test-drb

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101090 discussions

by CLASSICCMP＠trailing-edge.com

>Looking at the tape, I see that the words "END OF FILE BAS65.PTP" >are punched at the end of the tape in sort of pseudo dot-matrix >characters. Does the "PTP" extension tell us anything? "Paper TaPe" in DEC-ese. > Looking at >the start of the tape: >"MICRO-SOFT BAS65.PTP [2601,1260] 29-JUL-77 15:27:58" That makes sense, Microsoft was cross-assembling on PDP-10's at the time, and [2601,1260] would be the PPN code for an account. For the first couple of years Microsoft was using the hyphenated form. >Looking through the first few feet of "real data"... > >No high bits, the first few bytes are: >00111011 x3b ';' (was hoping for the start of an assembly comment) >00110010 x32 '2' (nope, looks like some sort of hex...) >00110000 x30 '0' >01000001 x41 'A' >00110000 x30 '0' >00110000 x30 '0' >00110000 x30 '0' >00110011 x33 '3' >00111001 x39 '9' >01000001 x41 'A' That makes some sense, "20" is the 6502 opcode for a JSR (jump to subroutine). The next two bytes are presumably the subroutine's address, and "39" is the 6502 opcode for an AND abolute,Y instruction. Tim.

26 years, 2 months

Dumpster stories!

by Innfogra＠aol.com

The best dumpster I ever hit was a ComputerLand in San Mateo when they went out of business in the early 90s. I went to their going out of business sale and realized they would have lots of leftovers. After the sale I filled my Honda car two nights in a row, spending about 3 to 4 hrs a night burrowing >from one end of their dumpster to the other. The second night I had so much jammed into the Honda there was barely room for me. The passenger seat was so full it towered over me as I was driving. I barely made it back over the bridge to Hayward, where I was staying. I had to use one hand to keep the stuff from collapsing on me. All PC stuff of course. After they realized that someone was dumpster diving they broke every card they put in. >From 1990 to 1992 I regularly checked Microware's Beaverton, OR dumpster. They were a major west coast distributor until they had financial trouble >from expanding too fast. Ross-Dove held a huge liquidation auction which had some very good trash. I pulled quite a few brand new motherboards, cards and hard drives in boxes from that dumpster. Also in the early 90s Mentor Graphics was liquidating lots of Apollo 100, 300, 400 and 600 boxes. I pulled a bunch of circuit cards and software from the dumpster at their auxiliary storage. It was so interesting I started checking their main plant until security chased me away. My recommendation is to check computer businesses going out of business. Computer manufacturers going out of business or downsizing are also good. Check the major auctions like Ross Dove that happen in your area. Computer distributors often have good dumpsters also. My favorite story though is one of my scrapper friends. He had some Chinese buyers visiting him. They had gone through his yard in Bend and were on their way to Portland. Cruising through the industrial area of Albany he spotted a dumpster full of good scrap wire. While he wanted to look he wasn't sure of how these Chinese businessmen would take it. He decided what the hell and pulled his truck up beside the dumpster. Needless to say the Chinese were the first on top of the dumpster happily yarding the scrap into the truck. They were having a great time until the local police showed up and made them put all the wire back in the dumpster. I bet it made for great stories back home. Dumpster diving is lots of fun. Especially if you just dive in. Paxton

26 years, 2 months

Macintosh Portable problems

by netsurfer_x1＠hotmail.com

>I assume you used sealed lead-acid batteries? > >-Mike Yep, I uesd the exact type of batteries ("Cyclon" 2V, 5.0 Ah cells) that were originally in it. They are new cells. I am tempted to believe that the AC Adaptor/Charger has gone south on me. ____________________________________________________________ David Vohs, Digital Archaeologist & Computer Historian. Computer Collection: "Triumph": Commodore 64C, 1802, Double FDD, GeoRAM 512, Okimate 20. "Leela": Macintosh 128 (Plus upgrade), Nova SCSI HDD, Imagewriter II. "Delorean": TI-99/4A. "Monolith": Apple Macintosh Portable. ____________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

26 years, 2 months

HP 3000 MPE V: notes on Y2K Safe release

by steverob＠hotoffice.com

On Tuesday, February 15, 2000 11:29 PM, Joe [SMTP:rigdonj@intellistar.net] wrote: > Hi, > > I spotted a HP 3000 system 37 today in a scrap place. It has two HP 7963 > drives and a bunch of other stuff that I don't recognize. Can anyone tell > me something about them? > Question for the HP gurus: Since it's not too far away, I was thinking about grabbing the system. So, can I use my 3000/42 FOS tapes to reinstall the OS on the 37? Thanks. Steve Robertson - <steverob(a)hotoffice.com>

26 years, 2 months

Software Results Corp Unibus 68000 board?

by CLASSICCMP＠trailing-edge.com

>> I just found a "Software Results Corporation" Unibus >> (hex-height) board with an array of 32 2114 memory chips and >> a big fat 68000 chip on it. There's a COM5025 (UART?) and two >> 40-pin headers on the edge. >Yup. Cool. Even cooler that you know all about it :-). > Out of perverse curiosity, what's the S/N? I can eventually >look it up and tell you who used to own it. I might have even been the >guy that pulled the parts from inventory and tested the finished product. SN 1245, Rev 3.0. There's a handwritten "O" before the "CBD-X31" designation on the board. >I have all the software, firmware, schematics, wire-wrap prototypes, >*everything* for them. Unless you want to speak 3780 or HASP to some other >device from your Unibus PDP-11 or VAX, that board is useless. In that case, would anyone else on the list want to grab it? >Unless I am seriously misinformed, this board was the first single-board >DMA device for the Unibus. The RL11 and RX211 both date from 1978 or so and do DMA from a single Unibus slot. Seeing how the date on this 68000 board is 1982, does this mean that a predecessor to this board was being made in 1978 or earlier? -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/ 7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927

26 years, 2 months

Fluke 9010 Micro-System Troubleshooter ??

by ethan_dicks＠yahoo.com

--- Al Kossow <aek(a)spies.com> wrote: > "Has anyone else got one other than Al and Jeff?" > > Yes, there are a bunch of arcade game collectors that have them. Me. > "Has anyone ever tried to built the probe for one?" No. > Not that I know of. The probes always get separated from the > units (along with the docs and pods). The probes are going for > big bucks on eBay ($75-$100). Popular pods (6502,6809,Z80,68K) > sell pretty high there as well. I have only the 68000 pod. I'd *love* to land a 6502 pod. I would get some serious use. Mine came from Software Results Corp. (see other thread) and was used for testing COMBOARDs. -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com

26 years, 2 months

Software Results Corp Unibus 68000 board?

by ethan_dicks＠yahoo.com

--- CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com wrote: > Hi folks, > > I just found a "Software Results Corporation" Unibus > (hex-height) board with an array of 32 2114 memory chips and > a big fat 68000 chip on it. There's a COM5025 (UART?) and two > 40-pin headers on the edge. Yup. Cool. Out of perverse curiosity, what's the S/N? I can eventually look it up and tell you who used to own it. I might have even been the guy that pulled the parts from inventory and tested the finished product. > Date codes are from early 1984, > and there's a surprising amount of 54LS (and no 74LS) logic on the > board, leading me to think that this may have been intended for the > military market. Nope... the company got tired of snooping down bad chips. The boards were a couple of grand, customer cost, so MIL-SPEC chips were not a horrible cut into the profit margin and were, at the time, individually tested. It saved enough on labor to be worth the expense. > Is this, by any chance, a coprocessor type board, or is it a > "master" CPU? It is an intellegent synchronous serial card with onboard line-printer capability. On a RSTS/E system, you could avoid spooling jobs through the system line printer queue, saving many CPU cycles. We used to hang LA-180's right off of the printer port or sell a printer adapter for Dataproducts interfaced printers. > Am I imagining things, or has "Software Results Corporation" > been mentioned on this list recently? Yes. I was hired there in 1984 and eventually bought the name and rights to the software/hardware/customer list and provided service between 1993 and 1995 to all the customers who bought them in the 1980s (by 1990 sales were effectively non-existant except for upgrades). Coincidentally, SRC was the company that took out the full page back ad on "CPU Wars", now on the web at http://www.e-pix.com/CPUWARS/cpuwars.html I have all the software, firmware, schematics, wire-wrap prototypes, *everything* for them. Unless you want to speak 3780 or HASP to some other device from your Unibus PDP-11 or VAX, that board is useless. The dual 6309 PROMs are only smart enough to feed more complicated programs through a CSR window into the 16K of SRAM. Even simple diagnostics are downloaded at runtime, character by character. In its protocol emulation mode, it uses 16-bit DMA to feed buffers back and forth. Unless I am seriously misinformed, this board was the first single-board DMA device for the Unibus. Software Results pioneered the removal of the NPR jumper to allow such things to work (prior to this, DMA devices were one _backplane_ that broke grant between the input and output Unibus cables). We had to ship dual-height grant cards to accomodate the absence of the board when it was removed for diagnostic or repair purposes. More trivia: this board uses SRAM because of two early DRAM problems. Intel RAM was having higher than expected single bit errors (thought at first to be cosmic rays, but later proven to be stray alpha particles emitted from the minute quantities of radioactive materials in the ceramic packages). Additionally, the first batch of 68K CPU chips (my old boss still has XC68000 S/N 424, yes, there is a serial number engraved on the lid) had microcode glitches that caused longer than advertised bus cycles. For those designers that borrowed/copied/migrated existing Z-80 refresh schemes, the outages were long enough to interfere in some cases, causing catastrophic memory loss. SRC went with 2114s for reliability. ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com

26 years, 2 months

Fluke 9010 Micro-System Troubleshooter ??

by allisonp＠world.std.com

<What do you think of them? Has anyone ever tried to repair the tape drive <capstans on them? Has anyone ever tried to built the probe for one? BTW <these date from around 1981 and are powered by Z-80s so they're on-topic. Simple fix. Scrape off the black goo or orange goo. then use a little superglue to anchor some plastic or rubber tubing over the metal hub to get the original diameter (some error is acceptable). I do this on TU58s all the time. Allison

26 years, 2 months

TOUCH for DOS/Windows

by mcquiggi＠sfu.ca

If anyone wants this utility, I can put a copy on my highgate machine for general access. Kevin On Thu, 17 Feb 2000 13:58:04 EST classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org wrote: > "Richard A. Cini, Jr." <rcini(a)msn.com> asked: > > > Is there a DOS or Windows utility similar to the Unix TOUCH utility?? > > Borland included TOUCH with their Turbo Pascal and Turbo C packages. > > Also there was a version available thru PC Magazine, created circa 1988 > by Michael J. Mefford. If your like most, you probably got some floppies > full of utilities that PCMag was always putting out. > > Here is the syntax for the PCMag version: > > TOUCH filespec [/D date] [/T time] > date = month-day-year > time = hour[:minutes[:seconds]] > Default is system date and time. > > Mike

26 years, 2 months

Software Results Corp Unibus 68000 board?

by CLASSICCMP＠trailing-edge.com

Hi folks, I just found a "Software Results Corporation" Unibus (hex-height) board with an array of 32 2114 memory chips and a big fat 68000 chip on it. There's a COM5025 (UART?) and two 40-pin headers on the edge. Date codes are from early 1984, and there's a surprising amount of 54LS (and no 74LS) logic on the board, leading me to think that this may have been intended for the military market. Is this, by any chance, a coprocessor type board, or is it a "master" CPU? Am I imagining things, or has "Software Results Corporation" been mentioned on this list recently? -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/ 7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927

26 years, 2 months

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