> From: Rod Smallwood
> if you try to get it to boot it says no controller to every device
> except DD and that says no drive
Hmm, I wonder if that's a clue. Ah, probably not: 'DD' means 'TU58', which is
interfaced through a standard serial line (DL11 clone), and the standard
device location for the TU58's serial line is 776500, which is the standard
address for the first serial line, and since the 11/94 has a bunch of serial
lines, the code probably thinks there's a TU58 there. But there isn't...
> I cant get it to go into ODT to look at the registers.
If you look in the "PDP-11/84 System Technical and Reference Manual"
(EK-1184E-TM-001), available here:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1184/EK-1184E-TM-001_Dec87.pdf
Section 3.7 lists several ways to get into ODT. In addition to those, if you
look at Section 3.2.2, it allows you to configure the machine to fall into
ODT on power-on (section B gives details).
> From: Henk Gooijen
> The first 4 (5?) slots are QBUS
Technically, PMI, which is more-or-less QBUS on the left (A/B) side (modulo
not having grants, unless the appropriate backplane jumpers are set to send
grants to those slots), and it uses the standard CD interconnect (as in Q/CD
backplanes) on the right (C/D) side to carry PMI.
> The RX211 must have the NPR/NPG open. Check the documention which DIP
> switch must be set in the correct position. However, not sure if that
> would cause the RX211 to be "invisible".
Right; DMA would not work, but normal master/slave UNIBUS read/write cycles
to the device registers should still work.
> Can you check the RX211 in another UNIBUS system? See whether its CSR
> responds.
Another good test would be to plug a known working UNIBUS card into the
11/94, and check if the CPU can 'see' it.
> Also, check the configuration of the RX211. It might be set to a
> different CSR ...
Yup.
Noel
----- Original Message -----
> Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 22:56:32 -0500
> From: Daniel Seagraves <dseagrav at lunar-tokyo.net>
> Subject: Re: Scraping DEC Equipment
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Message-ID: <C7A98127-DFF4-41B1-A6AF-5DFCA234D286 at lunar-tokyo.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> I need a tractor feed assembly for a LA100, are the ones on the 120
> compatible?
----- Reply:
Apparently not, but I might have one for an LA100.
mike
need to see a photo
always looking for the beige upper case only hives~
I force people that whine about SHOUTING to use them for an hour....
Ed
In a message dated 6/1/2016 9:12:18 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
cclist at sydex.com writes:
On 06/01/2016 08:24 AM, tony duell wrote:
> Does anyone know anything about this? Does anyone
> have a service manual for it?
Internally, it sounds about the same as the veneered and generated Super
Bee from the early-mid 1970s. I don't see any manuals for it on
bitsavers, however.
--Chuck
I've got a Decmate II that has a keyboard issue. I've tested with a LK401
that I use with my Rainbow 100 system, keyboard works fine with the Rainbow
but gives a error 48 with the Decmate. I've had a look at the motherboard,
tracing pins 14 & 15 from the db15 connector to a series of what looks to
me to be picofuses. Testing these in circuit with a multimeter, 4 of these
"picofuses" show a resistance of approx. 530 ohms and the remaining 2
appear to be open. Anyone have any experience with these? Are these
really picofuses? Any insights would be appreciated.
Tom
Hello,
I would need some clarification about the Plastibands, as I will have to find a suitable replacement for the belt,
as ALL my cartridges need a replacement, after removing the old one without causing the infamous blank-spot.
Al, please could you clarify which size / brand of (Baumgarten) plastibands did you use for the TU58 cassette?
Mark, I'm not sure that a wider belt would work better, maybe worse. In fact pulley / belt mechanisms usually work with
pulleys that have a bigger diameter near the center than on the sides, resulting slightly convex.
Because of physical friction forces, an "unbiased" flat belt will always remain exactly in the center of the pulleys.
If a cylindrical pulley will be used, this effect will not be present, so the belt will slide off the pulleys.
On TU58 as in DC100 tapes AFAIK the belt is narrow, maybe abound the half the width of the pulleys.
Thanks
Andrea
> I tried using plastibands in a TU58 cartridge, with zero success. Once stretched, the width of the plastiband was too narrow, and > it kept on slipping off the edge of the tape spool and jamming things up thoroughly. These are the ones I tried using:
>
http://www.amazon.com/Baumgartens-8-inch-Plastibands-BAUSF5000-Assorted/dp/…
> I think they might have worked if they were at least twice as wide, at around the same circumference. Is there a different type
> available that might work better?
On Wed, 6/1/16, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 01/06/2016 19:34, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
>> On Wed, 6/1/16, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>> On 01/06/2016 18:57, Charles Anthony wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>>>> Apart from a personal 1202 alarm
>>>> I have a habit of coding "can't happen" error checks with 1201 or 1202
>>>> error numbers.
>>> You may be close .. Do you know why you do that?
>>>
>>> Here's a clue "Garmin"
>>???
>> You had me really confused there for a moment.? I thought you were talking
>> about the company that makes navigational devices at first and couldn't
>> for the life of me figure out what they had to do with it.? Obviously, I had the
>> wrong Garmin...
>>
>> But "personal 1202 alarm" is the funniest thing I've seen all day.? I'm going
>> to have to start using that expression.? My students won't have a clue what
>> I'm talking about.? Hopefully it'll be a good way to educate them a bit.
>>
> OK so answer this how many seconds were left? and who wore a different
> waistcoat every time?
The different waistcoat (or vest on this side of the pond) was Gene Kranz's habit.
I'd have to cheat and look up the number of seconds. My vague recollection
is about 15, but that memory seems to have suffered from bit rot. My impression
though is that Armstrong was determined to put that thing down no matter what
and the main role of the fuel level was when to stop looking and take the best
spot he could find.
BLS
Hello, kind ClassicCMP denizens,
I have two old Tektronix workstation machines.
One is a Tektronix 4132. It is a pc-sized (a little less tall, a little deeper) unit that uses a National Semiconductor 32016 chip as the CPU. It's got a bunch of cards for RAM expansion, parallel and RS-232 ports. It comes with two built-in RS-232 ports, one of which is for the console terminal. These machines have a slot in them a SCSI (single-ended) drive. Typically they were equipped with Maxtor XT1105 and XT1140 drives. In the front, they have a tape cartridge drive that uses 3m DC300A data cartridges. This drive is equipped with a piggy-backed Adaptec converter that takes the native QIC tape drive format and converts it to a SCSI accessible tape drive. On the bank panel is a 7- segment display that indicates the self-test and diagnostics, and when the OS (UTek) is loaded indicates system activity. These is also a row of DIP-switches that set things like the console baud rate, boot device, and stuff like that. There are two DB-25 serial ports, a GPIB port, an AUI port for 10 Megabit Ethernet, and a port that extended the internal SCSI bus externally. Below the back panel are slots for plugging in options such as RAM and I/O, which included things like full-width RAM cards (2 MB I think was the largest), half-width dual-port async RS-232 serial cards, a half-width parallel interface card, a half-width SCSI interface card (added another SCSI interface to the machine). The machine ran a 4.2-Berkeley variant known as UTek.
UTek was installed on the machine by putting a special cartridge in the drive that contained essentially a miniroot filesystem and basic boot code. The configuration switches on the back would be set to force the tape drive as the boot device. The machine would be powered up (the power button was a soft-power switch on the front panel of the machine), and the tape would be read, and options provided via the console terminal to format the drive, set its partition table, and things like that. Then, the mini-root Unix system would be loaded into, and run out of memory. From there, if I remember correctly, there was another cartridge (or perhaps two) that had the full UTek installation on them. The first tape was loaded, and a script run from the mini-root OS that would begin the process of loading UTek onto the hard disk from the tape image, and creating the boot block and all that would be needed to boot up the full UTek environment from the hard disk. When complete, the scripting would ask for things like setting the time and date (the machine had an built-in battery-backed real-time clock/calendar), setting the root password, creating user accounts and groups, and stuff like that.
The machine was (for the day) a pretty capable little Unix workstation at a time (the 4132 was announced in August of '85) when Suns were still at Berkeley, and anything else that ran a halfway decent version of BSD was a supermini like a DEC VAX, some of the more powerful PDP 11's, or a Gould PowerNode.
The other machine, the Tektronix 4317, was again a Unix workstation-class machine, but this time, was based on the Motorola 68020 CPU, likely because software availability for Motorola 68K-family machine was much higher than that of the National 32016/32032 architecture, and porting things proved to be quite a difficult thing to do.
The 4317 was also in a PC-like cabinet, with a QIC-type tape drive on the front. Internally, a SCSI hard disk provided storage, typically a larger one, like a 300Mb drive, from various different manufacturers. The back panel was similar to that on the 6130, though the SCSI connector was more standardized, and there was an option for a framebuffer card that could add on to the CPU that provided graphics capability. BNC connectors for RGB and sync (IIRC...or maybe it was sync-on-green, can't remember) were there, along with a jacks for plugging in a keyboard and mouse. With a color display and keyboard/mouse the machine could run X-windows. The back panel also had RS-232 ports, GPIB, and, if I remember correctly, it had both an AUI and BNC (for thin-net coax) for 10 Megabit Ethernet. It had some slots for expansion options, but I don't remember how they were organized. The CPU board had quite a bit of room for RAM, and I believe a RAM expansion board could pop onto the main board to bring the RAM (without expansion slots) to something like 4 or 5 megabytes.
Anyway, the situation is this:
I've got a 4132 and a 4317 stashed away in storage. Both machines have had hard disk failures, so OS is gone.
I used to have installation media, but alas, the cartridges all suffered failed drive tapes, and they failed in a way where they turned into goo, and without noticing it, I put them in the drives, and the goo turned to tapes into sticky, goopy spaghetti, not to mention making a mess out of the tape drive head, and getting gooey junk all over the capstan and metal tape guides. They weren't salvageable in any way.
So...what I'm looking for, after all that (hopefully informative) verbiage, I am wondering if anyone out there may have original UTek distribution media for both the 4132 and 4317 (may also work with the 4319 media), on DC300 or DC600 cartridges that are still viable, or at least if someone out there may have imaged said media somewhere along the way. I figure that with a good drive, I could reconstitute the images such that I could potentially get these two machines running again. I have appropriate SCSI disks that will work with the machines, and both machines seem to pass the in-built diagnostics and get to the point where they want to boot....but, alas, there's nothing to boot.
Any help is greatly appreciated. I have had these machines for a long time, and the 4132, I actually built from parts purchased from Tektronix stock when I worked there. I ran it for a long time, until I could get a PC that was a lot faster, and run (sigh) Windows, for very little money. I even still have 8mm backup tapes from the things...but only user data, not full backups of the OS and all.
Thanks in advance,
-Rick
---
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
On Wed, 6/1/16, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 01/06/2016 18:57, Charles Anthony wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > > Apart from a personal 1202 alarm
> >
> > I have a habit of coding "can't happen" error checks with 1201 or 1202
> > error numbers.
>
> You may be close .. Do you know why you do that?
>
> Here's a clue "Garmin"
You had me really confused there for a moment. I thought you were talking
about the company that makes navigational devices at first and couldn't
for the life of me figure out what they had to do with it. Obviously, I had the
wrong Garmin...
But "personal 1202 alarm" is the funniest thing I've seen all day. I'm going
to have to start using that expression. My students won't have a clue what
I'm talking about. Hopefully it'll be a good way to educate them a bit.
BLS
> If you look in the "PDP-11/84 System Technical and Reference Manual"
Ooops, getting my 84's and 94's (it's the same chassis) mixed up. You of
course want the "PDP-11/94-E System User and Maintenance Guide"
(EK-PDP94-MG-001)
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/1194/EK-PDP94-MG-001_Sep90.pdf
> Section 3.7 lists several ways to get into ODT. In addition to those,
> if you look at Section 3.2.2, it allows you to configure the machine to
> fall into ODT on power-on (section B gives details).
Basically the same manual, but you want Section 3.5.6.2 in this one for the
startup config.
Noel
