On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 10:15:47AM -0700, Sellam Ismail wrote: I have to agree. As one who was VERY recently in the job market (as a Java programmer), I was stunned by how much has changed since I entered the working world. Basically, if you're warm, don't drool, and know how to pronounce "Serializable", you will be accepted graciously somewhere -- probably not at your dream job, and definitely not at as high a salary as someone who knows how describe the difference between a static inner class and an anonymous inner class, but you'll at least get a decent entry-level software development job somewhere, making good money. People are DESPERATE for manpower. You can wear jeans to your interview. You can have long hair. You can (as I did) drop out of college without fear of retribution. You can (as I did) have majored in something completely unrelated to computers. You don't even need references, really -- especially since a lot of companies are afraid to give references anymore (there have been lawsuits. If you give a good reference for a bad employee, the company that hired him might sue you. If you give a bad reference, regardless of whether the employee is good or bad, the employee might sue you. Sigh.) As long as you actually know what you're doing, you'll get a job. If you follow through, do your job well and demonstrate that you're intelligent, you'll work your way up to a senior level position in five years. Yes, five years is "Senior" here. It's really that scary. I don't suspect it'll stay this way forever, of course, but for now it's frighteningly simple to get into a computer job in Silicon Valley. I don't know how it is elsewhere in the country, but I suspect it's at least similar. -Seth

Mike Cheponis <mac(a)Wireless.Com> wrote: Hi You do have to be smart enough to learn how to steal without breaking serious laws. You have to learn how to turn on friends. You need to be really lucky. But, most of all, you have to be driven. For Will While I work as a non-degreed engineer, without personal references, I'd have a hard time getting past HR. One still needs the knowledge that you'd get from college. I have taken many extension courses as well as read and understood many upper college level books. I've never stopped learning, even though I left college in the middle. Although, I have a better excuse than most, I was, also, tired of the entire school thing. Find a way to stay in school. One other piece of advice. Don't listen to counselors. They wouldn't be doing the job there doing if they really knew what they were doing. Decide what you want from college and go for it. Dwight

Re: ... Agreed. While I'd hire Dwight in an instant (if we were hiring), and while we have at least 2/5 of our programmers who don't have college degrees, I'd say: get that degree! One non-college grad here said he finds that after about 5 years of experience, most places don't care that he didn't have a degree. (He also said that the places that cared the most were the ones he least wanted to work at: large companies.) Stan Sieler sieler(a)allegro.com www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html www.allegro.com/sieler

Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> wrote: Hi I guess I'd have to put more emphasis of taking courses that you thought mattered over getting the degree. I don't know if I'd choose the same things that Sellam would choose but then he isn't me and I'm not him. I think he would still choose the right things because he felt they were right and not because some idiot consoler thought they were right. I should have noted that although I take extension courses, I don't take them for credit. I'm not there for a A or a C. I'm there for the understanding that I feel will make me better able to deal with the things I come across. I know when I am making progress or not, the grade doesn't. That is why it is important to realize that the things that are right for Sellam may not be right for me. I wouldn't tell him what was right for him but I might show him the path that I found. The point is, don't stay in college for the degree. It does have some value but if that is the only reason you are staying there, it isn't a good enough reason. It may get you a job, that you may not have even been interviewed for otherwise but you are not likely to stay at that job for long. One of two things will happen. You will either realize that isn't what you wanted or your employer will realize that you were not what they wanted. Don't stay in college because I told you so. I just think that you are missing the real reason for being there. I just suggest that you look for that reason before you make other judgments. If you treat college like a chance to look into those thing that you feel will expand yourself, you can't loose. The rewords of learning go way beyond monetary gains. Find what knowledge you are looking for in college and take course towards that goal. If you happen to get a degree along the way, OK fine. If not, you still have the knowledge. Just an opinion and most have one. Dwight

Foo with all this sideways thinking on college, not college, etc. How do you get a "good" job, not just money, but something you like etc.? Why throw around a lot of resume's, then act like a fish and hope you get caught by a nice fisherman. Turn the experience around and find places YOU want to work at, then find a way to work there. The hard part is figuring out which is the good place, getting the job more a matter of determination and effort. I've been working for about 35 years, and I still don't have a good picture of what I want to do when I grow up. I do have a good idea of what the company would be like though. Number one factor is the person in charge, do they do their job, ie manage and let you engineer?

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Pat Barron wrote: I would say my expereince agrees. ;-) This is exactly what 30 years of work history has been about for me. Often the new employer and I were 'aquainted' in some way, my current position was a direct result of my collecting activity. I'd also say the best jobs I've had/have more or less found me. Allison

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Well, I'd be sure the prospective boss has a sense of humor and doesn't have a PhD himself. My take on what a PhD tells your prosepective employer, though yours may, at least to some extent, be quite correct as well, is that the holder of the PhD has on at least one occasion completed (that word comes up a lot!) a pretty major piece of work as specified by his supervisors, with a minimum of intervention from above, availing himself of whatever resources were needed and producing the desired result within the allocated time. There are a lot of perfectly competent engineers who could not do that, under any circumstances, and for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's not directly taught in school, though you have to do some of the necessary things in order to graduate. The first thing, of course is to define and adequately limit the scope of the work that's chosen. The second is to plan out the task and stick to the schedule. There are numerous tasks that are a part of this work that have parallels in the corporate environment. The folks who advance the quickest are the ones who best know how to "get the job done" even if it means doing things they don't already know how to do. Those are the guys who've had the experience described above as the task of getting the PhD. Having the PhD doesn't guarantee you can do it, (personnel people frequently wish they had a guarantee) but it does show everybody you've done it once. I see employers today looking at a bachelor's degree as proof that you showed up pretty consistently over a nominall 4-year period. That's a major concern to employers nowadays. Having the bachelor's degree doesn't guarantee you know or can do a given thing, but it is more likely in the case of a graduate than in one who's not graduated, yet. The same is true of a master's degree, though that's often taken to mean one has addtional course work making him more of an expert in the discipline in which he got the MS. Perhaps that's true, but I'm convinced it's more assurance that the MS-holder has gotten through a fairly large piece of work, as opposed to a bunch of small ones. Does that sound far off what you see where you sit? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Ford <mikeford(a)socal.rr.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 1:39 PM Subject: Re: Getting a good job would

"Eric J. Korpela" wrote: If you amend that to "...learned more about a very specific topic in that extra 4+ years..." then I'd agree. The principle problem with Ph.D.s is that their knowledge base tends to be as narrow as any other new grads; the only distinction being that they have significantly more depth in one very specific area. Worse, during the past four years that they've been focused on that area they've typically been in the "simplifying assumptions" world that's so prevalent in academia; the difficulty being that more often than not they simplify the problem into oblivion and consequently have little useful to offer when it comes to delivering product. I've had more than one occasion where such people were literally reduced to tears in design meetings as a consequence of being crucified by some staff engineer. "...drop in the lap of a typical PhD who is familiar with the problem area..." Certainly anytime someone already has the proper frame of reference it takes less time for them to spin up; this was useful to me once when I needed formal correctness proofs of optimizations being performed by a code generator for a parallel processor. I went to Rice, got myself someone whose Ph.D. was in that very field and had them generate the (dis)proofs. When they were done we tried to find other things for them to do, but they were only marginally more effective than our new crop of four-year grads. The person in question is now making use of their Ph.D. by teaching undergraduate CS courses. I don't see any evidence that the skill set is particularly different; I haven't noticed that holding a Ph.D. makes one any more adept at solving problems or even particularly good at operating the coffee maker. All the Ph.D. represents is an additional four years of training in an environment that is skewed from the one found in industry; the only place where this would be an advantage is if they were to remain in that academic environment -- which many (eventually) do. Of course, my bias is actually broader than this. Given the choice between someone with four years of experience and someone with no experience and an advanced degree I'll generally pick the guy with real world experience. Given the choice between two people with new four year degrees, one with a 4.0, the other with a 2.9 because they were working in the field in order to put themselves through school I'll generally take the guy with the 2.9. It's all about what you can do and how well it fits with my needs. Everything else is meaningless. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97

On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Carlos Murillo wrote: Well, consider what you were dealing with; politicians and economics typically appear to live in their own strange little worlds, far from reality. Do you atually expect them to believe that electrons can't be bribed or that such people as Kirchoff could possibly know more than they know about anything? Now, on the other hand, I'm sure that they, along with the marketing people, believe that electricity is something that comes from great big glowing lightbulbs that people carry around in wagons, wheelbarrows, etc., and these people also expect us believe this as well. Note: the aforementioned is in reference to the inane "Electricity: You use it, now you choose it" commercials and printed advertisements pertaining to people being able to choose which utility company to purchase their electricity from. -- R. D. Davis rdd(a)perqlogic.com http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd 410-744-4900

"Eric J. Korpela" wrote: Perhaps. After all, the field that I received *my* Ph.D. in was CS, and the joke at the time was that only non-sciences tack "science" onto the end of the name of their field, hence "computer science", "social science", "space science" and the like. You don't often hear people refer to "physics science", "chemistry science" and the like :-) YMMV. I'm an empiricist; I call 'em as I see 'em. Is the typical Ph.D. more clueful than the typical four year? Sure. Is the typical Ph.D. more clueful that a four year with four years of experience? Generally not. It really has a lot to do with the dumbing down of CS coursework since the late 70's. I haven't observed that any sort of degree or lack thereof immunizes against being out of touch with reality. Something else about this statement puzzles me; there's the implication that Ph.D. != engineer. I hold one in my field and identify as an engineer, so I'm an existence proof the the intersection of the two is a non-null set. Again, YMMV. In my experience there's nothing about someone having a Ph.D. which makes them particularly more adept at becoming facile with a new problem space than anyone else. If you're asserting that a new Ph.D. is better equipped that a new four-year I'll agree, but again, if the assertion is that the new Ph.D. is better off than the four-year-plus-four of experience it simply doesn't match my experience. Both those statements apply to anyone, regardless of what sort of degrees they might hold. Uh, no. That fits in the category of "don't keep them around". It's technicians that I expect that sort of behavior from, and they don't come into my office, they come into the office of someone four steps down the food chain. So-called "self-starting" is required of everyone. The person I was referring to was not and is not an idiot. They are a counterexample to what seems to be an assertion that Ph.D.'s a mythically endowed with something which makes them superior to people who don't have them. I have *no doubt* that in some fields this is the case, but it's not in my industry segment. Most innovation in my field comes *from* industry, not academia, so anyone who would choose to spend another four years in that setting is viewed with something approaching suspicion -- which is why there's a tiny difference in the average starting salaries for new four-year vs. Ph.D. holders which essentially reaches a delta of zero after five years. I don't hire anyone to do visual basic code. I hire people to work on formal verification tools, superscalar processor design and mission critical systems. Nobody is "wasted"; I don't think we have anyone on technical staff who doesn't cost us six figures so "wasting" someone is an expensive luxury. People are given projects which stress them; if I ask someone what they're doing and the answer doesn't routinely include the phrases "...trying to figure out..." then it's time to give them something more challenging to do. Uh, no. I treat everyone the same: tell me what you can do, I'll ask you to do 115% of that, and we'll go from there. That's the reason we generally credit for having a low turnover rate on technical staff. Right, which is the same training that the guy with the four year degree has done, save for the fact that he's been doing it in industry on a technical team with people who have a responsibility to see to it that he's given the skills he needs to succeed -- or is assigned to something more suitable. Thanks for making my argument for me. *ROFL* I'm trying to think of the last time that I worked on a project where 65+ hour weeks didn't have to be sustained for the lifetime of the project, and for the life of me I think it was 1982. Avant! wasn't all that atypical with it's unspoken requirement that people turn in 80+ hour weeks even when it wasn't crunch time. The difference I see is that if you're late on your thesis you can add time, a luxury that isn't afforded in industry. I've got quite a few (just shy of half the technical staff), but they work for me not because they have Ph.D.s but because they've demonstrated the ability to produce results across the strangely broad range of problems that we address. However they're *no more able* to do so than their contemporaries with six year, four year or even no degrees. This may be due to a sampling error; most technical people in this organization have more than 12 years of experience and the newbies are never coddled but rather immersed into mainstream projects with assigned mentors. With apologies to Fred Brooks, there's no silver bullet for most interesting technical problems. This thread began with assertions regarding the relevance of degrees in the current job market, and someone tweaked your sensibilities with respect to holders of doctorates (for whatever reason -- as I said, I've got one and I didn't feel that it was a completely unreasonable slam). If your assertion is that a newly stamped out Ph.D. is more clueful than a new four-year the odds are good that you're correct, but it hardly makes them an ubergeek and in most industrial settings the delta between the two converges quickly. I brought this up at a staff dinner last night; of 30 people present more than half of us had Ph.D.s. *All* of us agreed that if we were faced with the choice *today* of pursuing an advanced degree or going to industry we'd forgo the degree or pursue it as a background task for purely emotional reasons. *That* is the economic reality of the industry that I live in. Cheers, Chris. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97

At 80+ you still get to go home. It gets hard when 130+ is required for more than a few weeks in a row. My personal record is 152 work hours (yes, conscious and working, not sleeping or eating) in a single week. I hope to never have to find out whether I'm too old to break it. If you aren't sleeping in bubble wrap under a desk with a guy holding a machine gun walking the halls, you haven't had a long day. :) But, of course, academia is easy. I can only think of one project I've worked on that had flexible deadlines. Of course that was very much to its detriment. When you're late for a delivery required to support a launch, your project and your thesis go away. You deliver an instrument, or you deliver an inert model with equivalent mass and vibrational properties. Guess which one you build first. Industry doesn't have a monopoly on sink or swim. Could be a selection effect. Maybe we get the cream of the crop in PhDs here. Maybe we require them to be more the ubergeek than is usual. I see no contradiction in that, those bright enough to sucessfully complete a PhD and be sucessful in industry would have likely succeeded without one. I might answer the same way if I didn't think mine had gotten me anything. Question: Half of the 30 people present had PhDs, what fraction of your new hires do? Another one: Do those 15+ PhDs on the staff think their primary skill is making a simple project last two years? Eric

If course it has a negative impact, both physically and psychologically. The question is, which has the greatest impact a couple weeks lack of sleep or failure of a major project. (Of course I'm talking management side. Even here, the staff engineers work a 40 hour week in general. For the scientist, it's the culmination of 3-10 years of work.) The bulk of politicians seem unaware and take the claims of the high tech industry leaders at face value. If you haven't called your congress critters with your concerns, you should. If course, here in CA, your congress critters won't listen to a constituent without a briefcase full of unmarked bills. People in small states have more clout. Eric

Richard Erlacher wrote: This is very true, and hardly a new phenomena. It was 1982 when I heard my VP of Engineering mutter the phrase "The logic analyzer you want costs $50,000, but engineering overtime is free". It would be difficult to claim that the situation has improved since. I'd agree, save for the fact that I can't really buy "cheap" labor in the local market. The vast majority of B1-B holders make the same amount as a US citizen because the immigration laws require it. The only way to tap into the cheap market is to go the HCL route, where you get a couple of token B1-B holders deposited on site who lob most of the work over the pond to some guy getting paid in rupees. While that model works for very specific tasks (like getting something ported to a new platform), it sucks for others. I'm not sure it's any different from any other market. When the skills you have become a commodity item then the only way to avoid suffering economically is to evolve a new set of skills which are not. It's certainly the case that this statement is true of most managers, but that's largely because their management (in response to their shareholders) are holding their feet to the fire (usually indirectly, via stock valuation and bonuses). That's in response to all the competing firms doing the same, including the guy in Madras whose banging out the same number of hours but costing less to do it. This isn't meant to be a defense of the situation; I'm just utterly unclear on how one makes it better when someone in the next country over has more or less the same skill set and is willing to work long hours for less money -- save, as I said earlier, to keep retooling ourselves with new skills in new technologies. Actually, people *do* understand you taking laterals -- it's considered a damning comment on the prospects of the project that you're leaving, its management, the company in general or all of the above. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97

Jerome Fine replies: Hey - are you advocating that we spend some time with our spouses and get to know our children and grandchildren. Now that is totally contrary to the work ethic. We might also wind up being happy and stop suffering from afluenza. Now you are try to use reverse psychology on us. I think everyone should have placed on their tombstone: "This person was dedicated to the job and gave everything to the company. Death came as a joyful end to a dedicated career and the family is now able to spend the income and the insurance money which there was never time enough to enjoy. This person is not missed since he/she was not around in any case." Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine

It was thus said that the Great Marvin once stated: Why do you hope he is jesting? Unless you actually *enjoy* slaving away for an employer who forces 60+ hour weeks ... -spc (Who was once told by my partner that he would rather have me show up at 9 am and be useless for the rest of the day than show up in the afternoon and actually get stuff done ... )

I don't know where this business of a 32-40 hour work week comes from. The only time I got away with 40 or fewer hours was when I was in the military or when I worked for the government at various levels. Other than that, my work week more often than not ranged between 80 and 120 hours, and longer if I was consulting for several clients at once. Moreover, even when I was on a relatively stabile project in the aerospace industry, I had only to wait until 1/4 of my allotted time had passed, for the "powers that be" to pull half my budget for use in a proposal (since R&D and proposals both came out of the same "new business acquisition expenditures" account. That meant that, having burned 1/4 of my personnel budget. I had to dismiss all my help and do the technical and some of the management work myself, keeping only one other fellow, usually a sharp dresser, so he could attend all the meetings and allow me to do effectively all the useful work. Since I took some math in college, I quickly learned that, while it was fun to work on the IR&D, I could get an extra $80 per hour consulting on the outside after everybody was gone from the plant. That compared favorably with the $00 per hour I got for spending my nights working on the IR&D. That's gone up some, I guess, but those were the numbers in '89. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Marvin <marvin(a)rain.org> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 9:58 PM Subject: Re: Getting a good job than inconsideration *really* away well

I am the proud owner of a HP85 after a friend persuaded a country rubbish dump operator that it really belonged in a museum or something similar. Seems to work ok, found a listing for a fractal program on the web and it worked after I corrected a typo in the listing. (And added a line to clear the graphics screen at the start of each run. I haven't been able to test the printer properly, but it appears ok, and I can't test the tape drive because I don't have any media. Anyone out there know 1) Where (if?) I can get tape media for it? 2) Any software about? 3) Any expansion modules. Seems to be an original HP85 (85A?) S/N 2204B 38784 No idea where it came from originally. Possibly a local govt office. Came First HP I've been able to find, nice little machine.... Cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au

At 05:55 PM 7/2/00 +0100, Tony wrote: I wouldn't say *most* software came on ROMs. There were a lot of ROMs for it but they usually included low level routines for handling plotters, printers, special I/O, matrix routines and the like. There is/was TONS of software for the HP 85, including Training Paks and Solutions books. There was also a lot of software availble directly from HP that they wrote to control various HP test equipment. There are a number of other interfaces for the 85. There are both DCE and DTE RS-232 interfaces, a GPIO (General Purpose I/O with 16 parallel lines that can be used as input or output or both) and a HP-IL interface. There's also a plug-in MODEM for it. Probably the strangest plug-in is the CPM module. It has it's own Z-80 CPU and 64k of memory. I just got one but I don't have a manual for it and I haven't had time to experiment with it. (Does anyone have a manaul for it?) Joe

At 10:46 AM 7/2/00 -0700, Jim wrote: Yes, the HP 75 uses a CMOS version of the HP 85 CPU. In fact, when you bought the assembly langauge programming material for the HP75 from HP they included a copy of the assembly language book for the HP 85. I'd like to see an emulator for it. I doubt HP would care, they've been good about giving their permission for people to copy manuals and what not. I know several people that have gotten HPs permission to copy stuff. If you're serious about writing the emulator I can check with them and find out who to talk toat HP about getting permission to copy the ROMs. Joe

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See, for example, http://www.dreamretail.com/cgi-win/dream44.exe/~p009000 123473 -- although we're talking CDN $s.

At 08:03 PM 7/2/00 +0930, you wrote: Yes, Any DC-100 tape will work in it, after you format it, including DEC tapes. Yes. lots but none is posted on the web that I know of. Beware that the HP cassettes are very prone to broken belts and shedding their media so original tapes may not be usable. Yes, There's lots of them still available. Check Eb-bay. I haven't priced other modules but the HP-IB interfaces seem to be only bringing about $15 right now. Yes, it's an 85A. It only has 16k of memory. HP must have sold a zillion of the HP-85s. They turn up all over the place. Yes, they are but they have two problems. The "rubber" feed wheel on the tape drive turns to goo and the two belts that operate the printer wear out. You can test the printer by pressing the "TEST" button. It should display and print the full character set. Joe

At 07:10 PM 7/3/00 +0100, Tony wrote: That's been one of my long term projects. Does anyone have a tapes that I'll donate so that I can copy them? Hmmm. interesting. I don't think I've ever seen an 85 with an electrical fault. Except for the tape drives and printers they seem to run forever . Joe

(IIRC) can support worth copying any anyone have a tapes that Some of the HP 85 software came on diskettes. My HP Regression Analysis Pac has 5 1/4 inch diskettes for the HP 83, 85 and 87, which is a good thing since the oxide on the tape is so deteriorated that the tape won't read. I'll teledisk the files to anyone who's interested, subject to the usual copyright disclaimers. I'd like to get the RA Pac copied onto a usable tape, so if anyone's willing, I'll send a blank tape and a diskette for copying. -W

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Joe wrote: The only exceptions that I can think of are hard-sectored, group-code- recorded, variable-speed, or double-density-128-byte-sectored. All of these being controlled by the hardware and not TeleDisk. - don

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 3:40 AM Subject: Re: HP 85 stuff that the so Ok, I'll keep that in mind. I'm going to try and track down some NOS, bound to be a fair bit floating around. No, I don't have any of the addons for the machine, I'll be looking for them now that I know what to look for. wheel on I'm going to pull the thing down and check that. Copyed a prev msg about a replacement. Whatever works. should Printer seems ok. left outputs Ok, I'll keep it in mind if it ever plays up. and risk sounds good. Unusual. a Hmmm, that has possibilities.. I am also lead to believe the 85 can talk to various pieces of HP test equipment, and that they share a common bus. (With the right interface of course). the and you'll Ok, thanks for that. Often the worst part of fixing (ptbl tv for instance) is not the fault, but getting the case either on, off or both. With some stuff it's like getting an egg back into it's shell. cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au netcafe(a)tell.net.au ICQ: 1970476

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"Eric J. Korpela" <korpela(a)ellie.ssl.berkeley.edu> wrote: HP has used at least three protocols for HP-IB disk drives: Amigo, CS/80, and SS/80. Some models of disk drives, such as the HP 9134, have variants to support different protocols. I think the HP-8x computers need SS/80. IEEE-488.1-1987 is the definitive reference. Print copy is $60 for non-members, PDF is $90 for non-members. http://standards.ieee.org/ Yes, if you wrote suitable software. Most (all?) IEEE-488 cards for PCs support acting as a controller or a device, but software support for acting as a device tends to be pretty minimal. It's theoretically possible to have multiple controllers on a bus, with only one as an active controller at any given time, through the use of the TCT (Take ConTrol) message. However, I've never seen this done.

Que? Video cable, what video cable>??? It's an integrated terminal with detached keyboard. Allison

At 06:40 PM 7/4/00 +0100, Tony wrote: My HP85B works perfectly with an HP9121 dual floppy drive. It is also the only mass storage device I can use, since the pinch roller in the tape drive disintegrated and I haven't got down to fixing it; I don't even know what diameter it is supposed to be. My 85B has the following plugins: 82909A 128K RAM module 82937A HPIB interface 82936A ROM drawer with "I/O", "Advanced prgm" and "plotter/printer" ROMS. I am looking for the math and assembler ROMS. 82940A GPIO interface. I have manuals for all of these, as well as the owner's and programming manual for the 85B. I am looking for the two tapes that comprise the software of the HP 3056DL data logging system. This system consisted of one HP 85B and one or two HP 3421 data acquisition and control units. -snip- A word of caution: the 16K RAM module intended for the HP85A can damage the HP85B. This is clearly stated in one of the manuals. I would not be surprised if it was actually the same module with an internal DIP jumper for DTE/DCE selection; several serial interfaces from that era (such as the HP 82164) had that option. I want one of those, ...and one of these too. I've seen two show up on eBay, but my pockets weren't sufficiently deep. Mine talks perfectly to both of my 3421's (which have the HP-IB option). I think Joe Rigdon told me that they can talk to floppy drives that support the "amigo" command set. I've also used it to talk to a 59306A relay actuator, a 5328A counter, and a 59313A A/D converter. Thanks too, Tony. This will be handy when I get to fix that pinch roller. carlos.

Hello All, I have a bit of a weird problem, I'm trying to make a 2nd bootable system disk containig RSX-11M+. I have an 11/83 with 2 RD53's and 1 RD54, and the system is on one of the RD53's. I booted [6,54]brusys.sys and then used DSC to copy the contents to the 2nd RD53. DSC did not report any error. Then when trying to boot du2 (the 2nd RD53), nothing happens besides a number of retries to access the boot information. DSC is supposed to copy the boot information as well as the data, so I'm wondering what I do wrong. Thanks, Ed -- The Wanderer | Geloof nooit een politicus! wanderer(a)bos.nl | Europarlementariers: zakken- http://www.bos.nl/homes/wanderer | vullers en dumpplaats voor Unix Lives! windows95/98 is rommel! | mislukte politici. '96 GSXR 1100R / '97 TL1000S | See http://www.bos.nl/homes/wanderer/gates.html for a funny pic. of Gates!

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Hello Mike On 30-Jun-00, you wrote: should and Don't we all know what BS, MS and PhD really means: Bull ____, more ____, and Piled higher and deeper. Getting the job isn't what you know, but how you can sell yourself and your ideas, no matter how half-baked they may be. -- Gary Hildebrand ghldbrd(a)ccp.com

Dropped out. Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure inapproaprate commercial use of government and university property didn't have anything to do with him "dropping out." Eric