Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: On Feb 14, 2007, at 8:52 AM, djg at pdp8.net wrote: That's a damn fine device. By the way, I'm fairly certain that the Calcomp model number for the IBM 1627 plotter referenced on your page is 565. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL IBM sold both the 565 and 563 plotters as the 1627 models I & II. I've been looking for one (IBM branded) for over 5 years now without any luck. Bob

I bought two front panels from some type of computer from ebay for the switches and lights. After receiving them, I find they are too neat to tear apart. They were said to come from a telephone company central office. Does anyone recognize these? I can't find any names on them. http://www.dvq.com/oldcomp/photos2/tele_comp_panel1.JPG http://www.dvq.com/oldcomp/photos2/tele_comp_pnl1.JPG Thanks, Bob

Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Bob Rosenbloom wrote: Wow, those are nice. Interesting that there's an airflow warning light; I don't think I've seen that on a system before. Three CPUs on the same panel, too. Weird! Do share anything here that you may find out elsewhere - looks like it came from a pretty interesting system. p.s. Your line breaking seems to be busted in your email client - I had to split everything manually on reply :( cheers Jules Sorry about the broken lines, I'm using a web email service so I can waste time at work emailing! Here's some more photos. The back sides of the panels and the connector plugs that must have gone to the computer. I like the indicators that say "survivor"! Bob http://www.dvq.com/oldcomp/photos2/tele_comp_panel2.JPG http://www.dvq.com/oldcomp/photos2/tele_comp_pnl2.JPG http://www.dvq.com/oldcomp/photos2/tele_comp_pnl3.JPG

Look at photo number 7. Looks like an HP 1000 E Series machine. Too much other stuff in the lot though. Bob http://cgi.govliquidation.com/auction/view?id=1124213&convertTo=USD

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 21:01 -0800, Bob Rosenbloom wrote: Hey, that looks like a setup used to monitor the cannon used to fire chickens at aircraft windscreens! Peace, Warren E. Wolfe wizard at voyager.net

Hey All, On 14/02/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I would agree. It smells as though it is part of a SCADA/control system of some sort. Honeywell was the first thing that came to mind but I have only seem a small amount of Honeywell control gear - so could be completely wrong. It could also be from a Harris machine. I have no idea when Honeywell or Harris started producing control systems so the dates may invalidate everything I have typed so far. This was my initial assessment based on the way the wiring looms are tied. Since, the eagle eyed Jim has pointed out the inspetion date of 68. My 2c worth. Simon -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is the utility of the final product." Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh

On 16 Feb 2007 at 12:48, Simon Fryer wrote: TRW was the vendor that came to my mind, but there were a bunch of them in the 60's. L&N, Foxboro, Bailey, Westinghouse, GE as well as Honeywell (and possibly Moore) all had computerized process-control of some sort. That there is no nameplate fits in with SCADA/process control installations. Usually, this stuff was rack-mounted and built-to-fit the installation. The redundancy would probably put it no earlier than about 1967; I'm not aware of earlier redundant systems, but then, the history of SCADA and process control computers is pretty scanty. But it seems that most of the earlier process control applications used single general-purpose computers, such as IBM 1800s and 1710s. And, as far as I know, no one collects these industrial artifacts. Or so my failing memory tells me. :) Cheers, Chuck

In article <45D69017.9060704 at sbcglobal.net>, Bob Rosenbloom <bobalan at sbcglobal.net> writes: What uses a Kennedy tape drive? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <000e01c752b9$daa14d20$6600a8c0 at BILLING>, "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> writes: OK, I'm just not familiar with 9-track drives in the sense of who manufactures the guts that everyone uses. So were these used on PDP-11s? IBM machines? Control Data? You say pretty much everything, but I've never heard of Kennedy drives before. Is that because everyone else bought them from Kennedy and then OEMed them with their own label on them? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007, Richard wrote: Hughes used Kennedy 9100 drives in the AN/FYQ-93 system, which replaced SAGE. Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/

One of the odder things I've acquired over the years is a tape controller made bu a company called 'Dylon' that has an HPIB host interface. I forget what drive I have hooked up to it, I think it's a Kennedy. The interface is standard Pertec unformatted, so many drives would work. Anyway, the programming maual (I have it, and the service manual with full schematics) gives example programs for the HP9825 desktop calculator (!). For a joke I occe linked it to an HP71B pocket computer via an HP82169 HPIL-HPIB translator. It worked perfectly (of course). Not a lot of use for a 9-track tape drive on a pocket machine, but... -tony

Just curious - is the Star 8010 really the Alto III, I know the Star was delayed over and over again and the Alto III had to go toe to toe with the Xerox 850 wordprocessor only to lose to it in proposals. What I'm curious about is this disconnect where I don't clearly see if the Alto III ever did finally make it out, to be the Star 8010 or if the Star 8010 is what the Star group has originally set out to produce or were there some Alto III's ever produced? Curt

On Fri, February 16, 2007 18:45, Chuck Guzis wrote: One of my customers uses SCADA to control some of their machinery and I had no idea the name itself was that old - what's the history of it? -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

On 17 Feb 2007 at 19:38, Tim Shoppa wrote: It's too bad that no one seems to make a hobby out of collecting old process-control equipment. I helped get me through college by working as an instrumentation technician summers. Really primitive stuff--your basic tools were a portable potentiometer, optical pyrometer and your pocket thermometer--and a pen-cleaning wire. A lot of the stuff was probably from the 20's. L&N Micromax chart recorders/controllers (used a clockspring motor to run the works; basically an automatic clamp galvanometer in a wheatstone bridge), Askania hydraulic controls. Some of the more modern stuff was Brown Electronik (later became part of Honeywell), and L&N Speedomax, using mechanical chopper-stabilized amplifiers--and the very newest stuff was Moore pneumatic. The first non-human square root-extractor unit I ever saw was pneumatic (used to compute flow from differential pressure). Very high-tech in those days. Much of the equipment ran as rattle). Steel mills used to generate their own power by burning coke-oven (producer) gas. For some reason never made clear to me, one of the competing "standards" for AC distribution was 25Hz (both 50 and 110v). The most advanced bit of equipment that I saw at that time was used to measure the dewpoint of the hydrogen reducing atmosphere on the continuous hot-galvanize line. A tiny mirror was cooled by a refrigeration unit and a sample of the atmosphere was directed onto its surface. A phototube measured the degree of fogging. Cheers, Chuck

Brent Hilpert wrote: Lets not forget EDISON promoted DC as well. When you think about it, the RPM of the generator is the limiting factor. You can't have your moving parts move too fast. Or too slow -- hamster powered night light. http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html

Chuck Guzis wrote: And all the technical "savants" in Edison's time wanted AC to be at 133&1/3cps (8000cpm), not 60. These eggheads kept "proving" that 60Hz was impossible/impractical/whatever even after Tesla lighted the World's Fair. -- jd Fuller's law of cosmic irreversibility: 1 pot t == 1 pot p. 1 pot p != 1 pot t.

On 18 Feb 2007 at 16:41, Bob Bradlee wrote: You should have seen mercury-vapor lamps operating off of 25Hz. The electricians would drive them from all three mains phases, so the lighting on the ground didn't look too bad, but if you glanced up toward the roof, it was very disturbing. Cheers, Chuck

Bob Bradlee wrote: Came across the following while searching for info on 25Hz systems: http://www.nycsubway.org/tech/power/rotary.html http://www.nycsubway.org/tech/power/ Nice writeups about the NYC subway and it's power systems. The trains ran on DC but the power transmission was AC. It suggests there were some benefits of the lower frequency for the rotary-mechanical AC->DC conversion process. Apparently some of the 25Hz stuff was still in use into the mid-1990s. .. To make this mildly on-topic, those of us here can all take offense at the following quote: "In even later years, solid-state rectifiers of sufficient capacity for the traction power industry were developed, and substations became no more exciting than giant computer chips."

I don't find large chips to be of much interest. Now large boards of small chips are a differnt story :-) I believe (military?) aircraft used 400Hz-ish supplies because they could then use smaller (and lighter) transformers and smoothing capacitors. It can be a problem for the military radio enthusiasts who want to power up such sets now. And of course it's one advantage of the modern SMPSU. The transformer is much smaller than a 50Hz (or 60Hz) transformer of the same output ratings, and the smoothing capacitors are smaller too. Over here I think it's officially 25Hz, but for much the same reason. Medium and large telephone exchanges produced that supply using a motor-generator set running from the (50V DC) lead-acid battery that powered the rest of the exchange. Small private exchanges produced it half-wave rectified mains (I have one of the ex-GPO converters somewhere). -tony

I think the main problem is that it's difficult to recreate enough of the 'process' at home to be able to use this equipment, so it would be a static collection. Of course some meaursing instruments can be used for other purposes, but then people do collect measuring instruments. Not quite the same thing, but I did rescue msot of the control system from, I think, an X-ray diffraction device. All discrete transitors, status indicators were DM160 indicator valves, configured by a patchboard. I got the paper tape punch and reader (mechancially the mechanisms used on the side of a Friden flexowriter, mounted on rack panesl with their own motors, and the printer, which was made by Victor Comptometer and seems to be essentially an electromechanical adding machine with solenoids over the key levers. I know the Honeywell-Brown 'Continuous Balance' chart recorder amplifier with the mechnical chopper. It drives a 2-phase induction motor, of course the output of the amplifier is phase-related to the chopper, which is phase-related to the mains (the choopper coil was driven by the heater winding on the mains transformer). One motor winding was driven from the amplifder output, the other from a winding on the mains transformer. Much the same circuit was used by various other ocmpanies, I mentioned I haf an old Houston Instruments X-Y analogue plotter in another thread. The 2 (valved) amplifiers in that unit have mechanical choppers in the input stage and woek in much the same way. -tony

On Feb 14, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Bob Rosenbloom wrote: I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's a control panel from something like an IBM Coupling Facility (which wouldn't have existed as a product in 1968) for a 360, which would have had "channels" and was available custom in triplex processor configurations. References: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#26 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#7 http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/3-1.htm http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/bg12.cfm http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/ trans/tq/&toc=comp/trans/tq/2004/01/q1toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/TDSC.2004.4 ok bear