11 Jan
2020
11 Jan
'20
7:23 a.m.
Hi Dave,
Den l?r 11 jan. 2020 kl 14:03 skrev Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com>:
Mattis,
These are VDU472C which were produced with both Nokia and ICL badges. They
are very much a straightforward IBM3179 clone and have normal IBM coax
ports on the back.
They have 122-key PC style keyboards with a large plug. Not sure if they
are AT or XT style. A parallel printer port. Inside there is a M68000P12
CPU.
So an ?embedded system? with no floppies. I have it plugged into am IBM
3174 screen controller and can connect out to
Ahh. Then that one is much more modern than the Alfaskop 4110 that I have.
It is based on a 68A00 processor and loads everthing from the communication
processor. S41 series was designed in the laste seventies. Is the VDU472C
actually manufactured in Sweden like the rest of the Alfaskop series or
somewhere else. Does it say something on some kind of badge?
It would be nice to see a picture.
I know Matt Burke (9track.net) has plugged his SDLC 3174 controller into
a CISCO router and used CISCO SDLC encapsulation to pass data to a modified
Hercules.
This works for MVS but not MTS or VM.
OK. The 4101 comm processor only speaks BSC. Need other software to do SNA
/SDLC. On the other hand BSC is much easier to understand than the SNA
stuff. At least for me who is not used to IBMish. I did manage send a POLL
to the comm processor and received back a valid STATUS message.
Dave
/Mattis
*From:* Mattis Lind <mattislind at gmail.com>
*Sent:* 11 January 2020 12:15
*To:* Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com>; General Discussion: On-Topic and
Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
*Subject:* Re: Old Nokia/alfaskop 3270 terminal
Hi!
What kind of Alfaskop terminal do you have?
Incidentally, me and a friend has been working quite a lot with Alfaskop
terminals lately. I have been refurbishing a complete Alfaskop S41 terminal
cluster with terminal , floppy unit and terminal controller. In the process
I have dumped all PROMs, PALs and FPLAs so that my friend could create an
emulation of the system in MAME.
A bit of the project is described here:
https://github.com/MattisLind/alfaskop_emu
and here:
http://www.datormuseum.se/peripherals/terminals/alfaskop
This short clip show when we just recently managed to boot the terminal
and the communication processor.
https://youtu.be/6DPpZw8JOmI
Aside from getting emulation of the cluster we are working on building a
gateway to bridge IBM BSC to TN3270 so that the system could be used with
Hercules. Then also we are looking into creating hardware so that the
emulated communication processor could talk over the proprietary interface
used by the system with a real Alfaskop terminal.
So the answer to your question is that to get an Alfaskop running you need
the communcation processor and a floppy drive. There are some variants that
are more self contained. The older System S37 had a model which included
the emulation software in ROM. But I doubt that one had a setup menu. It
had very simple 8 bit TTL CPU.
Then the system 41 could run in standalone mode. But it still required a
floppy drive to load the software from.
I don't know much about the later models, but my understanding is that
those also booted from the communication processor, the 9101.
/Mattis
Den l?r 11 jan. 2020 kl 00:13 skrev Dave Wade via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org>:
Folks,
Can any one remember how to get an AlfaSkop terminal into local setup mode>
Dave Wade
G4UGM & EA7KAE