> From: Paul Koning
> That's fine if your target is an OS for which you can write drivers. It
> wouldn't help RSTS users.
Right, they're stuck with exact clones of DEC controllers. (For Unix, tweaking
the RP11 driver to handle the extended RP11 should take all of 12 minutes,
tops! :-)
> Q22 disks .. RL02 also, if I remember right.
Oh, right, the RLV12 - forgot about that. Still, it would be nice to be able
to run RK11's and RP11's in 22-bit mode! :-) Especially since there will be
replicas of DEC's indicator panels for them, whereas an RL11 indicator panel
would definitely be... an anachronism! ;-)
> A possible answer for a lot of this is to do the actual emulation
> algorithms in software, in an embedded CPU inside the FPGA. For MSCP
> that's obvious, but it would work for the others as well I suspect.
Dave B is a wizard with Verilog, so until it gets to the complexity level of
MSCP we'd probably do it all in Verilog.
> From: Jon Elson
> I did **ONE** board with some kind of gold flash that a PCB house
> recommended. ... it was a colossal disaster. You had to lift the pin
> ... Since then, I have used pure tin HASL, and had little trouble.
I think gold came into the discussion in the context of the contact fingers
where the board plugs into the backplane. I've never seen a QBUS/UNIBUS board
with tin fingers, although they were common on SIMM memory cards; no idea
if tin would work for QBUS/UNIBUS - although now that I think about it,
SIMM cards didn't slide into position, but kind of rotated, so maybe tin
would work there.
Noel
Hello,
I read several posts about Unibus disk interfaces and emulation.
One of my retrocomputing dream is to design an Unibus universal board,
probably based on FPGA because of precise timing requirements,
to emulate one or more disk/tape interfaces, and possibly something more.
The real storage could be based on SD card, so very easy to be moved
to a PC for imaging and data transfer.
Probably a low level emulation would be quite easy, while a more complex
solution (MSCP) could be more difficult.
The board itself wouldn't be cheap at all, because PCB would be big,
and because FPGA aren't cheap either.
Probably it would be anyway cheaper than an MSCP-SCSI, and it would be
far more
flexible.
From what I understand, there could be a great demand of a such
interface here around?
Andrea
I have a couple of drives I would really like to recover the data from.
On one of the two I've tried so far, the lowest head in the stack is really stuck on.
Has anyone successfully unstuck a head from this era. I've tried the obvious things
(gentle rotation in both axis, heating the platters) but there is a lot of surface
area on those old heads and it is pretty badly stuck.
> From: Paul Koning
> I'd suggest the Massbus series, they are just about as simple as
> anything and that's where you find the largest capacities short of MSCP
> devices.
If you want to exactly emulate only DEC controllers, yes. (Of course, such a
project should do that, for binary compatability.)
However, as I think I have mentioned before, I'm actually enamoured of taking
a very simple controller like an RP11, which has lots of spare disk address
bits, and defining an 'RP11-E' which maxes out the virtual drive size without
changing _anything_ about the register format other than using unused bits in
the cyclinder address register. That will produce disks with 2^28 blocks, or
2^36 bytes, or 64GB. That's most of a large SD card... :)
Not too useful to those without the ability to tweak drivers, but... there's
another issue with the older controllers, which is that they only support
18-bit addressing, and for use on QBUS machines, where one would really like
to be able to do DMA to anywhere in the 22-bit space (for Unix, this would be
for swapping, and raw I/O - buffered I/O would be fine with 18 bits). So maybe
an updated version of those old, simple controllers would actually have some
use. (I'd certainly want them for my Unix boxes.)
> Apart from MSCP, avoid RL emulation also.
Why avoid RL's? Not the greatest controller, I agree, but it is a 'lowest
common denominator' drive for a certain era of gear.
> From: Toby Thain
> Isn't Noel working on something related?
I think Dave B gave a pretty good update.
In addition to what he mentioned, I'd like to mention the indicator panels
(like the DEC ones for the RF11, RP11, etc). Dave has designed the new
indicator PCB, and we have a couple of prototype PCB's in hand, stuffed and
working. I think there's a video clip of it doing its thing on the Web page he
pointed to.
Our concept is that we'll be able to drive more than one of these panels, by
connecting them together serially - that way a machine could have, say, both
RK11 and RP11 indicator panels, driven from a single QSIC board. That will
slow down the refresh rate a bit, but our numbers indicate it should still be
acceptably fast.
Noel
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Photos from the NWA Auction
From: ethan
I would figure the data center rooms and stuff might of had other racks
of
more modern server equipment that might have been sold off separately or
relocated to other sites. Didn't see holes in the floor for cabling but
wouldn't be surprised. I didn't see video projection hardware on the
auction and usually that is used to project the stuff outside the
cockpits
no?
What was left is the interesting stuff :-)
-------
There were a number of ex-NWA/Delta employees that were in the building
during the inspection phase. Talking to them, the sentiment was that
after the merger, Delta took "anything that was worth anything" and sent
it down to their facilities in Atlanta.
There were a number of simulator bays where the cockpits had been
removed, and the attendant server rooms were fairly bare. I saw a bunch
of Sun-3 "operator manuals" laying around, but no Suns. One of the guys
said they had a bunch of "old" Sun gear at one time, but that all went
south.
The PDPs and GP4 were part of what was the oldest DC-9 sim in the
country up until they walked away from it, so we were told.
I agree - the "interesting" stuff was left behind, but maybe not all of
it :-)
Steve
I read something in THE NeXT Best Thing book about Stanford col..
actually making some? or they were in on a design of some book not
handy now and my memory may also be flawed on this issue...
Ed#
In a message dated 10/20/2016 11:18:19 A.M. US Mountain Standard Tim,
wmachacek at q.com writes:
Does anyone on this list have any information on Stanford Computers? I
have
2 of them that I saved from being recycled many years ago. I have finally
gotten around to looking at them more closely. I have a model ?640? and a
model ?XT-10?. The 640 has 2 ? 5 ?? floppy drives plus a Conner CP-344,
42MB HD (the HD may have been a later add-on to the original
configuration).
The XT-10 has 1 ? 5 ?? floppy drive and a NEC D5186, 25MB HD. I could not
see a name on the MB in the 640, but the name ?80 Data? was on the XT-10
MB.
I believe these to be from the mid to late ?80s time frame. They both have
the 9 DB pin video connectors. The XT-10 has an EGA Graphics card, I could
not tell what kind of card is in the 640. I am being very reluctant to
start pulling cards on a machine this old for fear of breaking something.
The ribbon cable seemed somewhat brittle on the 640. Can ribbon cables
break due to age? If anyone has any information on these systems, I would
appreciate hearing from you. I believe this company was in the bay area
somewhere. With the name Stanford Computer, that seems very likely.
Thanks
for any information you can give me. I am in Colo. Springs.
Bill Machacek
Does anyone on this list have any information on Stanford Computers? I have
2 of them that I saved from being recycled many years ago. I have finally
gotten around to looking at them more closely. I have a model ?640? and a
model ?XT-10?. The 640 has 2 ? 5 ?? floppy drives plus a Conner CP-344,
42MB HD (the HD may have been a later add-on to the original configuration).
The XT-10 has 1 ? 5 ?? floppy drive and a NEC D5186, 25MB HD. I could not
see a name on the MB in the 640, but the name ?80 Data? was on the XT-10 MB.
I believe these to be from the mid to late ?80s time frame. They both have
the 9 DB pin video connectors. The XT-10 has an EGA Graphics card, I could
not tell what kind of card is in the 640. I am being very reluctant to
start pulling cards on a machine this old for fear of breaking something.
The ribbon cable seemed somewhat brittle on the 640. Can ribbon cables
break due to age? If anyone has any information on these systems, I would
appreciate hearing from you. I believe this company was in the bay area
somewhere. With the name Stanford Computer, that seems very likely. Thanks
for any information you can give me. I am in Colo. Springs.
Bill Machacek
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Photos from the NWA Auction
From: ethan at 757.org
Date: Tue, October 18, 2016 6:47 pm
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Wonder if anyone got the actual simulators/cockpits? Fun toys but
> won't fit in your average basement...
There were bids on them, hopefully they go to home flight simulator
nerds
that will entertain us with videos on youtube of them running inside
their
houses!
--
I was at the facility briefly to help out another lister with prepping
his lot for shipment. The GP4 is being dismantled for scrap. About half
the racks are already empty.
With a little bit of cash beer money and some wrench work, the panel you
see in IMG_5535 is now in the backseat of my car. It will likely be all
gone by EOD on Friday.
Hi Mouse -
running a museum project is fun but also a lot of work.
here is a little framework to think about and discuss Ed# at SMECC .
- SPACE
you rent or buy a building ($$$$ !)
or...
place displays in other's premises (can work if they protct your gear)
- INSURANCE
(property, liability, employee)
- UTILITIES
( winter is your enemy, summer is ours in AZ)
- SECURE FURANITURE AND FIXTURES
(when in doubt, lock it under glass)
EMPOLYEES and/or VOLUNTEERS
Great to have so you are not the only one chained to the entry desk,
employees cost $$$ volunteers no salary - either can be a
blessing or a curse if you get a bad one
In a message dated 10/19/2016 7:41:07 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG writes:
There's someone local who's seen my assortment of computer hardware
twice and has, each time, told me I should set up a museum.
This is tempting, but I don't know the first thing about doing it.
About all I'm sure of is that it would involve a lot of stuff I
currently have no idea of.
I know that there are at least a few people here who've been involved
in such things. While all the examples that come to mind are in the
USA, and mine would be in Canada, I'm sure there are many respects in
which the issues are jurisdiction-independent - and, who knows, there
may be such a person in Canada that I just can't recall offhand.
So, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd be willing to share
experiences, thoughts, issues, whatever, on the possibility.
I'm not looking to make a lot of money off this. If I can turn my
computers from money-sink to money-neutral, I'll be content. (They are
currently soaking up money in the form of causing me to be renting
significantly more storage than I would be if they were to vanish.)
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