So I got my hands on an HP 88780 1/2" Tape Drive from list Member Mark
(Thanks!). The drive physically looks to be in good shape but was pretty
dirty when I got it. I've cleaned up the drive and powered it up.
The good news:
The drive powers up. Initially I had trouble getting it to load a tape but
that seems to have been resolved.
I have a non-working PDT-11/150, which fails self test 7 (console
USART) and when not in test mode, and with autobaud disabled, doesn't
send anything to the console.
I dumped the ROMs (two 82S2708 1Kx8 PROM for LSI-11 code, three 8316E
2Kx8 masked ROM for the 8085 I/O processor, and one 8316E for the 8085
floppy controller), and I've started disassembling the 8085 ROM code
to figure out what the self-test actually does, but it's slow going.
It would be really helpful to have a copy (paper or scan) of the Field
Maintenance Print Set. Does anyone have it?
Thanks!
Eric
>
> Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2015 09:18:56 +0100
> From: Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at Update.UU.SE>
> Subject: Triprocessor PDP-10 [Was: Re: [multicians] Emacs humor]
>
> You make it sound like someone hacked up a computer consisting of one
> KL-10, one PDP-10 and one PDP-6. But I assume you mean homogenic
> three-processor machines?
>
> Who, besides Peter L?thberg, ran threeprocessor machines?
>
> Also, what are you refering to as PDP-10? KA-10?
>
> Thanks,
> Pontus.
>
>
1026 TOPS-10 DEC Development Marlboro, MA KL1099 Tri-SMP Scrapped 12/14/97
1042 TOPS-10 DEC Development Marlboro, MA KL1099 Tri-SMP Scrapped 12/14/97
1322 TOPS-10 DEC Development Marlboro, MA KL10 Tri-SMP
Michael Thompson
>Lots of places. The folks at Oak Ridge ("Atomic City") ran a 5-processor
>SMP configuration.
Rich - can you elaborate on this any? Which facility, what was it used
for? I've got family from Oak Ridge, and its unusual for my vintage
computer / atomic history to intersect like this.
Todd Killingsworth
The revived 2013 re-issue of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system is a joy to behold.? If you've never heard of Oberon before, it is a minimalistic education-oriented language and operating system designed after Wirth had taken a (second) sabattical at PARC in the 80's.
The new version runs on a custom RISC processor, implemented in an FPGA, instead of the NS3032 in the orginal Ceres workstations.?? Originally, it required a Digilent "Spartan 3 Starter Kit" with a custom-built daughterboard providing a few additional connectors.? This board is no longer made, however, and no other FPGA development board appears to provide the 32-bit wide fast SRAM the Oberon CPU required.
Recently, a new board, the OberonStation,? has come onto the market that was designed specifically for Oberon, and will boot up Oberon 2013 out of the box.?? It also looks like an excellent platform for other retro-style FPGA CPU designs that want to stay away from complex SDRAM controllers and the caches they like to feed.
My OberonStation arrived a couple of days ago, and it's really amazing to see what can be done with a hardware and software stack that is small enough to actually read and understand.
https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/http://www.projectoberon.com/
OberonStation - The Oberon computing platform
--Bill
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>> I think the elevator hack involved the AI Lab PDP-6 (or maybe, later,
>> PDP-10)
I can supply definitive bits here (I have read the code involved). The actual
interface to the elevator was in one of the PDP-11 front-ends on the MIT-AI
KA10 (memory escapes me as to whether it was the TV11 or the XGP11 or what,
don't have time right at the moment to go look - I suspect the former).
There was actually a table in the PDP-11 code that ran the Knight TV's
(perhaps the first bit-mapped display system) so that one only needed to type
'<Whatever>-E', and the code knew which floor that Knight TV console was on,
and automagically sent the elevator to that floor (3, 8 or 9).
>> I wouldn't be surprised if it migrated to the Lisp machines, too
Yes, but that would have just been a network client talking to a server; the
actual hardware interface remained, I am pretty sure, on the -11.
Noel
I have an 11/05 with ASR 33 for I/O. I am using the M9970 console card to
make the connection. I have loaded papertape BASIC into core (16K) and it
boots up from 000 000 to the TTY, I can type in programs, etc.
Question - I'd like to switch over to a VT 50 in 20ma mode. Not sure if
this is possible based on what I read here:
http://www.retrocmp.com/how-tos/interfacing-to-a-pdp-1105/144-interfacing-w…
Anyone successfully connect a VT 50 or 52 to a 11/05 or 11/10 over to the
EIN M7856 for printer and typewriter only, leaving the M9970 for program
i/o to save and load programs?
--
Bill
>Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > From: Jerome H. Fine
>
> > both DEC and DSD needed a bounce buffer managed by software
>
>Love that term, "bounce buffer" (I wrote a whole package to support them in a
>packet switch I did) - I'm officially adopting it, right now! :-)
>
> Noel
>
Hey - anything that anyone writes is automatically copyrighted.
So first you need permission to use that! I will try and figure out
who the person was that first used that phrase so we can both use it.
I did not mention that the concept worked quite well with the DEC
RX02 and the DSD RX03 when a PDP-11/73 was used. But when
version 1.0 of that device driver was used with a PDP-11/23, the
transfer rate was painfully slow because the interleave gap was
not long enough relative to the time needed to bounce the buffer.
Since the DMA silo had already been emptied into the bounce buffer,
the solution was to immediately initiate the next READ into the silo
and then bounce the buffer (for a READ request, of course). That
allowed the READ of the next sector on the floppy media to be
performed by the controller while the CPU was performing a
transfer out of the bounce buffer into the user buffer one word
at a time. I don't need to test the timing on any slower CPU since,
as far as I know, none support an MMU which would be required
to use a Mapped RT-11 monitor.
I may have the exact details and terminology incorrect - it was about
20 years ago.
Jerome Fine