test-drb

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

101090 discussions

by icardona＠gmail.com

Hi, some weeks ago I've purchased a System 37 in ebay. This unit was ebay in the year 2020 and the owner was made this video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1CZKQtaoSo When I power up the displays shows a 1. Sometimes if I stop and start fast the display shows a 2, but in all the cases all the leds stills lighted. The voltages on the power supply are OK, and in general I the unit have a good look, I don't see corrosion or leakages from capacitors. Looking the SPU training PDF of Bitsavers/HPMuseum , looks that maybe is related with a ROM or the WCS. Somebody have more info about this error, or know if is possible get some schematics / service manual? Thanks a lot Iban

4 years, 7 months

Archiving otrona attache disks

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

Is there a simh for the otrona attache? I have some.disk images created with Dunfield's utility..if not I will try to read them by using the Zorba portable, which is pretty good with varied formats. Bill

4 years, 7 months

unknown rack PSU ("PPI 1247-000-91 ADDS")

by jules.richardson99＠gmail.com

I found a vintage rackable linear PSU at a sale over the weekend, appears to be late '70s vintage going by date codes on some of the high-power components inside. Front panel is plain black with just a power switch and telltale lamp. Back has a ratings sticker which says "PPI 1247-000-91 ADDS". Outputs are +24V at 3A, +12V at 2A, +5V at 30A, -12V at 4A. Ring a bell with anyone? I'm familiar with ADDS in a terminal context, of course, but this lump is obviously for something larger - perhaps a "washing machine size" fixed/removable drive unit or similar, but I'm surprised there's not obvious branding on it if so. cheers Jules

4 years, 7 months

HP-UX on 9000/200 series

by plamenspam＠afterpeople.com

Hello, Does anyone have HP 9000/200 series running HP-UX instead of HP Basic ? The 5.1 image from hpmuseum.net can be booted only on 300 series with 68010. Best regards, Plamen

4 years, 7 months

IBM 1620 Simulation

by raywjewhurst＠gmail.com

Hello all, Long time lurker, extremely rare poster, I was reading the Wikipedia article on the IBM 1620 and became quite intrigued. I know that there is a simulator for it on SimH but I have never ran or simulated any card-driven machines before. I have all the documentation and the ibm1620.zip file >from bitsavers but I am not sure what to do next. I know I would like to try Monitor, Fortran-II and possibly GOTRAN but I have so many questions. I read the SimH documentation which gave me some understanding but I don't know exactly how the card decks work, how to install Monitor or how to boot Monitor once it is installed since I know you have to boot off a deck. My final question is, is there an easy to use card-driven machine to cut my teeth on? Also, any anecdotes on any of the old IBM computers would be both welcome and greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance Ray

4 years, 7 months

Ultrix-11 Networking

by dj.taylor4＠comcast.net

Its been fun? working with Ultrix-11 and have had success with the help of the list.? Thanks.? The tape file from Bill Gunshannon will create a working system.? Yay! I'm at the point of trying to network the SIMH pdp11 Ultrix-11 system. I have a few observations: 1. The youtube video 'Ultrix-11' shows connecting to sunOS systems. OK, he did this by simply issuing a single ifconfig command.? That didn't work for me. 2. Instead, I used the netsetup script supplied with the system, and had to reboot to get networking up.? I did seem to come up OK. 3. The SIMH FAQ suggests using a 2nd ethernet port, I was able to do this.? The linux computer I am running SIMH on has 2 ports. 4. The Ultrix-11 telnet ftp are old, unsecure versions, how do you connect to a modern Linux machine?? The Linux machines refuse the connections. 5. I also looked at the tuhs archive.? The Fred build script that generates a tk50 bootable tape image didn't work for me.? I substituted a file for the tape device and it caused SIMH to Halt. Doug

4 years, 7 months

Speaking of emulators... I have a userland Venix/86 executive...

by imp＠bsdimp.com

I've written a Venix/86 userland emulator. It uses FreeBSD's vm86 to run binaries natively and intercepts traps for things like system calls. I finally have it to the point where it can run the compiler via cc (which forks and execs c0, copt, cpp, as, ld, etc). My plans to try to recreate the sources for the binaries for Venix/86 from V7 and other extant sources have taken a step forward. Don't know if I'll ever get there, but at least I don't need a working Rainbow and can run the compiler at ~4GHz rather than ~4MHz.... http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-new-path-vm86-based-venix-emulator.html has my latest blog entry on it. The code lives in tools/vm86venix in my https://github.com/bsdimp/venix repo for those that want to take a look. It uses vm86 mode of 32-bit intel processors and traps all INT xx and other privileged instructions and provides appropriate emulation... And the compiled binary is smaller than the venix kernel (but it does less). Warner

4 years, 7 months

CWVG

by mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us

Back in the 2007 time frame, Andrew Lynch had written a utility to read Vector Graphic hard-sectored diskettes on a Catweasel board. Called "CWVG", does anyone have a copy of the program? Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/

4 years, 7 months

RQDX3 firmware sources

by chd＠chdickman.com

Has anyone tried to compile the sources? succeeded? I'm not even going to try, but I think the actual low-level formatter code is missing. Was curious if anyone else noticed that too. -chuck

4 years, 7 months

Call for manuals and maybe floppies: IBM 8100

by cube1＠charter.net

My next project once I finish my IBM 1410 FPGA implementation (so, a couple of years out, probably) would be to write an emulator for the boat anchor known as the IBM 8100. I had exposure to these things back in the 1980s. The project was not really a success: the DPPX operating system was way overkill for the underpowered machine, and wasn't reliable enough or capable enough to run them at remote locations with central administration. The machine had some fairly sophisticated features: Two groups of 64 sets of registers with 8 32 bit registers each Auto increment and auto decrement indexed addressing Address translation - but not paging A primitive form of I/O channel I have a set of install floppies for the DPPX operating system and some of the associated software (but, sadly, not COBOL or Assembler), imaged, and verified to contain what the labels say (via dd conv=ascii), but am short on information. (Of course, if someone else has floppies, all the better. I can image them - they are 8" DSDD, with the first track single density, kinda like an RX02). I do have the Principles of Operation GA23-0031 and the DASD devices (including floppy) Description GA23-0053 But in order to manage an emulator and actually install DPPX I would need just a bit more hardware info - or I would be flying blind to some degree as far as the operator panel I/O interaction.) Hardware Manuals: 8130 Processor Description GA27-3196 and/or 8140 Processor Description GA27-2880 (There was also an 8150, but I doubt the releases I have would run on it.) 8140 Processor Operators Guide GA27-3197 and GA27-2879 (Expanded front panel) 8101/8102 Storage / I/O Unit GA27-2882 Communications: Loop, Display, Printer: GA27-2883 (The "Loop" was a LAN like thing - kind of akin to the Apollo Domain ring, off of which one hung local terminals, such as the IBM 8775). Distributed Processing Programming Executive (DPPX) Manuals Installation Primer: G320-6048 Installation Guide: SC27-0401 IPO Planning Guide: GC20-1883 Assembler: SC27-0412 Assembler Messages: SC27-0416 (The machine also supported APL, PL/I, COBOL (which we used), FORTRAN... But I don't have floppies for those - heck, if the assembler wasn't standard (I doubt it was), I don't even have that, even though we had it at our installation, along with COBOL) DTMS (database, transaction mgmt.) Messages: SC26-3918 Customization Guide (SC26-3937) Application Development Guide (SC26-3938) Administration Guide (SC26-3939) Operation Guide (SC26-3940) Reference (SC26-3941) True story: The early releases of DPPX were just awful buggy. We ended up dedicating 3 conference rooms (with the dividers open) for a "warm room" for something like 3 months, housing our personnel and IBM personnel up from Texas. At one point one of the IBM'ers was overheard on a public phone in the hallway of our public building telling someone he was there "to help the hicks from Wisconsin". That got reported to our management and to IBM's management, and he was on the next flight back to Texas. ;) On the flip side, I was testing database recovery (it was my thing, back in the day - though we did not end up using the database / transaction manager). I found some bugs in the database log journal recovery process. I mentioned it to one of the IBM'ers in passing, also pointing out it wasn't urgent since we were not going to use DTMS anyway, at least not soon. He pretty much begged me to report it - and anything else I found wrong. Completely polar opposite attitude of the guy in the previous paragraph. JRJ

4 years, 7 months

Tandon Track 0 adjustment

by mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us

What's the recommended method for adjusting the track 0 switch and track 0 stop on a Tandon TM100-2, if you don't have an alignment disk? I do have a scope. Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/

4 years, 7 months

CWVG

by deramp5113＠yahoo.com

I can archive your disk content if you end up needing some assistance. I have a few Vector Graphic machines with 100tpi Micropolis and Tandon 100-4M drives as well as Mod-I drives at 48tpi. I also have utilities to archive and recreate disks on these drives by exchanging the disk image with a PC via XMODEM (FLOP2PC and PC2FLOP). Note that these disk images can also be mounted and run under SIMH. Mike

4 years, 7 months

OMNIBUS board handle spacers

by chd＠chdickman.com

I just printed some board handles for a 32k OMNIBUS board (thanks Vince Slyngstad, et al.) I now notice that all the OMNIBUS boards have an extra 0.1in spacer between the board and the handle. UNIBUS and QBus boards and logic flip chips don't have the spacer. Anyone else notice this and understand why? The only thing I can see is that it might adjust for the over the top connectors used on a lot of OMNIBUS boards. -chuck

4 years, 7 months

Call for manuals and maybe floppies: IBM 8100

by sieler＠allegro.com

Re: "My next project once I finish my IBM 1410 FPGA implementation (so, a couple of years out, probably) would be to write an emulator for the boat anchor known as the IBM 8100. I had exposure to these things back in the 1980s." I encountered one, once. Probably 1979, in a small conference room in building 47U of Hewlett-Packard's Cupertino site. Sitting all alone in the room. I was looking at it, and an HP engineer came in and explained that they were waiting for IBM service to fix the memory board ... the board HP had removed to look at closely :)

4 years, 7 months

Punched card file wanted

by Flash688＠flying-disk.com

Now that I am finally getting my vintage computer accumulation in order, I need a punched card file cabinet. Does anyone know of one that might be available for purchase or trade? I am willing to pick up anywhere in the western US. In an ideal world, I would love to find one of the ones with a slanted front on each drawer that holds a single card for a label. I have an old wooden library catalog file cabinet (60 drawers) that I would be willing to trade, as well as some DEC Q-bus chassis. Any leads would be appreciated. Alan Frisbie

4 years, 7 months

Anyone remember Kel-Am connectors?

by spacewar＠gmail.com

When I worked at Apparat around 1981, we used a lot of *male* IDC edge card connectors. I've almost never seen any since, and I couldn't remember the name of the vendor. I just found out that it was Kel-Am, but the internet knows almost nothing about them. Here's an example: https://www.elliottelectronicsupply.com/connectors/card-edge/male-card-edge… That photo doesn't show the Kel-Am logo, which is just a stylized "KEL-AM". There are some eBay auctions of the corresponding female connector (which other vendors did make), some of which show the logo. I wonder what happened to Kel-Am. Maybe they were acquired, maybe they went under. It would be nice to find a copy of their catalog. Speaking of which, it would also be nice to see some Robinson Nugent connector catalogs from the late 1970s and early 1980s. I am especially interested in seeing specs for their bottom-entry square-pin receptacles, which I think _might_ be the ones used on Apple /// memory boards.

4 years, 7 months

DEC DHU11 (M3105) wanted

by spacewar＠gmail.com

A friend and I are trying to get a PDP-11/70 running, and we'd like to get a DHU11 async mux board. Anyone have an extra? There's an Ebay listing claimed to be a DHU11, but that one is actually a Qbus M3104.

4 years, 7 months

Wilson Laboratories SX-530 disk exerciser

by Flash688＠flying-disk.com

Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: > On 8/25/21 4:51 PM, Alan Frisbie via cctalk wrote: > > I recently acquired a Wilson Laboratories SX-530 disk exerciser > > for SMD interface disk drives.? Unfortunately, it did not come > > with a manual.? Does anyone out there have a copy they could > > make available?? Yes, Bitsavers was the first place I checked.? > it's up now under test equipment Thank you very much! I've already downloaded it. I really appreciate all the work you do to keep this information available. > do you happen to have any service manuals for century data > winchesters? i have a bunch of manuals for the removable drives No, I do not. The only Century Data manuals I have are for the T-302, which I believe you already have. Alan Frisbie

4 years, 7 months

Ultrix-11

by dennis.grevenstein＠gmail.com

Bill Gunshannon wrote: > > With 3.1 available why would you want to run 2.0? Someone mentioned > a 4.0. I don't remember there ever being anything after 3.1 (promised, > but never saw it delivered) Would be fun to look at. But I suspect > anything beginning with 4 is actually Ultrix-32 which I think went as > far as 4.5. That seems likely, because AFAIR Ultrix-11 never got past 3.X. In any way I would like to point out that Ultrix-11 and Ultrix-32 are completely different: Ultrix-11 based on V7 (+addons) and Ultrix-32 based on 4.2BSD (+addons). I actually still have Ultrix-32 3.1 running on a DECstation. It really is nothing like running Ultrix-11 3.1, which I did many years ago. Dennis

4 years, 7 months

Extremely CISC instructions

by stepleton＠gmail.com

Hello, For the sake of illustration to folks who are not necessarily used to thinking about what computers do at the machine code level, I'm interested in collecting examples of single instructions for any CPU architecture that are unusually prolific in one way or another. This request is highly underconstrained, so I have to rely on peoples' good taste to determine what counts as "interesting" here. Perhaps a whole lot of different kinds of work or lots of different resources accessed is what I'm after. I expect these kinds of "busy" instructions were more common in architectures that are now less common, so perhaps this list is a good place to ask. For example, if we're thinking "number of times an item is retrieved from RAM", then any application of the x86 string instructions that could walk over memory for a while perhaps aren't so interesting. By contrast, by my count, the NS32000 series instruction "addw ext(4), ext(7)" requires at least five separate noncontiguous retrievals just to fetch the arguments into the ALU. (Note that I'm not differentiating between different sizes of data here: loading a 16-bit item and loading a 32-bit address both count as a "retrieval" in this example.) Instructions that are simply lengthy might be interesting, but not always: long literals or lots of redundant prefixes on x86 aren't that impressive, for example. Number of registers read or modified might be good too, but just saving or loading for the sake of subroutine calls (e.g. "movem.l r0-r7/a0-a6,-(sp)" on the 68k) seems pretty pedestrian. Other criteria may seem worthwhile; I trust peoples' judgement on this. Although I don't know it well, I suspect VAX will place well in one way or another. But to give an example of a candidate instruction that's prolific in a way I find more noteworthy, I'll go back to the NS32k and offer addw ext(4)+6[r1:w], ext(7)+12[r2:w] which in order to get its arguments (I think) requires the five retrievals already mentioned and adds two shifts and four additions to the bill. I think this statement reads: "Add the r1'th word counting from 6 bytes past the fourth address in the current module's link table to the r2'th word counting from 12 bytes past the seventh address in the current module's link table". That's a mouthful --- it takes a lot of work to describe what that one line does! Maybe that's what I'm hoping to share with people. I hope this is interesting to discuss, --Tom

4 years, 7 months

C.mmp OS

by mark.kahrs＠gmail.com

The answer to the question is Hydra I believe.

4 years, 7 months

PDP-10 CLU language now available

by lars＠nocrew.org

Hello, I found files for Barnara Liskov's programming language CLU on PDP-10 backup tapes. MIT has made them available here: https://github.com/MITDDC/clu-1976-1989 See also: http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/CLU.html

4 years, 7 months

FTGH: Atari Portfolio HPC-004

by jbglaw＠lug-owl.de

Hi! I'm offering an Atari Portfolio HPC-004 along with a 64 KB Memory Card for the cost of shipping (located in Germany.) It boots / works (using batteries), but I'm missing its original wall wart. Is anybody interested? Thanks, Jan-Benedict --

4 years, 7 months

Prototype new Apple /// memory board

by spacewar＠gmail.com

I've been working on a new memory board for the Apple ///, using (somewhat) modern and still-in-production components, especially CMOS static RAM rather than DRAM. Last night I soldered the connectors, sockets, and passives of my first prototype: https://flickr.com/photos/_brouhaha_/albums/72157719738576267 I need to do some testing for shorts, etc. before I attempt to actually use it in an Apple ///. I expect that some debugging of the design will be required. The Apple /// design is _much_ more complex that the Apple II and IIe. I intended this board to provide 512KiB of RAM, but I've already determined that some design changes will be required for that, so this prototype will only support 256KiB. The early Apple /// design, as documented in US patents, would have supported up to 512KiB of RAM, but the actual shipped design reduced that to 256KiB. There was a third-party 512Kib emory board from "On Three", which required pulling various chips from the motherboard and running cables from those to the memory board. The SOS operating system, as shipped, only supported 256KiB. On Three modified the SOS bootloader to detect and use 512KiB. Some Apple /// application software also had trouble with 512KiB, and On Three patched some of those.

4 years, 7 months

Replica computers PDP 8/11/10

by bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca

As reminder "Obsolescence Guaranteed" is building replica computers using simh with a pi all in a thin front panel. https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence https://obsolescenceguaranteed.blogspot.com/2020/02/inevitaby-pidp-10.html PDP 8's and 11's are selling like hot cakes. Ben.

4 years, 7 months

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