I won it. It resembles a Keytronic 5150, but has something like an rj11 (don't ask me how many conductors). Is it an IBM/K* internally? I guess I should have asked before I bid/bin.
------------------------------
On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 5:14 PM PST Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote:
>>> Don't make me open up a can of Thetans on you.
>> Oh shit! H-bombs!
>> Nah. I do happen to have a genuine can of EMP though. :)
>
> I see a global thermonuclear war coming...
Really? I was just opening the garage door wondering where I put my hip boots and shovel. And gas mask.
> Message: 13
> Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2013 03:00:14 +0100
> From: Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de>
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: WANTED: TM8E magtape controller for Omnibus
> Message-ID: <511EE82E.2010605 at hachti.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi David,
>
> On 15.02.2013 18:53, David Gesswein wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:50:44PM +0100, Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
>>> Is there anybody out there who
>>> 1. owns a TM8E magtape controller?
>> Yes.
> Nice.
>
>> I got mine from "thom restivo"<trestivo at tarinc.com>
>> back in 2004. At the time he said he had more boards. Found a TU10 to go
>> with it in 2007.
>> http://www.pdp8online.com/tu10/tu10-repair.shtml
> Thank you, I'll ask him!
>
> Regards
>
> Philipp
>
I'm afraid that Thom went out of business quite a few years ago and
sold his warehouse full of DEC equipment. I never found out who
bought him out. I enjoyed visiting and crawling through the place
though.
Bob
>Holy shit! It's a talking plant!
>
>g.
I keep telling you people I haven't smoked plants in decades if there seems to be a residual smell it's just probably the oregano I had my pizza
Go back to pretending you're Tom Cruise flyboy.
------------------------------
On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 3:22 PM PST Dave McGuire wrote:
> [off-list]
Uh...
> Dude. Gene IS Tom Cruise. He uses an alias here for the obvious
>reason. Watch yourself!
O great. First d*****bag atheists now a hitman from the church of Scientology to deal with!
> -Dave
>
> *snicker*
No thanks I'm cooking dinner now (it may be my last!). I don't want to spoil it
>Tandy and Amstrad machines had one accessory available that AFAIK was not
>avaialbe for other clones (it was avaialbe for IB< 5150/5160/5170
>machines). This accessory is rather important to me. I refer, of course,
>to a schematic diagram.
>
>-tony
The Tandy 2000 tech manual even included circuit board artwork. IINM IBM's extensive documentation didn't have that. They did include rom sources though, which Tandy didn't.
I've seen a fair amount of tech manuals. It's hard to beat these 2.
I finally got an inventory up of what I have. Heres the price $30
bucks an item plus shipping, no matter what it is.
Inventory as of 2-16-13
10 Apple Monitor //
4 Apple Monitor ///
32 Cosmetically damaged IIGS Monitors
10 Nice GS Monitors
8 Mac IIcx
2 Mac IIci
3 Mac IIsi
5 Imagewriter I
3 Beige G3 Minitowers
2 G3 Desktops
5 PowerMac 6100s
2 Centris 610
1 Quadra 610
1 Performa 6110
1 Performa 6116
1 PowerMac 7300/180
1 PowerMac 7500/100
2 PowerMac 7100/66
1 Performa 600
1 Macintosh IIVX
4 Original LCs
3 LC 575s
1 SE FDHD
2 SE 800k
5 Mac Pluses
1 Molar Mac
it's bleachy. Turns out it was left outside in a box w/a bunch of cables, and rain water bleaches things better then most other substances. Works fine. Tested it on the A600 I sold recently. Cable is a little dirty too.
Someone pointed out that the 3B2's disk may still be salvageable. I'm not sure about that, but I don't have a lot of
experience with the older drives. It's probably the original disk, as it has AT&T stickers on it. Plugged into multiple
computers and external drive enclosures it spins up, head load click, then spins down. I've tried reseating connectors
and checking jumpers, no change. I don't know what the jumper on the bottom side of the lowest PCB near
the SCSI connector does, and there are two empty DIP sockets on the bottom of the drive that could possbly be a
part of the problem. I haven't taken a scope to it to trace out the signals yet and see if an amp died.
On Thu, 14 Feb 2013, Chris Tofu wrote:
> Well plating can be accomplished in the home shop but where are you
> going to get the gold. Wait for a meteorite?
> But it brings up an interesting idea of mine. Couldn't you reverse
> plate the gold right off of pins and whatnot? No nasty chemicals, no
> mess, no fuss.
Gold plating usually uses cyanide compounds, which many people consider "nasty chemicals" (certainly chemicals
that one needs to work with carefully, but pretty common for both plating and case hardening).
If you're using cyanide anyway, you might as well go ahead and use a modified MacArthur-Forrest process and not bother with
the electricity. Pour your gold-containing objects in a dilute cyanide solution, recover the gold by either electrowinning
or single-replacement with zinc.
At the end of the day either way is a lot of work for little gold.
There was a question about what manufacturer made it. It looks like a generic Taiwanese whitebox,
sticker on the back says "Mega 4000", sticker on the front says "AT Light" (+1 for them getting
the spelling right instead of using "Lite", -100 for their marketing department appearing to have
no idea what "AT" means).
I guess I'll hang onto it for a bit, anyway. I have a SCSI card that will work in it and an old VGA
card.
------------------------------
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 8:05 PM PST Chris Tofu wrote:
>
>
>------------------------------
>On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 5:12 PM PST Jules Richardson wrote:
>
>>I know of at least one person who has some bare / partially-populated PCBs, but my board's the only complete one that I know of (aside from the possible ROM issue).
>
> are they willing to part with 1+?
And which Acorn are we talking about? Apparently Acorn had a relationship to BBC. I'm looking for an Archimedes by the way, they're just so darn expensive last I checked.
I pulled all the cards out of my rolling dinosaur. One small card with 2 sets of fingers sports an 80186. What is this card? I won't have a better picture until Monday if anyone was dying to see it.
------------------------------
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 5:12 PM PST Jules Richardson wrote:
>I know of at least one person who has some bare / partially-populated PCBs, but my board's the only complete one that I know of (aside from the possible ROM issue).
are they willing to part with 1+?
Hi folks,
I already have lots of stuff - but there's always something missing!
Is there anybody out there who
1. owns a TM8E magtape controller?
and
2. who can imagine to give it away?
I have a few TU10 drives that dropped in with a PDP11 some time ago.
It would be awsome to get one of them running on a 8/e system. I know that there
was a magtape controller. But I'be never seen one. And I don't know anyone who
has one.
At one point in newer history I found a H960 containing a 8/e and a TU10. But
when opening the 8/e, it was empty - no TM11 controller :-(
Any hints appreciated.
Kind regards
Philipp
(I'm currently getting my collection reassembled and rearranged. Most of it will
be tied together in the place where I'm living. Therefore I have begun to play
with minicomputers again - after a few years of very low activity and a widely
spread nearly inaccessible collection. And I will sell some stuff!)
--
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Philipp Hachtmann
Buchdruck, Bleisatz, Spezialit?ten
Alemannstr. 21, D-30165 Hannover
Tel. 0511/3522222, Mobil 0171/2632239
Fax. 0511/3500439
hachti at hachti.de
www.tiegeldruck.de
UStdID DE 202668329
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 1:37 PM PST Tom Gardner wrote:
>Let's not be US centric - I nominate AMSTRAD for one of the worst designed
>system boxes. The cables basically blocked all airflow resulting in all
>sorts of thermal problems, and the data separator, designed by some UK
>consultants who knew nothing about the subject, limit-cycled eating up all
>the disk drive margin.
>
>Tom
Didn't Acorn dabble in pcs? What about Research Machines? Fairly robust, no?
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 2:44 PM PST Tony Duell wrote:
>If you don't wantto etch your own PCB, it's relatively hard to get a male
>card edge conenctor
you can accomplish rudimentary masking and etching by using cheap packing tape. Encapsulate the board then slice and remove portions of the board you'd like to etch away. No copper sulfate IIRC (the etchant) won't eat your fingers. Just DON'T pour it down the drain, protect your clothes and be careful of animals.
(and if you do etch your own board, it's non-trivial
>to gold plate it).
Well plating can be accomplished in the home shop but where are you going to get the gold. Wait for a meteorite?
But it brings up an interesting idea of mine. Couldn't you reverse plate the gold right off of pins and whatnot? No nasty chemicals, no mess, no fuss.
it is, however, quite easy to get header plugs of
>various sizes, including ones with wire-wrap pins.
>
>If I ahd to make such an adapter in a hurry (== no time to make the
>PCB)_, I'd probably put 34 pin and 50 pin wire-wrap headers ont a bit of
>square pad board, wire-wrap approrpraity, and fit one of said adapterso
>nto the 34 pin header to conenct to the edge connector on the cable.
If I'm following you, couldn't you cut the card edge from a busted drive, solder that to an appropriate board (I would have to assume the spacing is identical), solder a header connector, preferably right angle, to the opposite side of the board, then solder jumper wires where appropriate?
Hi all,
my Name is Alex, me and a friend of mine have been actively
participating in a computer collection, mostly repairing
stuff and bringing it back to life. We have numerous old apples, vaxes,
decstations, suns, next etc and some
real weird old stuff ;)
Lately we discovered a DG nova standing in a dark corner of a storeroom.
We have absolutely no peripherals, just
the bare machine. It has 2 CPU boards, a general IO card, 2 Memory
boards and some unknown third party controller.
The Machine as it sits now has 2-3 problems (at least):
1: Somehow the "desposit next" switch does not work as expected by not
incrementing the adress sometimes. Doing a deposit-examine next-deposit
works, so thats a minor problem.
2: Simple programs run fine in single step mode. Press RUN and the
machine seems to hang. You can not even STOP anymore, you have
to reset the machine. Annonying, but to test the simple stuff single
stepping also works....
3: The biggest problem is: The ACs have numerous bits stuck on 1. It is
the same bit pattern for all ACs. We can store and
deposit the non-stuck bits, but all others remain a 1. With this
behaviour its really really hard to write any meaningful asm to
test the machine ;)
Please see the attached Link for pictures of the machine and the
bit-pattern of the AC. Since the AC Deposit works as expected
and the error shows only when examining we are positive that the error
is not in the AC Registers itself but somewhere where
the switch location is actually shifted into the AC....or something like
that. We are also struggling a bit to get all the documentation
in a meaningful relation. So if you have any pointers on what to do or
check, please chime in.
If the machine gets back to life i have plans on emulating a storage
device to run one of the available os-es. Should be doable with
a microcontroller and some logic glue.....but it looks like a long way ;)
See actual pictures of the machine here
http://bigalpha.ath.cx/nova/pics/ori/index.html
where you can also see the bit Pattern of the AC.
I kinda wonder why its
1 11X 111 X11 1X1 11X
I guess this should point us nearer to the point of failure.
best regards
Alex
I just joined the group, although I have had a long time appreciation of vintage computing technology. I spent most of my career on the software, marketing and most other aspects of computers but not hardware. I have put together systems, hacked at things, but at a light level, until recently. I decided to really learn how to design and engineer, choosing a project that would expose me to many aspects and be a forcing function for developing quite a few skills. Not that this makes me a full bore EE or able to design at a current technology professional level, but enough so I could envision, design and make hobby items of pretty much any scope I wanted. The project is a replica of an IBM 1130, a low end mainframe contemporaneous with S/360 and sharing the same logic and other technology. My aim is to build one that is an experiential replica - one that brings me as close as I can get to the experiences and behavior I had sitting in front of the console hand stepping through code back at the end of the 1960s. The internals are based on modern FPGA but producing a cycle by cycle accurate system, faithful to the timing on the real machine. I have a blog detailing the work, my current state and goals, if anyone is interested, at ibm1130.blogspot.com
Currently I am adapting an IBM Electronic Typewriter model 50 - a late model of the Selectrics - to serve as the console printer since the 1130 used a 1053 (Selectric based printer). The keyboard is being adapted from a keypunch keyboard, since the 1130 used the keyboard from an IBM 029 punch, and even where I am using more modern devices (a streaming link over USB to a PC to present card images to the peripheral adapter logic, I have made it timing and behavior faithful. The processor itself is working quite well, which is why I have moved the focus to peripherals. It is a very similar effort to that of Lawrence Wilkinson who has built a 360 model 30 and is also building peripherals at this time. You can read about the 360/30 project at http://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360/vhdl/
I am hoping that members of this group will be able to share advice and information as I look to adapt something like an RK-05 disk drive, since it is very similar to the IBM 1130 drive, in a later phase. It is a truly quixotic project with no clear end, but will give me the excuse to dabble in all manner of old technology along the way. Hopefully many of you will have fascinating projects and experiences that I can enjoy.
Carl
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Hi Folks,
I just heard that the Spare Time Gizmos SBC6120 partial kit is being offered as a Kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sparetimegizmos/classic-pdp8-replica
There are just 12-days left until the project expires. It currently has 11 of 30 slots filled.
Only 30-slots are available and all must be filled for the project to be funded.
I have signed up for one, so I'm hoping that it goes forward!
Steve L.
>From what I've read kickstarter also requires some formal example of a finished product now as well. Not just a pipedream with sponsorship. I imagine they're trying to use that as some security vs pay for an idea that someone might not be able to produce.
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 3:35 PM PST Chris Long wrote:
>Research Machines made a whole range of PCs starting with the first Nimbus.
>
>I have one in the collection but have had little time to look at it tbh.
I used to have a Nimbus mobo.
And I was thinking Apricot, yet said Acorn (that made a pc).
I seem to recall using a PCjr drive (Qume?) to image disks in a newer pc..
------------------------------
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 3:20 PM PST TeoZ wrote:
even the floppy drives were different then anything on a clone because the power was in the data cable).