test-drb

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101090 discussions

by thomas.gardner＠sbcglobal.net

If Mike is still on this mail list: yr email at mike<AT>corestore<DOT>org has been bouncing for about a week now, with a "Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1) message. Does anyone have an alternate email address for Mike? Tom

15 years, 6 months

Royal calculator available

by auringer＠tds.net

For the calculator collector: Royal 8HPD battery operated handheld printing calculator. It seems to be fully functional. Comes with two rolls of paper. I will accept the first decent offer above shipping costs from 53714. See a picture here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jja572/sets/72157625108629242 -Jon Jon Auringer

15 years, 6 months

EPAY DEC Qbus Z-80

by tshoppa＠wmata.com

Steve asks: > With my limited exposure to the DEC/PDP stuff, this looks strange... > Z-80 chips on a QBus card? Is it noteworthy? worth bidding on? > unusual? just plain junk? What would it work with/in /on? > item no 250693741192 These were circa early 80's and this board was 4 CP/M systems. I think there were single and double boards too. There were some bizarre hooks between the CP/M BIOS and the Unibus (usually VAX/VMS... but there may have been others) filesystems that I never really grokked. The relationship to VMS printers was more straightforward. But yeah, you need some specialized drivers etc. probably not updated since VMS 3.x to use this. We had these in the 80's and the secretaries would connect to the VAX, then connect to the embedded CP/M system, and edit files using CP/M word processor, then print to printers on the VAX. Pretty convoluted. Later on the same secretaries used an emulated IBM PC inside the VAX. Tim.

15 years, 6 months

IBM 5022

by robin＠hx-20.com

Hello Does anyone have a serviceable IBM 5022 disk drive unit, or perhaps have technical documentation on this drive that they would be prepared to scan and email? I have a single-platter disk pack (written in 1974) that I'd like to read. I believe it was written by a System/7. Am based in UK and US (MN). Thanks Robin

15 years, 6 months

EPAY DEC Qbus Z-80

by shumaker＠att.net

With my limited exposure to the DEC/PDP stuff, this looks strange... Z-80 chips on a QBus card? Is it noteworthy? worth bidding on? unusual? just plain junk? What would it work with/in /on? item no 250693741192 steve

15 years, 6 months

Tadpole/RDI UltraBook NVRAM problem...

by erik＠baigar.de

Dear Vintage-Computer experts, over the last year I "lost" two Tadpole/RDI UltraBook notebooks. These are Ultra Sparc based machines available in various configurations. Both machines refuse to boot, i.e. they pass all tests and print the right messages, but after initializing the memory they fail to load the kernel (boot disk) or do not send any network messages (boot net). I noticed, that there appear strange strings in the environment variables for hardware-revision for example and further investigation shows that the NVRAM (DS1643) must have lost a part of its content which are filled with e.g. 55 hexadecimal now. My question is, whether someone out there has got such an UltraBook up and running and is willing to read out the NVRAM and send me the contents. The machine has not to be opened to do this since the contents can be listed via the OpenBoot firmware. As most of the bytes should contain 00 it would for example be sufficient to take some low resolution photographs of the hex dump pages containing non-zero bytes and I'd be happy to type them into a hex editor myself... I'd post step by step instructions how the NVRAM's contents can be displayed... Best regards, Erik. P.S. The two UltraBooks are of the following type: U20-14-9-512P, Part No MU20014PCI36, Serial U20/1040, Serial ID 8527455. This one has got THREE hard drives. U200-14-3-128P, Part No MU20014PCI36, Serial U20-1253, Serial ID8526256 with two hard drive bays and one for the battery.

15 years, 6 months

How much would you reckon a Mac Performa 630 is worth?

by lproven＠gmail.com

25MHz 680LC40, 36MB RAM, MacOS 8.1. TV and Ethernet cards. Because to my astounded delight, I just got ?50 for mine, from a chap who found me via eBay. The auction he was originally interested in, for an LC475, ended for just ?8. But then, that chap only wants the hard disk drive... -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

15 years, 6 months

Free LA-100 posting

by cclist＠sydex.com

Fellow is posting an LA100 for shipping on Eric's VCF: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?22269-FREE-DEC- LA100-LetterWriter --Chuck

15 years, 6 months

IS501 sensor -- my solution

by ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk

Some days ago I was asking about a source for an IS50 OPIC optical sensor used in the shaft encoder of my Olivetti Sparkjet printer. And it appears this device is unobtainium In an earlier message tonigth I mentioned I had recently bought a cheap PS/2 mouse, and that it is now very dead. These 2 events are connected... The reason I boguth a cheap mouse is that it was optomechancial, rather than optical. And the reason it was PS/2 is that that was the cheapest one I could find. The salesdroid in Maplin thought I was craxy when I daid I didn't care what the interface was. On the other hamd, trying to ecplain classic computing to him was going to take too long, so I simply said that PS/2 was what I wanted... And of coruse the reason I wanted an optomechancial mouse is that it contains a pair of dual phototranssitor sensors to sense the motion of the encoder wheels. Of ocurse I took the mouse apart. It was very cheaply made, with the slotted disks and spindles moulded in one piece, then clipped into 'bearings' moudlded in the base of the mouse. Ouch. But I didn't care about that. I soon desoldered the sensorts which appear to be dual phototransistors with a common collector connection. And the pitch of the slots in the mouse's encoder disks was very close to that in the disk in my Sparkjet printer. Next job was to carefully remove and dismantle the encoder in the Sparkjet. I desoldered the OPIC, which shed a couple of pins in the process, but I cared more about the PCB. I also removed the dual resistor assockated with the OPIC> I then fitted one of the mouse sensors in place of it, common collector to the +5V tack. And with a little cut and muper, I routed the 2 emitter connections to pads that had held the dual resistor. I carefully ressembled the sensor and fitted 10k resisotrs in placeof the dual resistor assembly. That would do as an emitter load for testing. Turning the spindle produced a change in voltage, but it was close to +5V all the time. Dropping the resistors would help, in the end I foudn that 470 ohms (yes, that low) was ideal. I added a 74LS14 schmitt trigger IC on a bit of stripboard to clean up the signals, conneted the outputs to the pins on the connector to the printer's main board and gave it a try. Using the logicDart I could get a display of the wavefortms, and by adjusting the encoder PCB position I got a pretty good pair of quadrature signals. Doing the self-test on the printer got the carriage jiggling about is it should do (the printer was dismantled so that there was no platten, HV generartor, carriage rails, stc, so I couldn't see if it was preinting anything, but I coudlsee the montion of the carriage drive). Alas evey so often it would miscount and the carriage would jump in position. Much gabbing of signals with the LogicDart later, I spotted the odd glitch in one of the output waveforms. No idea what was causing it, but a 1nF camacitor in parallel with the 470R resistor on each phototransitor cleared it up. And cleaered up the posiiton problem Now 'all' I have to do is align the carriage rails properly. Iv'e refitted the rest of the printer mechansim, and it does print, but it fades out after few lines, to recover only wne I clean the end of the ink cartridge. I suspect the spark is flying in slightly the wrong direction and putting carbon ('ink') on the end of the cartridge, causing HV leakage. So, the replacement for the IS501 consisted of the sensor from a cheap mouse and a 74LS14, a couple of R's and a couple of C's from my junk box... -tony

15 years, 6 months

Sparcstation Voyager media?

by IanK＠vulcan.com

Hey folks, This is a question about a piece I have in my personal collection: a Sparcstation SS240 Voyager. It's a sun4m architecture luggable workstation with an LCD screen. The whole thing fits into a large shoulder bag - large enough it wouldn't be accepted for carryon luggage. It's cute, and it runs (after I replaced the NVRAM chip). When I got it, the machine had been set up with NetBSD, but being the masochistic sort I am I wanted to restore it to its original software. It just so happens I had Solaris 2.6 and gave it a crack. Solaris starts up just fine, but the device won't go into CDE, claiming that it can't find the framebuffer driver. Looking at the firmware, I see that it identifies a device called bwthree. Solaris 2.6 has a driver for bwtwo, but I've been unable to find a bwthree anywhere. (Google gives me pages and pages of "BW3," refusing to believe I want what I typed. Sometimes software is too helpful.) The original documentation for the Voyager describes custom install media - which presumably includes this driver. Does anyone happen to have such a CDROM? Can you confirm for me that there is in fact a driver so named? And if you have a running Voyager, is that what's in your /platform/kernel/drv directory? Otherwise, I guess I could just run NetBSD, but it's just not as fun. :) Thanks - Ian

15 years, 6 months

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