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101090 discussions

Who's rewired their house for this hobby?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Eric Smith > I was surprised about an aspect of the KL10 design. To my astonishment, > he replied, "The reason I made that decision was..." Any chance you could document (for history) what the aspect was, and why he did it the way he did? Actually, there is this thing called the 'IEEE Annals of the History of Computing' journal, and they have a special category called 'Anecdotes', where people tell the history of things they were involved in. They don't go through the whole peer review process, so there's a lot less hassle to writing something for that. I just did one on token rings at MIT. It's a good way to capture all this stuff that is of historical interest, but not otherwise documented. Maybe he could be convinved to do one on 'The Design of the KL-10'? Noel

11 years, 8 months

Who's rewired their house for this hobby?

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

> > From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) > Subject: Re: Who's rewired their house for this hobby? > > > From: Michael Thompson > > > just for the KS10 > > You have a KS-10? Way cool! What OS are you running on it? You should run > ITS > (the best PDP-10 OS _ever_, all sort of cool features), it was modified to > run on a KS-10, and there are emulated KS-10's running it still. > > Noel > The KS10 is on long term loan from the Rhode Island Computer Museum. I borrowed it so I could get it and a RP06 working. It runs TOPS-10 and TOPS-20. I haven't tried ITS, but I have everything that it would take to get ITS running. There are actually quite a few real KS10s in collectors hands. -- Michael Thompson

11 years, 8 months

retry: classiccmp help sought

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

I sent this a week ago, didn't get a response, thought I'd try one more time before trying to shoehorn time on my own to address (aka defying the physics of time): Greetings folks. Is there anyone that is *very* well versed in mailman "under the hood" that can do a one-time assist with the following: 1) Get the "two views of the same list but joined at the hip" working the way it previously was. I have some details/recollections on this, but not complete "do this" instructions. 2) There has been an ongoing issue for years with the "forgot password" emails and/or the new subscriber email verification not working right. 3) Please for the love of god figure out why every single post to the list gets me a "bounce rejection" notice to my mailbox and stop it. 4) Integrate multiple fragments (I have several, if that's not complete other listmembers have mentioned they can supply any missing fragments) of the list archives into one archive that is complete. FYI - when rebuilding the server a couple weeks ago, I switched from sendmail to postfix, so a passing familiarity with postfix would be helpful as well in your endeavors above. The OS is FreeBSD r10 p11. If anyone is versed in the above and has a bit of time to spearhead the above tasks, please email me off-list. Also - once the archives are cleaned up, two other folks have volunteered to get archive searches to be "much improved". Thanks!! J

11 years, 8 months

Reading a CD that has no reflective layer

by jfoust＠threedee.com

At 06:06 PM 11/24/2014, Eric Smith wrote: > Having an ISA slot is necessary but not sufficient; it also >requires a sufficiently slow CPU, and I'm not sure where the cutoff >is. Probably need a 286 or older. Yes, I think I saw a note that said 25 Mhz was too fast. - John

11 years, 8 months

Machinery, free for local pickup in Germany

by jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de

Hi. The Unix-AG has several machines taking up space. Those machines have not seen any use in many years. So we would like to give them into good hands. If YOU don't take the machines they will hit the dumpster, sooner or later. I can't rescue them. My flat is completely out of space. Problem: Local pickup in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Take them all, take only part of it. We don't care. As long as we can get rid of the stuff. Available is: - about half a dozen HP9000 B2600 - about half a dozen RS/6000 43P-100/-133 - about half a dozen RS/6000 44P-170 - one RS/6000 F50 - one Sun Enterprise 450 + the guts of an other E450 - one Sun Enterprise 250 + the guts of an other E250 - some Sun OEM thing, basicly a rackmount U60, dual 400 or 440 MHz. - one or two Sun Ultra 5 - one or two Sun Ultra 10 - one or two SparcStation 5 and 20 each. - Myrinet switches, cables and PCI adapters. (Copper and fiber optic.) - probably a SGI Indigo R4k and an Indigo2 R8k. - some minor stuff I forgot about. I may throw in some HP9000/700, SPARC and RS/6000 stuff from my private collection... (I need space to work on my PDP-11/34 and its Tektronix 4012...) -- tsch??, Jochen

11 years, 8 months

TRS-80 Model 16

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kevin Parker > good quality 8" media is a significant problem given its age .. > I have .. several hundred 8" floppies. .. > Some of the disks look like the parched earth of a desert so they'll be > a no go. As for the rest it's a guess - just be careful if you're > popping disks in and out and check if the surface of the disk is > visually OK and that it leaves nothing behind in the drive. I was under the impression that older floppies should be given the same 'heat soak' treatment given to old tapes (which makes sense; they are similar formulations on a mylar base). Once that is done, my understanding is that older floppies are actually generally quite usable, pretty must like they were when new? Noel

11 years, 8 months

Who's rewired their house for this hobby?

by killingsworth.todd＠gmail.com

Hi All - I'm looking into getting a bigger Sun box (bigger than my E3000) and after reading the specs... If I'm really going to do this, I'll need to get some 220v outlets wired up. (I'm in the US.) Any advice to pass along for this? I'd much rather listen to other people's surprises than have to rediscover them on my own. How much of what you collect requires 220v? How many big boxes do you keep running - 24/7 or just turn it on/off as you want to use it? I guess somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that old machines took lots of power. But do the collectors here wire up their homes and keep machines there? Or do you have another place (old warehouse or somesuch) that already supports multiple 220v hookups? Or do you colo it somewhere? Not yet sure how expensive it would be, but my wife thinks I'm completely certifiable. Todd Killingsworth

11 years, 8 months

Yay, now I need some Osborne boot media!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com > The flamewar about RX02 is based on defining what is meant by the > phrase "MFM floppy"! ... The RX02 is NOT an "FM floppy"; the RX02 is > NOT an "MFM floppy". It is a hybrid. Exactly. > In terms of the floppy ITSELF, disks rated for FM or rated for MFM > should both work I guess I don't understand this. Single-density FM and double-density MFM have the same maximum number of flux reversals per unit distance (which is how the RX02 can write double-density data on a single-density floppy). So >from the magnetic domain perspective, the coating can't really see any difference between single-density FM and double-density MFM. So what's the difference, if any, between a disk which is "rated for FM" and one "rated for MFM"? Noel

11 years, 8 months

mainframes and other stuff

by jfoust＠threedee.com

At 12:32 PM 11/24/2014, you wrote: > To give a more modern >perspective on things - how much gold do you think is in a Pentium Pro >microprocessor? Thick plate over a large surface area...go look it up, >and you will probably be surprised. Then do some back of the napkin >calculations on the surface area of the PPro, compared to thousands >upon thousands of pins in a 2075... Let's say that a Pentium Pro has a third of a gram; a troy ounce is 31.1 grams; so 94 Pentium Pro to the troy ounce; 4.5 pounds is about 65 troy ounces; so 6,182 Pentium Pro might have that much gold. The price of gold was still $35 a troy ounce in 1970; so that S/360's gold cost about $2,300 (or what feels like about $14,000 today.) In 2013 at $1,200 an ounce, that S/360's gold was worth $78,720. - John

11 years, 8 months

DEC Professional 350 - video issues

by commodorejohn＠gmail.com

I went out to Seth's moving-sale giveaway this past weekend and came away with a few DEC goodies, including a DEC Professional 350 which was given to me on the understanding that the video didn't work. I set it up yesterday and sure enough, the video doesn't work. Specifically, the monitor (a VR201 with BCC02 cable) turns on and displays no picture, but shows visible sync lines all across and down the screen, and the diagnostic LEDs indicate a selftest failure on the card slot that the bitmap card is plugged into. (I tried moving it to another slot just to check, and sure enough, it fails there, too. I don't think it's a general CTI bus issue because the other two cards don't generate a selftest failure code. I did test the monitor with the Rainbow I also picked up and it's working fine.) The card itself doesn't have any socketed ICs, so it's not chip creep, and the ZIF connector looks to be in good shape. Beyond that, I don't know what to look for in diagnosing the issue - does anybody have any idea what might be wrong with it, and how it could be fixed? (Is there a service manual for the card out there somewhere? I couldn't find one.)

11 years, 8 months

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