1 Jul
2004
1 Jul
'04
4:13 a.m.
On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 13:47, Rob O'Donnell wrote:
At 11:26 01/07/2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
Well I've seen them now today. There's a big stack of HP ones which look
*old*. The Entria's still there, then there are a couple of NCD ones
that look to be 88k units. What I didn't see was any screens for them
:-/
I'll drop the chap an email and see whether there are displays lurking
elsewhere.
I have completely filled up the car with other stuff that was there
though - there were a few oddball Cromemco cards and manuals for
instance which looked worth saving. I need to unload the car and do a
proper inventory, as I was just throwing stuff into piles to take as
time was tight. Watch this space as save for a few items that are going
to the museum, the bulk of it I just need to find homes for :-)
Still hoping somebody wants some Xterms! I think
everything else has now
found a home (unless anyone *really* wants an old dot matrix printer!)
I'd take one or two, if you or somebody can arrange shipping (to Salford,
UK, I'd cover costs), just to play with. I have no use for all of them
though! Which are the best sort to have? Back in the day, after having seen one, I always used
to
want to make up a video wall out of BBC monitors (Microvitec Cubs are
nicely stackable) but never had anything to drive it with, nor enough
monitors! Maybe that's a project for somebody, assuming the "16 BBC type
monitors" are of this sort.
Now you've spooked me. A 16 screen video wall is the plan as a museum
exhibit - bar a few last minute arrangements I've got 16 Cubs lined up
that I can have from another source. I've been chatting about this over
on the BBC mailing list for a few weeks!
My plan is to Econet 16 BBCs together in a rack, with something
controlling them. Of course the hardware (and network!) is too slow for
anything like moving video, but I'm thinking I can get away with hooking
a video camera up to the controlling machine and let the public take
still captures.
Running numbers through my head, it seems to be a viable project anyway.
Just a case of finding the time to actually implement it! (It started
out as a simple scrolling message system, but then it had occurred to me
just how stackable Cubs are too! :-)
Microsoft's "remote desktop" under
Windows XP seems to manage to send sound
to the remote client (as long as you use the right version of the client)
so I assume it must be possible.. Just needs implementing under X by
somebody..
Well the other option is to network-boot Linux with a diskless PC. Given
the low cost of RAM these days and the speed of networks, I assume I
could just have a RAM disk of a few MB to hold the OS once running, and
that could contain all drivers for the local sound card (so it's
actually a diskless workstation, rather than a remote X display).
I just don't have the time to put something together, and I haven't seen
a good tutorial document that says how to do this (I've got a EPROM
burner of course, but I have no idea what I need to actually put in the
EPROM for a network card, or what I do in terms of making an OS image
file on the server which is presumably then transferred to the client by
the code in the network boot ROM)
cheers
Jules