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Event Reminder: DEC Legacy is back on 9th-10th Nov 2019, Windermere UK

by mark＠wickensonline.co.uk

Just a quick reminder for those folk thinking about registering... The next DEC Legacy will take place Saturday 9th November 2019 - Sunday 10th at the Marchesi Centre in Windermere, North West UK. With a focus on Digital Equipment Corporation and their legacy of hardware, software and ethos I'm also extending an open invitation to those who are interested in SGI, HP, Sun, IBM and other high end hardware to come along and share their passion with us. Several formal presentations will be mixed with plenty of hands on time with hardware brought by enthusiasts. Enthusiasts are encouraged to bring along hardware and software to exhibit. The personal nature of the event brings a unique atmosphere within which friendships are easily forged. Registration is now open. Please visit http://wickensonline.co.uk/declegacy/ for more details. Kind Regards, Mark Wickens, M0NOM

6 years, 8 months

Identification of an HP minicomputer

by ggs＠shiresoft.com

Hi, I have sitting in my pile of stuff an HP minicomputer that I?m trying to identify (at least in terms of exactly what it is and what sort of configuration it might have). As far as I can tell, it?s an HP-1000 M-Series minicomputer (that should hopefully get us *some* details). The ?asset tag? lists the part number as 2113023-108. Looking at the back there?s space for 9 I/O cards (5 are occupied). So my question is which of the several CPUs could this be and how do I tell (for example) what the configuration is (e.g. how much memory, etc). Yes, I have looked on bitsavers, but short of disassembling the box to look at the (at least) 2 boards that are below the I/O slots, I can?t tell what?s there and I?d like to see if there?s a way to determine what this is without resorting to disassembly. Thanks. TTFN - Guy

6 years, 8 months

Archiving information, was Re: ADM-3A question

by marvin＠west.net

Al Kossow via cctalk writes: > On 8/14/19 8:53 AM, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote: >> I hope this thread will be written to a blog post > > Buried in a filing cabinet in the basement with a sign that says > "Beware of Leopard". > > Blogs are a stupid way to archive information, almost as stupid as > putting it on Facebook. The problem is not archiving, but rather retrieving the data. As a current example, I am looking for information on the Jonas Escort computers. A slight misspelling (Jonas instead of Jonos) resulted in a whole slew of graphic escort services. And spelling it properly has resulted in basically zero useful information about the computer itself. It is hard to believe the almost total lack of information on the Jonos. If the scarcity is real, it must be worth at least as much as the Apple I :). And ditto for the Molecular Computer although not as bad as the Jonos. BTW, these are two computers I'm looking at bringing to VCFMW if there is any serious interest. Instead of the search engines working to improve AI, they should be putting more effort into ESP. Marvin

6 years, 8 months

GW-DEC-1: A New DEC Prototyping Board

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Birkel > But which bus? There are three ... So I'm clearly not very awake this morning. I can only think of two major quad-width DEC standard slots - SPC (UNIBUS) and dual QBUS. What's the third - PMI? (MUD is hex, as is Fastbus.) Or OMNIBUS, if we're not restricted to PDP-11's? Noel

6 years, 8 months

Raspberry Pi write cycles

by athornton＠gmail.com

I did have a case where the Pi I was using as secondary DNS/DHCP and as the secondary backup server (using USB spinning disk) destroyed its SD card. But then it turned out not to be the load at all. No matter what I ran on that Pi, it would corrupt its SD cards in a matter of weeks (the symptom was that the fourth bit of some bytes would just stick on). I assume it was just something broken in the Pi itself. I will state here, for the record, that if someone can spam effectively -- or be a botnet C&C node -- from TOPS/10 on a PDP-10 emulated on my Pi, my irritation at having my systems abused will probably be overwhelmed by my admiration at their dedication. (Traffic encryption via simh is incredibly painful. You have to turn login delay waaaaay up to run NetBSD on VAX on a Pi if you want to be able to ssh into it; the machine itself runs fine-ish, but the zillions of cycles to encrypt the traffic swamps it in no time.) And, you know, if you manage to cause my SD cards in those machines to fail, well, gosh, guess I'm out $10 or so for a new one. I'm not bothering to back up any of the stuff inside 'em, btw (so those of you using 'em, seriously, save your work elsewhere if it's precious--and, um, yeah, unless you're on OpenVMS, TOPS-20, or ITS, you don't have a TCP/IP stack and since you don't have a direct terminal interface into it, that probably means copying and pasting from the terminal session...but if you have something you really want off it that's larger than a couple of screens full, just write me a note and I can likely extract it for you more reasonably). Adam

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Allison Parent > ! Seriously? ... Memory of some form there is a must. I don't know about you, but my approach in looking into hardware issues is often to start by reducing things to the simplest possible configuration that exhibits the failure. (I asssume the various reasons for that approach are obvious.) So, the OP couldn't get ODT to work. Well, what's the simplest config one needs for ODT? Well, a CPU (but it won't be executing any instructions, so one could leave HALT on), the console serial card (with a working terminal attached), a bus/backplane to plug them into, and a power supply. But no, the LSI-11 machines also want memory - although it's unused by ODT after a single read cycle at power-on. It's probably worth pointing out that this is _not_ true of the F-11 machines; those do ODT just fine without memory. Perhaps DEC got some complaints about the behaviour of the LSI-11, and made a change? I don't know if the front console on the early UNIBUS machines works without any memory on the UNIBUS - I'm too lazy to check. I have this vague memory that they do, though. > The architecture of pdp-11 has the first 256 words as interrupt vectors > and software locations. Some 'internal' interrupts from the CPU (e.g. NXM) are at fixed, low, locations (in Kernel D space on some of the models with MMU, to be technical - I don't know about the /40 and /34, etc), but there's nothing that restricts _device_ interrupts to be in low memory (either physical, or virtual on those machines which get vectors from Kernel virtual). E.g. in the "pdp-11 bus handbook" (EB 17525 20), pg. 119, it says "Place Vector on BDAL <15:00> L" - so one could use 0140000 if one wanted. Most DEC devices that do the vector with jumpers don't have posts for all 15 bits, it is true, but AFAIK no CPU looks at only the low bits on the bus. > How else would the console vectors at 60 work. ODT doesn't use interrupts. Noel

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Brent Hilpert > I wouldn't have thought any of the (various 11 CPU) ODTs used > interrupts for the console They don't. > Don't know which CPU Noel was referring to. The OP was having problems with an LSI-11 (M7264 quad card); I was working with an LSI-11/2 (M7270 dual card - I don't have any LSI-11's). But I'm pretty sure the CPUs on the two are identical; and certainly, both display the 'must have memory at 0 for ODT to work'. Noel

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jonathan (systems_glitch) > Yep, fun times on LSI-11/2! Heh, this one was _utterly trivial_ compared to the 'must have working memory at 0 or ODT won't start'! (I don't think I've ever seen that one in DEC documentation anywhere...) Noel

6 years, 8 months

ADM-3A question

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

>> Al Kossow via cctalk writes: >> Buried in a filing cabinet in the basement with a sign that says >> "Beware of Leopard". Good one! > From: Seth J. Morabito > I'm going to respectfully disagree .. the proliferation of modern > JavaScript frameworks that are designed to build single-page apps, and > make the web virtually impossible to scrape or mirror in an efficient > and simple way. ... every single page is statically generated at > publishing time and absolutely nothing is dynamic. It's not clear that it's the dynamic nature of the content he's unhappy with; it might just be that having stuff scattered across a zillion personal pages (be they blogs, or whatever) is going to make it hard to find the useful one when needed, and that's why he's cranky. (Well, more so than he usually is.... :-) If it's got something oddball term in the text, a Web indexer might be able to find it, but what if your search term turns up 17,239 matches? Finding the useful needle in the hackstack of crap on the current Web is a tall order - so tall, that I suspect a lot of people don't even try, just shoot off an email to CCTalk in the hopes that someone here will enlighten them. I've seen a number of instances recently where people's questions were answered on the CHWiki, but apparently they couldn't find it. So they wound up asking here... Noel

6 years, 8 months

ADM-3A question

by charlesmorris800＠centurytel.net

Thanks. I believe you are right also :) The expensive ceramic packages have hermetic seals, not so the plastic (epoxy) packages used in commercial grade parts. There are some kind of failures that can be fixed by baking - but I don't know if this is one of them (if the bond wire is soldered to the die it might work). If it detached from the weld at the lead frame, no go. Anyway there are over 100 chips on the ADM-3A board and I would be more worried about damaging the others with heat. I just paid 71 cents for another LS193 ;) Charles WB3JOK/0 -----Original Message----- From: Dave Wade Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2019 5:02 AM To: 'Charles' ; 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: ADM-3A question Charles, I believe that TTL chips suffer from failure or detachment of the bonding wire that runs from the die to the interconnect pin, which would result in a floating pin as described.] Not sure if environmental storage affects this as chips should be sealed... I have also recently seen it suggested that heating the chip up in an oven could affect a temporary repair (sorry I can't find the reference now). Dave G4UGM > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Charles via cctalk > Sent: 14 August 2019 00:20 > To: cctalk digest <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: Re: ADM-3A question > > After hanging vertically for 36 hrs in a hot upstairs room, more goop seeped > out from under the keyboard. It now works again. Whew. > > While running on the bench for burn-in testing, a cursor problem suddenly > appeared... it would only move every other keystroke. With the technical > description and schematic at hand, it wasn't hard to track down a 74LS193 > up/down counter with a blown (floating) LSB output. Confirmed by manually > toggling that bit and the cursor would move back and forth one position. > Meanwhile I removed the bad chip and put in a DIP socket. Naturally my TTL > collection didn't have an 'LS193 so I'm waiting on that. So I have a 24 line, 1 > column terminal :) > > The monitor was occasionally intermittent (no display at all, no HV, +15 and > drive signals OK). It seemed to change with movement of the wiring harness > from the main board to the monitor, too. I reseated the edge connector on its > PCB and it seemed to be fixed - but then the VERTICAL deflection collapsed and > tweaking the height adjustment caused increasing loss. The 100 ohm pot to the > base of the vertical output transistor had picked that moment to go open. > Changed that out and readjusted everything - so far so good after another hour > of run time. > > This ADM-3A could have been unpowered (and in a storage area without > climate > control) for a very long time. I wonder if that contributed to the failures I'm > seeing... hope there aren't any more until I get to use it for a while on my PDP- > 8/A (or 11/23+). > > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus

6 years, 8 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 59, Issue 13

by curt＠atarimuseum.com

Will... I?m still waiting for you and the Rhode Island Computer Society to get my brand new in the box 9766, the Alignment disk platter, the box of spare heads and the other unit 9766 beat up unit up and running that I gave you to donate to RICS for free in exchange for you reading the dozen 300mb platters I have and then once the data was read they could keep the platters... So still waiting on that... hint hint hint > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 14:09:16 -0400 > From: William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> > To: P Gebhardt <p.gebhardt at ymail.com>, "General Discussion: On-Topic > and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: Re: Control Data 9766 drive on epay > Message-ID: > <CANij+dfgBwBbQ2E29umm_QUx6duuwQANQ35cGgsmC7MbOkiXVw at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > There is a Make Offer option, and it does look like the seller does > take offers fairly regularly. I will not be buying it. > > If someone does, I have a huge amount of spares for 976x drives, > including refurbished heads. It might take a while to find them in my > mess, however. > > -- > Will > >

6 years, 8 months

Convergent Technologies NGEN and Datapoint monitor

by ce.murillosanchez＠gmail.com

Good evening, folks... Does anybody know if Datapoint made monitors for Convergent Technologies? In my "near junk" section I have some modules that someone stored in a warehouse next to a carpenter shop and under bombardment >from bats and birds.? The modules were made by Convergent Technologies and I never did much about them because of their extremely dirty state and also because of the lack of a keyboard.? I have: - Two CP-001/8 cpu modules (80186 at 8MHz, 256KB RAM, 6845 video IC) - Four 5 1/4" dual-floppy modules (each has two Mitsubishi M4853 half-height drives) - One GC-001 graphics controller - Two PS-001 power supplies, one is missing parts and then, a monitor that by the looks and controls is a VC-002 15" to be used with the GC-001, except that it is labeled as: Datapoint Corp. Model 97-1224-001 Serial 934055 Other marks:? 53-00355-00???? 5-84 So, do you guys know if Datapoint made monitors for others? Carlos.

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Isn't the interrupt disabled by RESET? Nope. On the -11/03 and KDF11-A, BEVNT is wired straight into the CPU, and there's no internal register to control it. The BDV11 does have a register which can enable/disable the LTC (it connects BEVNT to ground via a transistor when the appropriate register bit is cleared); but, ironically (given your question), BINIT/RESET does _not_ clear that register! Only BPOK does. (My theory is they were short of a bus receiver for BINIT, and rather than put a whole extra chip on the card...) So, once on, it has to be explicitly turned off, or the 'boot' switch (which toggles BPOK) has to be hit. The KDF11-B and all KDJ11 machines do have the LTC register, which operates 'correctly'. Noel

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Jerry Weiss > I turned BEVENT off and it boots successfully. I am not immediately > sure why this is necessary. If an LTC interrupt happens before the OS has set up the LTC vector, etc, hilarity ensues. E.g. the LTC has to be turned off before UNIX V6 will boot on an -11/23: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Running_UNIX_V6_on_an_-11/23 I discovered this the hard way; I roached the disk on my simulated /23 when I didn't. Noel

6 years, 8 months

ADM-3A question

by charlesmorris800＠centurytel.net

After hanging vertically for 36 hrs in a hot upstairs room, more goop seeped out from under the keyboard. It now works again. Whew. While running on the bench for burn-in testing, a cursor problem suddenly appeared... it would only move every other keystroke. With the technical description and schematic at hand, it wasn't hard to track down a 74LS193 up/down counter with a blown (floating) LSB output. Confirmed by manually toggling that bit and the cursor would move back and forth one position. Meanwhile I removed the bad chip and put in a DIP socket. Naturally my TTL collection didn't have an 'LS193 so I'm waiting on that. So I have a 24 line, 1 column terminal :) The monitor was occasionally intermittent (no display at all, no HV, +15 and drive signals OK). It seemed to change with movement of the wiring harness >from the main board to the monitor, too. I reseated the edge connector on its PCB and it seemed to be fixed - but then the VERTICAL deflection collapsed and tweaking the height adjustment caused increasing loss. The 100 ohm pot to the base of the vertical output transistor had picked that moment to go open. Changed that out and readjusted everything - so far so good after another hour of run time. This ADM-3A could have been unpowered (and in a storage area without climate control) for a very long time. I wonder if that contributed to the failures I'm seeing... hope there aren't any more until I get to use it for a while on my PDP-8/A (or 11/23+). --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

6 years, 8 months

XXDP on PDP-11/03

by dj.taylor4＠comcast.net

Recently, I assembled one of the RX02 emulator boards developed by AK6DN.? I am using it presently in a BA11-M box with PDP-11/2 cpu (really basic 16 bit system).? I put the disk images from github on the SD card (RT11 V5.07 and XXDP not sure what version). The box has a BDV11 bootstrap / terminator board and I use this to boot the RX02 emulator.? Works fine when I boot RT11, however I can't boot XXDP - it halts at 000104. Do I need to use a different version of XXDP to run on the PDP-11/03? Doug

6 years, 8 months

Compaq SystemPro XL Service Manual or PSU Schematics

by cctalk＠ibm51xx.net

Hello All, Does anyone out there by any chance have the Service Manual for a Compaq SystemPro XL or at least schematics to the PSU? Trying to revive one of these systems and the PSU is not working. TIA! -Ali

6 years, 8 months

Electr* Engineering

by athornton＠gmail.com

At Rice in the early 90s the department was "Electrical and Computer Engineering" if my hazy memory serves. The genealogy of Computer Science departments (and their curricula) (at least in the US) is also weird and historically-contingent. Basically it seems to have been a tossup at any given school whether it came out of the Electr[ical|onic] Engineering department, in which case it was memories and logic gates and a bottom-up, hardware-focused curriculum, or out of the Mathematics department, in which case it was algorithms and complexity analysis and a software-focused curriculum. Adam

6 years, 8 months

IBM 026/029/129 ribbons

by cctalk＠ibmjunkman.com

Just for reference the following site has ribbons for the subject card punches. https://www.aroundtheoffice.com/IBM-026-Keypunch-Ribbon/productinfo/RP-520-I BM/ I bought some a few years ago. As I understand it he makes a batch every year or so. I don't know but he might like the used reels back to use again. :-) Donald

6 years, 8 months

Anyone have a mid-80s Robinson-Nugent connector catalog?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

Or some RN 68 pin CLCC sockets, or even a part number for them? I tried buying a 1981 RFN catalog, but they weren't in there. I have a bunch of IMS 80186 slave cards with the CPUs pulled Of course, they didn't keep the caps. RN was bought by 3M and I've been unable to even find a part number for these sockets. I'm hoping not to have to replace the sockets to get these boards working. Pics of what I need are here https://twitter.com/bitsavers/status/1161075014235385857

6 years, 8 months

Pertec Interface Cable Length

by dj.taylor4＠comcast.net

I have a question about cable length - any electrical engineers in the house? Connected a Qualstar 1260 tape drive to an Emulex TC02 qbus tape controller in a pdp-11/53.? The interface is pertec with 2 50 pin cables. When I use a pair of short flat ribbon cables, 18 and 30 inches each, it works.? Under RT11 I can INIT, Copy, DUMP, do a Directory. It doesn't work when I use a pair of 5 foot long flat ribbon cables.? Are they too long?? Do I need twisted pair type of cable?? Is it possibly a termination problem? Doug

6 years, 8 months

Anyone have any Datapoint software on floppy?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

I picked up Eric's DP 1500 Z80 system at VCF West this weekend, unfortunately the boot disk has bad sectors. Anyone have any diskettes/images around for the 1500 or any other version of their systems? I took pics and dumped the firmware from it along with a DP 1551 pcb I've had for a while, and have been uploading the manuals to bitsavers that came with it, as well as a bunch that I've had scanned in the backlog

6 years, 8 months

DEC VT20 boot device

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> I didn't fully disassamble the program I have now done so; the -YK is _exactly_ the same as the -YA (the later ones, which are minorly different from what's in the manual), except that the HSR address (177550) has been replaced as the primary device address by that of DL11 #1, in the second block of DL11 addresses (175610). In other words, the ROM is prepared to load something in bootstrap loader format (which I have documented here: http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11_Bootstrap_Loader the one program known in this format is the absolute loader) over the non-console serial line. Noel

6 years, 8 months

Control Data 9766 drive on epay

by p.gebhardt＠ymail.com

Hi list, Just came across this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Computing-CDC-Magnetic-Peripherals-Control… Haven't seen one listed in years. The price lets me assume that this offer addresses customers that may use these drives in a production environment or so... I am not aware of museums or hobbyists who have such drives currently in a functional state to read and write from and to 80MB (CDC 9762) or 300MB (CDC 9766) disk packs. Maybe the CHM? ... not taking into consideration the CHM activities related to the Xerox disk cartidge? (2315-equivalent) software archive project. Anybody out there? Would be interesting to know. Best regards, Pierre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.digitalheritage.de

6 years, 8 months

Searching for manuals...

by geneb＠deltasoft.com

I'm looking for a full set of manuals for the Microsoft Professional Development System v7.1. If anyone here has them to loan for scanning or to sell, please contact me directly. Thanks! 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_!

6 years, 8 months

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test-drb