30 Mar
2010
30 Mar
'10
6:56 a.m.
Message: 11
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:35:27 -0400
From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Using vintage computers in the classroom
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID:
<f4eb766f1003291335j760a2a34s5139ef92e6320754 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote:
I can't describe the reactions of those who visit my classic car show and then walk
into a barn and find a five ton 1962 mainframe working away twirling tapes, reading and
punching 80 column cards, reading and punching paper tape whilst making ghostly noises
through its built in speaker. I should maybe give them ear defenders because its so noisy
and I haven't even displayed the 600 line per minute printer working yet until I fix
it. The heat and smell of hot electronics is a bit overpowering too. I have never worked
out where the smell comes from, is it gas escaping from the components, the paxolin or the
solder/flux. I know a lot comes from the magnetic tapes, we had a walk in safe full of
tape where I worked once and when it was opened after a month or two locked up it made a
hell of a stink, like Tutenkamen's tomb.
Good luck with the course. If you ever need a Apple Mac based simulator for a 1962
mainframe with an unusual architecture get in touch.
Roger Holmes.
Owner of ICT 1301 serial number 6, the first of at least 160 to leave the factory. The
design was started in the late 1950s.
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Ian King
<IanK at vulcan.com> wrote:
>> We're still in our first steps, and haven't made a lot of use of
> vintage systems in the classroom (although I do like to bring along my
> PDP-8/f, just to demonstrate what a desktop computer looked like in
> 1970).
.
Sure, 10 years earlier, but there was something like that two years
earlier, and perhaps 5-6 years earlier (the PDP-8/S, though I'm not
sure what you could reasonable show off with a 4K tabletop unit since
the TTY interface is external).
Fiddly details aside, it's still cool to wheel in a "personal
computer" from the era and watch the audience gape - I've done that
with my -8/L.
-ethan 
30 Mar
30 Mar
11:53 a.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Holmes" <roger.holmes at
microspot.co.uk>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 2:56 PM
Subject: Re: Using vintage computers in the classroom
I can't describe the reactions of those who visit my classic car show and
then
walk into a > barn and find a five ton 1962 mainframe working away
twirling tapes, reading and
punching 80 column cards, reading and punching paper
tape whilst making
ghostly
noises through its built in speaker.
Sounds like the closest you'd get to being in the Jupiter 2 (Lost In Space)
with some aliens!
I should maybe give them ear defenders because its so
noisy and I haven't even displayed the 600 line per minute printer
working yet
until I fix
it. The heat and smell of hot electronics is a bit
overpowering too. I
have never worked
out where the smell comes from, is it gas escaping
from the components,
the paxolin or
the solder/flux.
I think hot metal gives off a distinctive smell, but why I don't know.
I know a lot comes from the magnetic tapes, we had a
walk in safe full of
tape where I worked once and when it was opened after a month or two
locked up it
made
a hell of a stink, like Tutenkamen's tomb.
I don't know what Tutenkamen's tomb smells like, but certainly video tape
(as in VHS tape) does give off a unique smell when warm. I used to take out
the videocassette after watching something, turn it upsidedown and give it a
sniff (no, I don't know why I started doing that!). I started doing that
quite a bit (not sure whether it was habit or addiction!) for a while, but
eventually stopped.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uki
12:33 p.m.
On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Andrew Burton wrote:
I don't know what Tutenkamen's tomb smells
like, but certainly video tape
(as in VHS tape) does give off a unique smell when warm. I used to take out
the videocassette after watching something, turn it upsidedown and give it a
sniff (no, I don't know why I started doing that!). I started doing that
quite a bit (not sure whether it was habit or addiction!) for a while, but
eventually stopped.
Videocassette drawers always smell like cough syrup to me.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
1:07 p.m.
New subject: OT: 32 vs. 8-bit MCUs
A short time ago (a week or two), the discussion of uCs came up and I
pointed out that the Cortex M0 architecture had a good possibility to
displace the traditional 8-bit uCs, such as the 8051, AVR and PIC.
In my email today, I received this code-density study paper.
Granted, it's by a guy from NXP, with an ARM axe to grind, but for
whatever it's worth:
http://www.embeddeddeveloper.com/corp/flex/CodeDensity-NXP_IQ-30.pdf
This does remind me of an experience I had with the then-new x86
architecture. The local sales guy was pushing really hard for the
x86 to be the replacement for our 8085-based systems, pointing out
that x86 code was far more efficient space-wise than x80 code and
that translation tools were available to make the switchover easy.
I gave in and cooked up a code sample that used our floating-point
package to compute pi--a verifiable result. The FP code had the
dickens optimized out of it because it was high-use as part of a
BASIC runtime, so I thought it was a good candidate and at about 3000
lines, was non-trivial.
There was an MDS all set up at the sales office and I sumitted my
code on an 8" ISIS-II floppy for processing right after lunch. With
a wink, the sales engineer said "Oh, this should be easy--there's no
I/O". He cranked the translator up and we retreated to the
conference room for coffee.
Well, coffee turned into a free dinner and at 8 PM, the translator
was still grinding away. It never did finish, so I went home and
left the code with the sales guy.
About three weeks later, he called to say that they'd found the bug
in the translator and that my code was ready to test.
I was a bit surprised to see that it was almost two and a half times
larger than the original version. Worse, it didn't assemble--there
were errors. And when those were finally fixed, it didn't give a
correct answer--or any answer, for that matter. It simply died.
With a wave of his hand, the sales guy said that some "hand tweaking"
might be necessary. I responded that I might as well recode the
whole thing if I was going to have to debug it as working with
automatically generated translator code was not my idea of fun.
Thus, I take the NXP guy's claim with a small mountain of salt--but
it makes for interesting reading.
Best regards,
Chuck
5163
days inactive
5163
days old
3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk -
cclist＠sydex.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
roger.holmes＠microspot.co.uk