Hello
I was just messing around with Docbook to make some documentation.
I was also in search of Paul Allen's documentation from his Altair Basic
days. Is it alright if I take the content from the manuals on your site
and put them in the Docbook format?
Aaron
Hi,
does anyone consider going for these already?
I can offer a home for (also just some of) that stuff in southern Germany if nobody else does, but unfortunately I can not assist with collecting and shipping right now.
Anybody able to do a store&forward please contact me. Expenses within reason will be covered.
Save The VAXen (...and their ilk)!
Yours sincerely,
Arno.
-----Original Message:-----
Subject: Alpha, VAX available in Sweden
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:50:56 +0100
From: Pontus <pontus at update.uu.se>
Reply-To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Hi
If you live close to Gothenburg and can act within a few days I know of
some medium sized alpha and small vax machines available for pickup.
VT100 and VT520 terminals also.
Contact me offlist.
Regards,
Pontus.
Arno Kletzander
...sent from HTC Magician PDA
>
> Hi All,
>
> I'm thinking of building a "somewhat vintage" two-channel DAC board,
> intended to drive an oscilloscope as a vector display. I'm just considering
> parts now, unless someone has a really good design already set to build.
> By "somewhat vintage" what I mean is that I don't want to just drop in
> a modern "super chip" that will have ten (or more) times the power of the
> intended host computer which, by the way, is an SWTPc 6800. I figure the
> board will have some 8-bit processor on it. I'm leaning towards a Z-80.
> It will have an EPROM, some scratch static RAM, some glue logic to manage
> the communication with the SS-30 bus... and this is where I get fuzzy... a
> 1Kx8 dual ported static RAM and two DACs. These last two elements (the
> dual ported SRAM and the DACs) are where I don't have any experience. A
> little googling has led me to the IDT7130 for the dual ported SRAM and the
> DAC0830 for the DACs. Does anybody in cctalk land have experience with
> either or both of these chips? I have a source for the DAC0830, but I don't
> have a source for the IDT7130 yet. The basic idea of the design is for the
> 6800 to write a vertex list into the dual ported SRAM which the Z-80 then
> reads and pushes to the DACs. I'm hoping I can just hang these chips off of
> the Z-80 address and data busses like the RAM and EPROM but I need to do
> some more reading of the spec sheets.
>
> Any help greatly appreciated,
OK, some thoughts...
You first need to decide how you're going to produce the vectors It's
obviously importnat that not only do the 2 DAC output voltages get to the
right values (that is, the vector ends i nthe right place), but also that
they get there along a 'straight line' from where they were. There are 2
basic ways of doing this, the older one (which has a lower transistor
count, but is a right pain to get working) is to do it in the analogue
circuirty, that is the DACs 'jump' to the new valuse, the analogue
circuitry then genreates the appropariate ramnps to mvoe the beam), the
other is to do it digitally, calcualting stairsteps along the vector,
moving the DAC ouptus one step at a time, and using analogue circuitry to
smooth the result.
Unless there are good reasons not to, I would recomend the latter
approach.
You can porduce the stairsteps eitehr using simple logic ICs (take a look
at things like the DEC VT11 system) or using a microprocessor. The latter
is probably easier. Jaut about any processor would be fine, I see no
reason not to use a Z80
Somethign to be acaefule of is the relative speed of drawing differnt
length vectotrs. If the beam moves more slowly on some lines than on
otehrs, the former will appaer brighter on the screen.Try to keep drawing
speed constant.
There are then 2 other parts to the project. The first is the DACs
themselves. I think you want more than 8 birs of resulution -- 12 bits
would seem to be sensibe (12 bit DACs are not that expensive now). Try to
get double-buffered DACs, which allow you to load the input regsters from
the processor and then later transfer that registers's contents to the
DAC iteself. The advantage of that is the processor can output the 4 values
(high and low parts of X and Y) and then update both dacs simultaneously.
Without that, you might get little glitches on the display.
The otehr part is communication to the host. You have suggested dual-port
RAM, which is certianly oen way to do it. I would suggest looking at FIFO
buffers (each side cna write to a FIFO which si read by the other side.
Of even just a pair of ports with handshake flags. SOemthing like this :
'374
-----------
8 | | 8
Data Bus 1 ---/------| D Q |--------/--------Data Bus 2
| |
| Clk OE |
-----------
| o
WrStb/------+--------+ |
| +--+-----------+----RdStb/
| | |
| o |
| --------- +--|\
| | R | | >o---- Ready Flag
| +5V--|D Q|o-----------|/
| | | '00
+-------|> |
| |
---------
E.g part of '74
The ready flag shoud lbe readable by an input port on each processor. The
ideea is the processor 1 can write to the '374 latch, when it does so, it
sets the D-type at the bottom, maingign the ready flag line go high.
Processor 2 can detect this, it will then read from the '374, clearing
the D-type and briinging the ready flag low again. Processor 1 can
monitor the flag line too to see when processor 2 has read the data. The
NAND means that the ready flag will remain high while proecessor 2 is
reading (and thus asserting the reset line to the D-type) so proecessor 1
doesn't try to writ at this thime (when it couldn't set the D-type).
Take a look at the hP120 schematics to see how a pair of Z80z can
communicate using this sort of circuitry.
-tony
The bigi difference being that unix wildcards are complicated for a
reason - -tjhey let you do poweful things. Predicitve text just gets in
the way! In any case, you don't_have_ to use wildcards in unix (you can
always type the neames explicitly). On the other hand, I've not found a
way to avoid this darn predictive text.
-tony
Options -> Dictionary -> Dictionary off
should do the trick
/Jonas
I wrote this note yesterday, but replied to cctalk-request by mistake.
(The listserv engine wasn't impressed, by the way).
...
If you're using the built-in import or export filters provided with
Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, or whatever, for your own documents,
check over the results *very carefully* on a computer that does not
have the old word processor installed. For documents anything more
complex than a grocery list, the conversion tools provided with
document processing programs are not quite what you'd hope for.
One bit of advice I have is, if you want to convert old documents, do
it now. As each new edition of Word or Corel Office comes out, tools
for converting the oldest formats either disappear, or they stop
working and the vendors aren't doing the QA to know this. (The current
version of Quattro Pro crashes trying to open many spreadsheets in the
old .WB2 and .WB3 formats, for instance). People in this group may have
intermediate, older software versions lying around, but most folks
don't.
My experience is that both import and export tools do a decent job of
getting raw text in and out. Formatting, styling, graphics, equations,
cross references and outline numbering schemes? Not so much. But this
is where the investment in a document lies. Text is cheap. One way of
converting legacy formats is to have printed pages retyped in China or
India at under a dollar a page. (This is a real industry.) But
formatting is really expensive. Complex documents with drawings, math
or tables can cost a business $25 to 100 a page, or more, to have
reworked by skilled clerical or technical staff.
Word's import filters are *horrible*. The result *might* look ok at
first, but it goes downhill fast one you start editing or try to apply
a consistent stylesheet. Their treatment of equations and graphics is
downright dangerous. The filter that extracts WordPerfect's WPG
graphics only converts the basic [0,x] character set for text that
appears in labels in graphics. Characters in the other sets turn into
spaces. I saw a drawing that used the "1/2" symbol in a label that read
something along the lines of "IMPORTANT: TIGHTEN THIS NUT TO 2 1/2 FOOT
POUNDS" come out "IMPORTANT: TIGHTEN THIS NUT TO 2 FOOT POUNDS." The
equation importer is no better. "grad" (nabla, the upside-down
triangle) and "Delta" both come out as an uppercase Delta. Some other
symbols are dropped entirely. Many equations simply don't convert at
all. This has been the state of the filters since at least Office 97.
Microsoft has made no corrections.
OpenOffice? I've found it crashy, especially when trying to export or
import. Small documents, OK. Big, complex documents, no.
Export tools are typically worse than import tools. Vendors aren't
really motivated to provide a good tool that you can use to escape from
their product line. You can usually get away with *publishing* to
another format, but you usually won't get a maintainable *source*
document. (By maintainable, I mean a document with cross-references
intact, outline numbering organized the way the new environment's
native numbering system works, typography governed by a single
consistent style sheet, and so on).
My experience with exporting things from WordPerfect is that equations
are not editable, or are not converted at all. Graphics exported to any
vector format (e.g. WMF) still use the proprietary WordPerfect fonts,
so again, symbols beyond basic ASCII are a big problem. Once you move
the exported document to a system that doesn't have WordPerfect
installed, symbols disappear from the graphics. PDFs with embedded
fonts get around this, but, PDFs are really bad format for documents
that have to be maintained.
(A couple of years ago we lost a bid to do a conversion for a major US
oil company. They decided to convert a huge archive of refinery
operating manuals in-house on the cheap, by making PDFs and then
converting the PDFs to Word. They will be losing all automatic cross
references and numbering. After a few future edits, "Before opening
this valve, see the critical warnings in step 3.32.4 on page 147" will
be pointing to the wrong comments on the wrong page because these
numbers are now just literal text. Management didn't seem to be at all
concerned about this. If I lived next to a refinery on the Gulf Coast,
I'd move.)
There are a lot of other details that get lost in translation by the
native tools that won't matter as much to an individual, but do matter
a lot to organizations that have thousands of documents to maintain. My
business is there, so I've written converters from scratch. Keeps me
employed!
Brian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
_| _| _| Brian Knittel
_| _| _| Quarterbyte Systems, Inc.
_| _| _| Tel: 1-510-559-7930
_| _| _| http://www.quarterbyte.com
This is a long shot -- anyone have a spare "STP Connector Card" for a
VT103? This is a small paddle board that plugs into the main VT100
circuit board (on the J3 slot). Basically it re-routes the external
serial port internally in order to allow it to connect to the VT-103's
internal PDP-11.
It's a completely passive device and I have the schematic, PCB layout,
and pinouts so it's not looking like it would be too difficult to just
build one, but I figured I'd ask before I went through the effort.
(And for those interested, I'm finally doing something fun with the
VT-103 I got a few years ago. I've upgraded the backplane to 22 bits,
and I've installed a QED 993 board (a 3rd-party 11/93 clone with 4mb
memory onboard). Now I just need to work out the SLU connections for
the terminal itself (hence the STP connector) and work out some
storage... maybe I'll just borrow the SCSI card from my MicroVAX...)
Thanks as always,
Josh
Chuck said:
> Well, if you want "vintage" (and I assume you do) there was at least
> one such project in an old issue of Byte or Kilobaud (IIRC).
Wow, that takes me back. I built one back in late 1984 on a board to
fit into the expansion port of the C64. I believe it was Byte and I
believe the project was originally for the Apple II.
AFAIR
The board had 16 buffers on the address lines feeding two precision
resistor networks. One network for the lower 8 address lines connected
to the oscilloscope X input. The other network for the upper 8 address
lines fed the Y input. Giving you a 256 x 256 vector display of where
the processor was accessing memory.
I had a paying job to break software protection on some C64 games.
And this help alot to determine which parts of memory where pieces of
code were being stored.
For a while I toyed with the idea of writing a vector verse of Tic-Tac-Toe
by programatically putting jmp code pieces out in memory and jump from piece
to piece in a loop create the graphics on the oscilloscope.
--Doug Coward Poulsbo, WA
The new home of the
Analog Museum and History Center is
http://www.cowardstereoview.com/analog
On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Bill Sudbrink wrote:
> Al Kossow wrote:
>> On 12/8/11 5:27 PM, Bill Sudbrink wrote:
>>> too expensive
>>
>> typical here.
>>
>> glad to see your time is worthless.
>
> Quite the contrary, I enjoy designing and constructing digital
> electronics. I consider it a pleasant use of my time.
Bill, are you planning on something similar to the ZVG or something more
complex? I'm going to need an X/Y driver myself here pretty soon. (I
also need to find a good 4" round vector tube...)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!
Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical
minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which
holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd
by the clean end.
On the off chance somebody here has done this:
I have 2 wireless routers, one connects to cable and I have an internet connection. Its a wifi too.
I want to pick up that wireless signal with another router, locate it in the other part of the house to connect a wired ethernet device. its as if I want a wireless adapter, but not having an output that is usb, but a ethernet jack.
Is this possible?
Its to avoid running a long cat 5 cable thru the house.
Randy
On 12/8/11 4:47 PM, Bill Sudbrink wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm thinking of building a "somewhat vintage" two-channel DAC board,
> intended to drive an oscilloscope as a vector display. I'm just considering
> parts now, unless someone has a really good design already set to build.
>
http://www.zektor.com/zvg/
Hi All,
I'm thinking of building a "somewhat vintage" two-channel DAC board,
intended to drive an oscilloscope as a vector display. I'm just considering
parts now, unless someone has a really good design already set to build.
By "somewhat vintage" what I mean is that I don't want to just drop in
a modern "super chip" that will have ten (or more) times the power of the
intended host computer which, by the way, is an SWTPc 6800. I figure the
board will have some 8-bit processor on it. I'm leaning towards a Z-80.
It will have an EPROM, some scratch static RAM, some glue logic to manage
the communication with the SS-30 bus... and this is where I get fuzzy... a
1Kx8 dual ported static RAM and two DACs. These last two elements (the
dual ported SRAM and the DACs) are where I don't have any experience. A
little googling has led me to the IDT7130 for the dual ported SRAM and the
DAC0830 for the DACs. Does anybody in cctalk land have experience with
either or both of these chips? I have a source for the DAC0830, but I don't
have a source for the IDT7130 yet. The basic idea of the design is for the
6800 to write a vertex list into the dual ported SRAM which the Z-80 then
reads and pushes to the DACs. I'm hoping I can just hang these chips off of
the Z-80 address and data busses like the RAM and EPROM but I need to do
some more reading of the spec sheets.
Any help greatly appreciated,
Bill S.
Does anyone have the "Unibug" ROM that was supplied with the TI
TM990/189 University Board? This was an educational and evaluation
board for the TMS9980 microprocessor, an 8-bit-bus version of the TMS9900.
It's not hard to find images of the "University BASIC" ROMs on the net.
Those ROMs replaced the Unibug ROM.
Thanks,
Eric
vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
> I didn't know there was any non-magical way to convert Bookmanager
> to PDF. Are you saying you can do that?
I can work with DCF and Bookmaster _source_ documents, not compiled
binary Bookmanager, unfortunately.
> I certainly am, since I have and have access to a bunch of
> Bookmanager doc that is worthless on PCs although I love it on
> mainframes.
The comments I wrote yesterday (and posted to cctalk-request by
mistake) are about the import and export filters provided with Word,
WordPerfect, OpenOffice etc, not about DCF/Bookmaster, which really
live in another world. I'll post those comments shortly.
Bookmaster is pretty great, and it converts to DITA XML in a rather
straightforward way, which is no surprise since the latter is a direct
descendent of the former.
1978:
:note text='Warning'.
Don't run with scissors.
:enote.
2011:
<note type='warning'>
Don't run with scissors.
</note>
DCF (which is the IBM branch of the RUNOFF family tree, upon which
Bookmaster is based) is another story. In the hands of documentation
folks, it was a markup format. In the hands of engineers, it was a
programming language. When engineers wrote documentation, it was a
hairy mess. I've untangled some "interesting" DCF documents.
Brian
I've got a bunch of Nuclear Data peripheral circuit boards that I need
to reverse engineer. They are simple circuit boards with all the
tracings visible (i.e. no internal layers) and the parts are all 7400
series logic in standard DIP packaging.
If I were to do this manually, I would take high resolution
photographs of both sides of the board. From the photographs, I would
try to recreate engineering drawings: part placement and circuit
topology.
I'm wondering what kind of tools are out there that would assist in
this. Could I process the photos to extract the topology of the
printed circuit traces? Can I correlate this with image recognition
of the part packages and combine them to product a netlist?
I'd appreciate hearing any experiences from others that have reverse
engineered circuitry.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>
I make the bulk of my living converting documents in WordPerfect 5 and
up, IBM DCF and Bookmaster, and Interleaf to current formats.
Is anyone interested in hearing a bit about the problems using current
word processors to import the old formats? It's sort of on-topic, as
these are vintage products, even if still in use, but I won't bother
the list if it's not of interest.
Brian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
_| _| _| Brian Knittel
_| _| _| Quarterbyte Systems, Inc.
_| _| _| Tel: 1-510-559-7930
_| _| _| http://www.quarterbyte.com
At 05:57 PM 12/6/2011, you wrote:
>from something I dug up
>
>"OpenOffice Writer can read WordPerfect 5.1 documents, as can Microsoft
>Word"
My OpenOffice 3.3.0 doesn't explicitly say it
will, but I think I've done it in the past, so I
take your comment as confirming what I seem to recall.
>see
>
>http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/reading-wordsatar-…
>On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
>
> > Out of curiosity, what is there in the way of modern software that can
> > read Word Perfect 5.1 (probably some 5.2 as well) for DOS documents? The
> > good news is that I retrieved all these files at some point in the past
> > from the 3.5" floppy they were on. :-)
764 . [Stupidity] Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former. --Albert Einstein
NEW: a50mhzham at gmail.com ? N9QQB (amateur radio)
"HEY YOU" (loud shouting) ? Second Tops (Set Dancing) ? FIND ME ON FACEBOOK
43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W ? Elevation 815' ? Grid Square EN53wc
LAN/Telecom Analyst ? Open-source Dude ? Musician
? Registered Linux User 385531
I'm going to plunge into the world of slightly more advanced
electronics, and one of my teaching tools is a Velleman PCS64i that I
just inherited. It's an o-scope front end that interfaces to a PC to
provide the display.
I'm looking for the DOS software - it is not available on Velleman's web
site any more. I found the Windows software, but I'd rather keep it
simple for now. If you have the DOS software please let me know ..
Thanks,
Mike
The setups I have seen require a lot of square footage. You have printers, tape drives, and big DASD farms connecting to controllers and communications controllers and finally the mainframe which may itself be a complex consisting of more than one physical box.
I have not seen a machine room that wasn't all raised floor. I don't know that a small setup exists with the bus and tag technology but that was years ago. The new stuff is smaller and also doesn't need raised floor. Seems like it's probably an either or situation. When you need raised floor you need a lot. When you don't, you don't.
------Original Message------
From: ben
Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
ReplyTo: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: wanted: raised flooring for cheap
Sent: 7 Dec 2011 18:26
On 12/7/2011 11:10 AM, Vintage Coder wrote:
> Bus and tag cables are huge.
The other problem with raised flooring is who's floor are you on?
With a small system, could a raised island be built, with the computing
equipment raised say a foot or so, with just false floor between the
equipment.
Ben.
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/wptoword.html
Lots of options it looks like...
OpenOffice / LibreOffice is an opensource way of doing it...
Maurice
On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, what is there in the way of modern software that can
> read Word Perfect 5.1 (probably some 5.2 as well) for DOS documents? The
> good news is that I retrieved all these files at some point in the past
> from the 3.5" floppy they were on. :-)
>
> Zane--
>
Well, i'll check into that once i get done rebuilding my router! :)
I'll image them and throw them online (my router, coincidentally, is the
only machine with a 3.5" floppy drive :> )
On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> At 11:42 PM -0500 12/6/11, Gary Sparkes wrote:
>>
>> Heck, I have a copy of WP 5.1 for dos sitting unused in a box. Perhaps
>> a copy of that will be easy to use for conversion? :)
>
>
> If the disks are readable, I have WP 4.2, 5.1, and 5.2 for DOS. I should
> also have a copy of WP for Windows 6.0, and WP for Mac around here. I
used
> to be big into WP before I moved to the Mac and moved to Word (hated WP
for
> Mac). The trick will be reviving a system, hopefully one with a version
on
> the HD still runs. Wasn't expecting 4.2 data, or it to be such a pain.
:-(
>
>
> Zane
>
>
>
> --
> | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
> | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
> | | Photographer |
> +----------------------------------+----------------------------+
> | My flickr Photostream |
> | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ |
--
Gary G. Sparkes Jr.
KB3HAG