What you want is a mini-kernel and userland. I fear very few modern distros or even OSes will fit that bill. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- rm -rf /bin/laden ----------------------------------------------------------

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/EINSTEIN-THE-WORDS-FIRST-EVER-HOME-COMPUTER_W0QQitemZ…

Jim Leonard wrote: Hmm, we did have a couple - that's not a gloat, just that I'd never considered that they might be *that* rare. I doubt the production figures were much different to other less-common UK home machines (Enterprise, Jupiter Ace etc.) - I suppose it being Ebay I could imagine someone paying 300 for one, but not ten times that.

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Jim Leonard wrote: Those are not "carts". They are 3" diskettes. CF2, for flippy use in single head drives. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Hi, Chris Halarewich said: As well as Tatung's own cp/m-like os there was cp/m 2.2 and zcpr3 available for it, best used with a 80-column monochrome attachemnt. I had all that, but it went to a cp/m enthusiast who would make more use of it than me! I think I've still got some of the 3-inch floppies somewhere. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

Why do people always forget the HP9830? It was 2 years before the IBM5100, and while HP called it a calculator, it was a full-blown desktop computer with up to 16K bytes of RAM running BASIC from ROM. OK, it had a 1-line alphanumeric LED display, not the CRT that the IBM5100 used, but I don't think that's enough reason to forget it :-) (SOrry, I'm biased. I love the HP 98x0 machines...) -tony

On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Tony Duell wrote: John Titor and the rest of his timeline apparently won't be aware of its existence. Besides, for reasons not specified, he had will need the APL and 360 emulation to be able to deal with the Unix "end of time" in 2038. Why? Is there even a Linux port to the 5100? Well, maybe he will have maybe thought that he needs windows to do the graphics. I'm afraid that I'm not very good at conjugating verbs for things that had happened in the future, and will happen in the past.

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:41:30 -0400 (EDT), der Mouse wrote HP9825 http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9825.htm -- Kevin Schoedel <schoedel at kw.igs.net> VA3TCS

I can't identify it exactly, but I am pretty sure it's one of 2 machines, one rarer than the other. The more common one is the HP9820. The rarer one is the HP9821. They're much the same to program, the difference is that the 9820 has a magnetic card reader at the rear right of the kayboard, the 9821 has a digital cassette drive (takes tapes that look like audio compact cassettes) there. They're members of the same family as the 9830 that I mentioned as a contender for the title of 'first personal computer'. There's one other model in the family, the HP9810, which is a 3-level stack RPN calculator, similar to the HP9100 to use (although totally different internally). They're all really computers in that they have a central processor linked to RAM and ROM, with the keyboard, display, printer,etc as peripherals. The processor is 16 bit, bit-serial, with 2 accummulators (A and B), program counter (P), 'Wualifer' (instruction register) Q, Memory address register (M), Memory data register (T), Extension register (E, only 4 bits wide) and an I/O register. The processor is built on 4 PCBs (these boards are common to all 4 machines in the family), containing about 80 TTL ICs. It's microcoded (there are 7 ROMs on on of the PCBs containing 256 28-bit words). The ALU, strangely, is a pair of ROMs on another of the boards contianing look-up tables for the functions. The M and T registers are not on the processor boards, they're on memory interface boards which are different in the various machines. The 9820 has 1 or 2 1K-word RAM boards (using Intel 1103 DRAMs) and 2 ROM boards each contianing 2K words of code. 3 optional ROM modules (1K words each) can be plugged into sockets just behind the display. The dispaly is 16 characters, dot matrix, and is driven by the firmware. The keyboard, on the other hand, is encoded in hardware. It's an odd design of keyboard, in that there are balanced teansformers formed by spiral PCB tracks under each key. Pressing a key brigns a piece of metal over one of the 'windings', unbalancing the system and providint an output pulse that's detected by the encoder electronics. It's reliable, but I guess rather expensive. Coincidentally, I've got a 9820 in bits on my bench at the moment. I bought it on E-bay, described as a 'non-working HP9820', and that's what it was. I'll emphasisse here that I have no complaints against the seller, he sold me just what I expected. Anyway, I've cured the electronic fault (a defective shift register chip in the M register circuit). There are 3 other faults. One is that an edge connector has been removed from the I/O backplane (and removed very well, I might add, there is no damage at all to the PCB tracks). I can get one card reader roller and printer platten have turned to goo. And the card reader spindle buckled and shattered when I tried to get the roller off with a puller. My poor little cat, who often watches me repair classic computers, was rather scared by this :-( (What is it about cats and classic computer enthusiasts???). Anyway, I've got to make a new spindle, and then work out a way to repair the platten. Still, it should be possible... Getting back to der Mouse's memories, the strip printer was built into the machine, but was technically an option (I've yet to se a 9820, or a 9810, which took the same optional printer, without it). The larger external printer may well have been an HP9866 (the 9866A is upper case only, the 9866B is mixed case). The plotter was probably an HP9862. There were several standard interfaces available, including 8 bit parallel 'GPIO' (used for, amongst other things, paper tape punches and readers0, a BCD interface (to read in readings from digital measuring instruments), an RS232 interface, etc. There was also an HPIB interface (I think this was the first ever family of mahcines to have HPIB). For the 9830 (the top model in the range, running BASIC), there was a complex and powerful asynchronous _and_ synchronous serial interface. You can get some manuals, including prgoramming info and boardswapper guides from http://www.hpmuseum,net/ The language developed into HPL (offiically 'High Performance Language', but it's obvious what it really stood for) which was used on the 9825 (manuals on the same site). On the 9820 it was a key-per-function language with a key for 'PRT', etc. The R() array, of course, stood for 'registers' The main differece to BASIC is hos you write an asignment. Rather than C=A+B, you write A+B->C (wehre -> is a right-arrow, called 'Gozinta' in some technical docs I've seen) You may have gatehrered I rather like this family of machines..... -tony

It puzzles me too. The connector in question is a normal, double-sided 25 pin (per side) 0.156" pitch edge connector. That's actually not a common size in the UK (0.156" pitch is not normally used over here), so it's probably somebody 'borrowed' it becuase it was the easiest way to get that sort of connector. The I/O backplane (where this connector whould be) provides 4 idencial slots at the back of the machine for interface models, the PCBs of which plug into those edge connectors. Now, unless you have one of the optional I/O ROMs like 'Peripheral Control) (and this machine didn't come with anything like that, only the maths ROM), these slots are pretty much useless because you can't send data to the interfaces. So removing that connector was probalby not a great loss for the original owner. And as I said it was removed very carefully with no damage tyo the backplane PCB at all. My first guess was that the connector had been used to repair this machine, possibly to replace a damaged conenctor between the memory box and the main backplane. But upon removing the latter, it was clear this was not the case, no other soldering in the machine has been disturbed. Oh well, this is not a major problem in that a suitable replacement part is available, sond soldering it in is not a problem for me. -tony

On 14 Apr 2007 at 1:34, der Mouse wrote: AFAIK, none of the usual suspects permit multiple assignments in a statement. The odd thing is that GWBASIC will pass a statement of the form X=Y=7, but Y will be 0 and X will be -1 at the conclusion of execution, regardless of the value of y or x at the beginning. OTOH, LET X=Y=3 will set both X and Y to 0. GWBASIC is full of stuff like this. As in IF Z<> 1 THEN X=3 : Y=5 executing X=3 and Y=5 if and only if Z isn't 1? Yes, many BASICs (including GWBASIC) do that. Cheers, Chuck

I beleive there was at least one BASIC where you could write A=B=0 (and it meant assinge 0 to A and to B, not set A to the boolean value of the compariston between B and 0, which it meant in some other BASICs) That was quite common. A lot of BASICs would take a line like IF X=0 THEN Y=SIN(D):Z=D*D+2 and do both assingments iff X equalled 0 Be warned that none are particularly common, and the 9820 is the second-rarest of the lot (the 9821 is the rarest, I am still looking for one). Also, they tend to have faults by now (all 3 of mine, a 9810, a 9820 and a 9830 have needed electronic repairs), and being a bit-serial machine, a logic analuser is pretty much essential However, I am happy to help anyone who's trying to get one of these machines going in any way I can (ohter, of course, than providing boards to swap :-)) If you want to run the old programs and get the feel of the machine again, I am told there's a pretty good HP98x0 emulator on the web, and I think it's open-sourve (and maybe written in Java, but I wouldn't bet on that). It emulates the 9810, 9820 and 9830 from what I've heard. Having got the real macvhines, and not having got anything to run the emulator on, I've not tried it, but it might be of interest. -tony

I know the feeling (!). To me, much of the interest in these old machines is being able to 'get inside the processor' with test equipment -- the 98x0 processor is 80 chips, all of them pretty simple (well, perhaps 100 chips if you count things like the M and T registers which are physcially on the memory interface boards). No emlulator can let me do that... The keyobard on the HP0910 uses the same ingenious balanced transformer system (the 9830, alas, is conventional switches), and the same printer was used in the 9810 and 9820. The displays are very different (the 9810 having 3 lines of 7 segment numberic displays to show the 3 RPN stack levels). The point being, of course, that the 9810 is a lot easier to find than the 9820 (although still hard)... The ROMs _are_ considerably harder to find than the machines (and interfaces/peripherals are not common either). The maths ROM is probably the easiest to find, though, most people who bought one of these calculators wanted the trig functions, etc. Note that the ROMs for the 9810 and 9820 are different. -tony

On 11/4/07 07:23, "Alexandre Souza" <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> wrote: Actually, the price is ?3,000 (i.e. Pounds sterling) - this puts the price closer to Six Thousand Bucks. Gulp! Based on this desperate bid for large sums of money, one can only assume that whatever he's smoking is very, very expensive! ;-) -Austin.

If you have a look at the feedback he has received as a buyer... <http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=darensgood ies&ftab=FeedbackAsBuyer> Note the "pills" in the list. Perhaps he needs the cash for a splash of plastic surgery? To be a bit more on-topic - I need to extend my.... SCSI disc size... Does anyone know how to add, partition and format a SCSI drive on an Acorn Archimedes A540 with SCSIFS (Risc OS 3.31) I have got a bunch of SCSI discs, varying in size from 540MB to 4GB knocking around in a box and I'd like to replace the 120MB Conner and external 116MB 5.25" Miniscribe with, say, a single 540MB internal. Can anyone on this list help please. Cheers Dave ;)

On 11/04/2007 09:22, James wrote: A friend of mine ran a software house that did games conversions, and about the time they were doing some Z80 versions of The Hunt For Red October, they wanted another machine with a Z80. I remember him telling me it was cheaper to buy two surplus-stock Einsteins, each with two double-sided 3" drives, than one Amstrad with one drive. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

A Tatung Einstein??? Since when has a Z80-based machine been the first computer (or even the first home computer). For those across the Pond, I'll post some details of this machine. It came out in the early-mid 1980s, after the BBC Micro. It's basied round a Z80A, clocked at 4MHz. There's 64K of RAM, with a 16K ROM that can replace part of the RAM (if you see what I mean). This ROM contains a reasonable machine code monitor, but not a lot else. The video side is baed round the TMS9927 chip (that's a PAL version of the 9918) with its own 16K of RAM. Sound is an AY-3-8910 chip, the digital I/O ports of which are used to scan the keyboard (a plain matrix of switches). There's a built-in 3" (not 3.5") floppy drive with a WD chip (I think a 1170) to control it. And space for a second drive. There are a reaosnable number of standard interfaces. IIRC, there's a connector for 2 external floppy drives (standard 34 pin, Shugart SA400-like pinout).Aa 60 pin bus connctor called the 'Tatung Pipe' (the name is a pun on 'tube' which is what Acorn called the second processor interface connector on the Beeb, in turn 'Tube' is a pun on 'bus', both being public transport systems in London) is an expansion bus connector carrying the standard Z80 signals. There's a Z80-PIO on the board, one port of which is used as a Centronics printer interface, the other port is used as a user port (2 more conenctors on the machine). There's a 4-channel 8-bit ADC (ADC0844 IIRC), used for the Joystik ports (but which obviously has many other applications). An 8251 provides a serial port, buffered to RS232 levels, and brouhgt on on a 5 pin form C (quincuncial) DIN plug with a sane pinout (unlike the Beeb, on the Einstein, turning the plug round does the null-modem swap). This conenctor carries TxD, RxD, RTS, CTS and Ground, DSR and DTR are available on marked solder pads on the PCB. One odd thing is that the colour monitor connector can be set by internal links to be either RGB or YUV analogue video. There's also an RF modulator to drive a TV The standard OS was called XtalDOS and was very CP/M like (although IIRC, some of the commands were re-named). There were several versions of BASIC for the machine (including a 'BBC Basic') and other languages available on disk. It's not a bad machine, although it's somewhat let down by the video chip (there's no 80 column text mode, for example, although there was an add-on board to do this). But it's not worth what this person is asking IMHO -tony

On Wednesday 11 April 2007 18:57, Chris M wrote: As I've learned before from this list, the only thing which that question generates is a flamewar about what is a computer, and what's a "home computer". Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I have yet to see a real HOME computer. Most game boxes I have seen - Coco, C-64 ect. where marketed as home computers but what do you need a home computer for?

It will fit in many houses. -- ----------------------------------- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Remember, Windows is not a virus. Viruses actually do something. -----------

And thusly were the wise words spake by Cameron Kaiser Just not those living in a shoe box in the middle of the road. Cheers, Bryan

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 23:24 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: If you put the empty cardboard packaging in certain parts of London, you could sell it to first-time home buyers for around ?450,000 Gordon

Hi, Chris M said: I believe some people in the user's group did that. I had an external 5.25-inch floppy as drive c: so I could read disks written by 22-disk on my old pc. Only worked under cp/m or zcpr3 though, xtaldos couldn't handle it. While digging out some 3.5-inch floppies yesterday I came across my collection of 3-inch disks, a mixture of Eintein and Amstrad format ones, including CP/M 2.2, CP/M+, Pascal and Forth...perhaps I should offer them for 500 quid to whoever purchases the Eintein :-) -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, stuart birchall wrote: Wow. There are lots of differences of opinion about which one was first. But this is the first time that I've seen a machine with 3" drives being touted as the first!

Hi There are some programming cards for a Olivetti 101 on ebay. It seem like I saw someone on this list that either has one or wanted one. It would be a shame to see these cards lost without someone or a museum getting them. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ The average US Credit Score is 675. The cost to see yours: $0 by Experian. http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=660600&bcd=EMAILFOOT…

Hi Alberto It sounds like you are the perfect person for these. They are iten# 200097833850 I hope you win. I'd love to have a 101 or a Diehl Computron. Both are classic calculators in that they were programmable. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Exercise your brain! Try Flexicon. http://games.msn.com/en/flexicon/default.htm?icid=flexicon_hmemailtaglineap…

I don't know how hard would it be or whether or not it's a feasible or a crazy idea... but there it goes in the form of several thoughts. On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 06:56:44PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote: Maybe not, if what I'm thinking of could work out. Again, I'm not sure how feasible or hard it could be, since I'm not a coder myself. I don't think that's a major problem, at least initially. One can always compile stuff on a faster box and install the binaries on the older (more classic) ones, I think. Of course, it'd be fantastic to have a lean, fast C compiler to use there, but I think other things are even more critical to get to the point of needing the compiler. I don't see DE's as a problem either. I simply ignore them all together. I never use them and never will, even when (if) I had a dual core PIV with 8GB RAM or something like that. I just don't like/want/need them. :-) Here it's when it (finally) comes my idea... I've been trying to get some modern Unix variant on my 486 notebook (no CD, PCMCIA NIC) for quite some time now hithout enough (to my likings) success. It's got 16MB RAM, but, for some reason, it recognises only 12. And, of course, 12MB is not enough to run any modern installer. I've ended up running a Linux distribution called Small Linux on it, but again, it's an old, poorly maintained distribution running an old Linux kernel. Many times I've though... man, if I just had a boot floppy of this *BSD system which would boot on 8, 4, maybe even 2MB of RAM, and which would allow me to install a really small base system... I could manage afterwards to get the programs I need on it once I had this base system (maybe something like 30, 40, 50MB?). Well, I think that using an optimised kernel, choosing the right programs to run and so, many operating systems (included NetBSD or any other BSD variant, of course) could perform quite well on all the hardware you refer to. I'm talking about 386 most of the time just to make an idea of about the power one of the boxes I think of might have; all my Sun lunch boxes (IPX, IPC, Classic, LX) would do, as well. So, back to the point. Wouldn't it be simply great to have/build a boot floppy with an installer which is extremely lean, as to allow one to install the system with very small amounts of RAM (let say 2-4MB). An installer which would allow you to install an small, fast, lean (but current) base system? Later on would be time to think of a replacement for gcc, or X, or whatever software one wants to use (depending on what hardware one has, also). Maintenance could not be too hard, I think, since the system would be an existing already operating system (let say NetBSD to name one), just installed on a very cared, optimised for resources way. But still binary packages or even ports could be used (again carefully selecting what to use depending on the hardware power). Well, that's enough for the moment for me to keep building ideas around that, unless other people feel all this isn't stupid, absurd or silly enough to just ignore it all together, so that further ideas and conversation can develop. Thanks, Dave, sometimes one has the feeling of not being clear enough 'cause of the language limitations, you know. :-) -- Angel @ Granada, Spain PGP Public key: http://www.ugr.es/~ama/ama-pgp-key 3EB2 967A 9404 6585 7086 8811 2CEC 2F81 9341 E591 ------------------------------------------------------ () ASCII Ribbon Campaign - http://www.asciiribbon.org/ /\ Against all HTML e-mail and proprietary attachments

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 08:21:05AM -0400, Ethan Dicks wrote: Man, I should have realized that myself :-) Of course I would also choose to have all the RAM to the operating system and none for video. I whish there is a way to do so on this laptop... I'll try to figure it out. Does somebody here knows? It's a Compaq Contura 410CX, a 50MHz Intel i486DX2, acording to http://www.laptopmemoryupgrade.com/memory/CompaqContura410CXMemory.html. Cheers, Angel -- Angel @ Granada, Spain PGP Public key: http://www.ugr.es/~ama/ama-pgp-key 3EB2 967A 9404 6585 7086 8811 2CEC 2F81 9341 E591 ------------------------------------------------------ () ASCII Ribbon Campaign - http://www.asciiribbon.org/ /\ Against all HTML e-mail and proprietary attachments

It was thus said that the Great Angel Martin Alganza once stated: You could do what I did to install Linux on a 4MB RAM 120M harddrive laptop computer---find a Linux distro that will boot (I used Tom's Root Boot disk and even then it barely ran). The steps I ran through went something like this: On the target computer, I could run a shell, fdisk, mkfs and dd. That was enough to get started. Run fdisk. On the machine I was working on, two partitions: 112M and 8M. Format the 8M as a filesystem and mount it. On a full Linux system, get some needed tools like tar, dd to a floppy. Move to target system, and dd tar off to 8M partition. So likewise with some other tools. On full system, I created a 112M file, and mounted it. Formatted it, and put kernel, init, and a small /bin. unmount it. tar the file and dd to floppy. On target tar xzcf /dev/fd0 | dd of=/dev/hda1 reboot target. Once rebooted, reformat 8M for swap and enable it. Keep using the floppy to get stuff over. Took a few hours, but I got it done. -spc (Wasn't the hardest install I did though ... )

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 12:38:44PM -0400, der Mouse wrote: And what about security? Are you patching the packages yourself? Sorry, I don't understand what you mean here. :( What was supposed to go where? :-) Cheers, ?ngel -- Angel @ Granada, Spain PGP Public key: http://www.ugr.es/~ama/ama-pgp-key 3EB2 967A 9404 6585 7086 8811 2CEC 2F81 9341 E591 ------------------------------------------------------ () ASCII Ribbon Campaign - http://www.asciiribbon.org/ /\ Against all HTML e-mail and proprietary attachments

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 01:27:52PM -0400, der Mouse wrote: Take into account I was talking about on topic :-) boxes and, at most, a 386 with 16MB of RAM or so. Of course things like SATA, ACPI, 64bits, etc. are aout of the question. For all that, current OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux do more than enough. My idea of 'modern' is a system which is being developed, making better, more optimised, patches are developed for it when problems or vulnerabilities occur, etc. Just think about a few people working on NetBSD 1.x, to name one, not adding new functionality, well, perhaps porting some interesting new programs, developing new ones, but mainly, keeping a good operating system, lean, fast, secure, and made today, not 5 or 10 years ago. I'm not for eyecandy (I use Ion3 as my window manager to have many xterms distributed across my screen on X, and I work on the console many times whitouth problem). I'd simply love to be able to do the same on one of my old i386 boxes, whitout having the feeling I'm running a 'Gruyere' (kind of :-) operating system. Regards, ?ngel -- Angel @ Granada, Spain PGP Public key: http://www.ugr.es/~ama/ama-pgp-key 3EB2 967A 9404 6585 7086 8811 2CEC 2F81 9341 E591 ------------------------------------------------------ () ASCII Ribbon Campaign - http://www.asciiribbon.org/ /\ Against all HTML e-mail and proprietary attachments