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CDC STAR was: Happy Birthday VAX 11/780 (influence of)

by cclist＠sydex.com

On 4 Nov 2010 at 9:39, Jerome H. Fine wrote: > TI ASC??? TI's Advanced Scientific Computer. The only reason I was aware of the ASC (and Burroughs' BSC) was because of some proprosal-writing I did for ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting) proposal. We didn't get the contract, but part of your "homework" was to become familiar with competitors' products. >From my often-faulty memory, the ASC was roughly based on the IBM S/360 instruction architecture with a rather arcane (at least it seemed so to me) vector box. 32 bit single-precison/64 bit double- precision with the S/360 style (8+24, normalized to 4 bits) floating point representation. I just did a check and there's some stuff on Bitsavers on it. However, I don't see anything on the BSC there. When we talk today about selling thousands and millions of systems, it was a very different world where vast amounts of money and manpower were put into the hope of selling 10 systems worldwide. One aspect of these supercomputers that's often overlooked is the amount of R&D that goes into peripherals to keep these things fed. TI had a special horizontal-spindle disk drive; STAR had some work done on a super-speed drum and a very wide tape-used-as-movable drum called SCROLL. I don't think that CDC's EBAM was ever considered for STAR (maybe early on), though I do recall seeing a rack of EBAM units sitting in the hall at ADL. By then, Jim Thornton had moved on to other things and was trenching around the parking lot at Arden Hills, burying coax for his 50Mbps network experiments. --Chuck

15 years, 6 months

Happy Birthday VAX 11/780 (influence of)

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2010-10-29 19:00, "Chuck Guzis"<cclist at sydex.com> wrote: > On 29 Oct 2010 at 0:11, Johnny Billquist wrote: > >> Next question: Does the VAX not have virtual memory any more now that >> I've pointed this out? Or do you need to redefine virtual memory in >> yet a new and strange way to exclude the PDP-11... :-D > > I think that using memory address spaces to qualify the "virtualness" > of memory is following the wrong animal. I think that virtual address space is intimately connected to virtual memory, and you cannot have one without the other. If your program vrites data to address 0, and reads it back, and get the same data back, and another program on the same machine, at roughly the same time, write to address 0, and reads the same data back, and that data is different than the first programs data, then I'd say you have virtual memory. > I would define "virtual memory" as the ability to fool a program into > thinking that it has more physical memory than is actually present. > So, can a PDP-11 with 16K of memory appear to a program as if there > were 32K present? Certainly. If we just disregard that the code needed to implement this thing might need more memory than 8K. The program that we intend to fool must have atleast 8K of physical memory, to which we can read in and out pages. With 16K that would leave just 8K for out demand paging software... Well, actually, this is a bit too simplified. An instruction can potentially refer to 4 pages, so we would need to be able to have four pages to be able to fully fool a program. That would mean minimum 32K of physical memory to use for the user program. And then some for your kernel. But you'd probably be able to come in under 56K, while fooling the program that is has 64K. With less than four pages, you could get into a situation where mapping in one page means you have to map out another, which the instruction refers to, and when you restart the program you'll just get another page fault, ad infinitum... :-) 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

15 years, 6 months

DEC H9504 'double hi-boy' cabinet parts

by adam＠nitrate.plus.com

Good morning / afternoon / evening people. For long enough now my PDP 11/70 (decdatasystem 570) has sat around without the side panels ('skins') or the lower front cover (the long, usually blue panel with the air vents). Can anybody assist with clothing this magnificent beast? I ask now because I _had_ a 11/60 cabinet for this purpose reserved with a dealer, but they scrapped it a few weeks ago (just when I wanted to collect it). I'm in the UK by the way before people read too far. In the north actually, but am very willing to travel for the right bits. Cash waiting, if thats what you want. According to the 11/60 document MP00166 (the 11/60 in this case being housed in the same H9504 high-boy corporate cabinet), the part numbers are as follows: Side skins: H9504-CA Front cover: H9504-Rx (x denotes the colour / logo config but I'm not bothered... it can be resprayed) If somebody had the whole cabinet, I have a trailer!! The side panels can also be found on many expansion cabinets / tape systems (for example they are used on my TS11) and, by the looks of it, early VAX. I'd be very appreciative if anybody can help me out. Condition is really unimportant as I have a paint sprayshop handy. Thanks in advance! ..Adam..

15 years, 6 months

TTL HEX LED driver chip

by chd＠chdickman.com

Was there ever such a thing as a 74x00 series LED driver that did proper hex decoding and not simply BCD? I can't seem to find that there was. The topic of why split octal was used on some early micro-computers came up on a list. After doing a search for a TTL LED driver that does hex, the answer is probably that there were no single chip option for hex displays. Split octal was just easier. This kind of joins in with the TIL311 discussion. It was a TTL compatible hex display, but expensive at the time. -chuck

15 years, 6 months

Watts Humphrey

by evan＠snarc.net

Watts Humphrey, known as the "father of software quality testing" died a few days ago. He was 83. Watts was a keynote speaker at VCF East 5.0 (two years ago.) He worked on the MOBIDIC ("Mobile Digital Computer") and on the Fieldata spec (which became ASCII), and which both happened at the Army base that's now our museum. Favorite story that I enjoy telling: Watts explained how, when MOBIDIC was finished and mounted in its 30-foot truck (late 1950s), the Army insisted on testing it like any other military vehicle. So they drove the computer-truck to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. On two test laps, the computer itself came through with flying colors both times. Also on both laps, the truck broke down! Here are some obituaries: Press release -- http://tinyurl.com/2fwdu27 Carnegie Mellon -- http://www.sei.cmu.edu/watts/ SD Times -- http://tinyurl.com/243shql* *

15 years, 6 months

Information about Tektronix 4107A/4109A graphic terminals

by d235j.1＠gmail.com

Anyone out there have one of these? I have one of each, but one is broken and has an incomplete set of ROMs (which appear to be one of the early versions -- maybe 1.0!). I do have a complete set of version 8.2 ROMs, dated 1985. Someone posted photos of a 4107A a while ago at http://picasaweb.google.com/glen.slick/Tektronix4107A#5300179266366767714 . The 4109A we have is fully intact, but the 4107A has front panel damage. Also, we're not sure whether or not we have keyboards and mice. Any information, including owner's and service manuals, would be greatly appreciated. --Dave

15 years, 6 months

Bill's PDP-11/34A (was Re: PDP-11/34A bring up (question about front panel))

by ethan.dicks＠gmail.com

On 11/3/10, B Degnan <billdeg at degnanco.com> wrote: > I don't want to hijack this thread except to say that I too just got an > 11/34 last week. I still need to clean it and learn more about what it > was set to do, but I have a quick question about the front panel. My > system has a flat front panel without the white cover cut out resembling > a mirror image of the US State of Delaware on it's side. My system has > a black front panel with a white rectangular frame around it instead. > What is the origin of this variation? I have never seen that mounting frame for the front panel, but perhaps it's related to your "DEC DataSystem" cover panel. Here's a photo I found googling around for "DEC Datasystem" http://www.compuseum.at/portal/Computers/PDP1134/tabid/93/language/en-US/De… > Here are pictures from the system as I first got it, if it helps with > the card order/comparison purposes. Note that some cards are not > installed in the backplane. > http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/pdp11-34a/before/ Do you have packs for your RL01 drives? Hopefully the packs were removed and the heads locked for transport. An 11/34 w/RL01 is a nice little RT-11 system, though it'd be a bit cramped for 2.9BSD (both in terms of disk and RAM). You could probably also run an older version of RSX-11/M on it too. I think we ran something around RSX-11/M 4.0 or 4.1 on ours in the mid-1980s. -ethan

15 years, 6 months

PDP-11/34A bring up (question about front panel)

by billdeg＠degnanco.com

> > >> > >> > I am the new keeper of the PDP-11/34A that Jack Rubin rescued a while >> > ago and wrote about here, >> > >> > http://decpicted.blogspot.com/2010/01/pdp-1134a-data-systems-design-dsd-880… >> > >> > I took it on a road trip from Chicago back to St. Paul after VCFMW >> > in September. >> > >> > I've been doing a lot of cleanup on it and finally got to the point >> > where I could power it on (just the CPU box) this weekend. >> > >> > I think now I need to learn about Grant Continuity ;-) >> > > I look forward to reading more about this. I don't want to hijack this thread except to say that I too just got an 11/34 last week. I still need to clean it and learn more about what it was set to do, but I have a quick question about the front panel. My system has a flat front panel without the white cover cut out resembling a mirror image of the US State of Delaware on it's side. My system has a black front panel with a white rectangular frame around it instead. What is the origin of this variation? Here are pictures from the system as I first got it, if it helps with the card order/comparison purposes. Note that some cards are not installed in the backplane. http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/pdp11-34a/before/ Bill

15 years, 6 months

Information about Tektronix 4107A/4109A graphic terminals

by dm561＠torfree.net

Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2010 00:31:49 -0500 From: Randy Dawson <rdawson16 at hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Information about Tektronix 4107A/4109A graphic terminals Hi David, Eiter I or Ed may be able to help - I know I have a few 4000 series manuals. Ed runs VintageTek, a Tektronix museum here in Beaverton: vintagetek.org We are meeting Thursday for the bi-weekly run at the Tek Surplus store, I ask to see what he has available. Randy +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ A little OT but speaking of vintage Tek: I have a bunch of their Service Scope 'magazines' from the late 60's; can I assume that these exist elsewhere and I can dispose of them if and when? mike

15 years, 6 months

Bill's PDP-11/34A

by billdeg＠degnanco.com

> > I have never seen that mounting frame for the front panel, but perhaps > > it's related to your "DEC DataSystem" cover panel. > > I've seen that sort of frame a couple of times; they were used in > (possibly among other things) embedded applications. It's been a long > time but I think I saw them in big GenRad board testers. > > > Here's a photo I found googling around for "DEC Datasystem" > > > > http://www.compuseum.at/portal/Computers/PDP1134/tabid/93/language/en-US/Def ault.aspx > > Hey, that looks just like the rack my 11/70 is in. > That could explain the original purpose of the 11/34 in my possession, the rack that the system came in has a DEC DataSystem panel: http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/pdp11-34a/before/2010-10-27_20-42-43_160. jpg Bill

15 years, 6 months

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