Let me try this again

Hi All, Last week I was looking for someone to host some Data I/O manuals. Sorry about that, I had no idea that they were already on the web. I thought they were created by the person that gave them to me. So now I have some scanned pages that someone might want to host. I believe that these are pretty rare and kind of historic. And again I want to get them out there to be a part of the Great Record and not be misplaced here in the Great Pile. And as before, let me know if these are already available somewhere else. Now the story. Well about 8 years ago I was in my favorite Bay Area electronic surplus store - Mike Quinn Electronics. At the time, they were still in the Quonset hut at Oakland Airport. I bought a pile of books and manuals. And when I got home I discovered among the books 3 handwritten and xeroxed, double-sided sheets stapled together entitled "MINI-MINI COMPUTER". The six pages described the design of a computer built using four core planes from an IBM 1401. At the time it was written, these core planes were available from Mike Quinn's for less than $9 each. The pages had no date on them, just the author's name and address. In 1999 I decided to track down this Hal A. Chamberlin Jr. Hal (I learned) is the author of the well regarded book "Musical Applications of Microprocessors". And I DON'T KNOW, but maybe the same Hal that started "The Computer Hobbyist". I contacted Hal in 1999 (at the time he was in Korea) and this is some of what he said: ---------- Start Quote -------------------------- Hi, you've reached me. Where in the world did you find that address? That's where I lived when going to North Carolina State University junior and senior years! Right now I'm living in Korea but will be back in the 'States in a bit less than a year. The "MINI-MINI COMPUTER" is a paper design I did shortly after graduating in response to requests from hobbyists around the country about how to make a core memory unit function. It was a slimmed down version of the computer I had successfully built and run year earlier called the HAL-4096. MINI-MINI was described rather completely on 2-4 (don't remember exactly) hand-printed letter-size pages which I reproduced via blueprint machine. I filled about a dozen requests for copies but never heard of anybody actually building one. I have at least one set of the original blueprints in my archives in America. I take it from your by-line that you have a museum of sorts that concentrates on analog computation. MINI-MINI was strictly digital with 4000 (not 4K) 4-bit words of core memory. Each word could hold one octal digit plus a "flag" bit which was used to indicate the boundaries between words and whether a word was negative or positive. Thus it was a variable word length machine like an IBM 1620. Instructions were 10 digits long and consisted of 2-digit opcode and two 4-digit addresses. There was no accumulator; everything was memory-to-memory so one instruction could do a lot. Although MINI-MINI was probbly never built (at least not by me), HAL-4096 WAS built and ran from around 1970 until around 1979 when I moved from New Hampshire back to Raleigh (it was retired then and didn't make the move because wires in the core memory were corroding and breaking). I have some photos, a newspaper clipping, some of the homemade boards it used, perhaps a memory plane sample, and some software listings. It was a pretty complete system with full console, Selectric typewriter (and later a line printer), card reader, card punch, paper tape reader and punch, and modem (300 baud). Software included a full-featured assembler and BASIC interpreter, a version of which was remotely accessible via auto-answer modem (Bill Gates, eat your heart out - I beat ya by more than 2 years). There were tons of utilities and some experimental music synthesis software (the real reason it was built). I've still got much of the software on paper tapes, card decks, and printed listings. --------- End Quote -------------------------------------- I just contacted Hal again to nail down the date that these pages were written. And he said: --------- Start Quote ---------------------------------- I graduated with a BS in the Spring of 1970 so that would have been the Summer of that year. I believe that Mike Quinn had suggested that I write some plans for using IBM 1401 core memory planes which he had in abundance at the time and that was the result. It was really based on the then running HAL 4096 which used a larger IBM 1620 memory unit. That web site is run by my former business partner at MTU. The HAL 4096 wasn't really begun until 1968 (beginning of Junior year) when I got the core memory unit from Mike Quinn and some logic boards from IBM where I had worked the immediately preceeding Summer. What was shown at the Engineer's Fair was the core memory and ALU doing "something useful" (don't remember what it was) but the CPU didn't execute the full instruction set and have any useful software until 1969-1970. Again, feel free to do what you want with the MINI-MINI plans. --------- End Quote ------------------------------------ If these pages are not already available and someone would like to host them, let me know. Like I said before I'm not sure what the effect of many people trying to download this file would be, so I will give the filename to one person. And that person can make them available to anyone interested. The scans are a little rough but then the originals are 30 years old and copies from a blueprint machine. The 6 pages are 8.5x11 scanned at 300 dpi stored as .JPGs and zipped together for a total file size of about 15.5 MB!! Oh! and I'm on digest. Regards, --Doug And if I still have anyone's attention, does anyone know where I can find program to do Group 4 fax compression under Windows 98? Or a program to put a .PDF wrapper around scanned pages (for the budget conscious) under Windows 98? Thanks, --Doug ========================================= Doug Coward @ home in Poulsbo, WA Analog Computer Online Museum and History Center http://dcoward.best.vwh.net/analog Analogrechner, calculateur analogique, calcolatore analogico, analoogrekenaar, komputer analogowy, analog bilgisayar, kampiutere ghiyasi, analoge computer. =========================================