11 Aug
2012
11 Aug
'12
2:20 p.m.
On 11/08/2012 20:58, Tony Duell wrote:
Without knowign what he machien is, I have no idea how
hard it would be
to track down (techncial) docuemntation. But I would guess that given
enough time it would eb possible to reverse-engieer it and deduce the
instruciton set ('mini' to me implies soemthing where the CPU si built
from MSI/SSI chips, so it is possible to understand it).
Don't bet on it!. I would
seriously go through the manual and be sure
before powering up the amchine, even for a few minutes.
Not sure if we have that for that particular mini. There is one disk
pack.... Ah... So what you are really saying is tht uou could run the ASR33 as a
terminal on some other machine. Sure. But why make it something mofern?
Why not a PDP11 or PDP8 of some flavour?
My personal opinion is that something local and unusual would be nice.
As we are in Manchester, for a long time one of the spiritual homes of
ICL, and as there appear to be no ICL1900's left running anywhere, i
would haev thought that Dave Holdsworth's ICL1900 emulator with George
would be a most appropriate machine... It used to live at
www.icl1900.co.uk but that appears to be down...
Why not? Is it impossible to write find the OS
anywhere else?
Or to writ
at least soemthign that talks to the termianl ports?
Several reasons think:-
1. Lack of documentation 2. Money
Unless you are peaying for the
volunteer's time, there should be little
money invovled. I woudl argue that taking on such a project would eb very
dducational, and that a numebr of people would jump at the chance.
3. The "Museum" things we have
already mentioned.
Any museum policy ytat ptrevents an otherwiese worthelss machine
from
being got to run again is fundamentally broken IMHO.
A vvery
clean ASR33 is not good. It may eman it's never seen
the business
end of an oil can...
They have oil in the proper places.... simulation (Raspberry PI based perhaps) to give folks
the
experience
of
using a TTY with auithentic old software?
Wait a second... If you have the
'authentic old software',
why can it not
be run on the mini?
Or even just link 2 ASR33's mback to back with a
suitable PSU for the
current loops and demonstrate them as a communications device.
-tony
--
Dave Wade G4UGM
Illegitimi Non Carborundum
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