped it shut seems things stayed in place
> nicely and no foam outgassing under the seal of the tape ring.
Those of us with autoload drives despised you. :)
Well, ok, the 3420 drives probably did ok regardless; you do get
something for the money (and mass) of a blue drive.
The Cipher streamers often choked on these, though.
De
ONLY SOMETIMES...
remember Varian also made scientific instruments that had computers
lasted to them and probably used dec when they were not making their own
mini Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org)
In a message dated 6/9/2015 2:46:50 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
bqt at update.uu.se writes:
On 2015-06-09 23:15, tony duell wrote:
>>> DEC was very keen on its OEM business and if the order was big enough
would allow some variation in
>>> colours but would not allow the dec logo to be removed or changed.
>
>> I?m not sure if that?s completely true. I remember a PDP11 (11/45
probably) at the University of Illinois, around
>
> I am pretty sure I once saw a PDP8/e which was absolutely normal
internally, but where the front panel was
> green (as were the switch handles) and it was badged 'Varian'. I don't
remember a Digital logo on the
> front anywhere.
WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made minis themselves. Sounds
extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge
on it. Did someone try to make a joke?
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 9:30 AM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> I?m not sure if that?s completely true. I remember a PDP11 (11/45 probably) at the University of Illinois, around 1975. It was used as a terminal controller for ARPAnet. The system was called ANTS (not sure what that stands for), and it had a custom logo panel for the top of the H960 racks, in red and yellow, showing large ants crawling all along the cabinets.
ARPA Network Terminal System. I've got an ANTS logo panel on the wall
at home. I know I have some photos of it online but I'm not finding
them in the destruction wrought by Google on their old Picasa site. I
remember the orange/red color combo made it really hard to photograph.
I'll dig them up later and post a follow-up.
There is some info on that system, as well as a lot of other PDP and
minicomputing goodness, here:
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/32601/semiannualtechn…
j
Hi all,
I'm going to release "version 1.0" of my book in a PDF edition this
Friday night. Then in a couple of weeks from now I'll release a Kindle
e-book version and a print edition.
The PDF version is only $8 and can be ordered right now at the very
primitive web site: http://www.abacustosmartphone.com.
There's nothing to stop people from sharing or posting the PDF, other
than me asking nicely: please do not do that. I am releasing the book
early because I need the money.
So what's in the book? It is the story of the evolution of
mobile/portable computers -- how we got from the abacus to the
smartphone. I wrote it in plain English for general and mildly technical
readers. There aren't a lot of tech speeds-and-feeds; it doesn't explain
how the computers worked or how to program them. It is almost entirely
about who made them, why, and how they all improved on each other to
incrementally move the ball forward. I think it's interesting. Some
parts are very funny. Most of all, it's a story that until never was
never told.
- Evan
With all the traffic on 8 front panels, which sounds great, I was asked
about letting a few of mine go a while ago. The plan was to test and
configure to order.
A few list members inquired about selling a few as is making it cheaper for
them, and more educational. I thought about it, looked at some of my
projects, my piles of junk, thought about it some more and said yes. I"m
not sure who dropped the ball.
Contact me off list if you are interested. I'll think about overseas.
Thanks, Paul
17 is still pretty scarce!
In a message dated 6/9/2015 11:57:04 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
lbickley at bickleywest.com writes:
> I know of 17 PDP-8/S systems, including four at the RICM.
> The RICM has an OMD8S data-break and memory expansion chassis for an
> 8/S.
