test-drb

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

101090 discussions

by mattislind＠gmail.com

I got heaps of documentation from an ex-DEC field service engineer. Among them there were a VT420 print set. I didn't see any schematics for the VT420 on bitsavers so even though this one looks a bit strange it is better than nothing. http://storage.datormuseum.se/u/96935524/Datormusuem/DEC/VT420-engineering-… /Mattis

6 years, 6 months

DEC documentation

by mattislind＠gmail.com

I have updated my inventory of DEC documentation with the latest arrivals >from Gunnar, the ex-DEC FS tech. Those were mostly binders of software documentation and handbooks. If there are a document that you would like to have scanned I will do my best to help out. But please do me a favour to check if they are not online already >from the regular sources. http://forum.datormuseum.se/category/35A7E09F-5154-49F1-BE57-9F9E3D923327.h… I can only scan documents up to ledger size. Larger documents, like some of the old schematics, need help from a professional scanning service, which unfortunately cost money. I cannot scan books, either. I will continuously update the inventory as I go through all the documentation. There are likely to be errors in the inventory. Typing on the phone is a pain. If you find errors please let me know. /Mattis

6 years, 6 months

plated wire memory

by dkelvey＠hotmail.com

I was just listening to a video on the Voyager space craft. It used an interesting type of memory, called magnetic wire memory. There is only a little bit of information of it on the web. It is clever in that has a non-destructive read. I just wondered if any one else was familiar with this type of memory. Dwight

6 years, 6 months

plated wire memory

by tpisek＠pobox.com

I worked at Univac Defense Systems in the early 70's. The launch control computer for the Minuteman was made by Univac. It had plated wire memory. I remember when the failure analysis group had to analyze a module that failed in the field. The module was locked in a safe and someone had to boost their clearance level to work on it. In plant 1, in Saint Paul, MN near the Mississippi River, there was a thin film memory production facility. It produced the memory used in the S3A submarine hunter (an/ayk-10 if I remember correctly). The bit planes were made from etched glass that had metal sputtered onto it, with tons of tiny holes for the word wires. The bit planes were stacked and the word wires were threaded through the tiny holes perpendicular to the planes. Because I sometimes worked out of plant 1, I had to take safety training for hydrofluoric acid which was used to etch the glass. Nasty stuff.

6 years, 6 months

Anyone familiar with these vintage touchscreens?

by jon＠jonworld.com

Hi! I saw this crop up on twitter and now I?m curious. Anyone familiar with these? Any idea what the backend was? https://twitter.com/newsfedora/status/1154813199054712833?s=21 -- -Jon +44 7792 149029

6 years, 6 months

Anyone familiar with these vintage touchscreens?

by jfoust＠threedee.com

At 11:51 AM 10/21/2019, Tony Duell wrote: >> Theinfrared array you're thinking of was invented at PLATO, for flat panel (plasma) displays. They don't work for CRTs because of the convex screen. > >My HP150 will have to disagree with you there. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-150#/media/File:Hp150_touchscreen_20081129…>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-150#/media/File:Hp150_touchscreen_20081129… - John

6 years, 6 months

Microcap12 Spice simulator

by pbirkel＠gmail.com

Forwarding from another list because of its general interest: ..... A heads up that the guy who was responsible for the full professional grade Spice simulator Microcap (latest version 12) has retired, and made his software downloadable free of charge. It was $4,500 per seat before. Download page here http://www.spectrum-soft.com/download/download.shtm ..... paul

6 years, 6 months

Vintage Computer Warehouse Liquidation

by sellam.ismail＠gmail.com

Does anyone know whatever happened to John Keys and his collection? https://www.guidestar.org/profile/43-1950958 The mission of the Houston Computer Museum is to collect and preserve historic computers, technology, and related materials; and to use these collections for exhibitions, educational programs, historical research, and related activities for the benefit of the public. Principal Officer Mr. John Keys Main Address 9410 Harwin Ste E Houston, TX 77036 I suspect that something may have happened to John, and this may have been his collection. Sellam

6 years, 6 months

Fwd: For auction: Amiga 3000

by sellam.ismail＠gmail.com

This is an Amiga 3000 in excellent condition, both functionally and physically. Other than the very slight yellowing of the front face and one barely visible scrape, it is almost perfect. It is extremely clean inside as well. The on-board battery has not yet been removed but it should be soon as it has begun to outgas and affect the surrounding components. I cleaned up the minimal oxidation it had caused on some of the various components local to it. The capacitors have no visible age-related issues. The system boots up into Amiga WorkBench 3.1 and has numerous applications and drivers installed. Video output is from the GVP EGS (works with SVGA monitor) board, which plugs into the on-board video port (via external connector cable). Photos: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmxBoNtw (Despite the marring of the back label, the serial number is readable: CA1013685.) Configuration: 16Mhz on-board CPU with Commodore A3640 68040 @ 25 MHz accelerator 2MB Chip RAM 16MB Fast RAM Great Valley Products L.C. EGS (Rev. 3) 28/24 Spectrum RTG graphics board w/2MB for 1600?1280?8 interlace, 1152?864?16 interlace, and 800?600?24 non-interlace video modes Utilities Unlimited Emplant Macintosh emulator board with Macintosh II ROMs (Apple 342-0105-B, 342-0106-B, 342-0107-B, 342-0108-B) Conner CFA170S 170MB IDE hard drive Quantum LPS525S 525MB SCSI2 hard drive 3.5" floppy drive So many people expressed an interest in this machine that I decided to sell it by private sealed bid auction. Between now and Monday, October 21, 8:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, if interested, please submit your bid to me by e-mail with your bid. I will confirm your bid by e-mail and notify you if you are the highest bidder, or otherwise of the final selling price. There is a reserve price of $800. If you are unfamiliar with a sealed-bid auction, you submit your bid private to me via e-mail. Your bid is the highest price you are willing to pay. Whomever has the highest bid by the deadline wins the auction. I will announce the final sale price to all bidders. The winning bidder has 24 hours to submit payment unless specific arrangements are made otherwise. Winning bidder pays for shipping via FedEx Ground, shipping from Sacramento, California. I will ship globally. Local pickup is welcome. Payment by PayPal using direct funds transfer is required. Other payment arrangements may be negotiated. My payment policies are explained in full in my FAQ, located here: https://tinyurl.com/VWoCW-FAQ Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, and good luck to all prospective bidders. Sellam

6 years, 6 months

Unix v2 in PDP-7 assembly language

by dzubint＠vcn.bc.ca

I don't have a PDP-7 to try it out on, but here it is: https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-sour… and https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/09/102785108… Enjoy! ---------------------- Thomas Dzubin Saskatoon, Calgary, or Vancouver CANADA

6 years, 6 months

looking for a program - last gasp questions (Dr Iain Maoileoin)

by cruff＠ruffspot.net

Perhaps http://www.asciisector.net/ <http://www.asciisector.net/> ?

6 years, 6 months

Free to a good home: Honeywell/Bull DPS-6 workstation / server (Seattle, WA)

by derschjo＠gmail.com

Hi all -- I picked this DPS-6 up over the summer and it's just taking up space (quite a bit of space) in the corner of my basement. This is a custom 16-bit, bitsliced, microcoded CPU from the early 80s with (I believe) 8mb of memory, and ethernet. It would originally have run a version of GCOS. It's about the size of a large-ish minifridge, but a bit deeper. It's also quite heavy! It's a neat machine, but it's very obscure and unfortunately incomplete (it is missing both mass storage and storage controllers). Otherwise, it is complete and in good condition (albeit a bit dirty). So you can see why you'd really want to have it in your collection . If anyone's up for a project, drop me a line. Local pick up in Seattle, WA. Thanks, Josh

6 years, 6 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 17

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

Paul - I had a quick look at PLATO. I dont think it was like that. In this game when you set a movement direction and velocity you moved through the universe in that direction ?forever?. There was not concept of ?moves? or ?turns?, it was very dynamic. Spasim looks much closer - but was that ?vector graphics?? The game I was using was just 24 x 80 characters. For the year and the WYSE terminals (etc) it was great. > > I wonder if this is a port of the PLATO game by the same name, which goes back to 1976 or so. PLATO had lots of multi-user games with various levels of graphics sophistication. Space war games included "conquest", "empire", and "spasim" -- that last actually had 3d graphics, which was quite a stretch for 1977. Then there was "airfight" (the inspiration for Microsoft Flight Simulator) as well as a boatload of "dungeon & dragons" games. > > paul > ------------------------------ > > Was it in use at Berkeley? I might have it stashed away in some of my > BSD-related tapes. > Chuck, I am Scottish, I have never been to Berkeley! I just cant remember the history. I remember playing the game with a bunch of post-graduates. I was either a post-grad or perhaps an early lecturer in the Uni. That places it square in the mid-80s. I did spend most of my time researching. The games would have appeared on tapes from other places?.. I am hunting around amongst the post-grads to see if any of them can tell me where it came from. I knew the game as ?search? in that that is what you typed in to start it. To keep the undergrads out if it we had to put both passwords and time-locks in the code?. Iain > --Chuck

6 years, 6 months

cctalk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 16 Message 11 - computer game

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

> > Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 12:55:09 -0400 > From: Bob Smith <bobsmithofd at gmail.com> > To: Dr Iain Maoileoin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions > Message-ID: > <CAHtNYbW8s10zaOODxSjvc1UNKpzRRqgcA4su4VW9ZSGw=OvKSA at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > are you thinking of conquest? > https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest > > conquest > > Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was > originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef > Poskanzer and Craig Leres. > > I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends > in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user > system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port > the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's. > > Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is > a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for > sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C > software with some C++ containers and constructs?. Fraid not ;-( no grid in search?. You actually scrolled through the universe on your 24 x 80! If you passed a plannet/star then you could see it on screen ( in the distance, or with a screen full of *?s as you hit it!) It had a vast universe and you could scroll around the universe for a hour without seeing the same place. > 4 or 5 of us playing it really cranked up the CPU load. I think many terminals were 9600, if you got your hands on a 19200 or better you were a p*g *n sh*t. On and off I have been hunting for this for 3-4 years. I know I am not making it up - it did come from some US university.

6 years, 6 months

looking for a program - last gasp questions

by iain＠csp-partnership.co.uk

Not star-trek.... I am trying to track down the source of a unix game ..... Years and years ago - 1980s - I was in the Computing Science Department at Strathclyde Uni.? and we had a bunch of BSD4 systems running on VAXen. I have memory of - but have never located - a curses based 24 x 80 display - multi-user "space-war" game that allowed you to navigate around a 3D universe with the 24 x 80 giving you a full screen view of the universe.. In the game you could * hunt the universe for aliens (like "shankers" I cant remember the others), * other players - you saw them as they saw you you could also team up with other players to have more firepower and call for help using a 1-line on screen chat/broadcast system, there were planet(s) scattered about - that you could hide behind. The students and I modified the program with some "special features".? I cant remember if the name of program was changed too ;-( Anyway we knew the game as "search", it was written in C - it was a good test of serial output capability of the VAXen - it was also a great way to teach students about the VI keys - since hjkl worked as expected for movement (at least that was out excuse to the prof when caught playing the game during the day). From my poor description can anybody tie down what I am looking for? Appreciated Iain

6 years, 6 months

Strange DEC stuff.

by mattislind＠gmail.com

An ex-DEC engineer offloaded some strange stuff that was going to the skip. I just thought I could have a look. But what is it? There is two backplanes marked KA14 and BE14. I thought it was the PDP-14, but I am not sure really. https://i.imgur.com/86tcLFz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BWiCz8l.jpg I came together with a similar sized PSU. Then there was a strange DEC workshop built paper tape reader. The reader mechanics looks similar to PC04 and PC05 but is smaller. The wheel is smaller and the stepper motor is smaller as well. Are these parts from some other DEC reader they cobbled together at DEC for inhouse duty. https://i.imgur.com/0zv55pP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rE423Hi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/8th1y3Z.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VKoH2LX.jpg Any clues?

6 years, 6 months

I apparently have Spacewar for Unix?

by dseagrav＠lunar-tokyo.net

While dumping lispm tapes, I found one with a label saying "Read it into DRAL" (may be "DRAC"?) "and sent a message to cap's bboard saying where it can be found. -Bob?. There was another paper label that had fallen off. What I think is the label in question was later found in the bottom of the box, a strip of masking tape saying ?SPACEWAR FOR VAX (Unix?)?. The contents are a 136KB tar archive containing source to a program called ?orbit?, all files are dated August 22nd, 1983. The README file follows: ?? To install orbit: 1. Do a 'make all'. 2. Make sure the directories on the path /usr/games/lib/orbit/* all exist and are writable by you (except /usr, of course). 3. Do a 'make install'. This should work with no changes on Berkeley 4.2, unless the structure for the console keyboard buffer has been changed. The crock that reads the up-down codes here should be changed to use the real ROM-table hooks, anyway. Unfortunately, all that nice stuff is in protected memory. Enjoy! - Bob Bane (bane.umcp-cs at UDel-Relay) ?? Does anyone know what this is? The (gzipped) tar file is at https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz <https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz>

6 years, 6 months

LISP implementations on small machines

by sieler＠allegro.com

David...where did you use Lisp on a B6700? Bill Gord and I wrote the first INTERLISP interpreter for the B6700 back around 1974-1975, on a DARPA contract, at UCSD. (At the start, it was to implement BBNLISP, but the name changed during the project :) DARPA found that researchers using INTERLISP (or others) on Dec PDP10s (and similar) were hampered by the limited address space (256K virtual memory). The B6700 offered a significantly larger address space (and many other features, of course :) (I know our LISP got distributed to other Burroughs sites in those days, just like our STARTREK and Bob Jardine's SOLAR.) Danny Bobrow (with Xerox PARC at the time) came and helped us get started. I met Warren Teitelman ... he had no idea that the cover of the INTERLISP manual was an homage to his last name. (See: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_197… ) We got our system up and running, including DWIM and other packages, and were told ... oops, DEC figured out how to expand the amount of virtual memory on the PDP-10, so we don't need to buy Burroughs mainframes now! Our INTERLISP was a full interpreter, and also had a compiler to LISP p-code, which might have inspired UCSD Pascal's p-code (Ken Bowles was our boss). I believe I have the source, in Burroughs ALGOL. As a side bonus, I got to interact with Danny, and people from PARC and BBN as we were watching other UCSD Computer Center people put the B6700 on the ARPANET. (I think we were something like the 25th computer.) Stan Sieler

6 years, 6 months

LISP implementations on small machines

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Some early machines, the PDP-6 I believe is an example, have > "registers" in the ISA but they actually correspond to specific parts > of main memory. The PDP-6 and KA10 (basically a re-implementation of the PDP-6 architecture) both had cheapo versions where addresses 0-15 were in main memory, but also had an option for real registers, e.g. in the PDP-6: "The Type 162 Fast Memory Module contains 16 words with a 0.4 usecond cycle." The KA10 has a similar "fast memory option". Noel

6 years, 6 months

DIBOL manual

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

I recently picked up a copy of "CTS-300 - DIBOL Language Reference Manual" (because when I went to do a CHWiki page for the language: http://gunkies.org/wiki/DIBOL I could find almost nothing about it online); does anyone have enough of a use for this that I should put it in the high-priority scan list? Noel

6 years, 6 months

Free mid-vintage Macs and a WP in St Cloud Minnesota for pickup

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

This came in, please contact me through https://www.vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm and I will forward your info to the person who requested a rescue so you can work it out, first come first served. Bill -------- Original Message -------- > From: ---- > Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 12:58 PM > To: ----- > Subject: VintageComputer.net Inquiry > > VintageComputer.net Inquiry Contact Information Name: Richard Lynch > Email: ------ Phone: ---- > ------------------------- > Comments: > Hi Bill, > I live in Texas but I have family in Minnesota (St Cloud) looking for someone local to give a new home to a small group of older Macs and a word processor. There are 3 old iMacs, an eMac, an LCII and a Performa 627CD. The word processor is a vintage Smith Corona PWP 3100. Everything is single owner and well kept in a smoke free/pet free home. It's all free and we can deliver in St Cloud, but it all must go - no cherry picking please. Do you think anyone in the group can help? > Thanks, > Richard > VintageComputer.net ---------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 6 months

DIBOL manual

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Chuck Guzis > One could argue that it's just as similar to FORTRAN (cf. computed GOTO > and logical IF statements). It probably worth pointing out that I never used COBOL, and have little knowledge of it. So when one reads "it is vaguely reminiscent of COBOL, as it has a 'Data Division' and a 'Procedure Division'", I must have copied that all from some source I found, because I don't know what the 'Data Division' and a 'Procedure Division' are (although I can guess from the names). > Where it differs mainly from FORTRAN of the times is a facility for > record layout I seem to recall that COBOL was the first language with support for structures? If DIBOL has support for them too, which would be another similarity between the two. Noel

6 years, 6 months

Fwd: IBM MST extender cards

by h.j.stegeman＠hccnet.nl

Hi Al, On the surface 3V & 1.2V is printed. This is a MST-4 card extender. MST-1 & MST-2 are different. I was also interested, but the seller was not willing to ship them to Europe :-( Regards Henk

6 years, 6 months

Restoring dull BOT markers?

by dseagrav＠lunar-tokyo.net

What?s the best way to restore a dull BOT marker so I can get a good dump of a tape? I don?t need a long-term fix since tapes themselves are in exceedingly bad condition and are unlikely to survive more than one read.

6 years, 6 months

Kennett Classic Opens This Friday

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

Hi - I was not going to write about this here until I was pretty sure we were on track, but it looks like we are go to open our new vintage computer gallery and hobby shop this Friday. If you're local to the Philadelphia/Baltimore area, look us up and better yet, pop in for a visit. Our first feature exhibit will be a Commodore History, but we also have a lot from the 1950's through the 70's on display to tell some of the lesser-known tales before the microcomputer era. The idea here is to bring vintage computing to the local community via something that they can identify with (i.e. Commodore) but also have historical depth for those of us who have a passion for the history of computing. For more details our new URL is. https://www.kennettclassic.com/ Thanks Bill vintagecomputer.net kennettclassic.com

6 years, 6 months

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