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

by joe.lang.0000＠gmail.com

I'm trying to find docs for monolithic systems 8009 board. multibus I, z80, RAM ROM 2 serial, FDC. I see references to the board online but no actual docs. I'm looking for information (schematic) for the on board interrupt logic and bus interface. I've figured out enough to get CP/M 2.2 running on it but things like interrupts,bus time out and arbitration are implemented in PALs and defy my attempts at reverse engineering. Even docs from another model (800X) may prove useful since similar logic may be used. thanks joe lang

10 years, 10 months

2
3
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cctech Digest, Vol 14, Issue 10

by clemc＠ccc.com

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 1:00 PM, <cctech-request at classiccmp.org> wrote: > From: Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> > > There was also AlgolW, supported on MTS. > > As MTS was being mentioned earlier I was going to ask if anyone knew > whether the AlgolW compiler was included in the available distribution. > ?The sources are available - they were googlable - send me a note off list and I can put together a tar image of what I have. FYI: It was written PL/360. I did some hacking on it under TSS years ago.? IIRC Wirth did AlgolW on the 360 at Stanford which was running one of the OS/360 flavors. CMU ported to TSS and Michigan to MTS. also check out: The Programming Languages Genealogy Project http://everything2.com/title/the+Programming+Languages+Genealogy+Project ?Clem?

10 years, 10 months

3
2
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And speaking of ALGOL

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Every machine needs a fast memory system. CISC machines just as much, > after all the number of memory references per operation of a given kind > doesn't depend on the sort of CPU architecture you use. You're forgetting the memory bandwidth for the instruction fetching. RISC machines execute a stream of simple, low-level instructions, whereas CISC machines tend to do fewer, (semantically) higher-level operations - and in the process, use less memory bandwidth for instructions. To be tedious (sorry), for example, instead of of the RISC instruction sequence 'move register Ra to Rt1; add constant X to Rt1; move mem loc (Rt1) to Rt2; add Rn to Rt2; move Rt2 to mem loc (Rt1)', a CISC would just do 'add Rn to mem loc X[Ra]'. Same number of _data_ reads/writes, but a very different count of instruction fetches. The CISC tradeoff (fewer, slower, instructions) made sense 'back in the day', and not just for memory bandwidth - it made for more compact code, back when memory was in very short supply (by today's standards). Now, of course, a number of technological changes - primarily multi-level caches - have changed the 'sweet spot' for optimal instruction complexity, while keeping the memory bandwidth needed for instruction fetches down. Noel

10 years, 10 months

2
1
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And speaking of ALGOL

by mark.kahrs＠gmail.com

One could always implement a KDF9 emulator and then port Randall and Russell code (from the book). And r.e. ALGOL68, Peter Hibbard had some sort of ALGOL68 system working on the PDP11s at CMU I believe.

10 years, 10 months

6
10
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Fwd: sparc20 available in boston

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

Posting this for another NetBSD developer. Please contact him directly if interested; I don?t have any additional information. paul > Begin forwarded message: > > From: David Holland <dholland-developers at netbsd.org> > Subject: sparc20 available in boston > Date: August 11, 2015 at 2:05:41 PM EDT > > I have a sparc20 sitting in my office that I need to get rid of for > space reasons. Anyone in Boston want it? I do not have time to deal > with shipping it, but you're welcome to try to persuade someone else > around here to do that :-) > > It has a keyboard and mouse, and I think a framebuffer, but no > monitor. There are I think two or three cpu modules, though I vaguely > recall there being an issue with one of them. Dunno how much RAM it > has. > > Deadline is Friday, although if someone speaks up by then I might be > able to hold it until the end of the month. Otherwise it gets thrown > out... > > -- > David A. Holland > dholland at netbsd.org

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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Qbus split I&D?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Johnny Billquist > The 11/34 that I played with did not have a product from Enable. ... > The product "my" 11/34 have came from Systime Thanks for chasing that down. Yes, that would explain the non-meshing memories! :-) > In addition, a few wires needs to be changed on the backplane, there is > a cable from a CPU card to the Systime card, and a few modifications > required on the 11/34 CPU itself. This all makes sense - if one can reach into the CPU, it's definitely plausible to have an upgrade which expands the size of the PARs (unlike the ENABLE board from Able). Noel

10 years, 10 months

2
1
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And speaking of ALGOL

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Chuck Guzis > Why all this DEC stuff about Algol? I probably started it; I just mentioned the PDP-11 one because a lot of people already have either 11's, or an emulator up and running. Noel

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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OT: Slow booting, was re: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Chuck Guzis > Could it be that the presence of ECC registered SDRAM requires that > every memory location get written before boot-up can proceed? There's > 2GB of the stuff, so that could be the difference. I was going to suggest that, actually. Turning on ECC in the memory in a somewhat older HP minitower machine caused a long delay in booting while it cleared all the memory. Noel

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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DEC RX02-PA?

by ben＠bensinclair.com

I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVE… I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! -- Ben Sinclair ben at bensinclair.com

10 years, 10 months

11
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SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Thanks Jay! Marc ---------------------------- From: Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> The link below is to a Google Drive folder with three files that I will leave up for a while: awstape.c - Read a SCSI tape, output in AWS format (Linux) awstoraw.c - Read an AWS file, output a raw byte stream awstosimh.c - Read an AWS file, output a SimH https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2v4WRwISEQRfi1TWnlKU1hqUXphWVhpZ1FK OGFoVjRPVnppX1F2aUMwTUw0QkxSNEsyMjg&usp=sharing They are anything but elegant, but have gotten the job done for me. JRU --------------------------

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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Friendly reminder to any 5620 / BLIT owners...

by ian.finder＠gmail.com

The battery in the teletype DMD 5620 is mounted in a very fatal position, and does indeed leak, as I learned this weekend. If you have not removed it, I would get on that now. In fact, if you still have batteries in anything, you might be doing it wrong... ;) Cheers, - Ian -- Ian Finder (206) 395-MIPS ian.finder at gmail.com

10 years, 10 months

3
3
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SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Hey, I'll take the offer, I am interested in both. Marc > Jay Jaeger wrote: > If anyone is interested, I have code for a Linux SCSI tape to > AWSTAPE program, and a program that translates aws format to a raw > byte stream. Not sure if I have one that translates to the SimH .tap > format, though. GNU C. > Chuck Guzis wrote: > I've got a Linux utility to translate SIMH .tap to raw binary, if that's > interesting to anyone. I would have thought that such utilities existed > already.

10 years, 10 months

3
3
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PDP-12 Restoration at the RICM

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

We found a shorted diode in one of the rectifiers in the +/-42VDC supply in the VR14 that was causing the main fuse to blow. The donor of the PDP-12 gave us a spare so that was an easy fix. We reinstalled the VR14 in the PDP-12 and ran the display diags. The VR14 display actually works! We found a open trimpot for the gain on the vertical flip-chip. We swapped the horizontal and vertical flip-chips, adjusted the gain trimpot, removed the flip-chip, and added a fixed resistor with the same value for now. The display when running the diags looks very nice and crisp. We booted LAP6-DIAL and could display a listing of the files on the tape on the VR14 monitor. After about 20 minutes of running nicely, the TC12 went back into the mode where it could not find blocks. Oh well, more debugging to do. -- Michael Thompson

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Wow. I'll never complain again that it takes too long to boot Windows...

10 years, 10 months

28
61
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Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Eric Christopherson > people who like to program in languages or language implementations or > libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. > From: Sean Conner > My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an > operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and > specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get > custom system calls to use. > ... > [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did some stuff. There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene did that. Noel

10 years, 10 months

6
6
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MTS

by lyndon＠orthanc.ca

There have been a few references to MTS over the past couple of months that led me to suspect people are running it under Hercules. I did some poking around a while back and managed to find some tape images (bitsaver, I think), and did some cursory reading of the release notes. I think there might be enough there to IPL and perform a basic installation, but what immediately caught my attention was the mention that sites had to purchase ASMH from IBM, which leads me to believe the public distributions don't contain an assembler. I cut my teeth on *real* computers on the U of Alberta's Amdahl running MTS, and I can't possibly imagine using it without an assembler. So my first question is: is anyone running MTS under Hercules from these public images? And if yes, question 2 is: which languages are included? One of the main reasons I would like to get MTS running would be to play around with the scheduler code. I remember some changes that were introduced circa 1981 that - I thought - destroyed the interactive response time of the system. E.g. APL went from being a joy to practically un-usable, IMO. I've always wanted to poke around in there and see if I couldn't fix it. And to get thoroughly esoteric and obscure, what are the odds that someone out there squirreled away an archive of SHOW:? from UQV-MTS? --lyndon

10 years, 10 months

7
11
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Adding a Hard Drive to an Original IBM PC Using a Raspberry Pi

by fozztexx＠fozztexx.com

One of my favorite old computers to tinker with is a rev B IBM PC. I recently moved it out into my living room to hopefully inspire me to mess with it more, but I still didn?t want to mess with having to put everything on 360k floppies. With all the slots occupied I had to find another solution for mass storage. Raspberry Pi to the rescue! I was able to use XTIDE and a Pi to emulate a hard drive over the RS232 port. All the details are here on my blog post: http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/244 -- Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com

10 years, 10 months

2
2
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SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by cclist＠sydex.com

A couple of weeks ago, I offered to share the source and executable for a SCSI tape-to-SIMH .TAP file utility for MSDOS. To run it, you'll need an ASPI driver for your SCSI adapter. It was compiled using MSC 8.00C. Find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6qiudlpyitgxom/STP2T02.ZIP?dl=0 Enjoy, Chuck ------------------------------------------------------------- "The first thing we do, let's kill all the spammers."

10 years, 10 months

10
20
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FOR SALE: HP 700/92 green screen monitor

by shawn-gordon＠cox.net

Excellent condition, $100 plus shipping or best offer.

10 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Algol 60, that is. It was used as the inspiration by just about > everything that followed I've just remembered that the Algol (probably Algol-60, but the manual doesn't say) interpreter used for the programming languages course at MIT was adapted from the Delphi (a homebrew PDP-11 OS used at MIT) version, to a version that would run under Unix V6. So it should be runnable under any PDP-11 emulator. I _think_ I have that on those backup tapes I'm trying to get read, so maybe someday (it's a pity none of that MIT Unix stuff seems to have escaped into preservation, at least, so far) it will be widely available. They had a BCPL compiler for the PDP-11 that ran under Unix, too. Ditto about 'on the tape'. > From: Phil Budne > Mostly I write SNOBOL4 throw away programs for textual transformations. Huh, that's what Regex-Replace is for! ;-) Noel

10 years, 10 months

4
6
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Apollo DN series HP root account

by wcn440＠gmail.com

I have a vintage apollo question... In the late 1980's when HP acquired Apollo Computer Inc, I recall there was an HP root account, that shipped with every new machine. In many cases this account was not removed. I recently acquired a DN3000 and to my amazement it was clean, and booted to an SR10.4 login prompt. Does anybody remember that HP account and password? Alternative cracks would be welcomed as well. Bill Newman

10 years, 10 months

4
3
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Classic programming

by echristopherson＠gmail.com

Is there a subset of this group for people who like to program in languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? Or other groups for such a thing? -- Eric Christopherson

10 years, 10 months

25
43
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Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Johnny Billquist > And one should not forget Algol. IIRC, Algol is mentioned in the paper I linked to. Of course, Algol's DNA is in pretty much every procedural language ever created since it was. > From: Andy Holt > (and, for that matter, PL/1 should probably be considered an unsung > inspiration for C as it was the implementation language for Multics > in which Bell labs was a partner and must have inspired at least > the name for Unix) The paper also mentions PL/I - IIRC, they (Ken, Dennis et al) had used it on Multics, and didn't like it. (Which I can understand!) I'm not sure there are any ideas from PL/I (specifically) which influenced C. Multics' influence on Unix is a very sizeable topic, which I won't derail into - it's an interest of mine, and I've been doing research on that; my hope is to do a paper on it at some point. The executive abstract is that the two extremes one hears ('Unix is derived from Multics'/'Unix is in fact a counter-reaction to Multics') aren't really accurate - the truth is in the middle. Noel

10 years, 10 months

7
10
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Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 Syste

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2015 18:43:53 +0100 > From: "Dave G4UGM" <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> > Subject: RE: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System > > Actually I remember booting an IBM4381 from cold after we shut it down > over Christmas. Just pressing the Power button powered it up eventually, > but I am pretty sure it took nearly an hour to get to the IPL prompt. So it > did disk drives, then tape drives, then other bits and bobs. But when it > spun up the disks it brought them up one at a time so the startup surges > didn't trip the main breaker. The same with the tape drives. Then it > loaded the microcode into all the controllers. Then it booted the OS. As we > were running VM this last bit took a few seconds (I think). I do know if VM > crashed you screen logo frequently re-appeared before you had time to think. > > Dave Wade > G4UGM > I have done the same on a Honeywell mainframe. After powering up everything manually the only the mag tape and card reader I/O controllers had boot capability. Push the INIT and BOOT buttons and it would read and load tape controller microcode from mag tape, then read and load the disk controller microcode, then the processor's boot code, and then boot from disk. It took just seconds for the mag tape part. Getting the front end processors bootloaded, and getting online communications, timesharing, and batch processing up took a while. This system was capable of booting from binary punched cards. We used to try it periodically just to make sure that this capability worked. -- Michael Thompson

10 years, 10 months

2
1
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Guy Steele and Emacs - was Re: Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Toby Thain > Peter Siebel's "Coders at Work" features a chapter/interview with > Steele: Ah, thanks for pointing that out; I do have that volume, but I guess I didn't read Steele's chapter. > "So I worked seriously on the implementation of Emacs probably for only > about four or six weeks." That's probably why I didn't know of it - blink and you missed it! :-) Noel

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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PDP-12 Restoration at the RICM

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

When we first powered up the PDP-12 the main fuse for the VR12 display blew. A replacement fuse did the same. We thought that the brown goo in the bottom of the chassis had leaked from the high-voltage power supply, and the high-voltage power supply is directly connected to the input, so that was the first suspect. We bench tested the high-voltage power supply using a Variac on the input. With a 10VAC input there was no output at all. Increasing the input voltage did not change the missing output voltage. I hate to mention this but... The two capacitors in the voltage-doubler circuit are connected in series between the output lead and ground. We connected a current limited lab power supply to the output lead and ground and slowly increased the voltage while watching the current draw. With the voltage stable the current draw was a few microamps. We increased the output voltage of the power supply to the 64VDC max, disconnected the power supply, and measured the voltage across the caps. It very slowly decreased, so maybe the caps were OK. We reconnected the Variac to the input and with 10VAC the high-voltage power supply had a 1000VDC output. We put 10x 500kOhm resistors in series across the output and increased the Variac voltage. By measuring the voltage across one resistor we could see that the output was more than 10,000VDC. The resistors started smoking so we knew that we had a lot of high-voltage available. So, once again the magic of reforming capacitors saves another piece of equipment. -- Michael Thompson

10 years, 10 months

2
1
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Qbus split I&D?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Johnny Billquist > All I can say is that I did a number of RSX SYSGENs on that 11/34, and > it truly looked just like an 11/24 from a software point of view. The thing that I wonder about it, for that to be true, is something that someone (sorry, to lazy to look in the archive to give proper credit) pointed out, which is that that CPU is only two boards, and the memory management, including the PARs, is built into one of them. So how could one extend a PAR >from 12 bits to 16, when there's already 12 bits buried deep inside the CPU? That's the part that I can't work out... > I'm hoping that Update ... still have the documentation around. You and me both! :-) I have this dream of one day having an 11/45, with the Enable and the optional cache. Now that would be a sweeet machine: most of the capability of an 11/70, but a lot less power draw. But I'd need the documentation to see how to connect it up! :-) > Every time this comes up I really want to go searching for manuals... > :-) Please do! :-) Noel

10 years, 10 months

12
26
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Qbus split I&D?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Johnny Billquist > One more thing to check this summer... OK, if you can, that would really be great; if either i) it's still together, or ii) there are pictures, it would fill some of the key knowledge gaps. In particular, i) what kind of backplane is it plugged into, and ii) what is the UNIBUS edge connector on the card connected to... Noel

10 years, 10 months

2
1
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Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Kip Koon > I have often wondered what the inspiration for the C Language was. BCPL > -> MCPL -> B -> c, quite an interesting list of languages. I don't think MCPL is in there; B was directly inspired by BCPL. See Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Development of the C Language": http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html I got the impression from the previous discussion that MCPL was a later branch. Noel

10 years, 10 months

7
7
0 0

VAX4000/300 MNS7.3 isntallation from CDROM

by holm＠freibergnet.de

Hi, I've got an VAX4000/300 eqipped with an TK70, 2x RF31, 1xRF71 disks, and an CQD-200/TM. I've connected an toshiba Xm5701 drive to the SCSI Bus and the machine sses it as DUA3. I have a VMS7.3 CDROM and want to install it on one of the disks. I've read some documents on HPs website but it isn't clear to me how to boot the cdrom correctly, there is root 1 mentioned. What bootflag must entered, B/R5:10000000? ..in the case w/o the R5:10000000 I get a $ Promt finally (here I habe to read further). With the bootflag the System is complaining that dua3 is write protected (it is the cdrom)... What's the correct way to install VMS on that machine? Regards, Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Freiberger Stra?e 42, 09600 Obersch?na, USt-Id: DE253710583 www.tsht.de, info at tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741

10 years, 10 months

6
26
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OT: Slow booting, was re: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by seefriek＠gmail.com

Supermicros (and to a similar degree Tyan) are mostly in the "server class" of motherboards. That apparently means they put a *lot* of self-test code in there somewhere. I've had literally thousands of Supermicro machines of a dozen different types at various times, and they all took an inordinate amount of time to decide to think about booting no matter what (all auto-detect turned off, quickboot on, inboard SCSI disabled). I got used to it, because quality-wise it was worth the wait.

10 years, 10 months

1
0
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PDP-12 at the RICM (Michael Thompson)

by michael.99.thompson＠gmail.com

Yesterday we started disassembling the CRT from the VR12. We picked out the silicone that attached the metal bezel to the front of the CRT. The exposed PVA was about 1/8" thick so we picked at the edges to remove as much as possible. We found that the shield was actually loose and were able to remove it without the usual heating or using nasty chemicals. Today we are forming a sheet of 0.093" LEXAN to replace the PVA. It should be a much better implosion shield than the original PVA. Picture here: http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/_/rsrc/1439041136242/Home/equipment/dec-pdp… <http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ericomputermus…> We tested the high-voltage power supply and it works well. Maybe we can start reassembling and debugging the VR14 this afternoon. -- Michael Thompson

10 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

IBM panel... warning

by tmfdmike＠gmail.com

Some of you may remember an IBM System/370 Model 155 panel on eBay a couple of months ago. Something recently prompted me to look that auction up again, and after reading this I decided to warn the list in case it shows up again. The buyer left the following feedback: SCAM! didnt sell 4 enough $, wanted $3000 more outside of eBay after I paid him! IBM System 370 Mainframe front panel (#181771383679)US $727.00 Be warned. Mike http://www.corestore.org 'No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.'

10 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Eric Christopherson > I should check TECO out some day. Only if you want to damage your brain. Have you ever _actually looked_ at any TECO code? If not, try this: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/09/22/worlds-greatest-pathological-l-… (It is not without reason that it is described as 'looking like line noise'.) Noel

10 years, 10 months

2
1
0 0

Unidentified chip -- Spoiler for HP 1260-0339

by ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk

> As a total aside, on some HP boards there is a 16 pin DIL package with the part number 1260-0339. > Any ideas what that chip is? What chip? Amazingly there is nothing inside that 16pin DIL package. No silicon chip, no thick-film resistor network, nothing. It is just a package with the pins. The purpose of it? It's a connector (!) to fit one of those IC test clips on to monitor various signals. -tony

10 years, 10 months

8
12
0 0

NOS!!! Compugraphic, (2) Computer Automation Naked Mini, (2)Motorola M-4408

by useddec＠gmail.com

All unused! Please contact me off list if interested. Located in zip 61853

10 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

OT: SNA was RE: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com

> -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of JP Hindin > Sent: 06 August 2015 19:07 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> > Subject: RE: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System > > > > On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Dave G4UGM wrote: > >> Booting an old CDC 6000-series machine meant mounting a "deadstart" > >> tape, pushing the button just below the screens on the DD60, entering > >> or editing the equipment status table, then going out for a smoke > >> (not me) or a cup of coffee, while the system copied the deadstart tape > to disk. > >> The next prompt was to enter the date and time. > >> > >> People are too impatient today. > >> > >> --Chuck > > > > Actually I remember booting an IBM4381 from cold after we shut it down > over Christmas. Just pressing the Power button powered it up eventually, > but I am pretty sure it took nearly an hour to get to the IPL prompt. So it did > disk drives, then tape drives, then other bits and bobs. But when it spun up > the disks it brought them up one at a time so the startup surges didn't trip > the main breaker. The same with the tape drives. Then it loaded the > microcode into all the controllers. Then it booted the OS. As we were running > VM this last bit took a few seconds (I think). I do know if VM crashed you > screen logo frequently re-appeared before you had time to think. > > Spinning off on this tangent, when I was learning how to fire up my Sun E10k > I didn't realise it took so ruddy long for the SSP and the E10k to speak to each > other. > So I was constantly asking the SSP for the E10k's power status (to see if they > were communicating) and being told the SSP "wasn't the master". > > I'd powered things up repeatedly and made all sorts of changes to the SSP > config and just couldn't figure out what wasn't working. So one day I'm > messing with it again and I'd walked over to the other side of the shop for a > manual and gotten distracted and maybe ten minuted passed and all of a > sudden all of the blowers dropped RPM and evened out. The SSP and E10k > had finally finished their secret masonic handshake and the SSP did the > equivalent of "Hey, dude, it's not 7000 degrees in here, you can chillax now". > > "People are too impatient today" -- Chuck G > > True enough. I just didn't know enough to know I should be patient. Excuse me if this isn't Exactly right, but I seem to recall some on in IBM saying that Thomas Watson Jr got a phone call one day. It went... TWJ: Thomas Watson here CLR: Is that Thomas Watson Jnr. TWJ: Yes CLR: and you are the head of IBM TWJ: Yes CLR and you first name is Thomas TWJ: yes CLR: and you are the head of IBM TWJ: yes CLE: and you are in your office TWJ: yes, but what do you want CLR: Just thought I would show what it is like trying set up and SNA session. Bye... > > - JP

10 years, 10 months

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Fwd: ROLM CBX 8000 System Service Manual Vol. 2 Scans Released!

by scaron＠umich.edu

Cross-post from the Collectors Network list that may be of interest to folks here. If anyone out there happens to have an old copy of Vol. 1 of the CBX 8000 System Service Manual, or might know an old ROLMan (or ROLwoMan) who might have same, I surely would appreciate the opportunity to digitize it! These are eventually going to be submitted to the Telephone Collectors International Library but it's certainly okay to take a copy for Bitsavers as well, if so desired. Best, Sean ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> Date: Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 6:17 PM Subject: ROLM CBX 8000 System Service Manual Vol. 2 Scans Released! To: Voice Over IP Tandem for Analog Switches <voip at ckts.info>, Sean Caron < scaron at umich.edu> Hi all, I finally got around to digitizing the copy of the second volume of the ROLM CBX 8000 System Service Manual that I had received courtesy of Dennis Hock. I've got the scans sitting on my personal site for now until I figure out the process for getting them submitted to the TCI Library. Everyone is welcome to peruse: http://wildflower.diablonet.net/~scaron/pdf/ROLM/ Please note that Comcast has been kind of dodgy at my place recently, so the quality of the connection may fade in and out a little bit. As this document is very large (perhaps around 1,000 pages) the scans were done mostly by machine. I dumped a chapter at a time into a Konica Bizhub 300 series MFP and scanned in double-sided mode at 300 DPI. I've cursorily reviewed them and it looks like the Bizhub did a pretty nice job of scanning ... there's a little bit of white space due to not all pages being double sided, and due to the fold-outs, but all the information is there! Thanks so much, Dennis, for loaning the manual to me and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it. I'll try to have the original back in the mail heading your way within the week. Let's hope this will stir someone to dig up an old Vol. 1 on which I can do the same :O Cheers! Sean

10 years, 10 months

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OT RE: Saved DEC kit

by jwest＠classiccmp.org

Tony wrote (re: 25kg)... ---- Its about half the weight of many minicomputer bits (I think an RK05 drive is about 50kg for example). ---- I cry DEC-bias, using an RK05 as your UOM ;) For HP, a bare 7906 drive is 75kg (165#), and with controller, power supply, and desk side rack that only holds the one drive - 154kg (340#). A 7970 is 59kg (130#). A bare 2113 cpu is 30kg (65#). Funny how I have those weights right at the top of my head ;) So I'd say that 25kg is more like 1/3 of many minicomputer bits *grin* J

10 years, 10 months

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Unidentified chip

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

So, I took Tony's advice (about parts) to heart, and have been stocking up on all sorts of things. (Ironically, I now have a _far_ better supply of parts that I had access to, back in the day, at LCS at MIT! But that's a rant for another day.) As part of that, I've bought up a number of IC collections, to build up a stock of 74xxx parts in various families (S, LS, etc). Along with them, I have acquired a lot of stuff I don't need (e.g. CMOS parts), and at some point I'll offer them here, for trade, for people who do have a use for them. (The PDP-11 systems I'm interested in basically don't use them.) As I've finished sorting and filing all that stuff, I'm left with a few things I can't ID. The most prolific one (I think I have about 6 tubes full :-) is something I'd appreciate a hand with: it might be some super-rare chip that people would love to find, or something. It's a 16-pin DIP, with the following on it (in three separate lines): "1028126", "D39315-A", and "CS9336P". The first number looks like the numbers I've seen on a couple of other un-identified chips, made by TRW. (I hope they aren't something classified I'm not even supposed to have! :-) Anyone have any idea what these things are? Thanks! Noel

10 years, 10 months

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VT340, VT340+, and other monitor repairs

by useddec＠gmail.com

Anyone interested in repairing some monitors in exchange for DEC gear or possible cash? sorry, US only because of shipping. Please contact me off list if you are interested. Thanks, Paul

10 years, 10 months

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Was there 3rd party DEC PRO CTI boards?

by pontus＠Update.UU.SE

Hi Out of curiousity, since I now have a DEC PRO380. Was there any third party manufacturer of CTI expansion boards? Regards, Pontus.

10 years, 10 months

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Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

>If you're willing to run MSDOS with an appropriate ASPI driver, >I can send you a utility that I know works []You're >welcome to the source code. >--Chuck Chuck, Could you share your DOS code with me too? I just assembled the hardware for that: a self loading HP88780B SCSI-1 9-track Tape Drive, a vintage DolchPac 65 PC that can multi boot XP, Win98 and DOS fitted with an old SCSI-1 card. And I am reading the SCSI protocol book in the evenings ;-). Your DOS SCSI tape software and source would give me a prodigious head start... I also have Pertec-interfaced Overland Data tape drive, that will be step 2. This is a more straightforward interface. And an HP-IB interfaced HP7970E tape drive waiting in the wings. Marc

10 years, 10 months

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Looking for AMI S4008 or MOSTEK MK4008

by nw＠retroComputingTasmania.com

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Bill Sudbrink <wh.sudbrink at verizon.net> wrote: > Subject pretty much says it all, except that I need the > ceramic package with the metal lid. Like this? http://www.ebay.com/itm/MK4008P-2-MOSTEK-16-Pin-GOLD-PURPLE-DIP-Vintage-MK4…

10 years, 10 months

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Looking for AMI S4008 or MOSTEK MK4008

by hilpert＠cs.ubc.ca

On 2015-Aug-04, at 6:32 PM, Bill Sudbrink wrote: > Subject pretty much says it all, except that I need the > ceramic package with the metal lid. Not that it's a help, but I have a Wang calculator that uses an array of MK4008's. Ceramic & lidded but the gold-plated pins rotted on one or two of them - recovered by soldering new pins onto the side. Could do with spares but they're not common. Would your interest in the specific form be for image sensor experiments?

10 years, 10 months

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Pertec Tape Drive Interface Musings

by nf6x＠nf6x.net

I was looking at a couple of documents describing the Pertec tape interface; the manual for my Kennedy 9610 tape drive, and a nice reference by a fellow with a rather familiar name: http://www.sydex.com/pertec.html According to my Kennedy manual, issuing a read command causes the drive to return one block of data. I can see how that would be used in block-oriented applications in which blocks may be randomly read, written and re-written on the tape. But most of my magtape experience has been using the tapes in a streaming mode, such as when reading/writing one or more tar archives separated by file marks. When writing a tar archive on a magtape from a Unix system, is the archive written as a sequence of fixed-size blocks? Or is the entire tar archive effectively written as one continuous block which must be streamed with no repositioning? I'm curious because I'm daydreaming about how to build a tape drive interface controller, and I wonder whether it might need to potentially stream an entire tape in one go vs. being able to safely assume some maximal block size. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/

10 years, 10 months

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Looking for AMI S4008 or MOSTEK MK4008

by wh.sudbrink＠verizon.net

Subject pretty much says it all, except that I need the ceramic package with the metal lid. Thanks, Bill S.

10 years, 10 months

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Tandy / Corvus Network

by snhirsch＠gmail.com

I've been given a small board that I believe is a Corvus Omninet adapter for TRS-80 Mod 3 or 4. I _think_ it's intended to support a product called "Network 4" that appears on a few old Tandy price lists and ad brochures. I'd love to find out more about the environment it's intended for and, if possible, get my hands on the technical documentation and system software. Is this familiar to anyone on the list? Steve --

10 years, 10 months

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Amstrad CPC 464 acquisition

by terry＠webweavers.co.nz

I got this model a few months ago and have written a few words about the process. For those interested... http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2015-08-03-acquiring-amstrads.htm Terry (Tez)

10 years, 10 months

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AM Varityper (phototypesetter)

by cclist＠sydex.com

I don't know how many of you were familiar with the Addressograph-Multigraph (AM) Varityper phototypesetting systems. Basically small computers with floppy drives and a (very nice) terminal--and a big box that held quite a number of photo "font" disks. Basically worked by shining a light through a specific disk and character onto light-sensitive paper. Produced gorgeous print ready copy. Compugraphic and Mergenthaler had similar systems and I think there were also several other competitors as well. At any rate, a pile of 8" HS floppies will be landing here in the near future. Does anyone have any leads on Varityper service manuals or anything might help me with the task of figuring out what on the disks? (The disks themselves do not come from a country that uses the Latin alphabet). Thanks for any leads... --Chuck ------------------------------------------------------------- "The first thing we do, let's kill all the spammers."

10 years, 10 months

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