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101090 discussions

Favourite text based word processing software

by mark＠markesystems.com

Ian King <isking at uw.edu> suggested: <...> > For low resource AND cognitive overhead, how about using either LaTeX or > HTML tagging, which could then be interpreted in a simple mapping table > for > a given printer? By not implementing all of the bells and whistles of > either syntax, one could create something that's lightweight and > sufficiently expressive. Or how about MarkDown? A combination of this (for in-line emphasis or font changes) and perhaps some beginning-of-line dot-commands (like runoff, and also in WordStar) would likely be adequately expressive (I've done entire reference manuals using only MarkDown), easy to implement, and easy to parse for formatted output (printed, HTML, or whatever). ~~ Mark Moulding

11 years, 8 months

Nice LSI-11 brochure

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

There's a nice LSI-11 brochure going on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/291318103446 It's got pictures of a lot of different kinds of cards (useful for ID purposes), a modest amount of technical content, etc. Definitely worth having if you're a PDP-11 collector, and can get it for not too much (I already have one, don't need another... :-) Noel

11 years, 8 months

Wanted - Tandy/RadioShack Prototype boards

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: drlegendre > If you take a look at eBay Sold Items, in late September, a 276-190 > sold for $6 inclusive of US shipping. It only took one bid, so it seems > like the competition isn't too tight. If you decide to go for the one at TopLine, and want to make an offer that's lower than the listed price, mention this (and give the item # for reference). They're very business-like, and they want to move inventory, so if something's only going for $X on the open market, they will cheerfully take $X for it, even if they have it listed for $4X (unlike some eBay sellers, who persist in listing things for $4X, and won't budge - with the result that their stuff stays up forever, almost never selling). Noel

11 years, 8 months

Wanted - Tandy/RadioShack Prototype boards

by dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com

Folks, Any one got any of these Radio Shack boards lurking that they would sell and ship to the UK? The 275-190 looks best, there is one on E-Bay now but at $20 plus $18 for shipping to the UK its getting very expensive.. . Actually looking at DigiKey that's cheap. $33 for a new board with no shipping. 276-180 276-152 276-190 Or actually any thing with a 22/44 way 0.156" connector. Dave G4UGM

11 years, 8 months

Anyone have a spare Apple IIgs power supply?

by spacewar＠gmail.com

If anyone happens to have a spare Apple IIgs power supply that they'd be willing to sell for lower than eBay prices, I could really use one. On eBay, the power supply often sells for more than the whole computer. I will replace the failed capacitor in the power supply that I have, but unfortunately when it smoked and burst, it got smelly resinous crap all over the PCB, other components, and the inside of the power supply case, so I'd prefer to put in another power supply than constantly fill the house with fumes from this one. Thanks! Eric

11 years, 8 months

Favourite text based word processing software

by billdeg＠buzz1.com

> Hello group > I'm toying with the idea of writing a simple word processing package along the lines of Wordstar for my Retrochallenge 2015/01 entry. <snip> > So a little more than a text-editor but only enough to support simple formatting and styles (bold, italic, underline for example). > > Ideally I'd like to implement a clean, logical design without many 'bells and whistles' concentrating on the core functionality. Mark, As a programmer I used to use QEDIT most of the time because it made it easy to edit by column as well as row, mark/move text, easy keystroke commands. The copy I have is saved as q.exe. It was better than notepad and I continued to use it well past it's era. Still hard to edit by column when your parsing text without being forced to use a spreadsheet program. Sounds like you're talking more of a word processor though. So, I'd put in my vote for something like IBM Personal Editor (PEDIT) which gave a person a lot of functionality with little RAM overhead. I never really liked WordStar or Word Perfect myself, but I used what I had available. As far as formatting to the printer goes, I suggest you include the capacity to enter printer codes manually so that you can use most any type of printer that accepts them. I remember inserting codes into programs that were used for a specific printer that way. If you have the manual and given you're talking simple print capabilities you would not need to supply drivers. Bill

11 years, 8 months

cctech Digest, Vol 2, Issue 12

by cruff＠ruffspot.net

On Dec 12, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote; > Subject: SCSI tape question > Now, when I come to a filenark, I'm expecting that the filemark bit (bit > 7) will be set in the sense key. It doesn't happen, the result just > comes back as 0 bytes read and a normal (NO_SENSE) sense result. The > additional sense code and sense qualifier bytes are also 0. I wrote the SCSI tape drivers for the Unix based version of the NCAR Mass Storage System (MSS) Storage Manager servers, we moved a few petabytes of data through them. It made use of the SCSI generic interfaces of Irix, Solaris and Linux, but we couldn't trust the default OS tape drive driver behaviors would do the right thing for an archive. You should be able to detect file mark indications in either the variable length or fixed block read modes. When the tape (or drive controller buffer position for those that perform buffering) is positioned at the file mark, you will get a check condition response to the issuance of the read command, then you (or the SCSI generic driver) issue the read sense command (immediately after the read, no other intervening commands!) and the file mark bit will be set in the sense buffer. For the generic SCSI devices, you can typically tell the driver to perform an auto sense for check condition responses. Just make sure you have properly told the driver where to put the sense data. I suppose a drive could have a manufacturer specific mode that could hide file marks, but I've never seen one. We did make use of manufacturer specific procedures to place the read head beyond the detected EOT mark so we could recover tapes that had been accidentally overwritten in the middle of recorded data.

11 years, 8 months

Wanted - Tandy/RadioShack Prototype boards

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Sean Caron > I can offer a seller endorsement; I've bought VAXen and VAX parts from > them quite a few times and they ship quick & are easy to work with... > they also are good about accepting reasonable offers on items. I have > no clue who that individual is but they have a huge stash of neat stuff > they are selling off... Oh, ComUsed/TopLine! Yes, they are really quite good, along all axes. I deal with them a great deal, it seems like I drive up to DC about once a month to pick up large/heavy items from them! :-) Their place is pretty amazing - it looks like something out of one of the seedy backwaters from a William Gibson book; on the inside, it's stacked to the rafters (literally!) with old stuff (albeit considerably better organized than the typical Gibson gomi collector's :-). Their business is buying and selling used computer stuff; e.g. they do a lot of business in used printers. Much of the large amount of PDP-11/VAX/DEC stuff they have/had came from the estate of a major DEC collector who died; somewhat to their amazement, I think, they've found that it sells well! I have the impression they've picked up other groups of stuff too, although none as large as that. They tend not to have complete systems of any size (some smallish LSI11's is about it), they don't have a lot of room; but the prices are usually hard to beat. Can definitely recommend them, along all axes. Noel

11 years, 8 months

[rescue] Inside Solaris newsletter

by silent700＠gmail.com

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Andrew Hoerter <amh at pobox.com> wrote: > I've followed up off-list, so hopefully my additional issues will be > available online at some point. I'm happy to say that the issues Andrew sent to me a few weeks back have made it through my scan queue, endured some archive.org index weirdness and are now online. There are now 52 issues of Inside Solaris to enjoy over your $holiday: https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Ainsidesolaris&sort=-date (Some of the metadata was incomplete, causing them to present out of order. I just fixed it but the changes haven't indexed yet...perhaps soon...?) -j

11 years, 8 months

No such thing as "the PDP" [was RE: Typesafety versus Worse is Better - was Re: Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?]

by radiotest＠juno.com

At 1247 AM 12/4/2014, Mark Wickens wrote: >I would argue that only the original PDP-1 could rightly be called "the PDP" Speaking of that pioneering machine, does anyone know if there are any plans by the CHM to try to make the MIT engineering prototype operable? I last saw it in use at MIT about 45 years ago, when it was housed adjacent to the TX-0 and the two were being used for speech synthesis experiments. From what I understand the operable machine on display at the CHM is a later C production version. Dale H. Cook, GR / HP Collector, Roanoke/Lynchburg, VA http://plymouthcolony.net/starcity/radios/index.html

11 years, 8 months

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