Tim Hotze wrote:
> Also, 88 (8088), 87 (487, 8087, etc.) and many other numbers. With macs,
> there's a whole slew of numbers that I don't want to get into.
Riccardo quoted Tony Duel as having written:
> >Which reminds me. Which word lengths have been used by (binary) computers?
> >Off the top of my head :
> >
> >4 (Intel 4004, etc)
> >8 (Far too many to list)
> >12 (PDP8, PDP12, etc)
> ..omissis...
> >What others?
>
> 9 (Texas 99/4, 990/10, TMS 9900)
> 86 (Intel Docet again)
I think some of you have misinterpreted Tony's question. He was asking
about word lengths. I do not believe that the Texas 99 series had a
word length of 9 bits (16 wasn't it?)
The Intel 8088 was 8 bits, the 8086 16; the 80x87, as I recall, are 80
bits internally (another one for your list, Tony, if coprocessors
count!)
I believe that there are some CPU chips now with 64-bit internal buses.
Any advance on 64?
At the other end, do the processors in the AMT DAP count as 1-bit
machines? Or are they bit-slices of a 32 bit machine? Or a 1024 bit
machine?
Philip.
I have to tell you all about the sad fate of a beautiful machine.
I was at an auction last Saturday, and immediatly started to drool over
this beautiful piece of equipment. It was an Intergraph 250 (No, I have
never seen one before) and it look to be in excellent shape. It was about 6
top 7 feet wide, by about 3 feet deep, and 5 feet high, with a beautiful
blue and white finish. On one side, behind a large black panel, was four
large, rack mounted drives; 2 were 557mb, and the other 2 were 337mb. I
believe the drives were old SCSI drives. On the other side, was a large reel
tape backup system, and below that, the guts of the machine behind another
black panel. Everything look to be there, and in working order.
Now for the sad part. It went for $2.50 (Converted to US, that is like
-$0.45 :) The person who bought it... some low, greasy guy with the name of
his autobody shop on his greasy ball cap (no, I didn't bid on it, I have no
place to put it) my friend asked him what he was going to do with it, and
you could tell by looking at the guy that he couldn't wait to try out a new
cutting saw on the thing, according to my friend (I was busy banging my head
agianst the wall :<
It is dead by now, and now I want to add to my misery by finding out
exactly what it was, what it's speed was, what it was comparable to. Anybody
out there know?
----------------------------------------------------------------
______________________________________________Live from the GLRS
The Man From D.A.D
----------------------------------------------------------------
I'm interested in the 386's.
----------
From: Zeus334(a)aol.com
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: STuff
Date: Saturday, November 08, 1997 4:36 AM
>have a bunch of wyse 60 terminals, a couple of 386's, an old printer
>and various boards etc. Anyone interested.
>"Janet Paganelli" <info(a)msnyc.org>
What's a wyse 60?
What kind of boards do you have?
Is it a dot matrix printer?
In a certain supply room, there are in storage some computers of interest to
me. There used to be some XTs and PCs, but they were given to a school. The
stuff that's still there:
A ton of printers, generally IBM dot-matrix
A ton of manuals and books, including manuals to Quattro-Pro, the manuals to
some of the IBM printers, etc. Also, books on C and pascal
A few cartons of floppies, with the original disks to DOS 3.3, and a bunch of
programs I have never heard of.
About 15 IBM network cards. I can't tell what they are, but they are brown
full- length eight bit things with round connectors on the back.
An IBM System/74, with three terminals.
I believe that the administration will part with all of these without much
difficulty. I could personally use the first 4 items. The System/74 is about
the size of a closet, and I doubt I would find much use for it (If only I had
room...)
I know nothing about it, and I would appreciate if you people would tell me
what the heck a System/74 is. It has a big floppy drive (14" or 8") built in
to the front panel, mounted on its side.....
>> I have at home a memory bank from a CDC Cyber two-hundred-and-something
>> (?) which is 18 bits wide. I had always assumed that this was 16 bits
>> plus two parity but it doesn't fit into 60 bits either way. (Memory
>> bank is huge quantities of 40ns and 45ns 64k x 1 static RAMs surface
>> mounted on both sides of numerous daughter boards. Each daughter board
>> is 64k x 18 and they stack four deep all over the "mother board" of the
>> bank.) I always meant to use this in something, but somehow I never got
>> around to it...
>
> That is perhaps from one of the Cyber 203/205/215 supercomputers. These
> were HUGE vector machines, from the same period (and a rival of) the later
> Cray-1s. They were 60 bit machines, so I am confused about the x18
> organization. Perhaps error checking was involved.
This one was thrown out by the Technical University of {better not say
where} in 1993. Not very old - date code on some of the memory chips is
1992.
My friend, a student there, whom I visited in August of that year, had
eight of these memory banks, eight megabytes each (64k x 2 bytes x four
boards deep x sixteen stacks per bank). I swapped him a Keithley 417k
electrometer (a very sensitive multimeter) for mine.
He also threw in a card from the CPU, which I think I've mentioned here
before. The technology is 100k series ECL so should have been faster
than Cray 1. (The Cray 1 in the {museum of same town} was 10k series.)
<Absolutely true. I do hope that the "classiccmp" mailing list doesn't
<go in the direction that Sam suggests, i.e. limiting discussion to
<computers considered "collectible" in the popular press.
Yes there are many machines that are quite interesting but aren't sexy by
the LA times standard. I will not argue that altair, Imsai, Apple, tandy
and IBM to name a few weren't povital. I may add that most of those names
do not attract my attention as I know some of the backroads and alleys
where I did application engineering and design work.
Maybe that's why I have an intel Intellect MDS 8080 development system
that is circa 1976 manufacture and of vastly superior construction than
the altair.
<That reminds me, Allison, I've got a couple of Motorola 6800 Exorcisor
<boards that I promised to try to sneak in through US Customs for you...
When they arrive I will be thankful.
Allison
On Thu, 6 Nov 1997 14:03:12 -0800 (PST), we heard Mr. Ismail utter:
> The Nova will never be featured in the newspapers because it is not a
> socially significant computer.
Two words, one of which is not printable, but the lead-in is
"Bull".
The Nova was one of the early minicomputers which came to be used
by schools in the early '70s. The other one, and slightly earlier in
origin, was the PDP-8. The pdp11 post-dates these by some time.
The Nova was a seminal machine even if it was a "widened/en-
hanced" PDP-8. One of the founders of Apple, who lots of those
here hold in very high esteem, was captivated enough by the Nova
to keep a picture of one tacked to his bedroom wall. (Kids,
sheesh! :-) )
> In the great scheme of things, it is but one of many.
So are lots of things, including many of the machines manu-
factured in the last two decades. Like the TRS-80, the Apple II,
the Commodore <whatever>, the ubiquitous PeeCee, and, yes, even
the revered IMSAI.
> Drop the rant already.
Yes. Please do.
There's more to life than microprocessors and tiny boxes.
Of course, I may have been trolled here, but if that's the case
I'll learn to deal with it.
______________________________________________________________________
| | |
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA |
| mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | |
| http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum/ | ICBM: N42:21 W71:46 |
|________________________________________________|_____________________|
>have a bunch of wyse 60 terminals, a couple of 386's, an old printer
>and various boards etc. Anyone interested.
>"Janet Paganelli" <info(a)msnyc.org>
What's a wyse 60?
What kind of boards do you have?
Is it a dot matrix printer?
At 23:18 11/7/97 +0000, you wrote:
>I am conviced that a lot of people (probably not on this list) wouldn't
>know a well-designed or well-built computer if it was dropped on them...
Naturally not, they'd be too busy limping around howling.
____________________________________________________________
Kip Crosby, honcho, mechanic and sole proprietor, Kip's Garage
http://www.kipsgarage.com: rumors, tech tips and philosophy for the trenches
Coming Spring '98: The Windows 98 Bible by Kip Crosby and Fred Davis!
At 23:13 11/7/97 +0000, you wrote:
>A true story.... I was at a radio rally (hamfest) about 7 years ago, and
>there was an Altair on sale, and alongside it....there was an
>Intel MCS8i 8080 development system. Well, it was late in the day, my
>money was running out, so I could only buy one of them.
>
>I picked the Intellec. And I am not sorry. Sure it's not going to make me
>rich, but it is _beautiful_ inside.
Damn, Tony, I always knew you had taste!
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine(a)chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California
Ive got a non working imagewriter model I available for cost of shipping from
NC if anyone wants it. i've the original box to ship it in, although the
packing material is missing. printer is complete except for plastic top
cover, and it gets power, but wont print. i think it's probably some logic
component inside which has failed. i have a wide carriage model to keep
anyway. interested?
david
At 21:00 11/6/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Maybe that's why I have an intel Intellec MDS 8080 development system
>that is circa 1976 manufacture and of vastly superior construction than
>the Altair.
Damn right, pop a case on an Intellec and you'll just sigh. They're like
little minis inside. You know what else is just as nice the same way? The
Tektronix boxes built around the LSI-11....
It's like having a '56 or '57 Mercedes. The whole world knows how sexy and
pricey a 300SL is, be it the Gullwing or the roadster; but it takes a
_real_ connoisseur to appreciate, even to recognize! the same year's 300SC.
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine(a)chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California
WHat kind of floppies does an RD-53 (? Is that it?) expect?
I've dropped in 360s and 1.2Ms, but all it does when I tell it format is
pull the head in and out, in and out, like bad sector error. It this like
RX02s where they need some wierd format before they work?
BTW, I tried imaging the harddisk already, but my XT doesn't like the
drive for some reason. These are just standard MFM drives, right?
On Thu, 6 Nov 1997 19:10:21 -0500 (EST), Mr. Donzelli was heard to
say:
> [...] military electronics has always been way ahead of what the
> industry [...] like spread spectrum communications (incidently,
> invented by the most unlikely of people) [...]
Thank you! My faith has been restored.
How many can name the individual in question? Hint: The name
appeared in a fairly recent "Invention & Technology" issue.
______________________________________________________________________
| | |
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA |
| mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | |
| http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum/ | ICBM: N42:21 W71:46 |
|________________________________________________|_____________________|
I 'd like to commend and thank Matt Pritchard for shipping the Hard Drive
Bibles. I know he went to a lot of trouble to purchase, pack and ship
several heavy volumes...and asked no profit for himself.
If he ever needs a favor, I hope everyone will bend over backwards to help
him!
Thanks, Mr. Pritchard,
manney(a)nwohio.com
Sam, that was very uncalled for. Any problems that you have could have
been solved in a gentlemanly manner, ceretainly witout resulting to this
level of language!
----------
From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)northernway.net>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Classic Computer Rescue Squad
Date: Friday, November 07, 1997 6:48 PM
;-) Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, Sam Ismail
said:
>Now, when the f**k did I say that?
[snip]
>Otherwise, pull your head from out of your a**, Tim.
[snip]
Geez, Sam! Take a [Choose One] (Valium / Prozac), wouldya??? Tho Tim may
have talked out of turn (I'm not judging either way), does it really
warrant talk of this nature? And if it does, could you keep the _extreme_
profanity to private e-mail?
I'm no saint myself, but others may become highly offended with this type
of abusive crap...
Just MHO,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | Why does Hershey's put nutritional
Programmer, NorthernWay | information on their candy bar wrappers
zmerch(a)northernway.net | when there's no nutritional value within?
On Thu, 6 Nov 1997, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> Of course, because DG Novae haven't been featured in the _LA Times_
> or the _Chicago Tribune_, nobody wants them. The instant they are
> featured, all sorts of lusers will start crawling out and insisting
> they *need* a Nova, price is no object, just like happened with my
> Altair's, IMSAI's, and Apple I's.
Oh, and Tim will be very sad on that day indeed, and in his generous
nature will open up the warehouse to all those who've spotted his
old post on this mailing list, and will not raise the price from
"take them away" to $10,000 each. :-)
- John
I had an Heathkit H-11a computer drop into my lap (somewhat literally)
last night, and it got me to thinking...
It's probably time to try to get one of these things running in its
original configuration (vs. the Dec cards in the Heath chassis config.),
so it looks like I need to track down some copies of the original Heath
(mutated Dec) software for the thing... (i.e. HT-11, etc...)
I've got most of the paper tapes for the H-11 so I think I'm ok there,
and I've got a H-27 disk sub-system for the thing, so now I seek the
software on disk.
Anyone out there have spares or a functional unit that can replicate???
And... Does anyone remember the specific differences between the H-11 and
H11a? (if any aside from the obvious addition of a third switch on the
front panel?)
(still seeking that elusive H-10 tho...)
Thanks!
-jim
---
jimw(a)agora.rdrop.com
The Computer Garage - http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw
Computer Garage Fax - (503) 646-0174
At 15:02 11/7/97 +0300, you wrote:
>Yeah, I'm mostly interested in collecting micros, but I forget how big
>minis are....
They vary. There are rack-mount minis, like an HP 2115 or some of the
smaller DG's, that you can pick up singlehanded, although you won't love
yourself for it. On the other end, our SDS 930 -- 14 racks, 5.5 tons
probably counting spares and docs -- is just the size that some people,
including me, call it a small mainframe, and some call it a mini. A PDP-1,
to take another example, is absolutely a mini, but if you add a Fastrand
(drum) and a goodly squad of tape drives, you have a fairly imposing computer.
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine(a)chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California
<I'd like a Nova, but I've so far not been courageous enough to think
<seriously about moving one from Vancouver to Montreal. :)
I'm embarressed to say that I live about 8 miles from DG and have had
little contact with any of their machines. You don't see them here around
fleas much either.
Allison
I think I have one, but without the disks. Is this OK?
-----Original Message-----
From: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
To: Manney <Manney>
Date: Wednesday, November 05, 1997 7:22 AM
Subject: PC/AT reference
> Not yet a classic, but does anyone have a {spare} copy of the
"Technical
>Reference Personal Computer AT"? This is the tech ref guide for the
original
>IBM PC/AT, published by IBM (I'm guessing in a gray fabric binder).
>
> TIA!
>
>Rich Cini/WUGNET
><rcini(a)msn.com>
> Charter ClubWin! Member
> MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
>
>
>
>
>
>
<Yes, I suppose, but it also shows that the computers were not the real
<cutting edge,
The programming however was! The MMC had the disk completely wiped and
even the timing tracks were gone.
<like crypto and countermeasures gear. If it were the
<absolute best, cutting edge technology, it would have been shredded
<(literally - I have seen the end results).
That's the point. The crypto and contermeasures stuff it was not the
parts but the general designs that had to be hid. After all we didn't
want it known how to encode or decode a cypher or jam a particular radar
as everyone could do it. Often it was not so much the hardware but the
underlying concepts. With computers the real advances were being made in
the commercial and university spaces as that's the users that pushed for
it or were experimenting with different approaches. If anything the
military was the winner as they got to use it after the fact incorperating
it into their systems.
Generally the loss is that we didn't get to see how Purple or Enigma
worked. But I do have a great article from the late 50s about how
The radar display system was linked to the Sage system.
Allison
Yeah, I'm mostly interested in collecting micros, but I forget how big
minis are. But if anyone has anything, that would be great. And how much
does a Nova weigh? A DG? The whole package?
TIA,
Tim D. Hotze
----------
From: Doug Spence <ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Classic Computer Rescue Squad
Date: Friday, November 07, 1997 1:26 PM
On Thu, 6 Nov 1997, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> Not a problem. I can get you a Nova 4 CPU+chassis, a DG terminal, a
> 6045 14" disk drive, controller, and pack, and a 9-track tape drive,
> all hooked together and running DG RDOS.
How much space would a system like this take, and what kind of power is
required to feed it? :)
> Of course, because DG Novae haven't been featured in the _LA Times_
> or the _Chicago Tribune_, nobody wants them. The instant they are
> featured, all sorts of lusers will start crawling out and insisting
> they *need* a Nova, price is no object, just like happened with my
> Altair's, IMSAI's, and Apple I's.
I'd like a Nova, but I've so far not been courageous enough to think
seriously about moving one from Vancouver to Montreal. :)
I know nothing about minis. My entire collection consists of
(generally very common) micros, and I'd almost be afraid to let a mini in
the house in case something goes wrong. (My conscience does not handle
damaging classic computer equipment well.)
> Tim. (shoppa(a)triumf.ca)
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca
<The Minuteman missle computers were not the cutting edge and not very
<secret. After all, they did end up on the surplus market without requiring
<demil
In 1971 is was nothing new but it's design was in the early 60s where is
was state of the art. The fact that it declassified and sold as junk
ten years later shows how fast things moved in that ten year span. As we
moved forward in ten year spans we see different amount of technolical
hops. Comparing the MMC to the PDP-8I shows that. The -8 was easily 1/4
the size and power and easily 10x faster.
As to the use of computes for nav, that's likely the oldest use. The use
I refer to was the targeting and tracking computer which relied on the
navigation.
Allison
<>Maybe that's why I have an intel Intellec MDS 8080 development system
What's significant is it was one of several used by the terminals and
printers engineering at DEC to develope the VT100!
<little minis inside. You know what else is just as nice the same way? Th
<Tektronix boxes built around the LSI-11....
I've seen a few of them but the LSI-11 itself wasn't built poorly either.
I have a few Q-bus PDP-11s.
That was the point of the multibus design used in the MDS. They defined
and created a distinct bus that was robust. The MDS box was the start
of that that line (multibus cards) as well.
<It's like having a '56 or '57 Mercedes. The whole world knows how sexy an
<pricey a 300SL is, be it the Gullwing or the roadster; but it takes a
It may be but when it's a particular one with a known history then there
is more to it.
Allison
