It will be at the CHM. The museum is still closed but VCF will be happening. To be consistent with current Santa Clara covid conditions, bring your mask.
see: https://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/
I hope to see you all there.
Dwight
Vintage Computer Festival West 2021 ? Vintage Computer Federation - VCF<https://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/>
Updated 2021-05-23. VCF West is for everyone! Computer geeks, families/children, students, collectors, IT professionals, curious onlookers? VCF West 2021
vcfed.org
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
around 1978 at SLAC.
For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high
level languages would just get in the way and slow things down. The
code was maintained by Veltman and Strubbe well into the 1970's, but
its future was held back by being so closely tied to CDC hardware.
In the mid 1970's, Strubbe began a conversion of Schoonschip to IBM
S/360 and S/370. It was sort of a curious technique, as far as I
gathered. The idea was to first translate CDC COMPASS source to an
intermediate PL/I like language. But then, instead of using the IBM
PL/I compiler, a bunch of macros were developed to implement the PL/I
like language in IBM assembly. This conversion was never fully
completed for reasons unknown to me.
Later on, when Tini joined the University of Michigan (that's where
I'm located), he realized that Schoonschip needed to be updated. But
the update was ... instead of CDC assembly he decided on m68k
assembly. (At this time, in the early 1980's, C probably would have
been the natural language of choice.) Moreover, he insisted on
developing his own toolchain (assembler, linker, etc). This was
before my time at Michigan, but basically he ported Schoonschip to
just about all the m68k machines of that era (Sun, Atari, Amiga, Mac,
NeXT, and others I am not familiar with). We have a pretty good
collection of m68k code
(http://www-personal.umich.edu/~williams/Vsys/index.html), but nothing
earlier.
Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like
code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC
source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The
CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it
exists on the tape.
- jim
--
James T. Liu, Professor of Physics
3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040
Tel: 734 763-4314 Fax: 734 763-2213 Email: jimliu at umich.edu
Hi folks,
Does anyone happen to have any links for XENIX on a Tandy 2000?
Cheers,
--
Adrian Graham
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest private home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk
A number of the prior systems were picked up or other arrangements made, and
a couple more pulled from storage to make room. As before, these are FREE
TO A GOOD HOME but you have to come PICK UP from various locations in the
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA region. Contact me privately if interested.
These remaining machines and peripherals will go to the scrapper on August 14
if not otherwise claimed.
NOT WORKING:
Network General Sniffer (Compaq 486 portable). Should "just work" with a
new power supply, but I don't have any time to deal with it anymore and
Wireshark has made it generally obsolete for what I used to use it for.
NOT WORKING:
Macintosh DuoDock, with key. Doesn't feed; this is usually a capacitor
problem. A bit yellowed but otherwise physically intact. I use a different
dock with my 2300 so I don't really need this either.
PARTIALLY WORKING:
500MHz iBook G3 laptop (snow, not colour) M6497 with tray loader optical
drive and power supply. Does boot OS X, but needs a new LCD backlight (mini
VGA port works and you can see the display in bright light) and battery is
of course toast. Otherwise physically intact except that ex-bro-in-law put
grotty stickers on it.
PARTIALLY WORKING:
Sawtooth Power Mac G4 450MHz. No RAM, no video card, no hard disk. Used to
be my file server but had issues with one of the PCI slots. Has optical drive
and ZIP with matching Apple bezels. Does power on, but obviously without RAM
or a video card (AGP) will not pass POST. Add your own USB keyboard and mouse.
Various other items:
Apple II Super Serial card with DB-25 670-0020-? (uses 6551 ACIA) and
Apple IIe 80 column 64K memory expansion 607-0103-K. Can't test them but
both look intact.
Kurta Penmouse. Serial and PS/2 connectors. Seems to have a power supply
jack (9V) but I don't have the power supply and I don't know if it needs
it. Can't test it, no drivers, physically intact.
Sun model 411 SCSI CD-ROM. Requires caddy. Won't mount discs, might need a
recap.
UMAX Astra 2100U flatbed USB scanner with power supply. Powers on. Works
with classic Mac OS but probably most systems. No driver disc.
Pair of Telular SX5 GSM terminals. These were the server room's backup
communication system. They work, but no GSM network to connect to anymore.
Might be fun if you set one up. Real serial ports! Real GSM modem! Full
kits with power supply.
Visual UpTime Select T1 CSU/DSU. Has a Cisco V.35 cable connected and
jacks for Ethernet, serial, DSX-1 and T1. Powers on, obviously goes
right into Red Alarm since there's no network. You telco nerds will love it.
Samsung 17" SyncMaster CRT. Works fine, great shape, just too big to keep
around anymore.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Never say never again. -----------------------------------------------------
FANUC A860-0056-T020 Papertape Reader and DOSTEK 440A BTR
https://www.ebay.com/itm/274883740917
Ebay listing includes my project notes. Hopefully someone here will want
it.
Bill
On 8/3/21 1:12 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>
>> On Aug 3, 2021, at 3:28 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> One of my favorite 6000 bits of code was the register save and restore
>> routines (not using CEJ). It was a favorite interview question for
>> those job seekers claiming to be proficient in COMPASS.
>
> ALL the registers, right? I remember seeing that problem description. And later I saw the code, don't remember it but now I know how it is done.
Yup, the trick is getting the first 18 bit register saved. Not obvious
since normal stores are done through the (A6,X6 and A7,X7) registers.
The trick is using RJ instructions to store an indication of each bit of
a B-register. After you get one register saved this way, the rest falls
out like a stacked deck in Solitaire.
--Chuck
I am not a collector exactly -- I just salvaged a bunch when they were
being sent to recycling.
My Model Ms are going strong, no bolt mod needed, but I also have 2
Apple Extended II and an Extended I and both, sadly, need some
attention. I am almost devoid of electronics skills.
Does anyone know of anywhere in Europe that does this kind of
repair/refurb work? I do not want to do intercontinental shipping...
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
There's a small discussion on S100computers about the terms 'skew' and
'interleave'.
In CP/M documentation 'skew' refers to what's usually called interleave
these days, i.e. offsetting sectors on a track to compensate for the fact
that by the time the computer has processed a given sector the next one has
already passed by, so that the computer has to wait an entire revolution
for it to pass by the head again; in other documentation as in Chuck's
22disk for example this is also called 'interleave'.
However, in later documentation the meaning of 'skew' seems to have changed
to refer to the offset of sectors between adjacent tracks to compensate for
the time required to step the head.
Can anyone (Fred, Chuck?) shed some light on this apparent double meaning
of 'skew'? And if skew was used to describe sector interleave then what was
the offsetting of sectors between tracks called?
Inquiring minds need to know ;-)
m
This was a talk at a recent Chaos Computer Club congress:
https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost#t=1707
?
We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over,
and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years,
though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of
those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough to
achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety of
those systems, talking about what makes them special.
In particular, we'll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single Level
Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine with the
interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach to UI design
TRON, Japan's ambitious OS standard More may be added as time permits.
?
It talks about Lisp Machine OSes, which interest me, but I especially
liked that there's a demo of Interlisp as well as the better-known
Symbolics OpenGenera. Unlike Genera, Interlisp is now FOSS and there
is an effort afoot to port it to modern OSes and hardware and revive
it as a Lisp IDE.
There's also a not-very-inspiring but all too rare demo of IBM i. It's
not pretty but this descendant of OS/400 is the last living
single-level store in active maintenance and production.
But the big thing that made me link to this after the discussion of
DOS/V, Chinese Windows 3.2 and Japanese DR-DOS and DR GEM, was the
demo of the final version of Japan's TRON OS.
Most people have never heard of TRON but it was extraordinarily
widely-used, embedded in billions of consumer electronics products.
Well, there was also a desktop-PC version, with its own very rich
object-oriented GUI, and this talk contains the only demo of it I've
ever seen.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
>Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2021 18:37:17 -0500
>From: Cory Heisterkamp <coryheisterkamp at gmail.com>
> This is a bit of a long shot, but is anyone aware of a successful
> method to read IBM Selectric MT/ST tapes?
> A museum in Australia has a box of them and are interested in the contents.
At the Computer History Museum we sometimes use a software technique
to recover data from the analog waveforms on mag tapes.
https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape
I'd like to try that on MT/ST tapes. Does anyone have a couple of
MT/ST tape cartridges with data that I can experiment with?
Hi,
I have been lurking for a few years, but thought I'd finally speak up
as I just received a 9 track tape purportedly containing the source
code to Schoonschip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoonschip). This
is a 2400' reel recorded at 1600 bpi based on the labels, and a
cursory examination suggests that it is still in pretty good shape
(although I am not sure how it was stored over the years). Here is a
picture of the tape:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JgY8QdVDchxubUz39jYn86gEczSvFhcZ/view?usp=…
We no longer have any equipment that can read the tape, so I was
wondering if anyone may be willing to help or if anyone had
suggestions on where to go to get it read. Thanks!
- jim
--
James T. Liu, Professor of Physics
3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040
Tel: 734 763-4314 Fax: 734 763-2213 Email: jimliu at umich.edu
As some here know, I collect some dusty deck fortran graphics. We have MOVIE.BYU up and running! (Thanks Douglas Taylor and Emanuel Steibler).
Ian built AMD 2901 bit slice hardware to run his graphics, it was called SuperSet, and was very quick for the 1980s. Architecture was 48 bit, A=B op C, similar to DSPs. Compiler processed fortran to this 48 bit 2900 hardware (he wrote the compiler too). Small package, a dormitory size refrigerator with all I/O to drive plotters and graphics terminals.
I went to look him up today, as he is not far from me in LA, San Diego, and a fellow R/C flier, and chat about the old Superset days, we did SIGGRAPH many times together.
Well, he is dead I find out, killed last year in Mexico is what the news says, buried in a well with his wife. They went often, many times a year.
Randy
This is a bit of a long shot, but is anyone aware of a successful method to read IBM Selectric MT/ST tapes? A museum in Australia has a box of them and are interested in the contents.
I'm fairly involved in the global Selectric community and while 1 or 2 MT/ST?s exist, they?re non-functional. I know IBM offered a 2495 Tape Reader for the IBM 360, which could be a starting point with modification, but I suspect those are even scarcer than the MT/ST itself.
Even the encoding format appears to be a bit of a secret. Recording is character-by-character, tape spacing controlled by sprocket holes along one edge.
https://obsoletemedia.org/ibm-mtst/ <https://obsoletemedia.org/ibm-mtst/?fbclid=IwAR28c5ej69AlF0os1PcykpHCh0Q_yz…>
Thanks- Cory
The A/C is in and running! Tomorrow and Sunday we reassemble the
exhibit floor and clean up the mess, just in time for the 60-person
group tour on Monday.
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Thanks to all who contributed to the new A/C!
Yep.
And, it was not appreciated when I suggested an interim release between
the MT/ST emulator and "Full-ST" to be called "Half Full ST"
On Fri, 30 Jul 2021, grif615 at mindspring.com wrote:
> Scope Creep.. no telling how many projects died in stalled development.
>
> On Jul 30, 2021 16:36, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 30 Jul 2021, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > Not really--it's very old technology, (1964), of limited
> capacity (about
> > 20 KB per tape), was a hideously expensive way to buy a
> typewriter
> > (about USD$7000 in 1964, or about USD$61,000 today), used
> almost
> > exclusively in large corporate offices to create form
> letters and
> > documents. In other words, it was not intended as an
> archival medium.
> > The effort required in preparing a document was
> considerable (one used
> > the mini-keypad for various functions). For a memo, it was
> easiest to
> > use the typewriter as a typewriter.
> > There are more interesting things to look at.
>
> Well, form letters are "important".
> But, once microcomputer word processing matured, they could
> be done easily
> and much better.
>
> An acquaintance was working on creating an emulation of the
> MT/ST, as a
> way for those who were familiar with the MT/ST and/or
> actually liked it,
> to be able to continue unchanged on a microcomputer.
>
> But, then he started adding features. Besides delaying the
> completion
> until it was no longer relevant, it was suggested that he
> change the name
> from "MT/ST" (pronounced "empty ST") to "FULL ST".
I heard a rumor that VCF is going to happen again!
But, I have seen NO MENTION of that on this mailing list.
Is it happening?
Will everybody be there?
It is now relatively short notice, and between that, not having a station
wagon or van, and health issues, I won't be able to pack up and bring a
suitable mass of stuff to peddle on consignment.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
Does anyone have the Windows (preferably Windows 10) drivers for the Lexar Media GS-UFD-20SA-TP PC card reader? I found a driver online, lexar_card_34806.zip at admirestore.top, but Malwarebytes gives a warning about the download site, so I am hesitant to download that driver. I want to get my old Lexar PC card reader working again so I can read some cards that I used with my Poqet PQ-181.
Bob
I'm running Linux Mint (an ubuntu derivative) and I want to mount ULTRIX
CDROM discs to see what I can see.
(I'm eventually going to image these, but I presume that will "just
work" with dd or ddrescue).
They are supposed to be UFS format (according to the net) and that
usually means you have to tell mount exactly which option to use (as not
all UFS implementations are compatible).
I've tried (all the options I can find) and failed:
$ sudo mount -t ufs? -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/sr1 /tmp/mount
mount: /tmp/mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on
/dev/sr1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
The CDROM would appear to be readable 9and I've tried a few anyway):
$ sudo file -s /dev/sr1
/dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on
/UPS_MOUNT_TAR_SOURCE, last written at Wed Sep 28 16:27:45 1994, clean
flag 30, number of blocks 243648, number of data blocks 233295, number
of cylinder groups 38, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum
percentage of free blocks 10, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational
speed 60rps, TIME optimization
A later Digital Unix CDROM behaves the same way with mount and reports
this with file:
$ sudo file -s /dev/sr1
/dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on
/kits/tmp/gendisk17665/mnt, last written at Wed Nov 20 13:38:02 1996,
clean flag 3, number of blocks 151168, number of data blocks 150383,
number of cylinder groups 24, block size 8192, fragment size 1024,
minimum percentage of free blocks 0, rotational delay 0ms, disk
rotational speed 60rps, SPACE optimization
I also have a few OSF/1 CDROMs, which I assume are also the same format.
Any ideas? I can't be the first person to try to do this ...
Antonio
--
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com
I found a copy of RP/M2 for the IBM PC by Micro Methods Inc. with manual
and some floppies, 8" and 5.25". According to the manual, this was a
CP/M compatible operating system. Doing a web search doesn't tell me
anything more than a couple offhand comments. Does anyone here know
anything interesting about this?
--
David Griffith
dave at 661.org
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
For a time I had quite a few Compaq Deskpro towers that had acquired (for free) from my employer after they updated to a newer HP Compaq model. These Compaq Deskpros were the white-boxed variety with Pentium III the like processors that date to the later part of the 1990s and into the 2000s. They interested me because they were able to work with the flavors of Linux that were becoming plentiful and useful at the time (like Mandrake, etc.) Anyway, the desktops themselves are gone, as well as the PC keyboards and the monitors that went with them, with this paragraph just setting the scene....
But at the same time I also acquired (pulled) from these same computers and their siblings a whole bunch of wired Ethernet network cards, one or two video cards, a whole bunch of the IDE/PATA 5.25-inch desktop CD drives, and a whole bunch(!) of 10- and 20-GByte IDE/PATA 5.25-inch desktop hard drives. I believe the vintage makes them all PCI cards for the network and video cards. For some reason I must have had it in my head that I would all need these extra cards (and more) to keep these boxes (and other desktops) going into the future when the apocalypse came <grin> !
Now I have no need for any of these parts. I don't want to chuck them to a recycler either, but it is tempting just to get the stuff out of the house (as I need to seriously downsize prior to retirement).
Is there a market for any of this that is worth pursing, or is this all too generic and plentiful to worry about? Giving shipping and that, I am not sure how much of this I'd care to deal with this through resale (eBay or privately) versus just dropping it all at the electronics recycling shop (which fortunately I have locally).
Just starting to sort this out...I've been meaning to send this e-mail for awhile now. Your collective thoughts? I know most of this is too new for most of your interests...
Kevin Anderson, Dubuque, Iowa
I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has
contributed to the recent threads related to floppy disk capacity.
I have found the threads to be very insightful and have saved things off
for re-reading when I update my personal notes on the subject.
Thank you!
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Hi,
A plea, does anyone have a copy of OpenVMS Alpha V7.3-2? I have looked at all my archives and only have it for VAX. An upgrade would also work as I have V7.3.
If someone has a copy in VMS so-called ISO format that would be great.
Just got a Personal Workstation 500au fully working and would prefer to keep it on V7 VMS.
Many thanks, Mark