test-drb

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101090 discussions

by evan＠snarc.net

Regarding my switch from an email newsletter to a weblog, there's been a tremendous about of feedback in support of the old format. Unfortunately the old format was just too much work for me to keep up with. I would keep doing it if I had unlimited time and money, but obviously no one does (except maybe Bill Gates on the money side.) The good news: I finally got an Atom feed working. The address is http://www.technologyrewind.com/atom.xml. Would those of you who prefer email updates be willing to pay a modest fee? I haven't worked out what technology I will need, but as I said before, I'd be happy to keep doing an email feed if it were easy and not terribly time-consuming. This isn't for profit, it's too avoid losing money when I'm formatting newsletter emails instead of doing real work. (This also is not any plan to contradict earlier statements about keeping the main product free -- you have my promise on that.) Of course, if someone points me to an automated blog-to-email conversion technology that is SO simple and takes no time at all, then I'll just do it without any premiums. Or maybe someone can write a cross-platform feed reader for vintage computers. :) - Evan

19 years, 6 months

New bounty on manuals ($$$)

by sellam＠vintagetech.com

I'm offering a bounty on the following manuals: Convex Architecture Reference Manual Fujitsu VP200 (any) If you have any of these manuals please contact me directly with specifics. Thanks! -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

19 years, 6 months

Cifer T-5

by stanb＠dial.pipex.com

Hi, I'm not sure if I've already asked this here, but does anyone know anything about the Cifer T-5 terminal? Mine is missing the keyboard so any info on that would help. Otherwise, assuming it's a fairly typical serial type, it will be a matter of sorting out the connections and the baud rate - not too difficult but easier if you know what it _should_ be. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

19 years, 6 months

resonable config 11/34 on eBay

by aek＠bitsavers.org

280054268630 350 bin with no bids in Ontario.

19 years, 6 months

ZX-81 / TS 1000 keyboards

by charlesmorris＠hughes.net

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 12:01:14 -0600 (CST), you wrote: >>> Does anyone know of a source for these keyboards, or know of a >>> company that could make them up? > This is very true of course...but (apparently I missed Al >Hartman's earlier message about this) I know of a company that can >make these keyboards. I have a ZX81 that needs a new keyboard too... the "tail" that connects to the board is trashed. Put me down to buy one if this should actually happen... thanks Charles

19 years, 6 months

UK PAL ==> US NTSC video convertor box?

by julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk

Has anyone here built a gadget to take a UK PAL RF signal as input and output a US NTSC RF signal (or output something else like composite, which can be converted fairly easily)? I suspect that a few of the US crowd own UK machines and may have needed to do this... I'm thinking that the quickest way might be to homebrew something using a scrap PC with a UK-spec TV capture card and some sort of video display card that'll output either composite or to a US TV, but even then I suspect that there are a few gotchas lurking! cheers Jules

19 years, 6 months

Nice System/36 5360 needs saving

by mross666＠hotmail.com

There's a nice, very complete, 5360 on ebay, starting at $0. Believe it's in ?Kansas?. Seller seems a good guy - hope someone saves this. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130041937602 Mike http://www.corestore.org _________________________________________________________________ Try Search Survival Kits: Fix up your home and better handle your cash with Live Search! http://imagine-windowslive.com/search/kits/default.aspx?kit=improve&locale=…

19 years, 6 months

Discussion of large systems

by kossow＠computerhistory.org

> Aren't the 9000-series Univacs not home-grown products, but rather > the follow-on result of the RCA Spectra acquisition by Univac? That is the Univac Series 80 The 9000 series is similar but not exactly the same as S360 (a few instructions and the I/O differ). There is a complete 9400 that is trying to be brought back to life in Germany http://www.technikum29.de/en/computer/univac9400.shtm It would also be nice to know what ever happened to Bill Yakowenko's 9200 http://www.cs.unc.edu/~yakowenk/classiccmp/univac/news.html

19 years, 6 months

Hazeltine 'computer'?

by legalize＠xmission.com

A guy on ebay is selling something that looks suspiciously like the monitor portion of a terminal, but he is calling it a Hazeltine 'computer'. I asked him if it was a terminal and he responded saying: "Its a computer, not a monitor." Either he didn't understand my question (I didn't ask if it was a monitor, I asked if it was a terminal) or he had a brain-fart and typed "monitor" instead of terminal in his reply. The item is #300053801044 and has a detail photo of the model plate where it says model 1DTD155463. On the lower left rear is what looks suspiciously like two DB-25 style connectors, presumably one for the host and one for a printer. So, did Hazeltine ever make a computer or did they only make terminals? -- "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/>

19 years, 6 months

multiple cpu machines Re: rogues galleries

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> Williams Defender uses two 6809 CPUs - one just for sound, and one for > everything else. > > Williams Joust is more complicated and uses four > 6809s. nope.. Defender and Joust both have a 6809 and a 6808 for sound http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=598&gid=1044

19 years, 6 months

decompilation as archiving?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> Maybe a better example would be something like reconstituting an > application where the owners of the property rights are defunct (dead > companies) or even the owners don't have the source anymore. Another example I can think of is where you have a piece of test equipment whose operation depends upon software for a computer that is no longer generally available. The Biomation CLAS 4000 logic analyzer, for example, is a SCSI device whose user interface runs on a 68000 Macintosh. Firmware/software for test equipment is one area in particular that points out the problem of devices becoming boat anchors because the code to control them wasn't preserved with the device. The trend in the past 10 years to produce subscription devices that depend on a host run by a company that no longer exists (Richochet, Catapult, Kerbango, ...) is another annoyance.

19 years, 6 months

(no subject)

by modi029＠terra.com.br

Hi Henry, I'm looking for Hardware documentation on rtVAX1000 and found your note on the net. Do you know where can I found such info? Kind regards, Izo Camacho.

19 years, 6 months

OT: South Pole was: Re: VCF 9 (Jay West) & (Jules Richardson)

by mtapley＠swri.edu

At 22:18 -0600 11/15/06, Sridhar wrote: >90 degrees south always points to the South Pole. It doesn't always >point to the same place, though. The precession of the Earth's >rotational axis causes the location of all coordinates on the Earth's >surface to shift by a small amount all the time. It's most easily >noticed at the poles. Barring smaller corrections of much shorter >period and magnitude, the Earth's axial precession occurs on a period of >about 26,000 years. All true, but partially unconnected and somewhat oversimplified. Earth's angular momentum vector precesses about the normal to the ecliptic (the plane of Earth's orbit) in a cone with half-angle 23.5 (or so) degrees and with a period of 26,000 years. This is directly driven by the lunar and solar tidal torque on the equatorial bulge of the Earth, which is in turn caused by the Earth's rotation. For a rigid body, this could happen without any change in the location of the "pole" as seen on the surface of the body. Independent of that (or of any external torque), the point at which the Earth's angular velocity (not momentum) vector intersects the surface, which is the instantaneous pole, wanders around on the surface. This is due to several things. One is the fact that the angular momentum and angular velocity may not be perfectly aligned. (Even a rigid body will do this if it is not spun along either its major or minor principle axis of inertia. This is the "polhode" motion of a freely rotating body as seen from the body.) Another is the fact that the Earth is continually rearranging its mass distribution by rainfall, earthquakes, ice-sheet melting, etc. etc., thus moving its principle axes of inertia around and causing the first condition to apply. (These mass redistributions are in turn driven primarily by the effects of incoming solar radiation, but this is an indirect effect of the sun on the system.) Another cause is due to the fact that the "solid" Earth is really a composite system, with many different solid and liquid components, many of which may be rotating with respect to one another and causing various interactions. I think I will stop there, acknowledging that I'm still oversimplifying. I will however add that I at one point in the early 1980's wrote a program in Fortran on a PDP-11 to display the current and predicted (by the IERS) Earth instantaneous pole coordinates on a Tektronix 4025 graphics terminal, erasing and re-drawing the predicted pole with every new update of the current pole. It was interesting to see how consistently off the predictions were. Sorry for the delayed-gratification nature of this post; I'm just getting back from 2 weeks' vacation. -- Mark Tapley, Dwarf Engineer (I haven't cleared my neighborhood) 210-379-4635 Dwarf Phone, 210-522-6025 Office Phone

19 years, 6 months

multiple cpu machines Re: rogues galleries

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

someone set me strait if Im way off - is an emulator, like MAME in essence a parser essentially? I bet theres probably more to it then that though... --- cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org <mbbrutman-cctalk at brutman.com> wrote: > > On the old standup arcade games multiple CPUs are common. > > Williams Defender uses two 6809 CPUs - one just for sound, and one for > everything else. > > Williams Joust is more complicated and uses four 6809s. > > > > Mike > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com

19 years, 6 months

Corporate genealogy?

by legalize＠xmission.com

Has anyone attempted to make a "big picture" view of the vendor landscape by creating a chart showing spin-offs and acquisitions of various vendors? I find this information sprinkled throughout Wikipedia, but no attempt at creating a "big picture" view. Has anyone done such a thing? -- "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/>

19 years, 6 months

multiple cpu machines Re: rogues galleries

by aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk

--- Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: > arcarlini at iee.org wrote: > >>> How about the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis? That ran a > 68000 and Z80. > > There have been many multi-cpu consoles; the Sega > Saturn had two Hitachi > RISC CPUs for core processing, plus a host of othe r > stuff for CDROM, > display, sound... The PlayStation 2 is also > dual-CPU. The PlayStation 3 > is a Cell monster, 7 cores you can play with, wrong!!! Some places state 9, but the last *official* CPU diagram I saw has 8 cores. One main core (slightly larger than the others) and 7 co-cores. (Does that make sense?) > although I think that's > been discussed here already by Mr. Brutman. > > My favorite was the Atari Jaguar, which had no les s > than: > > - a 32-bit RISC GPU > - a 64-bit RISC "object processor" > - a 64-bit RISC blitter > - a 64-bit general purpose DSP for audio and other > functions > - a 68000 for general-purpose helper functions > > And to shuffle memory around, a 64-bit DRAM > controller. > > The Atari Jaguar *should* have been the most > kick-ass console of its > generation (the blitter in particular was certainl y > the most powerful of > all the 5th-generation consoles). But it was so > complex that nobody > could figure out how to program it properly. > Coupled with legendary > Atari marketing fumbles, it died a quick death > before a suitable "killer > app" could be developed for it. > > Most coders unfamiliar with the system would treat > the Jaguar as a > 68000-based machine with a giant framebuffer, like > an Atari ST on > steroids. This was clearly not the best use of th e > machine. The Atari Jaguar is basically a Super Spectrum (SS). No I'm not kidding (surely someone here can back me up?). There is a page on the web somewhere explaining how the guys that were designing the SS ended up working for Atari. The SS evolved into the Atari Jaguar. Also, with the CD unit fitted into the Jaguar cartridge slot (so it could play Jaguar CD games - of which there must be about 6!) that add's yet another processor or two possibly. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

19 years, 6 months

Disk image conversions?

by rcini＠optonline.net

All: Here's an interesting one. I have several disk images for the Tandy 2000 that had been made with TeleDisk. One of the images is bad for some reason (must be truncated; won't get past track 30; complains that target disk drive is not ready when it reaches T30). The original disk is not available. I've done the basic troubleshooting on the drive and media (other images made with same new floppy diskette and drive work fine; swapped drive and media) to eliminate them from the failure tree. Even though TeleDisk seems to write to track 30 just fine, the disk is unusable. This is odd because it's an MS-DOS format (although 80T 9S) so all of the directory and media parameter info is at the front of the disk rather than the back. Is there anything I can do with this partial disk image to retrieve at least some of the info? Rich Rich Cini Collector of classic computers Lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator Web site: <http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/> http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/ Web site: http://www.altair32.com/ /***************************************************/

19 years, 6 months

Gentle Cleaners Used on Old Computers

by wizard＠voyager.net

Hey, all, I put together this list from the "Green Goo" thread. If anyone has more good information about various cleaners, or procurement information about ones listed, I would appreciate hearing about it, and I'll update the list. It could be handy -- maybe even a FAQ answer. Sincerely, Warren Wolfe ********************************************************** Gentle Cleaners Used on Old Computers. Caig DeOxIt - Remove oxidation from electronics, and clean - http://www.tubesandmore.com/ Caig ProGold - Seal and lube circuit card edge fingers, etc. - Radio Shack 64.4338 http://www.tubesandmore.com/ GooGone - Cleans off old adhesive residue. Mr. Clean - Cleans stains, discoloration, and magic marker from painted metal. Magic Eraser Afta - Cleans glues and residues - Home Depot CaiLube MCL - Cleans and lubes potentiometers, especially. - http://store.caig.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.183/.f

19 years, 6 months

OFFICIAL VCF EAST 4.0 date(s)

by evan＠snarc.net

This just in: we picked Saturday, June 9, and (probably) Sunday, June 10 as well. Hopefully we will determine the need for a second day soon. Someone, somewhere, will probably have a graduation-related conflict. To that person(s), I apologize, but we did our best. East 3.0 was awesome, but I gaurantee that East 4.0 will kick 3's ass!! - Evan

19 years, 6 months

Does this qualify as vintage computer?

by irisworld＠mac.com

Kind of neat: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15984363/ Rob Robert Borsuk irisworld at mac.com -- (\__/) (='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your (")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.

19 years, 6 months

Atom Toolkit. Was: rogues galleries

by fjkraan＠xs4all.nl

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: > No, but it does have an EPROM in the extension socket labelled "TOOLKIT > ROM #A000" or something similar. I've never quite figured that one out. > > Maybee this Atom toolkit: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/atom/toolkit.txt Fred Jan

19 years, 6 months

New Cipher 525 tape drive on ePay

by cclist＠sydex.com

Probably one of the first "floppy tapes". Item 320056306946. Cheers, Chuck

19 years, 6 months

decompilation as archiving?

by aek＠bitsavers.org

> But if I wanted to study RT-11 in > detail, hand disassembling it would be a major undertaking. Actually, a bad example, since sources are available. This is a worthwhile effort, but very time consuming. The DMCA also is an issue.

19 years, 6 months

decompilation as archiving?

by tshoppa＠wmata.com

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Richard wrote: > Has anyone considered decompilation (producing sources from binaries) > as a way of archiving system or application software that is defunct? > > I know lots of people have disassembled ROM listings and created > commented ASM listings from the ROM, but what about larger systems > where hand-disassembly is impractical? Hand-disassembly is just the start. Vast machineries of automated disassembly/decompilation is used throughout the world in piracy and reverse-engineering activities. These sorts of tools have been in existence for at least 30 years, very likely 40 or 50 years. Related to these machinations are other tools used in reverse-engineering, including emulators, simulators, in-circuit emulators, logic analyzers, etc. All of these tools are also used in retro-computing as defined by many different groups: video gamers, emulation of historically important systems by academics, and everything in between. But what you describe goes way beyond simple archiving, and more into the tools that let you analyze and appreciate the code. If you can combine the code with the original designers, original users, original business documents, etc., then you are really on the road to a complete recreation of not only the code, but the world at the time. As a classic example, 25 years ago you could buy a tool that disassembled your CP/M binaries and turned them into *commented* sources. Not the original source, of course! Tim.

19 years, 6 months

decompilation as archiving?

by legalize＠xmission.com

Has anyone considered decompilation (producing sources from binaries) as a way of archiving system or application software that is defunct? I know lots of people have disassembled ROM listings and created commented ASM listings from the ROM, but what about larger systems where hand-disassembly is impractical? -- "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/>

19 years, 6 months

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