test-drb

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101090 discussions

by ball.of.john＠gmail.com

I'm trying to find one of these systems and so far I am having absolutely no luck at all. Aside from some info and a few photos on the Old-Computers.com website I can't find anything else relavent to this system and so far I can't find anyone who has even heard of the things let alone seen one. Has anyone here ever seen or used one and does anyone here even own one? I want to use one to replace my unreliable VT510 serial terminal as well as try out the IEEE-488 port. Oh yeah, here is a link to that info on the system. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1 <http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=623> &c=623 John.

18 years

AT&T/Olivetti terminal? PC? what is it?

by legalize＠xmission.com

Ebay # 130215811399 It looks like it has a motherboard and a single card plugged into it, but I don't know if its really a terminal or not... -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

18 years

Chess

by cclist＠sydex.com

> Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 17:08:17 -0700 (PDT) > From: Chris M > any thoughts on vintage chess games? I used one back in the early 70s that was pretty decent with a nice display. But you needed a CDC 6000-series system to run it; it was a real cycle hog, IIRC. Wonder if anyone bothered to preserve the game? It was by-and-large written in CDC FORTRAN. It originally had its own PP display driver (CHD); later versions used the programmable "T"(on SCOPE 3.3, anyway) DSD screen. Cheers, Chuck

18 years

Sirius1/Victor 9000

by cclist＠sydex.com

> Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:45:02 -0400 > From: "Roy J. Tellason" > Is any of the stuff typical of such publications available online > someplace? I used to get those, years ago, but never kept any of them. > Some of the occasional bits might be nice to have, though. (As in, it > ain't worth me chasing it down but if you happen to have links handy... > :-) EDN is online only back to about 1996 or so. Electronic Design keeps much less online, perhaps a year or two. IEEE Computer keeps the whole shebang online--you need to be an IEEE CS member to access the content however. Some of the old 1970s-vintage stuff is a lot of fun to read--and is often a way to research a now-forgotten product or company. Nothing like reading about things when they were happening; not at all like relying on (ahem) some gray-haired guy's faulty memory of events. Cheers, Chuck

18 years

are there any 68000 multi-cpu systems out there?

by cclist＠sydex.com

From: der Mouse: > Were they 68000s, though? All the ones double-fault-fix machines I > know of were, I think, using 68010s. The early Apollo systems were, I believe. I recall talking to one of the "guys behind the table" at Wescon when the 68000 came out. He said that the most commonly asked question by customers concerned using the large addressing space and fault mechainsm on the 68K for virtual memory--and that he was getting tired of saying that it couldn't be done. It was certainly one of the first questions out of my mouth. Although it was kind of a kludge, he was proved wrong if one used two of the beasts. Does anyone remember the speculation that the feature size of the 68K was getting close to the limit of IC fabrication technology? It was, what, 3 micron? Cheers, Chuck

18 years

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by ray＠arachelian.com

http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers… From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" ? a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released /and unreleased/ game Infocom made. For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I /have to/ share some of the best parts. It's just /too good/. <snip> There are downloads of the Milliways game at the bottom of the web page, right before the comments. You'll need a Z-Machine interpreter to play them, as usual.

18 years

Sirius1/Victor 9000 - has anyone ever seen one working?

by cclist＠sydex.com

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:44:06 -0700 From: Al Kossow > Has anyone ever documented what the encoding and disk format is on > these floppies? I was approached several years ago to decode a pile of Victor 9000 diskettes and got as far as deciphering the GCR. The customer then decided to abandon the project, so I never got any farther than that. I think that I still have the samples I worked with in my collection. GCR wasn't terribly unusual in the 70s. Commodore was definitely not the first to use it on disk drives, in spite of what some may claim (it may have been Sperry/ISS). ISTR that one of the rags (EDN, perhaps) had a great article at the time on exactly how the whole Victor disk thing worked. I never bothered to keep a copy of it, unfortunately. I never liked Victor as a company. Early on, they made it a point to file suit for trademark infringement against any US electronics operation with the name "Victor", including, IIRC, an appliance store owner who had been using the name for 20 years. It was a bullying tactic that I found distasteful. I remember that the sign on their building was quite visible as you drove on highway 17 through Scotts Valley. Cheers, Chuck

18 years

More on Exabyte 8200

by cclist＠sydex.com

On the Exabyte ftp site, one can find several EPROM images for the 8200 tape drive. They're the files ending in .HEX in the pub/firmware/8mm directory on ftp.exabyte.com. Looks like one servo board PROM image and three firmware PROM images. It's probably a good idea to grab the contents of the exabyte ftp site if you have any of these drives. You never know when these things will suddenly go away. Does anyone have any electronic docs for the Tandberg QIC-24 drives? Cheers, Chuck

18 years

HP41 (was Chess)

by cclist＠sydex.com

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:03:31 +0100 (BST) From: (Tony Duell) > No HP calculator ever had a vacuum fluorescent display. And no HP > calculator eeer used nixie tubes. No, but a few TI desktop models did, including one that did hexadecimal math that we used. Personally, I'd love to find one of those in working condition--I could use it today, to supplement my HP 16C, but I suspect they're rarer than hens' teeth. Cheers, Chuck

18 years

IBM 6094 Lighted Programmable Function Keypad - bulk buy on eBay

by listmailgoeshere＠gmail.com

Hi cctalkers, The 6094 LPFK has been discussed on this list before (see thread "IBM 6094-020 Lighted Program Function Keys"). I notice that there's a bulk lot of 19 of them on ePay (see 180215874744) - now, I don't want 19, but I'd like one. I'm sure there are others on this list who would as well. Who else is game? This seller will only ship to the US, so someone within the US (I'm not) would need to receive them and reship - I'll happily pay a few $ on top of the onward postage for the trouble. Any volunteers? Ed.

18 years

HP thinkjet NIB on epay

by dr.emiel＠xs4all.nl

http://cgi.ebay.nl/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=260231490209 Boxed thinkjets with I think good printhead cables. Rik

18 years

video - Turing's Cathedral

by ray＠arachelian.com

I stumbled across this today, if you can get past the light stuttering, it's a fascinating watch. There are some notes here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html If you want to download this, copy the url below and feed it into keepvid.com. :) http://youtube.com/watch?v=KRBR4W8ft2g&feature=user Added: April 18, 2008 (Less info) Google Tech Talks April, 9 2008 ABSTRACT New Light on the Dawn of Digital Computing, 1945-1958 The digital universe consists of two kinds of bits: differences in space and differences in time. Digital computers translate between these two forms of information--structure and sequence--according to definite rules. Sixty-three years ago, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, John von Neumann and a small group of nonconformists launched a project to do this at electronic speed. The resulting architecture and coding has descended directly to almost all computers now in use. Von Neumann succeeded in jump-starting the computer revolution by bringing engineers into the den of the mathematicians, rather than by bringing mathematicians into a den of engineers. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that *mean* things and numbers that *do* things. Our universe would never be the same. With a mere 5 kilobytes of random access memory, von Neumann and colleagues tackled previously intractable problems ranging from thermonuclear explosions, stellar evolution, and long-range weather forecasting to cellular automata, genetic coding, and the origins of life. Programs were small enough to be completely debugged, but hardware could not be counted on to perform consistently from one kilocycle to the next. This situation is now reversed. Speaker: George Dyson Category: People & Blogs Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education

18 years

Sirius1/Victor 9000 - has anyone ever seen one working?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

Has anyone ever documented what the encoding and disk format is on these floppies?

18 years

The Unix Haters' Handbook

by lproven＠gmail.com

I'm sure that the UHH is old news to folk hereabouts. When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now, it's available for free: http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html (Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it.) It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now. It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged. Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like them. What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now, but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through flaming hoops. A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on. The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems, lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now, obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively svelte. If you don't already know it, give it a read. I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be really interested to know the thoughts of modern Unix gurus on how much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

18 years

Exabyte 8200 vs. 8205

by cclist＠sydex.com

Ah, no biggie--I have other Exabyte drives that will handle 8205 tapes. The 8200 that I have isn't a bare drive--it's in a "Contemporary Cybernetics" external box, complete with linear PSU and 2-line LCD display. The display seems to be controlled by what looks to be an 8051 connected via a 3-wire cable to the drive. It's interesting--lets you know, for example, how much tape you have left as you're writing, how many MB you've written and the current operation. However, on the subject of compression and 8200/8500 drives, I found the following thread on the Sun Managers list from 1992: http://www.sunmanagers.org/archives/1992/0017.html which mentions external third-party compression modules for the Exabytes. This is the first time I've heard of this--does anyone know anything about it? Nothing like being 16 years behind the time. :) Cheers, Chuck

18 years

Chess

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

any thoughts on vintage chess games? I used to have one for my original Tandy 2000. Dang thing caused a memory parity error right in the middle of a game once. Luckily it was the parity chip that got zonked. I was so proud of myself after I fixed 'er back up. ____________________________________________________________________________________ You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost. http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com

18 years

Exabyte 8200 vs. 8205

by tiggerlasv＠aim.com

Exabyte (now Tandberg Data) still has firmware images for the various drives that support firmware updates. I went there, and grabbed some images for the 8505XLS, in order to fool it into thinking it is an 8200. Be warned: The "EXPERT FOR DOS" utility, for updating firmware has a glitch in it which may leave you with an unuseable drive, if you choose the wrong update the first time around. The program greys-out the "Firmware update" button on drives that don't support firmware updates, such as the 8200. So, if you flash your 8505 with 8200 compatability firmware, EXPERT FOR DOS will read your drive as an 8200, and won't let you re-flash the firmware a second time ! EXPERT will politely show you the HARDWARE model number of your drive to be an 8505, but relies on the ID string that the drive returns, to determine if your drive is a model that supports flashing. A very stupid oversight on their part. So now I have an 8505, that is "sort of" flashed as an 8200, but not with the features I need. What's that you say? Simply re-flash the firmware, using the "special cable" that connects to the back of the drive? Easy enough if you have a 4-pin connector on the back. It's standard RS232. Of course, I have to have the older 3-pin model, which is TTL, and needs a leveling adapter. . . It's cheaper and easier for me to buy a different drive, than it is to assemble the required programming to fix the glitch. T

18 years

Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP or A real good substitute

by cclist＠sydex.com

> Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:33:41 -0800 > From: Brent Hilpert > What's the app?, does it really have special requirements? So many op-amp > types have been produced over the years. Perhaps I exagerrate, but they > seem like transistors in that a dozen modern types could cover > substitution for the entire range of types. The audio folks get very picky about brands of op-amps and swear there are audible differences between brands of the same op-amp. My response to those who say "just listen, you can tell" is usually "What?" Cheers, Chuck

18 years

Exabyte 8200 vs. 8205

by cclist＠sydex.com

For you 8mm tape fans out there, is the Exabyte 8205 drive simply an 8200 with different firmware--or are the electronics completely different? In other words, can I upgrade an 8200 to an 8205 without changing the PCB out? More of an item of curiosity now--I've got a bunch of Solaris tapes written on an 8205, but they're written in 8200 mode, so it doesn't really matter. Thanks, Chuck

18 years

Medos source code recovered.

by jos.mar＠bluewin.ch

Probably not too important, given that there are next to none running machines left, but I was able to recover source code for Medos 4.2, the operating system fot the ETH Lilith computer. No prizes for guessing that is coded in 100% Modula-2.... Jos Dreesen

18 years

Replacement for QP1008 (HP9816 PSU)

by dr.emiel＠xs4all.nl

I aquired a HP 9816 with a faulty power supply. Thanks to the diagrams of Tony I found out that the switching transistor QP1008 is shorted and a 2n2222 but thats no problem. I googled for it and searched my datbooks but can't find any replacement or datasheet for it. So does somebody knows the specs or a replacement for this transistor ? There was also a second processorboard in it from Newport Digital with a 68020 at 33Mhz, does anybody know these boards? Rik

18 years

Sirius1/Victor 9000 - has anyone ever seen one working?

by les＠frii.com

I have seen them working. In the day, I worked for a store which sold them, so I saw quite a few working ones. We also added touch screens (with s stylus) to quite a few of them. I remember discovering that the index detector on the floppy drives was not connected, like on an apple 2. The formating was completly soft sectored, which did not rely on a index pulse from the disk. I got in an argument with a Victor rep once about this. He was telling a story about an "idiot" customer, who was using 10 sectored hard sectored floppies (ala Northstar), and he told the customer that this was the problem. After some discussion with him, I opened a unit up, unplugged the wires from the index photosensor, and the unit still worked. He still didn't want to believe me. It also seems like the floppy used different speeds (rpm) on different tracks, running slower on the inside tracks and faster on the outside tracks to keep the same bit density at all places on the disk. There were more sectors on the outside tracks than the inside tracks. This would seem to preclude using a standard floppy drive.

18 years

Anyone know where to find software for an hp 16505a prototype analyzer?

by batata1＠free.fr

Hello I'm french and i've be seen your comments in last year what about hard disk problem of HP 16505A. Can you help me Try to contact me please I search any information about this device thanks Fernando from Paris

18 years

Atari SLM 804

by silvercreekvalley＠yahoo.com

There is an Atari SLM 804 on ebay (item 220224227774), I'm not the seller, but as these are quite rare thought the list should know. The SLM 804 is an early Atari laser printer using the ACSI (DMA style) interface. Ian. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

18 years

cctalk Digest, Vol 56, Issue 26 Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP

by trebor72＠execpc.com

cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > Message: 2 > Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:01:54 -0700 > From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> > Subject: Re: Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP or A real good substitute > Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:17:07 -0500 > From: "Robert J. Stevens" >> I am Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP or A real good substitute. I found >> a Data Sheet but having trouble locating any Parts. I am hoping someone >> has one in their Parts Box TIA Bob in Wisconsin USE trebor07 at execpc.com >> > > My cross-reference charts say that the TI OPA704PA (in current > production and available from Digi-Key) is a drop-in substitute. The > Philips ECG944M may also work. > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:33:41 -0800 > From: Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> > Subject: Re: Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP or A real good substitute > > >> I am Looking for a LM4250H 8 Pin DIP or A real good substitute. I found >> a Data Sheet but having trouble locating any Parts. >> I am hoping someone has one in their Parts Box >> > > I have several NOS LM4250CN, date code 8121. > The CN in plastic 8-pin DIP, 0C to +70C. > According to the NS book, the H is metal can, -55C to +125C. > > Can throw a couple in the mail from Vancouver, Canada, if you don't find > anything faster/closer. > > What's the app?, does it really have special requirements? So many op-amp types > have been produced over the years. Perhaps I exagerrate, but they seem like > transistors in that a dozen modern types could cover substitution for the > entire range of types. I am trying to build a Clone of the Godbout S-100 Terminator for my Byte-8 Box. Looks like Unicorn may have what I want Thanks for all the replies Bob

18 years

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