30 May
2010
30 May
'10
12:17 p.m.
>> 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've never seen a 4051, but I possess a 4052. I bought it in a clear
out at work rather a lot of years ago, and it's still my favourite
machine in my collection.
I had a dig around yesterday, and I found some of the stuff for it:
4050 Series Reference Manual
4050 Series Operator's Manual
4051 Option 1 (Data communications interface) operation manual
4052/2A/4/4A Service Manual (technical data)
4052/2A Service Manual (parts list and schematics)
Those last two I bought from Tektronix soon after I acquired the
machine. I don't begrudge them the more than 100 pounds each I paid for
the two manuals, but I think it was pretty stingy of them to ship them
without binders. Punched three-hole, too, so hard to find binders (In
Europe, including here in the UK, we mostly use four holes at 8cm spacing)
I also found a couple of tapes I made of programs - mostly fractals, but
I think the Christmas card from the magazine is on there, and a partly
finished program to draw maps in various projections.
What I haven't found yet, but am pretty sure I have:
A box of tapes from when the machine was new, with original software
Some microfiches of Tek manuals, including a large number of issues of
the 4050 Series Software Library Newsletter (later Tekniques magazine).
It was one of these that I printed out in order to type in the
Christmas card program.
The microfiches were given me by someone in Tek UK when I was
researching the talk I gave at the VCF in Santa Clara in 1998. I never
wrote and thanked them, for which I feel horribly guilty.
If someone has the equipment to scan microfiches, and is prepared to put
in the time to sort the stuff and get it online, I shall be happy to
hand them over. I could probably scan some manuals too - I think the
scanner at work will do the A3 or ANSI B pages.
It looks as though my next project will be to try and link the serial
port of my 4052 (which is part of the ROM expansion backpack, of all
things) to a machine on which I have internet access, or from which I
can store on media that I can read on a machine with internet access.
It's not until I try something like this that I realise just how poorly
connected my collection is...
> 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!
That is a great find! The 4052 has a very nice bitslice processor that
mostly emulates a 6800 (the decimal adjust instruction is missing, and
some simple memory management is added), so I suspect that a lot of 4052
ROM code is ported directly from the 4051.
Also, there is an effort here to put together a museum
and archive
the efforts of this wonderful company:
http://vintagetek.org/
Site looks promising. I wondered about signing up, but it asks me when
I worked at Tek (I didn't) and whereabouts in the USA I live (I don't).
OTOH I couldn't see any useful things like a mailing list or
discussion forums.
For the moment, I think I'll keep an eye on the site and see how it evolves.
Philip.
PS I think the 4050 series are great machines, and I'd love to get
together with people here and form some sort of user group.