27 May
2010
27 May
'10
3:26 a.m.
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 23:20:10 -0700
From: derschjo at mail.msu.edu
To:
Subject: Re: Looking for Tektronix 4051 programs...
Clay Archer wrote:
I will dig around here and may be able to help with some friends on this. I am hooked up
with a few ex Tek guys and located here near the Tek campus. We meet Friday nights for
pizza and beer, talk ham radio and
other geeky stuff.
Also, there is an effort here to put together a museum and archive the efforts of this
wonderful company:
http://vintagetek.org/
Needless to say Tektronix is not cooperating. They have been purchased by a conglomerate
and don't seem to care too much about history.
Our local electronics store (Norvac) was cleaning out their back room and I got my hands
on this bookshelf set of Tek manuals:
4050 Series Graphics System Reference Manual (This one covers the BASIC interpreter
syntax, and a few examples)
4051 Preliminary Service Manual (This one has some really well done cartoon hand drawings,
nice flow charts, and schematics)
T4002 Graphics computer Terminal (3" thick and looks complete, users manual, service
manual and a section on DEC interface options to PDP-8, 4803 interface unit)
If this material is not up already, whats the recommended workflow, to get these into
Bitsavers or the BAMA archive ? Questions like recommended scan resolution, output to pdf
or general comments from others who have done this.
Randy
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a cute idea. Combine multiple calendars with Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multicalendar&ocid=…
I have been fortunate in acquiring and restoring
a Tek 4051 recently.
I had used one of these back in '77 to '82 and I still have some
documentation, and I found other manuals on bitsavers.org but have not
located any software. Do you know of any source on-line? I found
references on this site (Feb. 2009) from other users talking about
building an archive of software for the 4051.
I have keyed in a few short programs to test the vector graphics, but it
would be nice to have the original standard pack tape programs. Even
printouts would be helpful. I recall when I last used a 4051 back in
the early '80's we had the ability to dump & load programs using the
serial port, and the ability to un-secret the programs. If I can find
this information again I would be glad to provide it to help build a
software library for this fantastic system.
Thanks,
C. Archer
I was working on software to dump 4051 tapes over a serial port or the
GPIB bus, as well as an emulator. Both are still works in progress
(progress being very slow at the moment) based on disassembling the
system ROMs and going through the service manuals. I recently came into
possession of the actual source code for the 4051's ROMs on microfiche,
which I've passed on to Al for archiving. Looking forward to reading
through those once he's done!
I'm hoping that once I work out enough to write a basic emulation, I'll
know enough about the hardware to write some assembly code for the real
4051 to allow raw dumps of 4051 tapes (and hopefully writing them
back!). But I have a few other things stealing time from me at the
moment, so it won't be in the near future...
Josh