Re: Tim Shoppa's last message.
When I had this machine running, it would attempt to boot from the
Floppy (when asked to do so from ODT). The problem at the time
(which still exists) was I had no bootable media in said floppy
drive, thereby eliciting continued head loads, at about the tempo of
a dirge. Clic, read, 'nothing here...' clic, read, 'nothing
here...' clic, read....
Had I known Then what I know Now (grateful thanks to Tim and
Megan and Allison) I could have made a bootable disk on one of the
other machines, and gotten it going.
Aaron's problem is classic Catch 22... and I have just now freed
up some weekend time to perhaps assist him in that regard.
Note to Aaron: the Docs you gave me are In Process, and will be
returned to you when complete.
Cheers
John
< So don't underestimate the power of a micoprocessor. We
< just bring them unde a yoke, no 'real' processor ever
< har to carry.
Oh, I don't. I've said Z80s are not as shabby as some of the latterday
retrorevisionists would think. I've never seen a i286
running anything (OS) that really used all the raw power in any
useful way other than in embedded tasks. That view come from mostly
ISA bus PC implementations while interesting are really not best
possible performance.
At the other end of the line there were some monster transistor based
systems that offered stellar performance at a price. Some of the SSI
(small scale integration) IC machines of the late 60s bumped up those
numbers or shrank/lowered their cost.
Allison
>> Maybe you mean MHz? :-). Sorry, ads where sellers claim
>> spectacular milliHertz performance are one of my pet peeves. (Along
>> with specs calling for compatibility with the ASC-2 character set
>> and construction plans calling for DB-9 connectors!) Though it would
>> be an interesting exercise to construct a Pentium II-type computer
>> based on relays just so that it does top out around 300 milliHertz!
>
>No thanks... I don't have a dozen spare telephone exchanges for parts
;-)
If one were to estimate the number of transistors in a penitum II
at 100 million (?), then if an exchange has ~three relays per number,
you would get 300,000 relays in an exchange, which means 334
exchanges with a few spare parts left over!
>> example, everybody around the world uses the term "metric ton" when
>> the perfectly acceptable (and SI-preferred) term "megagram" is
>> exactly equivalent (and to my ears sounds better!) And why say
The reason is that using scientific notation/unit prefixes requires
more calculation if one is not well practiced. While 90 decibels
versus 900 decibels shows the relationship clearly (for those that
know what a log is), 90 decibels vs. 90 bels is not quite as simple for
some.
>90 decibels (what's wrong with 9 bels?)
>1000 millibars (= 1 bar. I was told by an idiot teacher at school that
>the 'bar' as a unit of pressure did not exist. A lot of books claim it
>does, though).
Has anyone read the book "Innumeracy"? It mostly deals with debunking
the concept of probability, but it is interesting in other respects,
too. BTW, would you say 'kilobyte' is a misnomer? THe number it
signifies isn't 10^3, it's 2^10. For a feeble attempt to get back on
topic: was kilobyte always accepted as 1024 bytes?
>-tony
>
>
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It's a large MFM device, makes interesting noises, known good, but
one of the little animals (students) thought it would be k00l-rad to nuke
the CMOS. Anyone got numbers for this thing?
-------
> [TOPS on a PDP-10 is a *MINUS*?]
> What? You're kidding, right? What is wrong with PDP-10s?
Correction: PDP is a minus not TOPS :)
Maybe I'm just not _the_ big fan of the PDPs.
Maybe I'm just to /370ish :)
Gruss
H.
P.S.: Unix also runs on PDPs - for better or worse
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
How many of us (I don't) pronounce "giga" with a soft initial 'g'
as is correct..? [Back to the Future used to drive me crazy until I
found that the writers were right...]
I have a 2.5 Farad @ 450VDC capacitor bank... takes an hour to
charge, but delivers many Joules into a low-impedance load.
Sometimes quite spectacularly! If the load is a solenoid, many Tesla
are produced as well.
I used to know the speed of light in Furlongs per Fortnight.
If you wish to piss off the counter help at your local parts
shop... ask for a 'Light-Emitting Resistor'. Hardware stores and
markets have them too.
I maintain several movie theaters in connection with my Work..
when asked (by newbies usually) how much power the sound system is
in the largest one... and I am in one of those Moods... I will
sometimes answer "About 11 RMS Horsepower..."
And speaking as an audio geek... if a Pentium-class processor
were made out of relay logic... imagine the *sound* it would make!
I have many recordings of old telephone switchrooms.. especialy
interesting are the large urban Crossbar offices... nothing yet I
have heard makes that kind of sound.
Finally, I have heard that a 'Millihelen' is the amount of
beauty required to launch just *one* ship.
Cheers
John
On Oct 17, 18:22, Tony Duell wrote:
> Subject: Re: RX50's on a PC?
> >
> > Has anyone tried wiring an 8" RX52 floppy straight to a modern PC
> > controller? I did the best I know how, and I *appear* to have a
>
> What on earth is an 8" RX52? There are 8" RX01s and RX02s and 5.25" RX50s
> that I know about. Never heard of an 8" RX5x drive.
I wondered if the reference was to something like the General Robotics
double-sided RX02-compatible, but ISTR that's called an RX03. The drive is
a standard SA800-compatible, and the controller emulates an RXV12, except
that it has a firmware formatting routine.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
> ----------
> From: William Donzelli[SMTP:william@ans.net]
> Reply To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
> Sent: Monday, October 19, 1998 11:05 AM
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
> Subject: Re: discrete transistors
>
> > What about 386s? Did Intel outrun the mainframes with the 386, or were
> > there discrete transistor machines with better performance than that?
>
> If one looks at the Linpack benchmark, the CDC 6600 was almost twice as
> fast as a Sun 386i/250 (info lifted from
> <http://lithos.gat.com/docview/linpack.bb>).
>
> > BTW, what did the Cray I use?
>
> The Cray-1s used simple ECL chips - I think there were only four types in
> the whole machine.
>
> William Donzelli
> william(a)ans.net
>
> ----------
> From: Ward Donald Griffiths III[SMTP:gram@cnct.com]
> Reply To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
> Sent: Monday, October 19, 1998 11:34 AM
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
> Subject: Re: TOPS-20
>
> Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
>
> > I think what most people lament is that 20 years later, Unix still
> doesn't
> > have the user friendliness of TOPS-20 nor are we likely to see anything
> like
> > it any time soon.
> >
> > -spc (Yea yea yea it could be done, but doing it right (or even
> reliably)
> > under Unix is a real pain ... )
>
> Well, nobody's stopping anybody from doing a TOPS-20 lookalike for
> current hardware. Linus Torvalds did his. (And as the old quote
> goes, Unix is just as user-friendly as any other operating system,
> it just isn't so promiscuous about who it's friendly with). You
> could do a TOPS-20 "shell" over Linux or you can do your own kernel.
> You decide. Never used TOPS-20 myself, though I'd like to try it
> sometime, Eric Raymond speaks highly of it even though nowadays he
> mostly hacks Linux and has even convinced my wife into installing
> Red Hat onto an otherwise unused Pentium-90 box so she'll learn
> skills not included in her nursing education.
> --
> Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
>
> When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked me if I had any
> firearms with me. I said "Well, what do you need?" -- Steven Wright
>
> [Why is TOPS-20 so much better than Unix?]
> Umm... It runs on a PDP-10?
Thats a Minus.....
> Seriously, now, I like the idea of being able to
> [DETACH CONTINUE]
> [^T]
> [^C^C]
> [CONTINUE]
> Various other nice things too...
Tja that's the problem with Unix - minimal service
and no inteligence providet :) To support a solution
like above, The OS must be aware of the user at all
time and special keycodes have to be reserved for
the OS. Personaly I also prefere more inteligent
OSes - BS2000 for example offers the same functionality.
Press the K2 key and the programm is interupted and
the OS prompt comes up - get information, even start
orther tasks - use any OS command needed (maybe without
loading a new programm into your task, since this will
destroy the old :). And because the debugger is just a
set of OS commands, you're free to poke around ...
Sigh. Brave old world :)
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
