1. I have a need for a DE9 female connector without the metal
housing, something like
(http://www.robotshop.ca/Images/small/en/parallax-basic-stamp-1-serial-adapt…).
I need quite a few of them, so I'd rather not buy DE-9s and rip
off the shielded housing manually. Anyone have ideas?
2. Anyone on list have any experience with MAX 7032A Altera CPLDs?
I'm working on a VIC-20 MIDI interface for a friend in Toronto,
and I'd love to use a small CPLD to make it more cost effective to
produce the MIDI cart. I've found TQFP 7032A units for
$.31/piece, but I've never done CPLD. I want to learn, and
thought if I at least knew someone could help me though the first
few bits (and help with the programming cable, etc., it'd be much
easier.
3. I'm making the journey to Toronto for the World of Commodore 2009
show Dec 5. I'd love to meet list members in the area, and
there'll be some vintage CBM stuff present, if you're into that
sort of machine.
4. Anyone have a source for 28AWG 2 conductor twisted wire?
5. If so, do they make it in 3 conductor?
Those who care about the CBM machines on-list have no doubt heard all of
this, and I don't want to be accused of spamming, but I thought I'd
point out I ran a batch of MOS 6540 adapter PCBs, and I have created a
small FLASH replacement for the 2364 and 23128/23256 DIP ROMs. Some of
those might be of use on other 80's era machines.
Jim
--
Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X)
brain at jbrain.com
Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times!
Home: http://www.jbrain.com
I have a 500 series card (don't remember which, I'd have to pull it out and look) with a manual. No cable or software. It was a pull from a batch of 7200's we won at auction years ago.
?
If anyone would like it, make me an offer off-list.
?
Also, I have a couple of 7200's that are available for free, if someone lives in the Philadelphia area and wants to pick one/both up. I also have a 7200 logic board that is a pull from one of the units I upgraded with a 7300 board, if someone wants a spare. I might even have more than one.
?
I also have a Mac 512k Shell with tube and logic board, but nothing else if someone wants that to make a Macquarium out of, or to complete into a working unit.
?
I'm moving in two months, and I'd like to get rid of some excess stuff. But, not to a landfill.
?
Al
>
> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:44:57 +0000 (GMT)
> From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
> I would really hate it if this list became a mostly old PC (or Mac) list.
> IMHO there are better places to discuss such machines (no, I don't know
> hwere said places are).
The two best places for discussion of old Macs are probably the Low End
Mac (lowendmac.com) lists (includes "Vintage Macs" (68K) and
"1st-PowerMacs" (NuBus PPC)) which are now hosted on Google, and the 68K
Macintosh Liberation Army Forum at 68kmla.net. Applefritter.com is also
nice but does not get as much traffic as 68kmla.net.
This list is probably as good as anywhere these days for Apple Network
Server information, because Cameron K. is here, unless he knows of an
active forum for them. The last one I knew about is long gone.
Not so many years ago the best place for Mac stuff was the comp.sys.mac.*
hierarchy. Sigh. And you could buy and sell stuff in comp.sys.mac.wanted
without paying Ebay fees...
Jeff Walther
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:02:57 -0600
From: "Michael B. Brutman" <mbbrutman-cctalk at brutman.com>
Subject: Re: Ten Year Rule
Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
>> Well, without the newbs the community will slowly die away. I like to
>> see young people getting interested in what I'm interested in. Let them
>> talk about their "vintage" Pentium and hope they discover the cool stuff
>> in the "Minis and Mainframes" section.
<snip>
>> I'm in both and I also visit http://forums.nekochan.net/ for my daily
>> dose of SGI.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Pontus.
>Hi Pontus,
>We need the newbs, and we need to be gentle to them. But newbs can get
>annoying when they just babble endlessly and refuse to do basic
>research. The good news is that we can try to moderate or filter a lot
>of that out.
<snip>
>Regards,
>Mike
---------------------
...and moderators can be annoying when they're patronizing and condescending
and think that people who think P1s are antiques are a "problem" on a forum like
Erik's which is mostly about exactly that, folks helping each other restoring and
modifying their old Intel boxes (but also more esoteric stuff, in case I'm giving the
wrong impression).
Meanwhile, here we can spend a week discussing and reading about arcane
camera stuff, but woe to anyone who might mention Windows 3.1...
And now of course we have to have the tedious "what is vintage" discussion yet
once again... has this been a problem? Have we been overwhelmed with Vista
questions?
Did someone use the word 'anal'...?
m
I have a HM (Hotel Microsystems) Server with an eight slot backplane and
can choose from a
selection of '386' and '486' computer-on-a-board cards that I have. I
also have one 'IBM Blue
Lighting' card. Six of the other slots are filled with Sundance ISA
transputer cards (5 are 20MHz, 8Mb,
1 is 20MHz, 4Mb - I'm still half-looking (not in any real hurry) for 32
1Mbit memory chips to fully populate
the final card).
In their day, they were the system of choice at Cardiff University for a
few years, and they came as
a very small desktop with a three (or was it four?) slot backplane, or as
the server.
The server I have was the 'demonstration' model sent for evaluation. The
side panels are
perspex. It looks really nice with all those full length transputer cards
in there, blinking away.
Doug.
------------------------------
Message: 20
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:50:31 +0000
From: Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com>
Subject: DEC VT100 character generator
To: ClassicCmp <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID: <4B0B11B7.4020304 at dunnington.plus.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Several months ago, someone was looking for an image of the 23-018E2
character generator ROM for a VT100. A generous reader has given me an
image, which I've uploaded to my website at
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/DECROMs/
Better late than never, I hope!
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
------------------------------
Pete,
That matches the rom I typed from the vt100 tech manual datasheet for
MESS. Are you sure someone dumped it from a real chip and didn't just
submit the rom I typed up (which is now floating around the 'net)? The
rom is marked as a 'bad dump' in MESS, because I was almost sure the
typed one is very slightly wrong due to the fact that the sum16 of the
one I typed does not end with "00", which seems to have been standard
DEC practice for roms at the time. Hence I was hoping someone with a
working or scrap vt1xx series board would dump the real thing.
The trouble with most people dumping the original chip seems to be that:
A. it is soldered to the vt1xx board
B. it has uninverted CE (I think...) and a few other pinout oddities
(see schematic on bitsavers)
P.S. the second optional character rom (only selectable if you have an
AVO board installed, or a VT102/VT131 which has AVO builtin), labeled
23-094e2 is also not dumped. This one, fortunately, is socketed on
systems which have it, and I believe has a normal pinout. I think it
contains european characters and formatting/word processing characters.
It might also contain some or all of the technical font used on the
later vt3xx+ systems as shown here: http://vt100.net/charsets/technical.html
P.P.S. the main cpu roms from a vt1xx with the word processing romset
installed are also not dumped. I have no idea what the numbering on
these is though. Two of the CE pins alternate in binary form for the
chips to allow them to be 'self decoding' and inserted in the four
sockets in any order! cute, but makes dumping them a bit harder.
--
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgevaryahu(@t)hotmail(d0t)com
jzg22(@t)drexel(d0t)edu
>My expeirience is that if you have a drive with a correctly-aligned
>positioner/head assemly, you can remove it as an assembly, and put it
>back in _the same drive_ and it will still be alighed. But if you move
>positioenrs between drives you have to do a realignment.
In my case unfortunately that would not be the case as the best I can find
are two other units in unknown condition from a completely different set of
drives.
>The alignment procedure is not hard if oyu have the alignment pack. You
>also need a 'scope (but just aout any 'scope will do) and a way of moving
>the heads to a particular cylinder and selecting head 0 or head 1. I had
>no prolems using a PDP11 + the appropriate controller for this, just
>togging values int oteh controller registers from the PDP11's font panel.
>If you use a PDP9/e, I think you have to write a trivial program for this.
I can easily get hold of a scope but a calibration pack is a different
story.
>THe disk packs are different between the PDP8 and PDP11 systems. They're
>hard-sectored (by notches in a metal ring on the disk hub), PDP11 packs
>are 12-sectory, PDP8 packs are 16 sector. The former are _much_ easier to
>find.
I think if I could find the rest of the system I might also find the packs
as well. Since this was a local and very little known recycling job only a
few businesses in town and university staff drop stuff off. I really wish I
knew dropped this off but alas, no records are kept on who drops off what.
My best bet is either the hospital or it came from someplace in the
university. Where exactly I have no idea.
On 11/24/09, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Kirn Gill wrote:
>> I was thinking recently, and I know that the general threshold for
>> discussion on this list is ten years, but is that enough?
Guideline, not threshold. There are countless exceptions on both sides.
>> As it stands, given the rule of a minimum of ten years, most early
>> Pentium III PeeCees are listworthy for discussion.
Guideline, not threshold.
>> In just two more years time, the world's most popular computer operating
>> system (as of the time of this email's writing) would be perfectly valid
>> to discuss, even as "on-topic". 2001 to 2011 is ten years, isn't it?
>
> NEVER!
> There are better places for THAT discussion.
Indeed.
The results of one of the many recurrent discussions of "The 10 Year
Rule" is that it really comes down to "interesting machines are in,
mainstream machines are out". The list of what falls in and what is
still out, changes from year to year, but a rule of thumb is that
there are plenty of places to go to ask for help fixing your Windows
PC, and this is not the place for it.
At one time, when MS-DOS was still in common use all over the planet,
this was not the place to talk about those sorts of machines. I would
suggest that now, DOS knowledge has become esoteric (the slide
starting with the release of Windows 95, one could argue), and that
discussion of boxes running MS-DOS could be on-topic. I would still
suggest that Windows 98 and newer are quite off-topic and will be for
a large number of years into the future (meaning
greater-than-the-quantity-10). Windows 95 is kinda on the fence to me
since there's a disconnect with Win98-and-later. Practically
speaking, if you are fiddling with Windows 95 at this point, it's
because you want to experience how things were 14 years ago. Windows
98, though, I would argue, is new enough that it's still a "modern"
experience.
If you wanted to discuss the Pentium FDIV bug and which chips were
affected, I'd think that was on-topic. If you wanted to discuss what
Windows drivers are needed for that very same machine, I'd say that's
off-topic. Same hardware, different sides of the line. "Ten Years"
isn't (and hasn't been for a while) the be-all-end-all criterion.
-ethan
Hi folks,
there are some Siemens items in Kiel. Free for pickup. Will go to scrap if nobody wants them.
The first two pictures:
http://pdp8.hachti.de/gallery/endangered_stuff
There's also a big printer (one TON!!) in another room. That unit's future will be the scrapyard as
well if nobody is interested in it.
Best wishes,
Philipp
--
http://www.hachti.de
