10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
10:59 a.m.
Next time I'm at the location where they're stored, I can try to find you a
number. They're RS-232, but they're a bit funky to get to work with
anything else; I don't remember the details, but it seems like they used
really odd settings - like 6 bits, mark parity, 2 stop bits. Also, the
attached phone only works with Northern Telecom phone systems, unless you
were to gut the whole thing and stick the electronics from a one piece phone
in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
X-windows, and let them surf the web as well as accessing our answering
machine (which runs on our file server, and is already web-enabled), Mister
House control console, and the CD jukebox control software. I'm going to
*try* to set up either a Real Audio server or some kind of multicast audio
server, and have a sound card in the server sampling and digitizing the
output of the CD jukebox and the computer-controlled FM radio tuner, so you
can "tune in" from any workstation in the place and listen to the radio or
CDs. (Hey - I've gotta have *something* to keep me out of trouble!)
Someone moments ago made a reference to old Nortel
(well, Northern
Telecom, back then) display phones, but I didn't realize what they
were referring to until I'd deleted the message :-/
If those are the little black-paneled phones with CRTs and slide-out
keyboard drawers, could you give me a model number? I've just realized
that that'd make the perfect kitchen terminal, and might keep an eye
out for them now, but it's awfully hard to search the 'net for
'nortel display phones' without getting bunches of current stuff.
-Rich
--
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
Concordia University, Montreal, QC (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich(a)alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------
Bill Richman
incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r
(Home of the COSMAC Elf
microcomputer simulator!)
10 Feb
10 Feb
11:03 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman (bill_r(a)inetnebr.com) wrote:
Next time I'm at the location where they're
stored, I can try to find you a
number. They're RS-232, but they're a bit funky to get to work with
anything else; I don't remember the details, but it seems like they used
really odd settings - like 6 bits, mark parity, 2 stop bits. Also, the
attached phone only works with Northern Telecom phone systems, unless you
were to gut the whole thing and stick the electronics from a one piece phone
in them.
Hm, this part's interesting -- while I'm sure there *were* models that
were only PBX-aware, an old neighbour of mine used to work for Nortel
and had one at home, so now I have to find out if they were produced
in any quantity :-/
-Rich
--
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services
Concordia University, Montreal, QC (514) 848-7625
------------------------- rich(a)alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------
4:59 p.m.
Howdy,
At 05:03 PM 2/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman
(bill_r(a)inetnebr.com) wrote:
Well, I still work at Nortel (in hardware design, for 15+ years),
and had no idea that _anybody_ would ever be interested in the
Displayphones. Geez, we musta thrown out gobs & gobs of those
things years ago (yeah, yeah, how were we to know ...).
Now, I didn't work on the Displayphone hardware myself (my group
designs the DMS-100 digital switching system and it's successors)
but I know that at one time in the mid-late 80s there was quite a wide
deployment of them within Nortel for people to use to dial into the
mainframe computer. A lot of folks had them at their desks and
quite a few took them home. I think they had 300 bps modems
built in. As I recall, there were at least two different models,
the early model looked much like a miniature Hazeltine terminal,
the later model had the CRT display up on a stalk. I also
recall that it must have been very difficult or impossible to
do lower case on those things - you could always tell who
was writing their e-mails on a Displayphone because everything
they sent was in upper case only. You could program in
a list of names and phone numbers and have it autodial the
numbers. The models I saw used all hooked into a standard
POTS line. I do not recall a model that required what we
call a "P-Phone" (PBX-type) line, but I can't say for sure
that one wasn't made - all the ones I saw were POTS.
I also thought that it was possible to set things
like the data rate/parity/stop bits for the external
RS-232 ports through a set up menu. A buddy at work used one
at his desk until it died recently, I thought it was amusing
that when hisphone rang, the CRT on the Displayphone lit up
with a message "Excuse me, you have a call" or something like that.
It's been a long time since these things were a supported
product, so I doubt seriously I can get my hands on any
docs., but will keep my eyes open around work.
Alex Knight
Calculator History & Technology Museum Web Page
http://aknight.home.mindspring.com/calc.htm
Next time I'm at the location where
they're stored, I can try to find you a
number. They're RS-232, but they're a bit funky to get to work with
anything else; I don't remember the details, but it seems like they used
really odd settings - like 6 bits, mark parity, 2 stop bits. Also, the
attached phone only works with Northern Telecom phone systems, unless you
were to gut the whole thing and stick the electronics from a one piece phone
in them.
Hm, this part's interesting -- while I'm sure there *were* models that
were only PBX-aware, an old neighbour of mine used to work for Nortel
and had one at home, so now I have to find out if they were produced
in any quantity :-/ 
11:41 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
in them. What I've decided to do for terminals
around the house (including
the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
X-windows, and let them surf the web as well as accessing our answering
machine (which runs on our file server, and is already web-enabled), Mister
House control console, and the CD jukebox control software. I'm going to
*try* to set up either a Real Audio server or some kind of multicast audio
server, and have a sound card in the server sampling and digitizing the
output of the CD jukebox and the computer-controlled FM radio tuner, so you
can "tune in" from any workstation in the place and listen to the radio or
CDs. (Hey - I've gotta have *something* to keep me out of trouble!)
Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on touchscreens though.
Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
to come with caveats... I have some 386 mono-LCD tablet computers with
them, but with only 2 megs RAM and 5 megs flash, which basically restricts
them to DOS apps. And a couple of touchscreen CRTs for Macintoshes
which work great, but can't be wall-mounted like the others and I also
don't have a lot of suitable software for the Mac yet. I'm just going
to end up having to write some software. I'm playing with the metawidgets
concept (XML to describe what the GUI should consist of, and leave its
rendering up to the client). More about that at
http://cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com/~ecloud/journal/
For now on the Mac in the kitchen, I can use a touchscreen keyboard to
do command line stuff via telnet to one of the Linux boxes, or I can run
an old version of MacX to run X apps but that's ugly because it won't
run full-screen. The menubar and titlebar waste a lot of space.
--
_______ http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud
(_ | |_) ecloud(a)bigfoot.com finger rutledge(a)cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com
__) | | \__________________________________________________________________
12:40 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once stated:
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
> the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> X-windows,
Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
into the network at home).
The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM. The oldest Slackware distribution
I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install. Don't even attempt
to run X if you have less than 16M and even then, you going to have to use
an older window manager like twm or fvwm/fvwm2.
If anyone is interested I can go into more details about how I installed
Linux on the Toshiba (in total spent about three, four days trying to get
*anything* installed on the box).
Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on
touchscreens though.
Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
to come with caveats...
At the Miami Ham fest earlier this month, I came across this one table
where the guy was selling a prototype Linux PDA. IBM made these touch
screen computers (basically they look like a thich LCD screen and are jet
black) with a stylus. He slapped a 1G harddrive and installed Debian Linux
on the thing. To Linux it looks like a standard PC, but it was a (I think)
33 MHz 486 with 8 or 16M RAM and a 1G drive. He wanted $250 for it.
Tempting, but decided for the Sun 3/80 at another booth.
-spc (The Toshiba has a BogoMIP rating of 9.96. Woo hoo!)
5:42 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 06:40:42PM -0500, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
Neato. I'd have the equivalent with my 730T if there were such a thing
as a gigabyte PCMCIA type III hard drive. Biggest I've seen is 540 megs,
and on ebay they are really expensive. BTW anybody got any PCMCIA drives
for sale of any size? Well I'll start another thread about that...
--
_______ http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud
(_ | |_) ecloud(a)bigfoot.com finger rutledge(a)cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com
__) | | \__________________________________________________________________
It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once
stated:
Yeah if I was going to try to make do with 4 megs I'd try to cook up a
customized distro using some older code. TinyX can run in 4 megs in theory
but the web page warns that you may not be able to run more than 1 app
at a time. :-) But running all apps from a remote server should help.
I think with 8 megs you could run just about anything you want remotely.
TomsRTBT has some really small utils too. Whole collections of utilities
are implemented as symlinks to a single executable, and the executable
looks at the command line to figure out which utility to run. There's a
similar package listed at freshmeat called "busybox" but I'm not sure if
that's what Toms uses. libc5 and a.out are also a good thing in a small
amount of memory especially if there aren't going to be a lot of processes
running at once (elf has overhead but saves memory if the same lib is
linked to multiple executables that are running at once). Somewhere
I have a slackware so old that it uses a 1.0 series kernel. It has light
memory requirements but nothing I could do would make it work in 2 megs
of RAM like I wanted to do with those 386's. The kernel would load but
there wasn't enough memory left to run init. :-)
An idea I bounced off one of the mailing lists was what if code could run
in-place directly off the "hard drive" (FLASH in my case) without having to
be loaded in memory first. But AFAIK noone has done this yet. My guess
is it would involve modifying the loader (in the kernel or in libc? Not
sure which) to instead do an mmap and return a pointer to that space.
But I gave up thinking about it and resigned myself to make do with DOS
and build a custom lightweight GUI framework. At least the metawidgets
concept is very portable, moreso than X even.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
> the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> X-windows,
Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
into the network at home).
The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM. The oldest Slackware distribution
I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install. Don't even attempt
to run X if you have less than 16M and even then, you going to have to use
an older window manager like twm or fvwm/fvwm2.
If anyone is interested I can go into more details about how I installed
Linux on the Toshiba (in total spent about three, four days trying to get
*anything* installed on the box).
FWIW my first Linux box was a 386 with 5 megs. So slackware really did used
to run in that just fine. I was using a 1.2 series kernel then.
Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked
on touchscreens though.
Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
to come with caveats...
At the Miami Ham fest earlier this month, I came across this one table
where the guy was selling a prototype Linux PDA. IBM made these touch
screen computers (basically they look like a thich LCD screen and are jet
black) with a stylus. He slapped a 1G harddrive and installed Debian Linux
on the thing. To Linux it looks like a standard PC, but it was a (I think)
33 MHz 486 with 8 or 16M RAM and a 1G drive. He wanted $250 for it.
Tempting, but decided for the Sun 3/80 at another booth.
12 Feb
12 Feb
4:25 p.m.
On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:40:42 -0500 (EST), you wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once
stated:
We received the first "batch" of Compaq 486/50's I bought (24MB RAM, 384MB
HDD, TFT active color display, two PCMCIA slots, built-in trackball) along
with a couple of PCMCIA ethernet cards (IBM), and it turns out that FreeBSD
works *great* on them; just loads up, detects the ethernet card, installs
over the net and runs. They work great for browsing the 'net and for home
control stuff. I've spent most of the last couple of days fishing cat 5
cable all through the house. Now we can even surf the net from the
bathroom... ;-)
-Bill Richman (bill_r(a)inetnebr.com)
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r - Home of the COSMAC Elf Microcomputer
Simulator, Fun with Molten Metal, Orphaned Robots, and Technological Oddities.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
> the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> X-windows,
Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
into the network at home).
10 Feb
10 Feb
3:18 p.m.
At 03:59 PM 2/10/00 -0600, Bill R. wrote:
Next time I'm at the location where they're
stored, I can try to find you a
number. They're RS-232, but they're a bit funky to get to work with
anything else; I don't remember the details, but it seems like they used
really odd settings - like 6 bits, mark parity, 2 stop bits. Also, the
attached phone only works with Northern Telecom phone systems,
Hmmm. Both of mine are presently working on the regular phone system. I
just plugged them in and they worked. There is a setup screen in mine
that lets you define all the RS-232 parameters. At least one of mine has
two RS-232 ports. One for a printer and the other to connect to a computer.
Joe
8906
days inactive
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days old
7 comments
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participants (6)
-
aknight＠mindspring.com -
bill_r＠inetnebr.com -
rich＠alcor.concordia.ca -
rigdonj＠intellistar.net -
rutledge＠cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com -
spc＠armigeron.com