test-drb

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101090 discussions

by c.murray.mccullough＠gmail.com

I wish to congratulate Apple on its 40 anniversary today. An early pioneer in our cherished hobby. Happy computing. Murray :)

9 years, 1 month

Random VGA question: 160x200 "high color" mode?

by derschjo＠gmail.com

Awhile back a "pre-alpha" version of the PC classic "DOOM" was unearthed (dated Feb 28, 1993), and it claims to support a "high color" VGA mode. >From the README.TXT: "Use High-color DAC (160 x200, but great color!) (Only newer VGA cards have this-if it looks OK, ya got it) (This may--okay, will--REALLY screw up the playscreen's graphics. Just look at the neat colors and don't worry.)" I've tried it on a number of machines (from the 386 era to a modern PC) and they all just end up showing garbage when this mode is enabled. I cannot for the life of me find a reference to this mode existing anywhere, but I assume it must have worked on *some* SVGA chipset of the era since ID programmed in support for it. I'm guessing it was cut because nothing else supported it (and because 160x200 must have looked awful, even with lots of colors...) Does this odd video mode ring any bells with anyone out there? Any idea what hardware to look for that might support it? At this point I'm more curious about the actual hardware than getting this pre-alpha to run with it... - Josh

9 years, 1 month

WinWorld

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Fred Cisin > All this time, I thought that you had to be DEAD before they could take > your work. Actually, in most jurisdictions, it's death+N years. In the US, thanks to the sleaziness of Congress, and the spinlessness of the US Supreme Court, N is now 70. Noel

9 years, 1 month

Here's what happens when an 18 year old buys a mainframe...

by geneb＠deltasoft.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk It's pretty entertaining. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!

9 years, 1 month

11/23+ going cheap on eBay

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

So here's an 11/23+ in a nice BA11 box: http://www.ebay.com/itm/322046582015 If I wasn't _already_ knee deep in the blasted things, I'd buy it myself! ;-) The other cards aren't too interesting - an MXV11-A, MRV11-C (I think), a 64KB memory card, and what looks like an off-brand DLV11-J; and some sort of disk. Still, not a bad price (so far) for the CPU, box, and a handfull of boards. Noel

9 years, 1 month

R: Re: RSX-11 trouble

by supervinx＠libero.it

Well... REM ...AT. worked since an AT entry was present in the TAL output INS $BIGIND not INS -- File not found Disk (RD51) has 850 blocks free after some cleaning up. It had 738 before.

9 years, 1 month

RC2014 homebrew computer

by lproven＠gmail.com

I confess it is in no way a classic machine, but I thought that this might be of interest to some people here. I had not heard of it before until a chance retweet from a ZX Spectrum-related account today: http://rc2014.co.uk/ ? RC2014 is a simple 8 bit Z80 based modular computer. It is inspired by the home built computers of the late 70s and computer revolution of the early 80s. It is not a clone of anything specific, but there are ideas of the ZX81, UK101, S100 and Apple I in here. Built mainly with parts donated to Nottingham Hackspace and components salvaged from random bits of equipment, it uses modern PCBs. It runs on a backplane that hosts the individual modules. This has standard 0.1? header sockets meaning new modules are simple and cheap to design and can use Veroboard or even jumper wires to breadboard. For resilience, most of the modules have been designed on to dedicated PCBs. In it?s typical basic form it has; 32k RAM, 8k ROM (running Microsoft BASIC), 3.7628Mhz Z80 processor serial communication at 115200 baud. Other modules include 8k x 8 bank switchable EPROM, SD card bootloader, ZX Printer interface, Blinkenlights, LED dot matrix display driver, LCD display driver ? (Errors in the source material.) More info and purchasing sources: https://www.tindie.com/products/Semachthemonkey/rc2014-homebrew-z80-compute… And a (for my money, insane, but) interesting peripheral: https://hackaday.io/project/9567-5-graphics-card-for-homebrew-z80 -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

9 years, 1 month

OT: was: Re: AT&T Uverse IPv6 vs. Mac OS X 10.(old)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

Apologies all for the OT; just a few _brief_ replies. If anyone wants a serious discussion about this, the internet-history list would be the place to start it. > From: Charles Anthony > What they did was 'NAT plus IPV6 will solve everything.' Yes, but not explicitly; the 'official' IETF position was 'IPv6 will replace IPv4', and they pretty consistently refused to acknowledge that NAT would likely play a major role. I 'sort of' understand the second part - NAT is, architecturaly, very grubby (for a long list of reasons this is not the place to go into) - but it soon got the point of ostrich-like refusal to recognize reality - which meant that instead of an _architected_ approac to using NAT, it mostly got an utterly 'ad hoc' adoption. > From: Robert Johnson > So, I'm curious what your objections to v6 are It's different from IPv4 (i.e. old code can't understand it), but not different enough (i.e. it doesn't have enough new capabilities to make it worth switching to - IPv4 has many architectural issues, but that topic is too complex to go into here). > how would you solve the shortage of IP addresses? You have to start by realizing that IPv4 addresses serve at least three functions: i) identify the communicating device (in the sense that 'Noel Chiappa' identifies me), ii) says _where_ the thing is in the Internet (like a street address does IRL), and iii) is used by intermediate switching nodes to forward traffic. So the first step is to pull out ii) and iii), which can be done without modifying the hosts, and there are many designs that did so. Alas, a fuller discussion of this complex topic is not really appropriate here... Ask on internet-history, if you want to know more. Noel

9 years, 1 month

PDP-11 M873 ROM card info?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Does anyone have a -YB we can dump? Can I repeat my plea for this? (And also a -YC?) > I have a -YA, and will dump that in a few moments OK, I'm mostly done with the disassembly; available here: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/M873-YA.mac I haven't fully understood the TA11 code (and don't plan to), nor the DECtape/magtape code (might get to that some day), but the disk and paper tape code is completely done. (I'm currently loading over serial lines, for getting the machines running, etc.) The paper tape code is 'interesting'; it took me a while to figure out _exactly_ how it worked. It appears (to me, at least) that that code will not function correctly unless the abs-loader has at least one byte of '0' pad on the end of it, for two reasons. (See the comments on the listing.) Luckily, my copy of the abs loader binary has such; although real .LDA tapes have blank leader, of course, the .LDA files I'm generating don't. The serial line code in the M9301 (-YA at least, and probably the others too) uses the identical code, so it has the identical issue. Noel

9 years, 1 month

RSX-11 trouble

by supervinx＠libero.it

Hi! Got a MicroPDP 11 plus. It seems to be misconfigured. It can't execute .CMD files, reporting Task "...AT." terminated Load failure. Read error No disk errors are reported with ELI DU0:/SH Disk seems to work: I can run .TSK files. The file STARTUP.CMD isn't read at all. Any hints? Which file is executed right before STARTUP.CMD? I see two RED commands and a MOU before it tries to read [1,2]STARTUP.CMD and reports the aforementioned error. Thanks

9 years, 1 month

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