On Wed, 18 Sep 2019, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: Please don't let anybody call the 25 pair 50-pin miniature ribbon connector (RJ21), "Centronics"!

On 9/18/19 6:27 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: We used to call them "blue ribbon" connectors. I'm sure that that's also a misnomer. --Chuck

On 09/18/2019 09:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: The original Amphenol connector was about 3 X the contact spacing of the micro-blue ribbon connector, but basically the same design. They used Diallyl pthalate insulators. I don't know if these are just always dyed blue, or the chemical makeup makes them blue, but it is a deep blue color. So, that's where the blue in the name comes from. The contacts are punched out of a ribbon of gold-plated beryllium copper, so that's where the ribbon in the name comes from. Jon

One aspect of the RJ21 coding that's always puzzled me was the ordering of the colors. 25 pairs, where White Red Black Yellow Violet for each "bank" and within each bank Blue Orange Green Brown Gray So the first pair would be White-Blue and the last (25th) would be Violet-Gray Does anyone know where the odd ordering (contrary to electronics color code) originated? --Chuck

On 9/19/19 12:56 PM, Kevin Monceaux via cctalk wrote: Grey or slate for outer jacket and the listed colors for wire pairs or groups of pairs in the cable. Allison

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 11:23:38AM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Accuracy. Me too. But enough videos that I watched featured individuals who felt compelled to emphasize that were telco cables are concerned, the colors are violet and slate, not purple and gray, that I'm willing to take their word for it. It kind of reminds me of when Dr. Pulaski met commander Data, and mispronounced his name as Dat-ah, instead of Day-tah. He told her how it was pronounced. She asked, "What's the difference?" He replied, "One is my name, the other is not." Where the 25 pair telco color code is concerned, violet and slate are in the color code, purple and gray are not. -- Kevin http://www.RawFedDogs.net http://www.Lassie.xyz http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org Bruceville, TX What's the definition of a legacy system? One that works! Errare humanum est, ignoscere caninum.

On 9/19/19 9:56 AM, Kevin Monceaux via cctalk wrote: Yes, and Ma Bell had optional colors with names like "rose". Regardless, what's the origin of the color scheme? In other words, what is the basis of the ordering? Resistor color code follows (pretty much) colors as they occur in a rainbow. Evidently, Ma Bell doesn't believe in rainbows. --Chuck

On 9/18/19 6:16 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: ? You have to be OLD to have used these? Golly, maybe I really am OLD. There were touch-tone later versions also. Hooked to a KSU with the wonderful 50 wire cable. I remember that our (no dial at all) phone number was Sheffield 2118-W. (Party line, don'tcha know). My grandmother's was 46 (no exchange or dial; rural phone company). Anyone collect the old Rolm (IBM) PBX stuff? --Chuck

A number of years ago I picked up a Lucent Merlin Legend system. It was around 1999, and Lucent wouldn't certify the system for "y2k" so this business switched over to a Nortel in a giant middle finger to lucent. The irony is the only thing that was "y2k incompatible" is you had to one time set the date on the 386 PC to 2000, otherwise it would roll back to 1970. Past that though -- it was good. The 386 PC ran a unix, and had a special interface card that presented 4 analog phone lines to the PBX. It had the full, awesome Audix (my favorite voice mail system) on it. The PBX came with an entire pickup truck bed of crap, for the price of $1200. IIRC I sold about half the phones and some line cards for $800, which made the system more affordable to me (and based on the price of the phones in those days, it made someone else's day too.) At the time I had 3 roomates, and it was very handy to be able to transfer calls around the house. In addition, there is an option to page all extensions. This was constantly used by roomates for tons of fun. And aggrivation. Some stories: We had music on hold setup, and there was a thrift store CD player in the coat closet that held all the hardware for this thing. The system had two carriers and about 6 boards. When people would call, if it was a telemarketer "track 2" was the crazy over the top rap hold music. That way when you transfer the call it sounds professional -- but not the hold music. I remember trying to go to bed, and the frigging roomates were paging my phone over and over. It was about 2AM. Given the house was a rental, the cabling to all the extensions and computers was run down the hallways -- no permanant modifications. I remember punting the phone down the hallway and slamming the door shut followed by tons of laughter. I eventually ended up with the better 486 computer that ran Audix. It came have the hard drives and the ISA cards that interface to the PBX. One day I would like to try to convert all the voice prompts and build an asterisk setup that uses the same voice mail menu format and clean voice prompts (versus the lame ones asterisk has.) MAP 5P I think is the name of the 486 computer. My roomate always begged to upgrade to the line card that supported caller ID, but all the phone lines were in my name. I always fought it, because I knew he would never answer the phone. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I swear I would hear voices downstairs in the house. It seemed like the place was haunted or something. Finally I was in the right place at the right time.... the MLX-10D phones (so bad ass, look them up) had some kind of issue with the rubber components decaying in them. The phones had quick dial entries from the prior owner still stored in a lot of them. Well, in the middle of the night I guess the phones would "false trigger" and dial on speakerphone random people. So it was their voices in the middle of the night coming out of speakerphones. I also had the MLX-20L huge secretary phone with two sidecars. It was killer. The Merlin Legend was a pain in the ass to program. I think there was windows software that sort of helped. I never messed with a Magix. The MLX-10D + the Definity equivilent were my favorite phones. The rings, the look of the black set with the LCD, etc. I speculate they run on ISDN, but am not sure. The original Merlin was stylish, and I had one for a period but it was just too limited. Cool ring tone though. Where does one find a working 5ESS for home? -- : Ethan O'Toole

I have 20 RAMTEK memory boards from late '80s frame buffers. They each have 20 TMS4161-20NL video RAM chips on them. The RAMTEK part # is ASSY 510857 Anyone have any interest? Jon

just a box of boards or a system missing a memoru module? On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 8:45 PM Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

Much to my surprise, there are CAMAC Crates and memory cards on E-Bay. How you would use this I don't know. When I worked at NERC we used them for many many tasks. We had a Honeywell L66 running GCOS3. We used these to emulate Honeywell RNP707s. These were like 3780's so remote work terminals, printers, punches, readers etc. Some of these were just local to the Honeywell and others were remote...... .. we also build 3780 HASP type workstations, with remote screens as well for access to IBM kit elsewhere. Then we had media conversion systems which for example we used to read tapes from the various experiments they carried out and copy the data to normal 9-track tape..... Some systems had Unibus PDP/11's. Others had Q-Bus systems. The software was built on an IBM mainframe using a PDP-11 cross assembler and we had libraries to handle the CAMAC modules. Some systems had PROM loaded cards, others we loaded from Paper Tape. Some of the software wasn't reliable so we had to re-boot often Dave

Jon, Used lots of these back in the day. Where in the world is it, its big to ship? Does it need a CAMAC memory card or a QBUS card? Dave controller for in it. I that.

http://www.pulseinstruments.com/plugins/PI-451A_Users_Manual.pdf 100ns to 100us with MOS outputs On 9/30/19 6:48 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:

Hi I thought I'd mention that when troubleshooting a computer, if you can't takeover the execution of the processor, such as a diagnostic ROM, a pulse generator can be a useful tool. For most all TTL, except some bus drivers, one can use a pulse generator to override a 1 value to inject a signal in a circuit path. Most don't realize that these have many uses. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 1, 2019 8:10 AM To: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>; General at ezwind.net <General at ezwind.net>; Discussion@ <ezwind.net:On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: Tek 500 pulser modules On 10/01/2019 08:02 AM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: Wow, good find! Thanks, Jon

I have some bundles of Chabin TLC (transmission line cables) This is the exact same material used in IBM 360s. It has 18 signal conductors and 36 grounds. They are about 3 feet long, and I have something like 11 of them. Any interest? Jon

I have 15 pieces of memory SIMMs for the Challenge M series (funny, seems like there should be an even #). Pics here : http://pico-systems.com/images/SGIChallenge.JPG Jon

5ESS? Hmmm, you must have a pretty BIG home, no? I've had a tour of a 5ESS and it was QUITE big, like 50K square feet at least, not counting the battery room and the cross connect frames, or the Solar turbine generator. Jon

Not really, and most of the space is filled with arcade and pinball machines :-) But it is my understanding that a 5ESS could be widdled down to two racks. And it's not like I would keep it forever. Apparently the management platform that used to be a 3B2 runs on a Solaris machine in emulation now. So something like a Sun Netra T1 can take the place of the large computer. Only need enough line circuits to run say 32 or 64 analog loops and maybe some ISDN/T1? True, but don't need rows of racks of modules that drive the subscriber loops. -- : Ethan O'Toole

Around the 1993 time frame I was at high school band camp for marching band. We had an hour or so for lunch, so a friend and myself headed off to the nearby Burger King. Burger King was located next door to a GTE telephone switch facility in Chesapeake Virginia. The facility had a parking lot, and maybe a yard behind it with the trucks and what not. Lunch happened rapidly, and we were talking about the telephone company building. I had the bright idea that it's also their lunch time, and if we stand in front of the door -- maybe we could get a tour. With some 40 minutes to spare of our lunch, we stood in front of the door and caught the next employee. We asked about a tour, and she said it shouldn't be a problem but she needed to check. She had us wait in the entrance area while she checked with the manager. As I recall the manager wasn't available then, but she said it was fine and she could give us a tour. She started off, but then the manager came and was able to take over. They were both super friendly. He took us in his office and abruptly busted out with "Why you boys so interested in the phone company?" We explained we had BBS systems and were into computers, he seemed to think it was cool. We got a tour of their DMS-100 switch. My eyes were big everytime I saw a modem wired to that puppy, behind the managers back of course. It wasn't terribly large, they explained the building used to be full of switch but with the modern digital one it was now less than 1/8th of the building and the rest of the building became offices. I remember there were the line subscriber modules and the newer ones were twice the density of the older ones, 32 versus 64 POTS lines IIRC. And the 64 POTS lines module wasn't that large. A lot of it was the copper wiring frames with punchdowns. The DC power system was awesome, the whole setup was very clean. The security was higher than I would have imagined, IIRC the manager had to call in before opening the door. All and all it was pretty cool. When we were leaving the manager and the lady were waving goodbye and the manager said "Have a good onee boys! Please don't sabotoge my switch!" It was pretty surreal. He knew. How did he know I read phrack magazine and ran Tone Loc?! We were 20 minutes late getting back but word had gotten back to band director that we were getting a tour of the phone company building. He was cool with it.

On 09/19/2019 19:27, Ethan O'Toole via cctalk wrote: Around 2000 I picked up an expanded Nortel Compact ICS (CICS) with voice mail unit - might be the last thing I bought from a NetNews post. That was 8 analog CO lines and 24 extensions as received, with a tub of cables, phones, buttons, die-cut un-printed inserts, a few manuals, etc. Overkill for a four bedroom house with attached office, but it gave me all the features I wanted as a remote worker. I had the music on hold wired up, but stopped using it after one occasion where I put a staff meeting conference call on hold... When I finally acquired an ISDN line card years later I was very excited, but then I moved cross country before I put it into service. Maybe I should have tried to order ISDN at the new place but it was late 2005, and my DSL Internet service included an analog loop with free calling nationwide... Still using the CICS, having upgraded some handsets (M7310 -> T7316e) and the system software. --S.