Dear friends,
I'm recollecting information for an article I will write about the
transition of electro-mechanical calculators to electronic calculators
during the 60's.
I've found that the ANITA from Sumlock Comptometer of England (1963) is
usually regarded as the first electronic calculator [1]. However, recently
I found an article about Heinz Nixdorf of Germany in the LEXICON's History
of Computing (CD-ROM) which indicates that he built several models of
electronic calculators back in 1954 (Models ES12 and ES24).
I haven't been able to obtain more information on these calculators. I
suppose this is because Nixdorf moved soon onto the computers technology
(eventually joining with Siemens).
As a reference, I posted a copy of the Nixdorf article in my web site at
the following address:
http://www.dotpoint.com/xnumber/chistory.htm
Information about the Anita can be found at:
http://www.dotpoint.com/xnumber
SECTION: VINTAGE CALCULATORS --> ELECTRONIC --> ALBUM --> Anita
Any information on this subject will be appreciated.
Regards,
James Redin
-----------------------
[1] Bruce Flamm, "The World's First Electronic Calculator - Who Made It?"
The International Calculator Collector - Fall 1996, Issue #14.
I recently picked up a time/date stamper from the trash. It is a
box with a slot, and when a paper is inserted, the paper is stamped.
The first year on the stamping drum is 1951, so I assume that's when
it was made. It uses a cloth ribbon for ink. How do I reink it? Also,
the stamping has impressed the numbers into the rubber platen. How
do I get rid of that?
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
<the trackstar was made years ago in the late 1980s. in fact, radio shack
<to have it in the catalog for sale! you might want to check out ebay.com
<they did have some of these cards for ~$20 about two months ago. it's a f
<length isa card that you plug a standard disk ][ into. dont know about vi
<though. supposedly they were quite compatible and one could run just abou
<anything on that card.
I have one of these. A Diamond Trackstar 128k, has two 65c02s and 128k of
ram. It can use the standard 360k drives and the apple ones as well.
What I don't have for it is the software. Looks really neat and useful.
I don't know if it would work in anything later than an XTclass machine
and without software it's hard to determine that.
Allison
<Now that's where an IMSAI front panel really paid off. You put
<in the card, stored an FF in the first location, the panel
<display show EF instead...bingo, the RAM on D4 is bad (or more
<likely a bent pin or upside down in socket).
Or run NSdos and use the ramtest program. Another solution is load a
monitor into known memory and fill ram with 00 or ffh to detect stuck
bits.
Allison
"Daniel A. Seagraves" <DSEAGRAV(a)toad.xkl.com> wrote:
>BTW, That's *NOT* a mail bomb. He asked for it. I've been ^Qing thru all
>that crap all morning, and I'm sick of it. He wasted a lot of my time, so
>I'll waste a few of his. Besides, it's only about... *clicky click* 39 meg.
Daniel, mail bombs, real or implied, are a childish act. They accomplish
nothing except annoyance and can cause loss of other important mail by
any user on the involved systems. It's as effective as insulting your
computer when your program has a bug.
I thought the public posting of private messages was quite egregious, too,
but Daniel didn't do that.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
<From: Simon Coombs <simon(a)nenevr.demon.co.uk>
<Subject: Northstar S100 compatability
<Does anyone have any idea what sort of RAM cards the Horizon likes to
<play with? My system already has an (albeit flakey) RAM-16 card, and I
<have the remains of an old Godbout Econoram-II card, sans about half its
<chips. I have *no* idea whether this card was ever used with the N*.
Ram16 or ram17, any 8k/16k/64k static ram cards all work and may of the
dynmaic ram cards that have local (on card refresh). The NS* was pretty
clean so most memory bords worked well. The econoram-11 and the ram16
both work. The ram16 should be easy to fix it's static and uses 2kx8
parts.
<retired gracefully. I think that the PSU could do with some adjustment,
<too; if anyone in the UK has schematics for any of these bits, and would
Northstar* PSU requires adjustment???? The Horizon used three terminal
FIXED REGULATORS. Unless you mean 120v/240v wiring of the mains
transformer.
Allison
At 07:43 21/03/98 +1100, you wrote:
>When I talked to the designer of the Mattel videotext system, I was confused
>and mentiioned this piggybacking on TV signals in the blank area, and he was
>kinda amused that I would confuse videotext with TELEtext. Videotext had
>dedicated phone numbers your system would ring up. Teletext was piggybacked
>on TV signals.
Yes, they are two different services.
Here in Italy the Videotext service is called "VIDEOTEL" and works using the
Teletel/Prestel standard with speed 75/1200 baud.
The Teletext service broadcasted from RAI is called "TELEVIDEO":the signal
is inserted in the TV frames and can be seen with a decoder. The
informations are divided in pages (capacity abt. 990 per TV channel)
regarding many topics: from weather forecasts to news, tv programs schedule,
and other info that can be recalled with the remote control.
Some broadcasters uses it as an economic "one way" data transmission
(Telesoftware). With a special pc-board connected directly with the TV
antenna, is possible to download
files transmitted as multiple pages (E.G. the price updates for the the
pharmacies).
Ciao
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
? Riccardo Romagnoli,collector of:CLASSIC COMPUTERS,TELETYPE UNITS,PHONE ?
? AND PHONECARDS I-47100 Forli'/Emilia-Romagna/Food Valley/ITALY ?
? Pager:DTMF PHONES=+39/16888(hear msg.and BEEP then 5130274*YOUR TEL.No.* ?
? where*=asterisk key | help visit http://www.tim.it/tldrin_eg/tlde03.html ?
? e-mail=chemif(a)mbox.queen.it ?
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
> Videotext never really caught on in the US except on cable TV as a
>non-interactive display. I believe there are still a few videotext
services
>piggybacking on satellite channels. They transmit on one of the unused
scan
>lines at the top of the picture, similar to closed captioning for the deaf.
When I talked to the designer of the Mattel videotext system, I was confused
and mentiioned this piggybacking on TV signals in the blank area, and he was
kinda amused that I would confuse videotext with TELEtext. Videotext had
dedicated phone numbers your system would ring up. Teletext was piggybacked
on TV signals. He called videotext a precursor to the internet (and also
stated that he doesn't use the 'net because you have to pay for things you
want, and it's not got much useful on it anyway - I wonder how long since
he's used it?!!)
Cheers
A
OK, I'm lucky enough to have prototypes of a videotext system using the
Mattel Aquarius computer. I have hardware, and more importantly software,
manuals, and some videotext specs. I've got the things the guys used to
design their hardware - that is, the low level detail. I also have some 25
year old printouts of videotext screens. Rather neat. Contact me if you
want copies, basically at cost - or I will dig out particular information
gratis.
Cheers
A
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Peacock <peacock(a)simconv.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Saturday, March 21, 1998 5:20 AM
Subject: Re: information
Turlough O'Brien wrote:
"videotext" but there is little to no information available on the
net about "Videotext" or in the libraries.I would greatly appreciate it if
you could send me some informatin on the subject.
(This is from memory and unreliable) There was a proposed standard
for North America called NAPLPS, for videotext presentation. I believe it
was sponsored by Philips. If someone has a complete collection of BYTE
magazines, I recall there was an issue devoted to videotext, circa 1981.
The one clever feature of NAPLPS was that the graphics were based on
floating point coordinates. Because screen sizes and resolutions would
vary, positioning and sizing graphics was a problem. NAPLPS used a
coordinate system where the width and height of the screen ranged from 0 to
1. For instance, to place a pixel in the center, you referenced coordinates
(0.5, 0.5).
Videotext never really caught on in the US except on cable TV as a
non-interactive display. I believe there are still a few videotext services
piggybacking on satellite channels. They transmit on one of the unused scan
lines at the top of the picture, similar to closed captioning for the deaf.
To my knowledge the only truly successful videotext implementation
was the french minitel telephone directory.
Hope this gives you a place to start.
Jack Peacock
This plea for PDP items was on the "Obsolete Computer Helpline" today
and form the traffic lately I'm sure someone could contact this person
to give him some pointers by direct email.
>Steve Hogan <SHogan7080(a)aol.com>
>Nottingham, UK - Friday, March 20, 1998 at 03:27:29
>
> HELP
>
> I am looking for a source of spares for Digital PDP 11 computers.
>
> In particular, and Disk Controller and Disk Formatter cards
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