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101090 discussions

Free punched card deck machine, suitable to make reader and punch

by carlclaunch51＠gmail.com

I bought this years ago for a planned project to create a card reader and card punch for a mainframe replica, using this machine that was designed to reproduce decks of punched cards. It is very heavy and sturdy. It has two input hoppers and two stackers, one for the source cards and one for the punched copies. The punched head is cooled by ammonia gas, indicating that it was designed to operate at a healthy rate of cards per minute if it needed that kind of cooling. A keypunch, by comparison can punch cards at about 20 cpm with no need for cooling, so I estimate this could run at hundreds of CPM. This is ideal for a hobbyist would would convert it so that it reads cards into some kind of mini, mainframe or other computer device, with the other side able to punch contents from the same computer onto blank cards. This works with the standard IBM '5081' style 80 column punched cards. I am moving in 12 days and would need to send this to the scrap yard if someone isn't interested. I can hold it here until July 12th or 13th latest. You will need to bring help to move it as it weighs a few hundred pounds. Pictures at - https://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/sys/d/los-altos-free-punched-card-reader-p…

5 years, 1 month

VT340 Emulation

by dj.taylor4＠comcast.net

Does anyone have experience with the Reflection software that will emulate a DEC VT340 color graphics terminal?

5 years, 1 month

PDP-11/05 microcode dump?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Mattis Lind > Thanks Noel for sorting this out. Eh, de nada. But thank you. >> I wonder if the ucode in the two versions is identical? The uROM chip >> numbers should give it, (if they are the same on both versions, albeit >> in different locations on the board), but I have yet to check. Does >> anyone happen to know? OK, so the situation here is pretty complicated. To start with / make things worse, that CPU uses lots of PROMs. Lots and lots and lots and lots of PROMs. For the data paths board (M7260), both major versions appear to contain the same PROMs (going by the DEC part numbers), but the chip location (Exx) numbers are all different. For the control board (M7261), the C, E ('early' version) and F ('late' version) etch revisions each contain mostly the same PROMs, but apparently with slight differences between the sets of PROMs in each (as reflected in different DEC part numbers). For details see: http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/05#Control_PROMs to which I have just added all the gory details. As to getting the contents of all of them dumped in machine-readable form - oi vey! >> on the earlier version (prints for that version are in the GT40 prints >> online It turns out that I have hard-copy prints for the "C" etch revision of the M7261, which do not yet appear to be online; the GT40 prints have the "E" etch revision. I will scan the pages for that revision of the board, and put them up 'soon'. (I'm not doing the whole print set, it's about 1" thick, and most of them are for other things anyway, like MM11-L memory, etc.) Noel

5 years, 1 month

cctech Digest, Vol 81, Issue 26

by aek＠bitsavers.org

On 6/29/21 10:00 AM, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > I miss that machine. I'd love to sim it but the code and schematics are > gone forever. Actually I think CHM has a box of stuff but I can't find a > link to it anymore. > another case where I watch cctalk, and this showed up only in cctech so I only saw it today since I only get digests of cctech https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=adage some has been scanned http://bitsavers.org/pdf/adage

5 years, 1 month

Konan The DJ 210 SASI Controller Manual

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

I noticed that there is no copy on bitsavers of the Konan Corp "The DJ 210" SASI Controller OEM Reference Manual so I posted one on my web site: https://www.vintagecomputer.net/cisc367/Konan_The_DJ_210_SASI.pdf I am not 100% sure, but if I was to guess this info could be applied to repairs for Tandy's and other 5MB hard drives of the era that used the ST506/412 and maybe the Tandon 603S (?) You be the judge, I am not an expert. Bill kennettclassic.com

5 years, 1 month

Interesting photos of a computer graphics lab from 1968

by spam＠hell.org

A friend of mine collects old photos, and sent me a link to this set he just recovered from film. He doesn't know much about the provenance, but it might be interesting to figure out what we can about them. The link is here: https://www.espressobuzz.net/Found/GeorgeClark/GraphicsLab/ The film roll was dated June 1968, which was a month before I was born. The most interesting (to me) is the photo of the Adage Graphics Terminal. I'd never heard of the company before, but it looks like they were one of the many tech companies that sprang up in the MIT & Harvard orbit in the 60s and 70s. There's a small amount of info about the company on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adage,_Inc. Also in the same photo, to the right of the terminal is a silver box that might be an early joystick. It's hard to say. The pictures of the graphics terminal output is pretty cool, given that it's probably really pushing state of the art at the time. Also, they're in color, which was still not terribly common at the time. The only few photos I was able to find of Adage terminals are all black and white. Other recognizable hardware are a couple of ASR33 teletypes (one of which was rebadged as Adage), and some tape drives, the manufacture I don't recognize. Everything else, I pretty much can't make out what any of it is, but perhaps someone recognizes the particular layout of the blinkinlights? He was told that the pictures were taken "somewhere in the northeast". I suspect Boston, and therefore probably MIT or maybe Harvard. On the same roll were some pictures of "a colonial ship with lots of cannons", which I suspect was the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor, but I haven't seen those pics yet. I wonder if the tile pattern on the floor is distinct enough or recognizable? Anyway, it's an interesting set of archival photos, and I figured someone here might find them interesting or might recognize more than I do. -mike

5 years, 1 month

Fwd: Lawrence Moser Breed 1940-2021, A Personal Recollection

by lee_courtney＠acm.org

Sad computer history note - Larry Breed, one of the original implementors of Iverson Notation AKA A Programming Language AKA APL passed away last month. Larry went to work at IBM on the first APL implementation on an IBM 7090 in 1965 as his first job out of Stanford. My path crossed Larry's not thru APL, but when I was working my first retirement job at Hassett Hardware in downtown Palo Alto. Larry would come in to buy parts for his latest Burning Man or community project. He was a delightful person to talk with, learn something from, and just be around. I'm sorry I did not take the time to talk to him more about APL when I had the chance. There's a Wikipedia entry on Larry here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Breed) and remembrances of him on the apl.comp.lang mailing list. God speed Larry and RIP. Lee Courtney

5 years, 1 month

Serial Multisession

by cctalk＠gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net

Does anyone know anything about the "Serial Multisession" that the VT LAN 40, and presumably other terminals, supports? I've not heard about it before and intend to do some research. But I figured that it was an interesting enough topic, that is multiplexing terminal sessions over a single serial link, to warrant further discussion. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

5 years, 1 month

INFAPLUG LAN

by binarydinosaurs＠gmail.com

Hello folks, A random conversation on twitter yesterday lead me to discovering an old 1980s LAN technology called INFAPLUG. This was a serial LAN hooked up via a PC serial port at 9600 baud to a ?smart plug? the size of a wall wart. This plug contained all the smarts and hooked into the coax backbone. There were boards available for VAX amongst other things so I?m amazed I?d never heard of it. Has anyone else? A small writeup is here: https://archive.org/details/lansexplainedgui00curr/page/64/mode/2up?q=infap… <https://archive.org/details/lansexplainedgui00curr/page/64/mode/2up?q=infap…> Cheers! -- Adrian Graham Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest private home computer collection? t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

5 years, 1 month

On compiling. (Was a way off topic subject)

by sieler＠allegro.com

Paul K got it right: "Any language can be interpreted or compiled. For some languages, like LISP and TECO, interpreting is a rather natural implementation techniques, while for others (C, ALGOL) compilation is the obvious answer. But either is possible." A few quick notes... Back around 1973, I wrote a compiler for InterLISP on the Burroughs B6700, with the target code being a new P-code invented just for LISP (by, I think, Bill Gord, based on Peter Deutsch and Ken Bowles P-code work). Yeah, some parts of the P-code machine had to invoke the interpreter, but that's philosophically no different than the next note... Around 1977/1978, Hewlett-Packard released the source code for their COBOL compiler for the HP 3000. My friend looked at the source and said: every statement compiles into a bunch of subroutine calls! So, technically....it was a compiler. But, essentially no machine code was emitted :) In 1984, HP announced their PA-RISC systems (HP 3000 and HP 9000), and that their ALGOL-like language, SPL, used by them and customers on the HP 3000, would not be ported to PA-RISC (because "it wasn't possible"). We looked at it and said: we can. And, we did (without the "subroutine call" mechanism :) In some cases, we emulate a 16-bit wide CISC architecture (e.g., if you use the SPL construct "ASSEMBLE (...)", we compile it...into PA-RISC code emulating the old architecture). It's still in use today, and can now emit either PA-RISC code or C source code (for a form of cross-compiling). What HP missed, and many people miss, is that any language can be compiled. The main question one might ask is the degree of closeness to machine code that's emitted :) Stan

5 years, 1 month

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