John,
I have a real Industrial-11 console I could check with, if you can
set up a version of the picture with that console.
Michel
----- Original Message -----
From: "John A. Dundas III" <dundas at caltech.edu>
Date: Friday, February 2, 2007 1:53 pm
Subject: Re: PDP-11 GUI console, was Re: Foonly
> At 3:17 PM -0500 2/2/07, Bill Pechter wrote:
> >I'd love to see the Dec DataSystem 570 graphic...
>
> Easy: just run the program, use the Preferences menu item, select
> Console, click on DataSystem 570, whoosh, the console window will
> change.
>
> BTW, someone with a real 570, or an Industrial-11, can make sure I
> got those right. I have only (!) a "regular" one to measure against.
>
> John
>
> If anyone is desperately looking for tapes in that area of interest, let me
> know and I'll make a list of what's there.
An inventory with part numbers and date codes would be useful to find out
what still exists. I need to bug Jeff Moffatt about this as well.
--- Ade Vickers <javickers at solutionengineers.com> w
rote:
> Right at the end of the latest Egg Money advert, i
s
> that a TRS Model 3 or
> Model 4?
>
> This link should be viewable for a while:
>
> http://www.visit4info.com/preview-flash.cfm?vm=0&t
ype=2&adid=41634
>
>
> Also, a previous ad has featured a CBM PET shaped
> "mockuter" (mock
> computer), with the tape deck replaced with an
> oversized trackball:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0nZwyua8Ao
>
>
> Cheers,
> Ade.
>
hehe, I saw the first advert only the other
day and wondered what it was. Unfortunately
the writing was too blurred by the disk drives :(
I recall the PET one too. That was showing
around the time of The IT Crowd (UK, Channel 4) on t
errestrial TV. I spotted what looked to
be a real PET in the corner by the entrance
in that.
That was funny, and even more funnier for
computer enthusiasts (I assume we don't call
ourselfs computers geeks/nerds? *ducks*).
Regards,
Andrew D. Burton
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> On 4 Feb 2007 at 0:24, Tony Duell wrote:
>
> > Incidentally, I heard a news item a few days ago
> that 'PC World' (a chain
> > of computer shops in the UK) will no longer be
> selling floppy disks once
> > their current stocks run out. Apparently USB
> sticks store more data and
> > are more conveneint (well, the first is true, bu
t
> irrelevant if you only
> > need to store a few kilobytes, the second is
> definitely false if your
> > machine doesn't have a USB port).
>
> This is bad news from a preservation standpoint.
>
**>> snip <<**
>
> Cheers,
> Chuck
Yes, that's bad news for me too.
Whilst my Amiga's are down at present, I do
fully intend to get back to them and develop
more games/software for them.
All my stuff (so far) is only usually around
200-300KB in size. Without floppy disks I'd
have to burn them to CD, or upload them onto
the 'net (and then burn them to CD's using a
laptop - which I haven been meaning to get
for 2 years now, just for that purpose).
Whilst we won't run out of 3.5" disks just yet,
I was wondering how feasible would it be for
someone (probably fairly rich) to make
home-made disks?
Or perhaps someone would spot the hole in the
market and continue to make disks for those
of us that require them? The only problem with
that is of course, would we be buying enough
regularly (200,000 a year?) to make it worth
their time/effort/money?
I have a feeling it ain't looking good....
Regards,
Andrew D. Burton
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
>Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:56:01 -0800
>From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
>Subject: Re: Arty computers
>Didn't the GI CP1600 have an external line that, if activated, would
>inhibit P-counter increment? I don't know if anyone ever used it for
>anything.
>Cheers,
>Chuck
------------------------
My, what a remarkable memory you have: pin 40, /PCIT (Program Counter Inhibit),
also used to output a pulse on execution of an SIN (software interrupt) instruction,
apparently used mainly by the control console.
mike
At 19:45 -0600 1/30/07, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>I've often thought that you can see the beauty of machinery (including
>computers) on many levels. Most classic computers are not particularly
>beautiful to look at, but there can be beauty in how they're assembled (I
>personally think the HP9816 is an interesting construction), there can be
>beauty in the elkectronic design, or the firmware, or... You just have to
>look for it.
Agreed, which leads me to NeXT cube as my nomination. Though the
mainboard design is not a particular standout, chassis design,
appearance, and software all appeal strongly to my aesthetics.
I quail at the thought of suggesting a thread on "performance arty"
computers...
(...or "artless" computers. TRS-80 model 1?)
--
Mark Tapley, Dwarf Engineer
(I haven't cleared my neighborhood)
210-379-4635 Dwarf Phone, 210-522-6025 Office Phone
--- "G Manuel (GMC)" <gmanuel at gmconsulting.net> wro
te:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
> [mailto:aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk]
> Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 6:59 PM
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: arty computers
>
**>> snip <<**
> >Regards,
> >Andrew D. Burton
> >aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
>
> >PS. Does anyone know what has happened to
> >the Old Computer Museum? I can't connect to it?
>
> Do you mean www.oldcomputermuseum.com? It works fi
ne
> for me.
>
> Greg
>
Ok, I can connect, but I get redirected to here:
http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/files/error.html
I'm on dial-up and am from the UK. That shouldn't ma
ke a difference should it???
Does anyone know if the site has been altered/
upgraded recently?
Regards,
Andrew D. Burton
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
>
>Ooh... didn't know that the M4 could run CP/M.
>
I ran "Montezuma" CP/M-80 exclusively on my Model 4P. I did it at first so
I could use Turbo Pascal, but decided pretty quickly that I liked it better
than TRS-DOS.
--------------Original Message:
From: Marvin Johnston <marvin at rain.org>
Subject: CBM 8032 Garbage on Screen
I've got a CBM 8032 that powers up "fine", but the screen is filled with "!" on
every other character position. When some letters are repeated, they can change,
i.e. "nnnn" becomes "onon" which seems like (without checking the ASCII charts)
that the "n" and "!" are ORed to become the "o". Anyone have any ideas what the
problem might be? Most of the schematics I have are buried someplace, so I
thought I would start here.
---------------------
My guess would be a stuck bit D0 in UC4 (even chars) or UC6 (odd chars), a 2114,
notorious for its failure rate.
mike
--- Tony Duell wrote wrote:
> > Interesting. Most people seem to say nice things
> about
> > the Apple ]['s design. I'd love to hear some
> informed
> > bashing ;) . Could you elaborate some about the
> > machine's short comings from your perspective?
>
> Firstly let me emphasise that my first computer was
> a
> TRS-80 Model 1. And
> I thus do have a soft spot for that machine.
> Irrational, probably, but
> there you are. I've got several TRS-80s now (M1, M3,
> M4, CoCo, M100) and
> all have proved _very_ reliable. Odd considering
> other
> people's
> expieneces, but I must have replaced perhaps a dozen
> components _total_
> in all said machines.
I see nothing wrong with that. The Tandy machines
seemed like decent computers for the money. I wouldn't
mind picking up a TRS-80 someday.
> Now, the Apple ][...
> I had a lot of rpboelsm with it randomly crashing.
> In
> the end I took the
> whole thing apart and stuck an ammeter in the 5V
> output of the power
> supply. It turend out that the mainboard (48K RAM) +
> languge caed + 1
> floppy drive drew _more_ than the rated current of
> the
> supply as given in
> the techincal manual If you added more drives, a
> serial card, etc, it
> became ridiculous.
Strange, I haven't noticed any stability problems with
my ][ and ][+ under similar loads. Still, an unstable
machine is unlikely to impress.
> Much has been said about the Apple ][ disk
> controlle,
> and how it's a
> clever design. Well, a minimal-component design
> certainly, but I didn't
> like it. Not having a track0 sensor seemed like a
> Bad
> thing for starters
> (continually banging the head against the stop does
> not improve the
> alignemnt!). The drives are Shugart mechanisms with
> the IMHO poor
> plastic-cam-with-a-spiral-groove head positioner,
> and
> becuase the drives
> are non-standard you can't use any others (unlike
> the
> TRS-80 where you
> can use any 5.25", 3.5" or 3" drives). But for me
> the
> biggest problem was
> that the Apple couldn't read/write disks from other
> machines, unlike the
> TRS-80, which used a WD1771 controller and could
> handle any single-desity
> 5.25" disk (I spent many late nights getting it to
> read the disks from
> the school's RML380Z computers, which also used 1771
> controllers).
What can I say? The Disk II, either you love it or you
hate it. :)
To be fair though, the Apple Disk II system was not
the only game in town. While they weren't common, you
could get a 3rd party 8" MFM floppy system if you
wanted to.
Would you recoil in horror if I told you that some
companies made single sided 40 track 3" (Amdisk) and
double sided 80 track 5.25" (Rana Elite 3) drives for
use with the original Disk II controller? ;)
> I didn't like the Apple ][ I/O system. Memory space
> was tight, but they
> wasted lots of space with those 'soft switches' and
> single-bit inputs. It
> could all have been packed into a few bytes. I am
> pretty sure the 6821 if
> not the 6522 was available when the Apple ][ was
> designed.
Fair enough.
> The first seiral port for the Apple ][ was a
> bit-banger. It was the only
> one I had for some time, and it was almost unusable.
> The TRS-80 used a
> real UART, and worked. Yes, there were better serial
> ports avaiable for
> the Apple later.
Was this an early serial board or were you using the
game port? I've always enjoyed the luxury of a 6551
equiped board (Super Serial Card II).
I think Woz was allergic to peripheral chips in the
beginning. :)
> The Apple text display did have lower case (wich the
> TRS-80 didn't as
> standard), but you couldn't mix text and graphics on
> the same part of the
> screen. Apple gave you the high-res mode, but
> working
> out the addresses
> gave me headaches (all to save a few chips IMHO!).
> And
> colours in the
> high-res mode were essentially obtained as NTSC
> artefacts.
The TRS-80 graphic characters are pretty neat. The
stock Apple character generator was certainly poor in
terms of graphics characters. Heck, it didn't have
lower case characters! Needless to say, soft hires
character generators were a pretty common project. It
would have been nice to have had one in the firmware.
The hires mode is somewhat byzantine and it was indeed
that way to save chips! :) Fortunately, it's not too
bad to work with if you use a lookup table to untangle
the memory map. I have no doubt it has turned off
plenty of people though.
The colors are NTSC artifacts! :) I thought that was a
neat hack. How did they deal with that in PAL land?
> And another oddiity. The whole design of the Apple
> ][
> seems to have been
> to save a chip if at all possible (provided the
> machine still works --
> just).
Bingo! Legend has it that Woz's aesthetic ideal was to
bum a design down to as few chips as possible. Almost
a Madman Muntz I suppose.
Methinks you're not a fan of Clive Sinclair either? :)
And yet the kayboard was encoded in hardware.
> Why? It meant you
> couldn't implelement a lower case keyboard in
> software
> (there are the
> well-known shift key mods where you run a wire from
> the shift keyswitch
> to one of the single-bit inputs on the games
> connector, which shouldn't
> have been necessary).
This is a good point. My guess would be that Woz
designed the Apple II as just a naked board, kind of
like the Apple I. Apple sold you the motherboard and
it was up to you to find a power supply , keyboard,
and housing. Apple did offer the ][ that way early on.
> Of course I like elegant, simple designs (the HP9100
> is a case in point).
> But the Apple ][ seems to have been a case of
> cutting
> too many corners.
> And I had a lot of problems as a reuslt.
>
> -tony
Thanks for your input Tony. While I've never had
reliability problems with my ][/ ][+ I think I
understand where you're coming from. I like the Apple
because I feel it's a machine with interesting
capabilities yet made from a small amount of simple
parts. It's a machine I can both grasp and enjoy.
What's your opinion of the BBC Micro? I've never had
the pleasure of using one, but on paper it sounds a
lot like a fast Apple II with a pair of 6522, 6845,
hardware ACIA, 1770 FDC, and enhanced basic.
Liam Busey
____________________________________________________________________________________
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On 4 Feb, 2007, at 18:15, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:52:33 -0500
> From: "Bob Bradlee" <caveguy at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: Ampex Timeline
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Message-ID: <200702041754.l14Hsgkx054201 at keith.ezwind.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> On Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:32:29 -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>
>> Another possiblity--the Ampex tape drives wouldn't have been standard
>> at the time; it would have been IBM 729's.
>
> Although there is little online about the earlt Ampex drives
> because they were goverment only.
>
> The following id from the Ampex timeline:
>
> 1950 Ampex introduces the first "dedicated" instrumentation
> recorder, Model 500, built for the U.S. Navy.
>
> 1954 Ampex introduces the first multi-track audio recorder derived
> from multi-track data recording
> technology.
>
> Some food for thought ...
>
> Bob
The machine in question was I understand 1959/60. I don't know the
official
release dates for the digital Ampex drives but ICT used them on the
ICT1301
which was released in 1962, though the tape drives were not immediately
available. These were one inch tape drives (Ampex TM1 I think) and
half inch
drives (Ampex TM4). These used the aluminium spools with three notches
in the hub not the later industry standard expanding hub type spools.
The
one inch tapes were 16 track and the half inch tapes were 10 track. They
used thyrotron valves to fire the pinch rollers. The TM4s also had a
version
used on the Lyons Leo computers of that era, these used the same tape
spools but with a small expanding hub, like a scaled down version of the
7 track and 9 track ones. Professional reel to reel audio equipment used
a quarter inch version of the same spools until recently, or maybe they
still do for all I know about audio recorders.
By the way, as Dr Who has been deemed to be on topic:
ICT 1301 consoles appeared on Dr Who and Blakes 7. I think I saw one in
a James Bond film too, but I have been trying to find which one but
have so
far drawn a blank. In the villains HQ there was a big round room on
two floors
and in the middle were some control panels, the whole place got blown
up as
is normal in a 007 film. Must have been filmed about the time 1301s were
being scrapped 1965 to the early 70s.
Roger Holmes (owner of an ICT 1301 for over 30 years)
the Peanut was a *mostly compatible*, no? I thought
the main hindrance to running pwogwams was the lack of
a 2nd floppy or hard drive...
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a PS3 game guru.
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the Peanut was a *mostly compatible*, no? I thought
the main hindrance to running pwogwams was the lack of
a 2nd floppy or hard drive...
____________________________________________________________________________________
Have a burning question?
Go to www.Answers.yahoo.com and get answers from real people who know.
> From: Liam Busey <buseyl at yahoo.com>
> > But for me the biggest problem was
> > that the Apple couldn't read/write disks from other
> > machines, unlike the
> > TRS-80, which used a WD1771 controller and could
> > handle any single-desity
> > 5.25" disk (I spent many late nights getting it to
> > read the disks from
> > the school's RML380Z computers, which also used 1771
> > controllers).
>
> To be fair though, the Apple Disk II system was not
> the only game in town. While they weren't common, you
> could get a 3rd party 8" MFM floppy system if you
> wanted to.
Lobo Drives made drives for, among others, the Apple II including a neat box
with an 8" floppy drive and an 8" hard disk. They were given to me to sell on
Ebay, and then the guy passed away (same person who gave me all the Poly stuff,
and lots of other things before he died.) I have them set aside until either I
have the time to find out more about how to hook it up, or someone drops by who
knows what they are doing. My suspicion is that the hard drives probably have a
lot of interesting things from Lobo Drives, hence my caution. And I *think* I
have the controller card, but again, I need to research this stuff out.
> On 1 Feb 2007 at 18:18, William Donzelli wrote:
>
>> The nerds would then hack these to say 99 MHz.
>>
>> The ubernerds would hack them to say 1111 MHz...
>
> ...and "who cares" dummies like yours truly would simply hack them to
> say "HI" and "LO"...
>
> Cheers,
> Chuck
I surely can't be the only one to have thought of hex...
Anyone hacked their Z-80 with a analog meter yet? Seems the easiest
(just pull off of the M1 line).
there never was the ability to perform color on the
*classic* (i.e Z80 or 68k based) Trash-80s, wuz there?
I know the 2K wasnt 1st, the award going to the coco
____________________________________________________________________________________
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--- Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 4 Feb 2007 at 0:56, Tony Duell wrote:
>
> > And another oddiity. The whole design of the Apple
> ][ seems to have been
> > to save a chip if at all possible (provided the
> machine still works --
> > just). And yet the kayboard was encoded in
> hardware.
> Why? It meant you
> > couldn't implelement a lower case keyboard in
> software (there are the
> > well-known shift key mods where you run a wire
> from
> the shift keyswitch
> > to one of the single-bit inputs on the games
> connector, which shouldn't
> > have been necessary).
>
> Thank you for absolving me of being the first to use
> the term
> "gutless wonder". :)
LOL. That has a certain ring to it.
It gives character. :)
> In a way, I suppose the disk controller was a clever
> design. But it
> locked the CPU into 2MHz operation. The use of a
> simple arithmetic
> checksum for each sector was not perhaps the most
> reliable solution
> either. But the biggest problem is that disk
> reading
> and writing
> required 100% attention from the CPU. On most other
> computers that
> used dedicated LSI controllers, the possibility
> existed for
> overlapped computation/disk access.
Oh yes, that's a huge gotcha with the disk II. It
could make communications software or data logging
interesting.
There were other disk systems for the Apple though
none as ubiquitous.
I like the Disk II. I don't think it was the ultimate
disk system, just a clever/ cheap one (for Apple at
least).
Liam Busey
____________________________________________________________________________________
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My God! I just looked at the PDP11 console on the OSX SimH.
It's beautiful. I use the PDP8 Xwindows emulator by Doug Jones... but I've
always felt the PDP11 needed something similar. I wish I could code enough
to do the full front panel in software for SimH.
Nice work.
Just wish I had a Mac newer than the 68030 in the IIfx downstairs.
Bill
On 2/1/07, John A. Dundas III <dundas at caltech.edu> wrote:
>
> I haven't seen a real one either, but sure appreciate Phil and Doug's
> work on the simulator.
>
> At 2:42 PM -0500 1/31/07, Phil Budne wrote:
> >John (Dundas) went on to build do PDP-11 front pannel blinklights und
> >switches for SIMH, looks like it's available at:
> >
> >http://dundas-mac.caltech.edu/~dundas/retro/simh/index.html
> >
> >Which says it includes Doug's and my work (in V0.9 or later).
>
> 'Tis true. I'm not much of a computer gamer but I do enjoy playing
> the occasional game of Lunar Lander on my Mac.
>
> John
>
Warren says:
> I would
> guess that the intellectual property rights of UNIX ended up with
> Alcatel-Lucent, but, that whole related series of trades, spin-offs and
> mergers has left me a bit confused. In any case, WHOEVER now owns the
> rights to UNIX would probably be interested in the fact that some
> version of their code is being sold without license.
>
Depends on who you listen to- SCO-Caldera think they got it from
Novell, Novell thinks that they still have it from when they bought out
AT&T's share of USL and SCO-Caldera only has rights to use...
At any rate the UNIX trademarks went to The Open Group, nee UNIX
International.
>
>Subject: Re: TRS-80 Model I
> From: Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net>
> Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:56:07 -0600
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>Let's look at contemporaries (1977 micros). The Sol-20 had 64x16 text,
>and unless you polled the hblank signal and limited yourself to poking
>one character per 50 uS, you'd get snow on the screen. There were
>others that had the snow problem as well (eg, exidy sorcerer). The
>TRS-80 didn't have the snow problem, but it too had a 64x16 text
>display. The PET (which I never used) also had character graphics of
>the most pathetic sort.
It did have the snow problem (more correctly flashing) save for the cpu
was so slow at 1.7mhz that it was less likely too.
It also didn't have lower case, Sol20 aka the VDM-1 video did!
Apple did some neat things but they went in differnt directions at different
prices.
Allison
Please do not reply to me, this is a forwarded email
>from http://oldcomputers.net
------------------------------------------------
Name: shanon barnett - dentalarts at myway.com
Where: cullman, alabama
Date: Tue, Jan 30, 2007 - 11:02:47 PST
I have a mid 70's IBM 3742 Dual Data Station with the
Manuals that came with it also 2 floppies that it
uses. Would like to sale.
------------------------------------------------
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--- Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
> > > The quintessentail 'arty' machine I still say
is
> the
> >
> > Won't we be flamed if we don't acknowledge the
> Kim-1 as the most beautiful
> > of all time?
>
Kim-wahhh??!! (joking)
I don't think anyone has mentioned the C= PET.
You can't leave that out, what with the whole
2001 thing and all that.
Regards,
Andrew D. Burton
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
PS. Does anyone know what has happened to
the Old Computer Museum? I can't connect to it?
"William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What exactly is it about that machine that makes you say that?
>> How does it differ from any other (similarly well-preserved)
>> PDP-11/70?
>>
>> (FWIW: I don't know either the seller or Jim Willing; I'm just curious).
>
>
> Jim Willing was one of the pioneers in this computer collecting hobby
> (I apply pioneers to those of us that were doing this seriously over
> ten years ago - before this list, and before there even was a hobby).
Cool! I'm a pioneer, having collected these things for close to 25 years.
Well, I'm not sure I would call it collecting in the normal sense of the
word. I want to keep these machines running, useable, and in use.
Guess that's why Magica exists (even though she's not powered on right
now), along with the other machines at the same site.
Johnny
>> Are there any working 7030s anywhere?
> Not a chance. Only a few (<20) were made. CHM has most of one.
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/stretch/
Nine were built.
There may be a simulator for one in the future.