test-drb

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

101090 discussions

by vintagecoder＠aol.com

If you look at the November, 1972 paper Wirth put out called "The Programming Language Pascal (Revised Report) you will find both "Pascal" and "PASCAL" in the text. The canonical "PASCAL User Manual and Report" (Springer-Verlag, 1974) uses all caps in the title and then in a few places such as "PASCAL 6000". Just because it's a proper name doesn't mean it's incorrect to capitalize it. After all, wasn't Blaise Pascal a Frenchman, and don't the French capitalize last names to this very day? ;-) ------Original Message------ From: Mouse Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org To: cctalk at classiccmp.org ReplyTo: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Right toolf for the job Sent: 5 Jan 2012 15:00 > they tell me it's not "FORTRAN" it's "Fortran" when I know damn well > it's an acronym! Not in the usual sense of `acronym', though. But... > PASCAL as delivered was pretty unusable. ...if you're going to draw the distinction between "Fortran" and "FORTRAN", you might at least get Pascal's name right. :) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

14 years, 4 months

Email address for Hans Pufal of ACONIT?

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

Can someone send me the email address for Hans Pufal of ACONIT? I would like to talk to him about the PDP-9 project at the RICM. -- Michael Thompson

14 years, 4 months

Cromemco FDC

by james＠attfield.co.uk

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:02:11 -0800 (PST) From: Jerry Wright <g-wright at att.net> Subject: Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC >> Josh, I would love to get your 64FDC for my Cromemco 68020 machine that >> is missing one. I have 16 FDC and other Croemeco Z-80 Boards to go along >> with it. > Which model 68020 Cromemco is it? I might be able to find a spare 64FDC... > mike Long shot, but if you have another or Josh doesn't take it I'd love to give it a home. I have a complete Cromemco board set here in an IMS-5000 chassis and a pair of TM848's but have consistently failed to get the 16-FDC to talk to them reliably. I'd dearly love to get a 64-FDC for it to go with the ZPU and/or an STD hard disk controller (or an IMI drive to go with the WDI-II controller I have). Anyone? FYI the ROM on the 'FDC flips in and out the entire top 32K bank. During boot RDOS ensures that the top 32K flips in and RDOS then flips out giving a clean 64K map. All done through port 40H. Jim

14 years, 4 months

Right toolf for the job (Was: teaching programming to kids)

by jonas＠otter.se

>> > Never used Fortran. >> Think of it as an old-style version of BASIC. WRITE is like >> PRINTUSING, >> with FORMAT being where you specify the print pattern. Any variable >> whose >> name starts with the letters I J K L M or N (alphabetic letters >> between I >> and N (which is the start of "INteger")) is assumed to be an int, >> unless >> you tell it otherwise. Many brands of it require giving a line >> number to >> every line. > > Oops! > For FORTRAN, that should read, "like some brands of BASIC, you can > skip > assigning line numbers to lines that aren't explicitly referenced." > Strictly speaking, "line numbers" in FORTRAN are actually labels. They do not have anything to do with line numbering and IIRC they do not have to appear in an ascending sequence either, they can be assigned randomly and with arbitrary gaps in the sequence. Assigning labels ("line numbers") to not explicitly referenced lines in FORTRAN would be like giving every line a label in assembler, completely meaningless clutter. /Jonas

14 years, 4 months

server outage

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

My apologies... the classiccmp server crashed, and it took some real doing to get it functional again. It was not a hardware issue, it was an issue with both Xen and FreeNAS (mostly Xen as to the delay in getting it back up). I'm embarrassed to admit, but I finally had to open up a per-incident support case with Citrix to get the thing resolved. On the bright side, there are backups (daily) of mysql, the website content directories, and the mailman archive, so no data was ever at risk. However, since those aren't full system backups - recovery from them would have been a bit time-consuming but certainly doable with no data loss. Yes, I'm setting up monthly snapshots (or vm exports) shortly just in case it happens again. Best, J

14 years, 4 months

OpenFirmware/Fcode - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

ROFL...installed in hundreds of thousands, if not milliins of machines running all over the world. Nearly all PPC-based Macs, all Suns (including current ones I think) past the Sun4c family, all reasonably modern RS6000s, what else...it was an IEEE standard for a long time, #1275. -Dave Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: >On 4 Jan 2012 at 20:43, Toby Thain wrote: > >> That was implemented as http://www.openfirmware.org/ (found in Suns, >> Macs, etc). >> >> The format is Fcode; it's actually a brilliant idea that of course was >> of more pressing importance when the hardware market was actually >> heterogeneous. > >Finding anything about this is a little difficult--lots of 404s, etc. >when trying to search. > >What was the last product that used Open Firmware? Most of this >stuff seems to be from the mid '90s. > >--Chuck >

14 years, 4 months

Cromemco FDC (was: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC)

by dm561＠torfree.net

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:24:36 -0800 From: Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> Subject: Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC On 12/31/2011 12:15 PM, MikeS wrote: > > ----- Reply: > >> Just curious: >> Does your memory configuration support swapping out the RDOS boot/monitor >> ROM? > Not at the moment, I haven't quite worked out if this can be made to work > properly with non-Cromemco memory boards. The 64FDC manual suggests > "Set[ting] the switches on the RAM board(s) so that memory from 8000h to > FFFFh is disabled..." which implies that the boards must support some way > of re-enabling the memory via software (for when the FDC's ROM is disabled > via a write to port 40h). > I'm wondering if this board isn't really optimal for this setup -- it > seems very geared toward having a complete Cromemco setup, which I do not > have. ---------------- I don't see why it would be a problem; the RDOS boot/monitor ROM lives at C000 so it should work with 48K RAM even if you don't disable it; ISTR that some folks simply connected the ROM chip select to the Phantom line if they had non-bankable memory and wanted to switch it in and out. And of course the ROM can be completely disabled as well. It controls up to four total 5.25 and/or 8" drives with write precomp, has an RS-232 console port and a pretty good monitor with the usual memory and disk manipulation, some basic diagnostics, etc.; not a bad card IMO. And it's fairly well documented. ---------------- > For right now, I was just planning on assembling a raw binary image and > using a PC (with a bit of hacked together software) to push the image into > the IMSAI's memory via the 64FDC's serial port, using the onboard monitor > commands. Just for fun :). > If you know of a source for images of these third-party CP/Ms, let me > know. Dave Dunfield's site has a CP/M for the 16FDC, which as far as I > can tell (from a cursory glance at the manuals) has identical I/O port > behavior to the 64FDC so I may just be able to use that, assuming I can > write the 8" image to a 5.25" floppy. ---------------- As a matter of fact Dave also has a utility for the FDC that actually lets you create a bootable disk over the serial port. No big difference between the 16FDC and the 64 FDC; mostly just stuff added for later models of 8" drives (Tandon 848) and mods for the tape drives. mike

14 years, 4 months

OpenFirmware/Fcode - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

I agree that it's a big loss, made even worse by some platforms moving to EFI, which is a joke in comparison. Like so many other inferior technologies, EFI was a solution in search of a problem, and some clueless sod in management somewhere decided to force it into some product lines, so now we have to put up with it when we've worked with much better. -Dave David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote: >On Jan 4, 2012, at 21:32, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: > >> >> What was the last product that used Open Firmware? Most of this >> stuff seems to be from the mid '90s. > >Probably the last PowerPC Macs, or the OLPC, or a few embedded things... Sadly, OF seems to have fallen out of favor, which I think is a real loss. > >- Dave

14 years, 4 months

cctech Digest, Vol 101, Issue 8

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

> From:?Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> > Date:?Wed, 4 Jan 2012 16:28:13 -0500 > Subject:?Re: The PDP-8/L at the RICM is running! > On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 3:14 AM, Holm Tiffe <holm at freibergnet.de> wrote: > Don't know if it's similar to what you've seen or not, but from my > experience testing M-series modules for the -8/L and -8/i, I've found > more dead 7474s and 7440s than any other type of chip. That is what we found from our recent PDP-8/L revival. We also found quite a few failed 7400, 7410, 7450/7460, I bought a HP 10529A Logic Comparator that sounds like the chip test device that you made. -- Michael Thompson

14 years, 4 months

TV -> D-Sub converter possible?

by vintagecoder＠aol.com

I have an old COCO II somewhere but I don't have a television. What are you guys who have similar old systems doing for a display? Is there a device to convert the TV out from those computers to D-Sub or dare to dream, DVI? What do you call such a converter? Thanks.

14 years, 4 months

Imperative thought patterns - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by dm561＠torfree.net

----- Original Message: Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2012 20:11:52 +0000 From: Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> To: "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: RE: Imperative thought patterns - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC From: MikeS Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 7:23 AM >> I think many if not most of the people on here discovered that they >> enjoyed and had a gift for programming by playing with BASIC on their C64 >> or equivalent [snip] > I think that many if not most of the people on here learned to program on > something other than BASIC. I, for example, learned FORTRAN IV on an IBM > 1401 6 years before the MITS Altair 8800 was introduced to the world. > I did personally not encounter BASIC until I was in grad school, on an IBM > 370/168 running Wylbur for interactive computing. I was much more taken > with the DEC-20. -------Reply: You're probably right about this particular group where most people are old enough to wax nostalgic about the DECs of their distant youth and many are presumably retired as well since they have enough spare time to waste on discussions like this one... ;-) I personally started on an IBM 650 and then the very first Burroughs B260 installed in Canada, and didn't encounter BASIC either until I bought one of the first PETs some 13 years or so later. But I suspect many of the programmers actually writing code in the 'real' world today are somewhat younger than 45 or 50, and did indeed start on an 8-bitter of the 70's and 80's when the whole field exploded. m

14 years, 4 months

AT & T 7300 docs (update)

by chrism3667＠yahoo.com

I'll have to rebox them as smaller parcels. I can't lift anything near that right now (or anytime soon). If you're still interested (those that previously responded), let me know. Media rate from 08005. Figure 2-3 boxes @ 25 or 15 lbs. each. If that suits you, they're yours. It'll probably take me another week or a bit more to get all that done though. I'll need a check for shippage. If you send me more (owing to my possibly exuberant estimates), I'll refund the difference, so no need to ruffle your punch cards. Let me know.

14 years, 4 months

Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by derschjo＠mail.msu.edu

Anyone have any recommendations for a reasonably featured 8080 or Z80 BASIC? What I've got running at the moment is a mongrel IMSAI 8080 with a Z80, 48K of working memory and a serial port. My eventual goal is to get CP/M running on it (I have a Cromemco 64FDC -- anyone know of either an official CP/M for this or know of a BIOS that supports this controller before I start writing my own?) but for the time being I thought it would be fun to get a BASIC running on it. The catch is I need something I can adapt to the serial I/O on the Cromemco controller -- so something that I can pretty easily modify is of course preferable. (I'm not opposed to manually hacking up a binary but having an official source listing to start with would save time :)) I started looking at the IMSAI 8K basic listing but there's a fair amount of hardware-specific I/O code in it scattered throughout so I'm not thrilled about modifying it... (and the only source listing I can find is in a PDF, which doesn't help any...) Thanks, Josh

14 years, 4 months

Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by Arno_1983＠gmx.de

> One of the things that frustrates me with C21 OSs and languages is > that the graphics facilities of machines are locked away behind the > high walls of libraries and APIs designed for professional developers > - which are simply too hard for an interested amateur such as myself. Are you aware of FreeBASIC (the one with the nice horsy logo) and had a look whether that floats your boat? This is an extendable freeware BASIC programming environment for Windoze (I dunno if it's available for other platforms too, I don't care at the moment) which can be enabled to do sound, Windows GUI widgets, networking primitives and the like via downloadable modules/libraries, which should be well documented and examples provided. I located and installed it a few years ago as a win- and TCP-enabled replacement for Turbo BASIC, both for my usual day-to-day diddling and intending to program a control application/"driver" for some not-quite-xterm, but couldn't scrounge up the spare time for more than a very cursory examination 'til now. Arno Kletzander ...sent from my HTC Magician PDA

14 years, 4 months

Guy claims to have re-badged VIC-1001

by christian_liendo＠yahoo.com

Ebay Item 320822744546 http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320822744546 His title "VERY RARE: This Commodore VIC-20 is a Re-badged VIC-1001. Made In Japan." Am I crazy or wasn't all the VICs made in Japan??

14 years, 4 months

22disk & CP/M's diskettes

by elazzerini＠interfree.it

Hi all, after i finally resurrected my BIGBOARD and I made ??the boot of the operating system CP/M, are struggling with reading old diskettes. Before i comes out completely my mind in the counting of all parameters to pass to the program 22disk, someone knows a comprehensive guide on how to decode the disc formats? I am very close to the identification of parameters, but frankly it is extremely stressful. I'll try to list where I am keeping in mind that the format Bigboard 1 has 77 tracks x 26 sectors / track each with 128byte single-density single-sided. 1) almost every disk CP/M in the first 2 tracks the format is 77 tracks x 26 sectors / track each from 128byte. 2) then starts the data portion that would be double-sided and i need to remove from this portion the sectors used for the FAT whose number is to be calculated as a function of the total number of sectors to be managed; 3) i'm able to reconstruct the sequence of sectors on the disk for the first 2 tracks with the CP/M and for the remain data area; 4) then takes over a parameter which is the allocation unit size that means how fields are grouped together to determine the parameters DRM 5) the allocation unit size determines all the other parameters BSH, BLM, DSM 6) Finally, AL0 and AL0 that the 22disk's document did not clarify well to me. SO: that it is a bit hard for me... Is out there anyone who can help me? Excuse for my poor english. Enrico -Pisa - Italy

14 years, 4 months

Oscilloscope vector display driver...

by rmu_scada＠yahoo.com

http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

14 years, 4 months

teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by vintagecoder＠aol.com

Depends who you ask. I was told by a guy with 3 years of Java programming under his belt that Java is much more powerful than assembler, after all, Java is object oriented! ;-) Anyway this ought to be an interesting subthread. I'll make the popcorn! ------Original Message------ From: Chuck Guzis Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts ReplyTo: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC Sent: 3 Jan 2012 09:53 On 3 Jan 2012 at 2:28, Richard wrote: > It's not really a fair comparison as we expect a "modern" language to > do much more than FORTRAN 66. Do what, exactly? Are you saying that simple languages can't "do" what more complicated ones do? Does the simplest---machine code, do less than, any HLL, modern or ancient? Is C less capable than Python? --Chuck

14 years, 4 months

Cromemco FDC (was: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC)

by dm561＠torfree.net

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:02:11 -0800 (PST) From: Jerry Wright <g-wright at att.net> Subject: Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC > Josh, I would love to get your 64FDC for my Cromemco 68020 machine that > is missing one. I have 16 FDC and other Croemeco Z-80 Boards to go along > with it. Which model 68020 Cromemco is it? I might be able to find a spare 64FDC... mike

14 years, 4 months

Connect Shugart SA850 to PC

by shadoooo＠gmail.com

Hello. I have a Shugart SA850 I would connect to a PC, to read/write old diskettes using linux. I would need a suggestion on how to do connections and specially how to set the jumpers on the driver. Any advice? Andrea

14 years, 4 months

Imperative thought patterns - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by dm561＠torfree.net

----- Original Message: Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:33:02 -0500 From: Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> Subject: Imperative thought patterns - Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC > On 1/2/12 8:22 PM, "Josh Dersch"<derschjo at mail.msu.edu> wrote: >>>> Djikstra said, "It is virtually impossible to teach good programming >>>> prctices to students with a prior exposure to BASIC; they are mentally >>>> mutilated beyond any hope of regeneration." >>> >>> He had that lovely combination of clear sight and fearless expression. >> >> If only that particular expression of his was even remotely true :). >> >> - Josh > Most long-time imperative programmers who seriously studies The Structure > and Interpretation of Computer Programs will come face to face with the > essential truth of Dijkstra's remark. The consequent un-learning is just > as valuable as the learning... --T ----- Reply: I don't think Josh was questioning whether Dijkstra said it, but whether it's actually *true*; since you (Toby) say elsewhere that "I too learned with assembler, BASIC, Pascal, C, and so on", then you must also be "mentally mutilated beyond any hope of regeneration". That would of course explain a lot... ;-) I think many if not most of the people on here discovered that they enjoyed and had a gift for programming by playing with BASIC on their C64 or equivalent and, far from being "mentally mutilated", have gone on to be quite competent programmers and/or analysts; I also suspect that had that C64 been equipped with a language that discouraged 'playing' and enforced rigid rules of structure etc., many of those folks would today be in a different and perhaps less satisfying career. m

14 years, 4 months

Scheme implementation [was RE: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC]

by RichA＠vulcan.com

From: ben Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 7:27 AM > On 1/3/2012 7:03 AM, Toby Thain wrote: >> Yeah? Scheme has come in at around forty. And you don't get much more >> modern than that. > I thought scheme was written in C. SCHEME[1] was written in MACLISP under the ITS operating system running on a PDP-10. Who says Lisp isn't good for writing interesting software? ;-> [1] The name was really "Schemer", a follow-on to Conniver which was a response to Planner. Program names are represented in 6-bit packed 6 per word in ITS. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

14 years, 4 months

teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by julianskidmore＠yahoo.com

Hi folks, > I'm writing a small Forth engine right now >>While BASIC is good for a starting language it is not the first >>>language I'd bring up on a machine unless it had already been >>>setup on that machine. >>>I'd bring up Forth. One can get the console in and out running >>>first. One can then easily experiment with the disk IO until >>>it is working right. >>>The source is available and easy to understand. >>>Once one has a good understanding, bringing up other >>>languages is trivial. When it comes to teaching programming to kids, simple computers like those in the 8-bit era surely have to be the best. You might want to check out FIGnition, my DIY educational computer, which although based on a modern AVR MCU, is designed to work like a retro 8-bit computer; is simple enough to be built by novices and small enough to be fairly easily understood. https://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition It works with PAL and NTSC video and around 80 have been sold to Universities, Colleges and Schools in the past 8 months since its release. -cheers from julz

14 years, 4 months

Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

by jfoust＠threedee.com

At 11:08 PM 1/2/2012, Ethan Dicks wrote: >I was never a C128 user, nor were there a lot of them in our local >Commodore user group. In general, though, how common was CP/M usage >among the C128 crowd? Was it too little, too late by then? Certainly CBM was pretty good at "too little, too late." When I acquired my C-64 in 1984 or so, I spent too much for the CP/M cartridge, and I rarely used it. I, like CBM, thought it would widely expand what software I might run. Didn't turn out that way. - John

14 years, 4 months

An interesting job for someone in the UK?

by lproven＠gmail.com

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/hawking_job/ Maintain & support the undocumented tech of Prof Stephen Hawking's wheelchair. Wow. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

14 years, 4 months

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