- test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org - classiccmp.org

by shadoooo＠gmail.com

Hello Rob, I'm quite sure that the tantalum explosion has nothing to do with the spin-up failure. Indeed the RD53 (Micropolis) is infamous for a problem in the head positioning shock absorber. The head positioning system is based on a voicecoil inserted in the magnetic field; the angle covered by the head arm is limited by two adjustable metal limits originally covered with rubber. At startup the mechanism is moved back and forth to check the two limits, and exactly at the ends a special magnetic pattern is recorded on the surface of the disks for calibration. Due to age, the rubber becomes goo, so the angle limits become wider, so during the calibration the head falls offer the calibration area and spin-up fails. The suggestion is to choose a clean room with few dust and a good lighting, carefully open the top cover of the disc, and remove the goo the more as possible using adsorbent sticks. Be sure not to touch the disc surface with the goo accidentally. Then try to insert some small pieces of paper over one limit (if I'm not wrong the failing is the left) in place of the missing rubber, and try the disc, and continue to add thickness until it works. Then you are sure about the right limit to move. Then remove the paper, loosen a little the screw, but just a little so the limit will not move unless pushed with some strength and a screwdriver. Then move a very small amount towards the center and try, then repeat trial and error until the disc starts. Then tight the screw and it is over. Close the disc and voila. Andrea

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: shadoooo > they can run linux for the software side Maybe it's just me, but running Linux on an interface card strike me as somewhat grotesque. It's bad enough running a far faster chip than the vintage CPU, but... a majorly complex operating system to boot? > I'm trying to figure if an hybrid QBUS / UNIBUS solution is possible. > Of course one have to switch some jumper to avoid conflicts Lots and lots and lots and lots of jumpers. The two buses are completely unlike, pinout-wise. And the UNIBUS board has to be a quad, and there are some QBUS chassis which only take duals... > What kind of bus transceivers did you used for the QSIC We used a mix of DS8641 quad transceivers (they're still available in reasonably good numbers for a reasonable price) and AM2908 octal latching transceivers with a tri-state output (to allow us to have a bidirectional internal bus for BDAL00-BDAL21 - we were trying to minimize the number of pins needed on the FPGA to interfaces to the QBUS). But we probably will use a different FPGA on the production boards, and all DS8641's. > you have to go from 5V open-drain logic to 3.3V logic? We do that with separate 74LVC7T245 level converter chips. Noel

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Weird List Post Error

by cctalk＠ibm51xx.net

Hmmm... I just sent a message to the list and got the following error: "Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: RE: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system? Sent: 10/22/2016 10:30 AM The following recipient(s) cannot be reached: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' on 10/22/2016 10:30 AM 451 Requested action aborted: local error in processing" Resent the message again and it went through fine. Anyone else having trouble posting? -Ali

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by shadoooo＠gmail.com

Hello Dave, exactly! But in place of a plain FPGA, nowadays I would choose a FPGA-ARM board, for example the ZedBoard MicroZed or the Myirtech Z-turn, both of them have a Zynq onboard, and they can run linux for the software side and programmable logic for the interface side. Very nice and flexible. For the development, I'm trying to figure if an hybrid QBUS / UNIBUS solution is possible. Of course one have to switch some jumper to avoid conflicts, but hey, in the end you would have a true universal board. What kind of bus transceivers did you used for the QSIC, specially because you have to go from 5V open-drain logic to 3.3V logic? Thanks Andrea On 10/21/2016 07:00 PM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: > You mean, perhaps, something like this? > > http://pdp10.froghouse.org/qsic/html/overview.html

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

MOTD: It is amazing how many ways you can make mistakes with 32-bit instructions

by pbirkel＠gmail.com

Published in the National Computer Conference, 1976. Full quote: "He bought an RPC-4000 "at a graveyard-type disposal sale," and later noted, "My RPC is working but I can't get an assembly program more than two-thirds loaded. This produces lots of messages telling me my programs are bad" I suspect some memory aberrations, but the memory print routine won't print either. So I have been trying to write a simpler routine of my own in machine language. That is a drag. It is amazing how many ways you can make mistakes with 32-bit instructions." " Also memorable: "An Indiana hobbyist bought a Univac 0 File Computer as scrap, with arithmetic unit, program-control unit, 90-column reader/punch, sort-collate unit, tape-drive program controller, and six magnetic-tape units. The new owner says, "I had figured to use the outside winter air to get it turned on and see what I've got, and just close down in summer. As to space, not too bad: only about 400 or 500 square feet, pretty compact. I'm presently having 220 V installed to begin to turn on some of it." And *we* think that we have it tough :->. From: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1976/5084/00/50840235.pdf -----

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

> > John McAfee predicted that 5 million computers would be wiped out. > The press were called in. > > On March 6, there were apparently DOZENS of drives wiped. Few, if any records kept to verify numbers. > McAfee, as expected, took full credit, and declared that the REASON why it was dozens, instead of millions, was because his warnings were heeded. > > Six months later, when he took his company public, he raised 42 million dollars. > > He is currently a fugitive as the "prime suspect" in the murder of his neighbor in Belize (apparently NOT virus related) > > Side note...maybe 6 or 12 months before the big virus scare I called McAfee on the phone and spoke with him about a virus I found on a GRID laptop that I found was copied to 4000 similar machines out in the field where I wokred. He emailed me his latest test iteration of his software, a copy on a scratch disk. It was a very early version. I had no idea of course of his future, but I was impressed with his software because it was light, no install disks and he knew his stuff. We were talking about how to inject his antivirus prpgram into a program I wrote to update laptops remotely by modem, and how we could send virus updates via this process. It was getting impractical to keep sending me disks and we needed a better way. You could not buy his software Viruses were starting to get more numerous. I don't know if he had just started his company, it was not public or anything yet. In fact I got his number inmformally from a manager at a company called Sales Tchnologies out of Atlanta, I w as working with their sales tracking program they were already using my "mass update" system to manage their software and data updates. That's where the virus came from. Fun times all MS DOS based, btrieve database, Sprint Internet exchange for free phine calls inbound >from anywhehre in the USA... I also remember building and compiling Sales Tech software version updates on a xerox workstation. When I left they offered me the Xerox but I remember thinking what would I ever do with *that* old piece of junk? "Well Bill you're the only one who knows how to use it so we will just throw it away then, are you sure".."yah, my apartment is too small...." At least that's how I remember it. Bill

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

On Oct 21, 2016 8:30 PM, "Steven M Jones" <classiccmp at crash.com> wrote: > > On 10/21/2016 14:15, william degnan wrote: > > Any disk or archive you come upon from the early 90's should be scanned for > > viruses before use on a vintage machine. USe a modern PC as it's no biggie > > to clean old viruses that way. Scan before you use on an older machine, > > scan inside of ZIP files not just the zip itself. There were three viruses > > that I found years ago on the most-often seen Maslin archive set. Old > > stuff that's not an issue for modern machines. > > I didn't think modern A/V products included complete historical sets of > signatures. I'm sure they can deal with ancient, simple bootloader > infections and such, but at some point I'd be concerned there's a gap > where something might be too new to be detected by the simplest > heuristics, but too old for a more sophisticated signature to be in your > common modern products. > > But this isn't something I've had to deal with. Is this an imagined > problem, or has somebody run into this? > > Thx, > --S. > Stoned Monk is still detectable by modern anti virus software, 25 or whatever years later, at least last time I tested using a win 7 machine. So, that was maybe 4 or 5 years ago.

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

HP 7945 disk format

by aek＠bitsavers.org

for anyone wanting to try David's MFM emulator in an HP MFM 7945 disk box, here is the format, determined from reading a Vertex V170 drive from one --sectors 32,0 --heads 7 --cylinders 987 --header_crc 0xffff,0x1021,16,0 --data_crc 0xffffffff,0x140a0445,32,5 --format WD_1006 --sector_length 256 The 7945 is notoriously flaky because of the Vertex drives.

9 years, 8 months

2
7
0 0

PDP-11 RL02 disk emulation

by scott.l.baker＠gmail.com

Hi, The author of this project http://www.pdp11gy.com <http://www.pdp11gy.com/doneE.html> built a wire-wrapped board to interface an RL02 controller (RL11, RLV21, or RL8A) and an FPGA development board (which does all the heavy lifting for the disk emulation). I decided to build one of these emulators and to design a printed circuit board rather than using wire wrap. The schematics and layout of my RL02 interface board can be found here: http://sierracircuitdesign.ddns.net/temp/RL02 I made changes to the original design (e.g. I used different driver and receiver chips) but I think it should be plug compatible with the original wire-wrapped design. Feedback on this project is most welcome. Regards, Scott

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Burroughs B5000 emulator

by kspt.tor＠gmail.com

On 21 October 2016 at 16:37, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: > A friend of mine is working on an emulator for this Burroughs Large > Systems beast. [..] > I have suggested to him that it might be easier to work under an > existing mini/mainframe emulator, such as SimH or maybe even > MESS/MAME, but he is highly resistant to this idea, for reasons I do > not really understand. > > I'm interested in opinions: do folk think that it would help, or not? I fully understand. Not everything is easily tweaked to fit into those frameworks. When I wrote my two minicomputer emulators I couldn't see how on earth I could get that working inside simh without increasing the work needed ten or fifty times. There wasn't anything there that would help me for what I had in mind.

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > 1976 Peripherals Handbook, page 6-4. It specifies the driver output > low voltage at 70 mA sink, not 50... Differing editions give slightly different numbers. I was looking at the 1972 edition (which was the one that was closest to hand, no other reason); the number I gave is on pg. 204. I haven't checked later ones to see if there were further revisions. The later 70mA sink spec is probably a slightly more robust number to work with. Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

Burroughs B5000 emulator

by lproven＠gmail.com

A friend of mine is working on an emulator for this Burroughs Large Systems beast. There is an existing one -- https://github.com/pkimpel/retro-b5500 But it's web-based and in Javascript. Mark wants one that can be run as a proper local binary, under Linux. I believe he's using part of this emulator but trying to port it to either C, FreePascal or a mixture of both. I have suggested to him that it might be easier to work under an existing mini/mainframe emulator, such as SimH or maybe even MESS/MAME, but he is highly resistant to this idea, for reasons I do not really understand. I'm interested in opinions: do folk think that it would help, or not? Also, anyone who might have any info that would aid him and are interested, I can put you in touch. He claims the system was influential in the design of the original Intel 8088/8086, which is news to me. Comments? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

Fwd: Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: David Bridgham > the right threshold voltage to meet the receiver spec The UNIBUS spec says the 4 crucial receiver parameters are input thresholds (high and low), and the input currents (high and low); the crucial transmitter parameters are the output low voltage (at 50 mA sink), and the output high leakage current. Noel

9 years, 8 months

4
4
0 0

Old versions of Emacs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff > Emacs in 1983 would have been Gosling Emacs, I guess. Prior to that one, someone else at BBN (whose name I have forgotten, alas) did an Emacs intended for PDP-11's running Unix. It wasn't programmable (the way 'real' Emacs is), perhaps because there was not enough room for that on a PDP-11. I should have that on my MIT-CSR backup tapes, but if you're interested in a copy, it will be a while before I can excavate it; the tapes had some dropouts, which may have made the dump (a straight 'dd' of a 4.3 filesystem) unreadable. Noel

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

More DEC Alpha kit available, Newmarket UK

by binarydinosaurs＠gmail.com

Folks, We have another pedestal ES40 and rackmount ES45 to give away, as well as a half-height Compaq rack (20U?). Has to be collected from CB8 7NY before the end of next week otherwise they get recycled. Anyone fancy an early xmas present? :) -- adrian/witchy Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection? www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

9 years, 8 months

4
3
0 0

Old versions of Emacs

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff >> someone else at BBN (whose name I have forgotten, alas) > Sounds vaguely like MicroEMACS by Dave Conroy, but I suppose this is > something else? Unix V6 you say? Was it BBN PEN by David Barach, David > Taenzer, and Robert Wells? None of those names rang a bell. I just read the entire backup tape (in file form) into an editor, and searched for "Emacs", and I found some things which indicate the version I'm thinking of was written by Warren Montgomery, of Bell Laboratories (that's what I get for relying on memory, sigh). It was apparently written in the 1980 to early-1981 timeframe. Googling 'Emacs Warren Montgomery' turns up some interesting early things, including this: http://org.ntnu.no/emacs/implementations.html https://www.finseth.com/emacs.html Perhaps you already have this content, though? > Yes, I am! I don't think I can take on every single variation of Emacs, > but a version this early is interesting. OK, I will keep this in mind if/when I ever manage to read the dump. Noel

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

Photos from the NWA Auction

by coryheisterkamp＠gmail.com

For those curious about the equipment that sold last week, I put together an album from my brief stop on Saturday. Let me know if you have trouble viewing it. https://goo.gl/photos/yb83SJSj67gS96n39 On closer inspection it appears the documentation for that GP-4, as well as some of the other computers, sold to different parties (the value being in the shelving and cabinets). I'm still losing sleep over that GP-4. From all appearances it was a turn-key setup (in theory). Unfortunately, the auction site immediately removes closed lots from their webpage so no idea what it sold for, or if it went to a scrapper. I suspect it was billed as 'cabinets of aviation equipment'. Being 3 hours away I can't exactly run over there and pin a note on it. Some further digging on the net revealed a photo in the Motorola Annual Report 1965 featuring the machine touting Moto's new ECL logic. Apparently it was designed for aviation simulation but included facilities for being a general purpose machine. -C

9 years, 8 months

7
11
0 0

Museum thoughts?

by mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG

There's someone local who's seen my assortment of computer hardware twice and has, each time, told me I should set up a museum. This is tempting, but I don't know the first thing about doing it. About all I'm sure of is that it would involve a lot of stuff I currently have no idea of. I know that there are at least a few people here who've been involved in such things. While all the examples that come to mind are in the USA, and mine would be in Canada, I'm sure there are many respects in which the issues are jurisdiction-independent - and, who knows, there may be such a person in Canada that I just can't recall offhand. So, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd be willing to share experiences, thoughts, issues, whatever, on the possibility. I'm not looking to make a lot of money off this. If I can turn my computers from money-sink to money-neutral, I'll be content. (They are currently soaking up money in the form of causing me to be renting significantly more storage than I would be if they were to vanish.) /~\ 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

9 years, 8 months

4
4
0 0

Museum thoughts?

by couryhouse＠aol.com

Nice display Bill! Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: william degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com> Date: 10/20/16 13:01 (GMT-07:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: Museum thoughts? > > > > > There's someone local who's seen my assortment of computer hardware > > twice and has, each time, told me I should set up a museum. > <snip> > > > > So, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd be willing to share > > experiences, thoughts, issues, whatever, on the possibility. > > > > Maybe you could find a local museum and volunteer there, see what's involved behind the scenes.? If there is nothing close enough to your interests offer to contribute an exhibit to a local college, or business, or someone who has a stale display case that could use a refresh. Come up with a plan and present it to the powers that be.? This way you can get some experience before you go full museum. Here is an example of what I am talking about, at the U of Delaware in the computer sci hall.? I got some students to help set up. http://vintagecomputer.net/UofDelaware/UofDelaware_CM_TRS80-2.JPG Bill

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

WD1793 FDC versions

by mhs.stein＠gmail.com

Anybody know what the differences are among the WD1793, WD1793A, WD1793B-02 etc., or where I could find this info? Thanks, mike

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > That's fine if your target is an OS for which you can write drivers. It > wouldn't help RSTS users. Right, they're stuck with exact clones of DEC controllers. (For Unix, tweaking the RP11 driver to handle the extended RP11 should take all of 12 minutes, tops! :-) > Q22 disks .. RL02 also, if I remember right. Oh, right, the RLV12 - forgot about that. Still, it would be nice to be able to run RK11's and RP11's in 22-bit mode! :-) Especially since there will be replicas of DEC's indicator panels for them, whereas an RL11 indicator panel would definitely be... an anachronism! ;-) > A possible answer for a lot of this is to do the actual emulation > algorithms in software, in an embedded CPU inside the FPGA. For MSCP > that's obvious, but it would work for the others as well I suspect. Dave B is a wizard with Verilog, so until it gets to the complexity level of MSCP we'd probably do it all in Verilog. > From: Jon Elson > I did **ONE** board with some kind of gold flash that a PCB house > recommended. ... it was a colossal disaster. You had to lift the pin > ... Since then, I have used pure tin HASL, and had little trouble. I think gold came into the discussion in the context of the contact fingers where the board plugs into the backplane. I've never seen a QBUS/UNIBUS board with tin fingers, although they were common on SIMM memory cards; no idea if tin would work for QBUS/UNIBUS - although now that I think about it, SIMM cards didn't slide into position, but kind of rotated, so maybe tin would work there. Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by shadoooo＠gmail.com

Hello, I read several posts about Unibus disk interfaces and emulation. One of my retrocomputing dream is to design an Unibus universal board, probably based on FPGA because of precise timing requirements, to emulate one or more disk/tape interfaces, and possibly something more. The real storage could be based on SD card, so very easy to be moved to a PC for imaging and data transfer. Probably a low level emulation would be quite easy, while a more complex solution (MSCP) could be more difficult. The board itself wouldn't be cheap at all, because PCB would be big, and because FPGA aren't cheap either. Probably it would be anyway cheaper than an MSCP-SCSI, and it would be far more flexible. From what I understand, there could be a great demand of a such interface here around? Andrea

9 years, 8 months

11
14
0 0

Unsticking a Seagate ST-419 head

by aek＠bitsavers.org

I have a couple of drives I would really like to recover the data from. On one of the two I've tried so far, the lowest head in the stack is really stuck on. Has anyone successfully unstuck a head from this era. I've tried the obvious things (gentle rotation in both axis, heating the platters) but there is a lot of surface area on those old heads and it is pretty badly stuck.

9 years, 8 months

6
10
0 0

Unibus disk controller with modern storage

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > I'd suggest the Massbus series, they are just about as simple as > anything and that's where you find the largest capacities short of MSCP > devices. If you want to exactly emulate only DEC controllers, yes. (Of course, such a project should do that, for binary compatability.) However, as I think I have mentioned before, I'm actually enamoured of taking a very simple controller like an RP11, which has lots of spare disk address bits, and defining an 'RP11-E' which maxes out the virtual drive size without changing _anything_ about the register format other than using unused bits in the cyclinder address register. That will produce disks with 2^28 blocks, or 2^36 bytes, or 64GB. That's most of a large SD card... :) Not too useful to those without the ability to tweak drivers, but... there's another issue with the older controllers, which is that they only support 18-bit addressing, and for use on QBUS machines, where one would really like to be able to do DMA to anywhere in the 22-bit space (for Unix, this would be for swapping, and raw I/O - buffered I/O would be fine with 18 bits). So maybe an updated version of those old, simple controllers would actually have some use. (I'd certainly want them for my Unix boxes.) > Apart from MSCP, avoid RL emulation also. Why avoid RL's? Not the greatest controller, I agree, but it is a 'lowest common denominator' drive for a certain era of gear. > From: Toby Thain > Isn't Noel working on something related? I think Dave B gave a pretty good update. In addition to what he mentioned, I'd like to mention the indicator panels (like the DEC ones for the RF11, RP11, etc). Dave has designed the new indicator PCB, and we have a couple of prototype PCB's in hand, stuffed and working. I think there's a video clip of it doing its thing on the Web page he pointed to. Our concept is that we'll be able to drive more than one of these panels, by connecting them together serially - that way a machine could have, say, both RK11 and RP11 indicator panels, driven from a single QSIC board. That will slow down the refresh rate a bit, but our numbers indicate it should still be acceptably fast. Noel

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

Photos from the NWA Auction

by shatle＠nfldinet.com

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Photos from the NWA Auction From: ethan I would figure the data center rooms and stuff might of had other racks of more modern server equipment that might have been sold off separately or relocated to other sites. Didn't see holes in the floor for cabling but wouldn't be surprised. I didn't see video projection hardware on the auction and usually that is used to project the stuff outside the cockpits no? What was left is the interesting stuff :-) ------- There were a number of ex-NWA/Delta employees that were in the building during the inspection phase. Talking to them, the sentiment was that after the merger, Delta took "anything that was worth anything" and sent it down to their facilities in Atlanta. There were a number of simulator bays where the cockpits had been removed, and the attendant server rooms were fairly bare. I saw a bunch of Sun-3 "operator manuals" laying around, but no Suns. One of the guys said they had a bunch of "old" Sun gear at one time, but that all went south. The PDPs and GP4 were part of what was the oldest DC-9 sim in the country up until they walked away from it, so we were told. I agree - the "interesting" stuff was left behind, but maybe not all of it :-) Steve

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Stanford Computers

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

I read something in THE NeXT Best Thing book about Stanford col.. actually making some? or they were in on a design of some book not handy now and my memory may also be flawed on this issue... Ed# In a message dated 10/20/2016 11:18:19 A.M. US Mountain Standard Tim, wmachacek at q.com writes: Does anyone on this list have any information on Stanford Computers? I have 2 of them that I saved from being recycled many years ago. I have finally gotten around to looking at them more closely. I have a model ?640? and a model ?XT-10?. The 640 has 2 ? 5 ?? floppy drives plus a Conner CP-344, 42MB HD (the HD may have been a later add-on to the original configuration). The XT-10 has 1 ? 5 ?? floppy drive and a NEC D5186, 25MB HD. I could not see a name on the MB in the 640, but the name ?80 Data? was on the XT-10 MB. I believe these to be from the mid to late ?80s time frame. They both have the 9 DB pin video connectors. The XT-10 has an EGA Graphics card, I could not tell what kind of card is in the 640. I am being very reluctant to start pulling cards on a machine this old for fear of breaking something. The ribbon cable seemed somewhat brittle on the 640. Can ribbon cables break due to age? If anyone has any information on these systems, I would appreciate hearing from you. I believe this company was in the bay area somewhere. With the name Stanford Computer, that seems very likely. Thanks for any information you can give me. I am in Colo. Springs. Bill Machacek

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Stanford Computers

by wmachacek＠q.com

Does anyone on this list have any information on Stanford Computers? I have 2 of them that I saved from being recycled many years ago. I have finally gotten around to looking at them more closely. I have a model ?640? and a model ?XT-10?. The 640 has 2 ? 5 ?? floppy drives plus a Conner CP-344, 42MB HD (the HD may have been a later add-on to the original configuration). The XT-10 has 1 ? 5 ?? floppy drive and a NEC D5186, 25MB HD. I could not see a name on the MB in the 640, but the name ?80 Data? was on the XT-10 MB. I believe these to be from the mid to late ?80s time frame. They both have the 9 DB pin video connectors. The XT-10 has an EGA Graphics card, I could not tell what kind of card is in the 640. I am being very reluctant to start pulling cards on a machine this old for fear of breaking something. The ribbon cable seemed somewhat brittle on the 640. Can ribbon cables break due to age? If anyone has any information on these systems, I would appreciate hearing from you. I believe this company was in the bay area somewhere. With the name Stanford Computer, that seems very likely. Thanks for any information you can give me. I am in Colo. Springs. Bill Machacek

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

1966-68 Honeywell u-COMP DDP-516 Console

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

I recently came upon the console for a Honeywell u-COMP DDP-516, which is the older brother of the Honeywell Kitchen computer (DDP-316). Took a lot of photos: http://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=655 Bill

9 years, 8 months

3
3
0 0

Photos from the NWA Auction

by shatle＠nfldinet.com

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Photos from the NWA Auction From: ethan at 757.org Date: Tue, October 18, 2016 6:47 pm To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Wonder if anyone got the actual simulators/cockpits? Fun toys but > won't fit in your average basement... There were bids on them, hopefully they go to home flight simulator nerds that will entertain us with videos on youtube of them running inside their houses! -- I was at the facility briefly to help out another lister with prepping his lot for shipment. The GP4 is being dismantled for scrap. About half the racks are already empty. With a little bit of cash beer money and some wrench work, the panel you see in IMG_5535 is now in the backseat of my car. It will likely be all gone by EOD on Friday.

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Museum thoughts?

by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com

Hi Mouse - running a museum project is fun but also a lot of work. here is a little framework to think about and discuss Ed# at SMECC . - SPACE you rent or buy a building ($$$$ !) or... place displays in other's premises (can work if they protct your gear) - INSURANCE (property, liability, employee) - UTILITIES ( winter is your enemy, summer is ours in AZ) - SECURE FURANITURE AND FIXTURES (when in doubt, lock it under glass) EMPOLYEES and/or VOLUNTEERS Great to have so you are not the only one chained to the entry desk, employees cost $$$ volunteers no salary - either can be a blessing or a curse if you get a bad one In a message dated 10/19/2016 7:41:07 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG writes: There's someone local who's seen my assortment of computer hardware twice and has, each time, told me I should set up a museum. This is tempting, but I don't know the first thing about doing it. About all I'm sure of is that it would involve a lot of stuff I currently have no idea of. I know that there are at least a few people here who've been involved in such things. While all the examples that come to mind are in the USA, and mine would be in Canada, I'm sure there are many respects in which the issues are jurisdiction-independent - and, who knows, there may be such a person in Canada that I just can't recall offhand. So, I'm wondering if there's anyone who'd be willing to share experiences, thoughts, issues, whatever, on the possibility. I'm not looking to make a lot of money off this. If I can turn my computers from money-sink to money-neutral, I'll be content. (They are currently soaking up money in the form of causing me to be renting significantly more storage than I would be if they were to vanish.) /~\ 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

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dennis Boone > The sources for the V6 versions of the tmrk et al programs seem to be > here: Yes, I have those, thanks; those are the 1-block programs I mentioned to Warren: >> The only V6 boot mechanisms are 1-block programs that go into block 0 >> of device 0 and which boot Unix directly from that file-system Well, to be technical, also there are the programs to copy the disk images >from tape to disk - mcopy.s does that - etc. In case anyone looks at mcopy.s and wonders how R5 (which contains a pointer to the console print/input routines) gets set up, mboot.s, which will have run previously (to load the appropriate disk-controller-specific version of mcopy off the tape) does that. One can't actually boot V6 Unix directly from a V6 distribution tape, all one can do is copy the disk images from the tape to the disk; one then boots from the disk. (Although now that I look, there is tpboot.s, which claims to boot >from a file on a 'tp' format tape. But I don't think V6 was ever distributed in that form - and in any case, it would still need a disk with a Unix file system, with appropriate files - init, sh, etc - already on it, to be able to boot Unix that way.) Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

MFM floppy and HD emulator DREM

by emu＠e-bbes.com

Hi all, anybody has any experience with that: http://www.drem.info/ ?

9 years, 8 months

15
26
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> Here are some notes I made a while back, when I looked at it: > ... > Block 2-xx - gubbish, apparently inodes, code, etc? So I just realized something's incomplete here. There's an intermediate stage (loading 'xxyy', where 'xx' is "tm" or "ht", and 'yy' is "rk", "rp" or "hp"). Those must be in stored in that block "2-xx" area, but I'm not up for grokking the assembler ("tpboot.s") that loads them to see how it works (it takes a file-name, 'xxyy' as above, entered at the console). And I got the tape files slightly wrong: mcopy.s is indeed the tape copier program (assembled with either tm.s or ht.s, and one of rk.s, rp.s and hp.s), to produce the 'xxyy' files above. However, the first stage booter is "tpboot.s", not "mboot.s" (didn't look closely enough); again, assembled with either tm.s or ht.s - that produces the first-stage bootstrap that goes in blocks 0 and 1 of the tape. Noel

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey > This doc: .. describes a way to install from tape, but it seems like it > does a block copy of a tape image to the disk. Yup, that's the standard V6 install from tape. It uses the two programs I mentioned in the last message; first mboot (which produces the '=' prompt), and then mcopy (assembled with the appropriate disk and tape drivers), which is used to copy disk images to the disk. > Also .. there is a v6.tape.gz file. Unfortunately, I have no > documentation on this. It could be raw blocks, or it could be a TAP > file, who knows. I looked into this previously. The other three files: root.v6.tar.gz doc.v6.tar.gz usr.v6.tar.gz are just TAR dumps of the 3 disk images on the V6 distribution tape: the root (includes kernel source, and most of the binaries), usr (source for all commands), and documentation. The v6.tape seems to be an image of V6 distribution tape. Here are some notes I made a while back, when I looked at it: The first 100 512-byte tape blocks contain the tape bootstrap stuff. Blocks 100 - 4099 are the RK05 root image, blocks 4100 - 8099 are the /usr RK05 image, and the blocks 8100 - 12099 are the /doc RK05 image. .. The most recent timestamp on any file in /usr and /doc is July 19th 1975, as with Dennis' copy. However, the most recent file timestamp on root is October 11th, 1975 Block 0 on tape - mboot (tm tape booter) Block 1 on tape - hboot (ht tape booter) Block 2-xx - gubbish, apparently inodes, code, etc? Block 98 on tape - hpuboot Block 99 on tape - rpuboot Block 100 on tape - rkuboot HTH. Noel

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by wkt＠tuhs.org

Hah, the file http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Tools/Tapes/Vtserver/v7_standalone.tar.gz has the source code for the standalone tools including boot and vtboot.pdp. So, given a working V7 environment, you should be able to rebuild these and possibly make them work in a V6 environment. Alternatively, if you have a working V6 environment (e.g. a simulator), you could bring in the vtclient.c code and integrate it into the V6 boot binary. Cheers, Warren

9 years, 8 months

1
1
0 0

Are DEC TK50/TK70 tapes worth hanging onto?

by tdk.knight＠gmail.com

Don't store ur tapes in a damp basement will help with sticky shed syndrom... Keep em dry a food dehydrator helps... On Oct 18, 2016 7:46 PM, "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: On 10/18/16 5:37 PM, Steven M Jones wrote: > I think they're useful to folks who have drives that can use them, and > they aren't nearly as fragile as QIC or helical scan drives (4mm, 8mm) > of a similar age. > The drives, maybe, but the tape sheds like nuts.

9 years, 8 months

6
5
0 0

2020 Power consumption

by RichA＠LivingComputerMuseum.org

From: Mike Ross Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 2:39 AM > On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at update.uu.se> wrote: >> Somewhat related, how much power does a 2020 draw on average? > Bye some enormous coincidence I was just looking through some DEC > pdp-10 brochures I have. > DEC advertised the 2020 as drawing no more power that a hairdryer; the > quoted figure was 1400w as I recall. Umm, are you sure about that? That was how we advertised the Toad-1 System in the 1990s, but the Mighty Mite power supply in the 2020 draws a lot more than that. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

MASSBUS disk emulator (Was: Unibus controller for MFM disks)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Ian S. King >> Does anyone know anything about the status of the plans to open-source >> it? > I've made some inquries, stay tuned.... OK, thanks! >> Can you briefly describe what it was? I'm still curious about what it was: was it a stand-alone board with a separate power supply, or did it plug into some sort of backplane? Did it use something like SD cards for storage? And what was the MASSBUS connection like: a set of 3 Berg headers into which one plugged the flat cables, or was there some oddball connector that wound up connected to a standard MASSBUS connector? Noel

9 years, 8 months

8
9
0 0

VCFed, the BBS!

by couryhouse＠aol.com

I could care less about telnet... I want to make the teletype ?clack! ? Ed# Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> Date: 10/16/16 18:39 (GMT-07:00) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: VCFed, the BBS! On 16/10/2016 14:10, william degnan wrote: > On Oct 16, 2016 5:52 AM, "Evan Koblentz" <cctalk at snarc.net> wrote: >>> I mean? please add 110? Baud? Evan! >> >> I was giving examples, not carved-in-stone specifications. > If the system is simple it'll be easier to support, 110b is not, given the > number of persons coming in from the other end so slowly.? No one barely > has a phone line anymore as it is, most (95%) of the external traffic will > be telnet.? If the bbs allows those few of us with phone lines to connect > at 300 to 1200b to get to a handshake and resolve to a simple welcome > screen for hardware testing purposes, that would be a good start. Get that > running see what kind of traffic results, and plan phase ii from there. > > I imagine it will be best once this system is up and running that people > call in on Sunday afternoon so visitors to the museum hear the inbound > calls in real time like a sys op would running a bbs from his basement. > Bill Speaking as a former Sysop from the 1980's. What would be nice is a couple of DEC Rainbows running FidoBBS and connected via a phone line simulator. Enter your mail message on one and see it get transferred to the other where it can be read. Rod Smallwood -- *PDP-8/e PDP-8/f PDP-8/m PDP-8/i Front Panels ex Stock - Order Now*

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

MASSBUS disk emulator (Was: Unibus controller for MFM disks)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rich Alderson > Yes, the d/r card is strictly level conversion, and the microcode in > the Xilinx does all the Massbus protocol. So if you don't mind continuing to indulge my curiousity (thanks for all the indulgence so far :-), is the D/R card a daughtercard that mounts on the Mesa (my guess)? Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

Xerox Alto restoration, part 10

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Liam Proven > It boots, and with a borrowed mouse, GUI apps work There was a new blog post which I don't think was mentioned here yet: http://www.righto.com/2016/10/restoring-ycs-xerox-alto-day-10-new.html but it doesn't cover the borrowed mouse; does cover getting the CPU 100% working, though. Noel

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

Xerox Alto restoration, part 10

by lproven＠gmail.com

It boots, and with a borrowed mouse, GUI apps work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMp5EAq-Elo -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

FS (cost of shipping): AS/400 8-port twinax concentrator/adapter cables

by jtp＠chinalake.com

I have two IBM 21F5093 AS/400 8-port twinax to DB25 adapters with clip mounts. Looks like the coil is about 14-16 feet of cable. Pics on request. Free for the cost of shipping (01888 metro-west Boston,MA , about 3 lbs each) Need the space, gotta go.

9 years, 8 months

3
2
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org > To load V6, you need to build a virtual tape which replicates the V6 > tape. Err, there's the problem. The V6 boot tape consists of 3 'dd' images of RK05 V6 file systems (one each root, source, and doc), with a 'boot block' on the tape which can copy them to RK05 packs; there is no standalone 'mkfs', etc. Now, if I were willing to wait for the transfer of the entire 4K blocks, I could use that approach, but... my only working mass storage device (currently - more on the way, at some point) is an RX02 - much smaller. So I _can't_ go that way, my only choice is to replicate the V7-type process (stand-alone 'mkfs', etc), for V6. Although I suppose I could use an emulator (I have been using Ersatz-11 to run V6 for quite a while now) to produce a RX02-sized file system, with just the stuff it needs to boot ('init', 'sh', etc), and use VTServer to transfer that over. And I'd probably have to tweak the client-side code to write raw images to disk (not sure if it already knows how to do that). > the problem is that both "boot" and "vtboot.pdp" contain the > client-side code to talk to the server, and it seems that I didn't > supply the source code for this. > ... > Hah, the file .. v7_standalone.tar.gz has the source code for the > standalone tools Yup, found that some years back when I first found VTServer. > Alternatively, if you have a working V6 environment (e.g. a simulator), > you could bring in the vtclient.c code and integrate it into the V6 > boot binary. The only V6 boot mechanisms are 1-block programs that go into block 0 of device 0 and which boot Unix directly from that file-system (type a file name, and it loads that file and starts it). So there is no second-stage boot program to integrate the VT client into (although obviously I could port the second-stage bootstrap to V6). > From: Ian S. King > I know I made it work and booted V6 on my 11/34. I'll start with getting VTServer to run under V6 (my only Unix, don't have anything later :-), so if you turn up whatever you used to boot V6, it would probably still be useful. Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by wkt＠tuhs.org

Hi all, an early version of VTServer is still at: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Tools/Tapes/Vtserver/ I think some others took it and extended; Fred van Kempen springs to mind. To load V6, you need to build a virtual tape which replicates the V6 tape. Hopefully this is easy to do. However, the problem is that both "boot" and "vtboot.pdp" contain the client-side code to talk to the server, and it seems that I didn't supply the source code for this. I'll go home and dig through my old stuff and see what I can find. Cheers, Warren

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: "Ian S. King" > ISTR that one can generate a 'tape' config file with whatever components > you want/need. Right, I saw that, but I need the V6 components... > I know there are v6-specific tools somewhere ... I think it's somewhere > in the TUHS site, and not completely obvious so you have to hunt a bit. Any hints you could provide would be most gratefully received. I looked in the source tree, and doing a search for "mkfs" only turned up the normal V6 mkfs. (Note that for the V7 one, the source for the standalone and Unix versions is one file, which has #ifdefs. That seems to be the one that's in the VTServer tree.) I had a pretty extensive walk through the archive 'back when' I first found out about TUHS, and I don't think I saw V6 versions (I would likely have grabbed them, if I had); I did find (and grab) VTServer, along with a bunch of other stuff. I just took another quick skim, couldn't find them. I would have guessed that they didn't exist, since that whole method of putting Unix on a machine didn't exist until V7, so it wouldn't have been written 'back in the day'. Noel

9 years, 8 months

1
0
0 0

VTServer/etc for V6 Unix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

So, I'm trying to do what VTServer was invented for - load Unix into an actual PDP-11, over its serial line, when one doesn't have machine-readable Unix on any mass storage for the machine. However, all the initial code that VTServer loads ('mkfs', etc) is V7-specific (V6 has a slightly different file system format) - and I want to install V6. Has anyone ever tweaked the programs which VTServer loads to do V6-format filesystems? I did a quick Google, but didn't see anything. No biggie if not, it won't be much work to adapt them all, but I figured I'd try to avoid re-inventing the wheel... Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

MASSBUS disk emulator (Was: Unibus controller for MFM disks)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Rich Alderson > There have been 2 generations of Massbus Disk Emulator (MDE) at LCM. Thanks for the bits... very interesting. > Data was transferred via FTP over a 100baseT crossover cable connected > to a Slackware server; the Rabbit was able to keep up with 4 drives at > this speed Were the bits actually stored on the Slackware server, or was it just used to put bits on the 'drive' to start with? If the latter, what were the actual bits stored on? (I know, not that relevant, since this is the prior rev, but I'm curious.) > a Mesa 5i22 Anything I/O card (includes a Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA) that > plugs directly into the PCI bus in a server-class X86-64 box, and used > a revision of a separate driver/receiver card designed for MDE 1.0 to > connect to the Massbus Let me make sure I understand this; was there some sort of cable or somehow a connection from the Mesa 5i22 directly to the driver/receiver card, which was purely 'level conversion', with the Mesa doing the 'protocol' on the MASSBUS? (I.e. they didn't communicate over the PCI bus?) > a control program for the PC side which runs under Windows 2008/2012 > Server. So the actual bits are stored on something (disk?) controlled by the PC? Noel

9 years, 8 months

2
1
0 0

11/35 on eBait

by glen.slick＠gmail.com

On Oct 2, 2016 11:03 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > > So there's another 11/35 up on eBait: > > http://www.ebay.com/itm/142135416325 > Went unsold at $3500. Relisted, this time at $5000. Buy it this time before it goes up to $6500 next time??? http://www.ebay.com/itm/142146207101

9 years, 8 months

4
4
0 0

Comdyna GP-6 Analog Computer Repairs Needed

by bill.phillips＠christovalisd.org

I have a Comdyna GP-6 analog computer that I need repaired ASAP. Anyone available to help me out? Bill Phillips wcphillips at verizon.net

9 years, 8 months

3
3
0 0

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

test-drb