In message <000601c48f81$dfe2c370$0500fea9@game> "Teo Zenios" &lt;teoz(a)neo.rr.com&gt; wrote: Same here - I tried to get some parts for my logic analyser (pod cables and grabbers) locally - Agilent wanted ?69 (IIRC) for 20 grabbers, most T&M equipment dealers wanted at least twice that. I paid $20 including shipping for a set of 20 grabbers from a seller on Ebay. I'm also bidding on a pod-to-analyser cable and a pod repair kit (the eejit that sold me the pods never bothered mentioning that a few of the cables were damaged to the point of inoperability - I only noticed after I'd left feedback). I agree. I bought my BBC Micro (Master 128 variant) to use, not to shove in a cabinet to be looked at but not touched. They're computers, they're designed as tools, they should be used not looked at from behind a pane of glass. What I would like to do is build a replica of the MOS KIM-1 (or Synertek SYM-1, more likely the latter). I've got a CPU chip, but I'd need to source some 6530 (or 6532? can't remember the part number perfectly) RIOT chips or emulate them with an FPGA. As for the keyboard, well, there's always keyswitches and PCB blanks :) In case you haven't guessed, I like the 6502 - never really managed to get to grips with Z80 assembler, but 6502 ASM was easy (no worse than learning PIC16 assembler). Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... Are those cookies made with real Girl Scouts?

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 15:53:27 -0400, Ed Kelleher &lt;pres(a)macro-inc.com&gt; wrote: Sour I may be, but there were plenty of sources of neat computer "junk" before eBay. And I liked those sources, thank-you very much. They cultivated a sense of patience and appreciation. In my books, collecting old computer stuff has as much to do with the hunt as anything else. If the hunt is turned into a keyword search and instant gratification, it looses its appeal. Why? I think it's because you learn a lot more about computers while hunting them down than you do with them at your finger tips.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ronald Wayne" &lt;AppleTO(a)gmail.com&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 6:50 PM Subject: Re: eBay madness wrote: Yes, there were probably places to find old stuff before eBay came along , but there was no single place that had the quantity and variety of equipment with pictures! I never learned that much from my computer search besides how to search. My learning experience is from visiting forums and websites dedicated to the equipment I like, searching Google for conversations about specific hardware, software, and problems along with books, magazines and mailing lists like this one. Then there is the knowledge learned from hooking the things up and running something on them along with upgrades and other mods. I think you are confusing the thrill of the hunt with the fun of playing with the equipment itself. Some people love to tell a story about how they found a part for their classic car in an old barn, or how they found an expensive painting 300 miles away at a county auction, and then there are always the funny stories about things that happen on the way to pick something up. I don't see eBay being the one stop for everything store, quite a bit of my collection was found on newsgroups, forums, and some from people on this list. eBay is just a convenient source for some items that would take years to show up in your local searches if ever. Believe me I appreciate the deals I found on eBay and have the patience to wait for them to come along 6 months or even years after I started looking for them. I will also keep looking on the sources that have worked for me in the past.

Rumor has it that Ronald Wayne may have mentioned these words: That's easy for you to say -- you probably live in a decently populated area. In the area that *I* live in, almost 50% of the classic computers in the area are owned by 2 people, a friend of mine and me. And the rest, are basically unavailable. (Believe you me, I found a guy with a couple of Amiga 1200s he *said* he wanted to part with -- that was 5 years ago, and I've yet to see a machine or him. I've sent *several* reminders through "friends of friends" with no response. If there's something I need relatively quickly, ePay is the only way to fly. If it's something secondary, this list and my Tandy Model 100 list have proven *much* more fruitful than any local hunting grounds... and I've tried. Lemme tell ya, I've tried. I'd have better luck hunting pink elephants. Booze is pretty easy to find in this town... I learn a *lot* more working with the computers, than I ever learned about hunting for one. I looked for a VAX for a few years, and learned *very little* about them; as there were very few people here locally who'd eve *heard* of them, let alone knew anything about them. Once I had gotten one (well, several) I actually started learning how to use the durned thing. But that's just my take on things. I realize that regionally situations can be very different - it's just in my region, life in the classic computer world sucks. ePay helps fill a void that can't be filled here by a little hunting. Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch(a)30below.com |

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, John Allain wrote: For some it works, for others it doesn't. SimH does not do exact simulation (for at least PDP-11 and VAX architectures) so its machine footprint to the operating system software is rather messy and confusing. That said.. it's decent. I use it for VAX, mostly. Correct. So good luck on standalone systems, or on Win32 platforms in a command window. I did a VT module for it, as well as someone else, but Bob dumped it and favored the "telnet console" method. --f

Paul Koning wrote: The best one I have found for Linux is 'xterm -132', then control/left-mouse and set the 'vt220 keyboard' flag. edit/edt actually is usefull in this mode. The gnome/kde terminal emulators are not as compatible with a real VT as xterm is, but you still have to discover where the function keys have been re-mapped to the PC's keyboard. Nice thing about Linux/simh, is that you can start it up in an xterm window, and it just works. No need to open a second window to do the actual work in, setting up the networking, running as root, etc... Hyperterm (bwaaa-haaa-haaa). Worst emulation of a terminal by any commercial company, IMHO. Kermit-95 is one of the better terminal emulators available for Windows, but it isn't free. It also lets you transfer file in/out of the emulators (with appropriate kermit installed in the simulated os). None of the terminal emulators for windows will open a window directly on the same system (like a dos-box). You have to open a dos-box, start simh, open the terminal emulator, and attach to a port created by simh.

Ethan Dicks wrote: "gnome-terminal" is NOT an xterm. It is an extremely dumbed-down terminal emulator written and maintained by developers who can't imagine and never even considered that you might want to use it to connect to a remote system, let alone a non-Linux remote system. "That's what VNC is for." <-- verbatim quote from a "developer" on the gnome-terminal maintainers' list. Doc

John> At 11:26 AM -0400 9/1/04, John Allain wrote: John> I have done precisely this under Mac OS X. Took a real VT100, John> connected to a Keyspan USB serial adapter, modified /etc/ttys John> appropriately, and there you go. Considering that Mac OS X has terminal emulators that (presumably) can emulate a VT100, why didn't you just use those? paul

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, John Allain wrote: Ahhhhhh.... Grasshopper!! At last, you begin to Understand...... ;} Cheers John

At 12:11 PM -0400 9/1/04, Paul Koning wrote: The point of my exercise was to verify that a real VT100 would perform hooked up to OS X through a USB serial adapter. [It worked fine.] That it works as expected with SIMH is merely icing and perhaps useful for others to know. The stock Terminal application in OS X does not do a complete or satisfactory VT100 emulation, in my book. There are indeed other emulators that may or may not do the desired job. John

At 10:06 AM -0700 9/1/04, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Both. Just doesn't do what I want. [So I wrote my own. Might release it someday, but it almost certainly doesn't do what someone else might want, e.g., scrollback.] John

At 7:54 PM +0100 9/1/04, Shirker wrote: You bet... a) Keyspan "High Speed USB Serial Adapter USA-19HS <http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/USA19HS/> b) Add a line similar to the following to /etc/ttys: tty.USA19H181P1.1 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure c) 10.2.8 [PowerBook G4] and 10.2.8(G5) [Yes, I hooked it up to my dual 2GHz G5.] John

The xterm that Mac OS X ships with is totally braindead!!! They've disabled the '-xrm' flag, which of course I need :^( Zane

Zane H. Healy wrote: Zane, are you talking about the X11 xterm or Terminal.app? I'm running Apple's X11 here on 10.3, and the xterm that came with X11 honors -xrm. $ xterm -xrm '*cursorBlink:true' starts an xterm with blinking cursor, and $ xterm -xrm '*cursorBlink:false' starts one with a solid cursor. Doc

Now I'm going to be tempted to hook a VT420 up to my G5 2x2 :^) Terminal.app is a lot better than it used to be. The main problem I see is that trying to remap the keys is a total nightmare, and I've yet to figure out how to get the top row of the keypad remapped, which makes it worthless to me. The one possitive note, is it handles the double-height fonts correctly! If they'd get keyboard remapping improved, I think it could be just what I need. I've been threatening to buy a 3rd party terminal emulator for Mac OS X, but I simply can't find one that works they way I want. Most don't handle the double-height fonts correctly, and their keyboard support is spotty. Then there is the whole nightmarish mess of thier configuration menues. At this point I used a hacked .Xmodmap with xterm, but that means the fonts aren't quite right. Still at least the keyboard works the way I expect when I'm logged into OpenVMS (works good for PDP-10 and PDP-11 OS's as well). Zane

Has anyone been able to build this for Mac OS X? The various little testing tools run under Terminal.app quite nicely. However, after I *finally* managed to build mterm, they just generate escape sequences. It sounds most interesting though, I think I'm going to have to find time to try this out on another Unix box. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

I guess I should read the instructions shouldn't I :^) Oh, my gosh! This is pretty much the closest I've seen to what I'm looking for in a terminal emulator. A couple questions after looking through the doc file, is there a way to make the font larger (easier on the eyes), or get a scroll bar? The only problem I see right now is that the delete key's on the Mac keyboard aren't mapped right. I'll have to see if I can figure out how to fix that. If I can get that fixed, I'm definitely going to be using this at least part of the time! Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

At 01:53 02/09/2004, der Mouse wrote: This reminds me of my experiments with double height.. Double height characters were also a feature of the teletext character set used by Prestel (and Micronet) in the early 80's. I was commissioned to write a terminal program for use on this for the BBC Micro at the time, [to be embedded into another software package] and also took some care over this. One of the "features" of the specification was that a double height character "overflowed" onto the line below, hiding whatever text was sent for that line. Because of the way the BBC display circuitry worked, you actually had to replicate the data on the double-height line on this line too, to make it display the bottom half of the characters. Most terminal emulators took this into account, and then ignored anything that was sent for this second line. I however had access to a "real" hardware terminal, and noted an interesting thing - if you removed the double height sequence from the first line, the second line would then show up with whatever text has been sent for it. If this was itself defined as double height, it would overflow on to the third line, hiding it's original text - if that line had had double height, it would of course be removed, revealing the text on line 4, etc. etc. It was possible therefore to send two sets of 12 lines of double height text or graphics, interleaved, and swap between them simply by sending a single space character to overwrite first double height intro sequence at the top of the screen. By doing this, then putting it back, it was possible to flick backwards and forwards between two /completely different/ images "instantly". (ok, in the time taken to send 2 or 3 characters, but compare to the time taken to send a maximum 768 characters at 1200 baud!) Absolutely amazing to see at the time. Of course, not a single one of the software emulated terminals actually coped with this, (except the one I wrote). Pity, as there were very few users using real ones. Rob.

I have a shell script that works quite well for remapping the keyboard for a specific xterm. It works on AIX, IRIX, Solaris, and Linux (as well as others most likely), it doesn't work on Mac OS X. At one point, when I still had room, I had a VT100 hooked up to the Linux system I was using for running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, but I could only get it working at something like 1200 baud. Another option I've used is to have a VT420 (my favorite type terminal) and connect it to a DECserver, and then use LAT to connect to the OS being emulated. Obviously this tends to be a little tricky to get setup right :^) I've had it working with TOPS-10 and RSX-11M. FYI, I don't emulate VAXen. Zane