In article <20110722221557.ba3f8f2a.jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de>, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> writes: Interesting! Tektronix seems to like to make lots of little variants of their products. I bet you have a 4012-<something> on the nameplate if it came from the factory that way. On the 4010, 4010-1 indicated that the terminal had the printer support; a small amplifier board in the tube section is needed to properly support the printer interface. If you look at the 1972 catalog, pg. 274 you see a picture of the newly introduced 4012 and it clearly has the thumbwheels like the 4010. The 4012's big change from the 4010 is that it supported all 96 ASCII characters, while the 4010 only did upper case. You can see it in this PDF, pg. 94, 95 <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/vintage/docs/tektronix/Tektronix_Terminals_1969-1993.pdf> I was wondering if the space might have been better spent taking the tape drive, but its a moot point now anyway :-). I'd like to have my arduino housed with a modern printer inside the original enclosure so that it simulated the original device :-). My goal is to finish that hardware project this year; I now have enough equipment to start testing my design to make sure it can produce the signals within spec. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:55:27 -0600 Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: The nameplate reads just "4012". First I have to clean everything. Then I'll have a look at the 4012. The phosphor in the tube is damaged at the right edge. To bring up the /34 will be interrestig, especially the RK05. There is a medium still mounted. Everything was stored in a warm, dry but very dusty basement for about 20 years. RK05 + dust = ! good. Lower case letters as a feature... :-) I have a 4006 (?) in storage. It is upper case only and thats quite anoying. The tape drive was much biger and havier then the hardcopy unit. Hmm. That would be in time for the next VCF-Europa... -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 18:49:34 +0100 (BST) ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: No, unfortunately I forgot about that. Probably. I'll see. Take it this way: The previous owner moved all this stuff down into the basement 20 years ago. He removed the stuff from the rack before I arrived. I doubt that he engaged the shipping lock. So the chances are good that this already happened long before I arrived. About the tape drive I left behind: If someone else wants it I can get you in contact with the owner. Most likely he will be happy when you take it out of his hands. But you have to pick it up in Heidelberg, Germany. No shipping! -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:48:02 +0100 (BST) ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: I did this a few minutes ago. As expected, the previous owner transported the drive without lock and the medium inserted. Even worse: He powered it up in this state. There is a big headcrash. I.e. Track 0 has no longer any oxide... :-( At least I'll need a new medium. Probably heads? Or can the heads be cleaned and reused? Plan B: Get a RL11 and connect my knowen to work RL02. Plan C: Build some modernish hardware to emulate the RK05 drive. Or even better: Get some UniBus to SMD or ESDI controller. I have some nice SMD and ESDI disks around. Winchester disks are so much more reliable. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:21:39 -0700 Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote: I know. I had a quick look at the maintenance manual. Interchangeability is no issue. I have only one drive and don't need to read / write other peoples media. Yes. I even got an offer. I have to see how this works out. Yes, not as much fun as real hardware, but educative. Sure. It is just a mater of keeping open eye and time. The problem is the missuse by the previous owner, bad storage conditions and time. Meanwhile I removed the damaged disk from the RK05. If I am in real luck the headcrash may be before track 0. So the disk may be usable. But the drive needs a tough cleaning. The foam used as prefilter and gasket is brittle. The duct from the absolute filter to the cartridge is brittle too and has fallen into pieces already. I need at least replacements for the pre- and absolute filter and the cartridge duct. I did a quick smoke test with the Tektronix 4012. Unfortunately it doesn't work. The tube lights up in green, as usual, but can't be cleared. The phosphor is dameged on the right edge and there are quite some signs of bun in. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:17:52 -0700 Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: No. I'll reuse it as decoration for my office at work. Will look nice alongside that 9 track tape on the wall. I already have a platter from a 14" disk with head crashes hanging there. Now my colleagues can see how such platters where packed. :-) OK. There is a nice picture in the manual. It shows different types of dirt in relation to the flying height of the heads... I'll see. It will take some time until I get back to the drive due to the replacements needed. Obviously. No metal-cutting data storage... ;-) -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Jul 24, 2011, at 5:17 PM, Al Kossow wrote: Yea, I had assumed that he would through the pack away. The drive is definitely salvageable. Just make sure the heads are *clean*. That's why I talked about re-alignment. The easiest way to make sure that the heads are clean is to remove them from the drive. Allows you to make a good inspection (under magnification) that you've cleaned them up properly and there aren't any remaining bits of the old pack stuck to them. As far as 12 sector packs, I've literally hundreds of them. So I know they're not that hard to find. :-) TTFN - Guy

Yes, letting a CRT "bake" for a while can do wonders. See the youtube videos of bandersentv and you will be convinced. "Horked" has a different meaning here - meaning stolen. -- Will

In article <20110725093548.de68acc7.jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de>, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> writes: This could mean that you have a disconnect somewhere between the keyboard and the rest of the circuitry, which means its not hearing your PAGE keystrokes. Look at the 4010 service manual and compare the board numbers to those in your machine. The 4012 is not *that* different from a 4010 and probably shares some boards in common with the 4010. A 4010 only does 9600 baud max IIRC, so you should check the strap/knob settings on the 4012 to determine the right baud rate. Its probably set for 300 or 1200 baud. I wouldn't give up on this terminal just yet. The 401x machines are all small-scale integration fixed logic, no microprocessor and no microcode. Just simple state machines and logic. I've studied the diagrams and its not that complicated if you just take some time to study it and work through the problem logically. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

If you remove the heads, then you have to align them. Several times in the field I have unfolded a tex pad, placed it between the heads and hand launched them. Carefully sliding the pad back and forth cleans the heads and most of the time removes any oxide. A small tool can be used for stubborn oxide. I haven't read all of the replies, but is the pack beyond cleaning? Do you have access to another? Paul On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:

TEX pad= A small foil packet with a disposable cloth of some kind with isopropel alcohol on it. On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 3:01 AM, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:

On Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:05:18 -0500 Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote: OK. Thanks for the explanation. I didn't find anything usefull when I googled it. Unfortunately I am on the other side of The Big Pond. So I can't get exactely this stuff. But I think I can use the cleaning pads that are used for cleaning video heads and the like. That seems to be equivalent. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

No worse than using a Tektronix 'scope to trace a fault in an HP computer, and I'll bet many of us have done that... [Quite why you'd prefer an HP 'scope to a Tekky is beyond me, thouygh :-)] Are there people who insist on only using test equipment that was around when the device-under-repair was new? Personally, I'll use whatever I have that's appropriate, which means I'll happily work on a 1970's computer with a 1990's LogicDart. -tony

[Tek 4012] Hav you checked the obvious -- the power supply votlags, the CRT electrode volatage, whether the heaters (write gun and flood guns) are glowing, etc? -tony

I am not very familair with these storage CRTs... How do they behave if the flood guns are operaitonal but the 'write' gun isn't? What happens if the latter has an open-circuit heater? -tony

In which case, screw in the adjustment screws so they just touch the tails of the heads. Lock them in that position, and remove the heads. Clean thm and put them back without touching the adjusting screws. It's not close enough for interchangablilty, but if the heads are good you'll be able to foramt, read and write with it. [...] Err no!. If the disk is damaged, the heads will not fly over it, and the ehads load at th eoutside edge of the disk. If that area of the disk is damaged, the ehads will crash every time, and will be damaged. -tony

The RL11 is an NPR (DAM to the rest of the world) device, so when you install it, uou have to cut the jumper between pisn CA1 and CB1 on the backplane. If you dont uyou get soem very odd problems (although the magic smoke stays in the ICs...) I don't think so. The CPU and memroy boards use standard ICs. OK, many of them are no logner made, but they are not hard to find. And you don't need special alignment tools to repalce them :-). I think a logic fault is a lot easier to fix than a headcrash. -tony

Well, there are controllers to conenct the RK05 to machines other than Unibus ones. The RK8e (for Omnibus PDP8s) and the RKV11 (for Q-bus machines, although it only supports 18 bit DMA addresses) spring to mind. The RKV11 is not easy to find though. -tony

On 07/22/2011 03:58 PM, Dennis Boone wrote: They used to exist, but they are far from common now. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:47:20 -0400 Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Yes. But a bad trade. I traded some Transputer stuff for the /34. The former owner of the /34 is a Transputer-fanatic. He has several Transputer systems running. So I gave ihm some of that Transputer stuff I found in a dumpster diving session recently. I couldn't use the Transputers due to a missing host interface. He is verry happy with that Transputer stuff and actually uses it. He didn't do anything with the PDP-11 in maybe about 20 years. So he was glad to give the /34 to a DECadent person like me. The bad thing on the trade: The /34 is a rack full of heavy machinery. The Transputers are only a few, samll PCBs. Due to a herniated intervertebral disk, that caused a partial paralysis of my right leg, I am no longer able to lift stuff like a RK05, not to think about a BA11-K with that big mains transformer in the back. It was - literally - a pain in the back for me to get this stuff into my flat, even with the help of a friend. Getting this stuff into the rack will be "interresting". Most likely I'll have to build some kind of a small crane... In theory yes. In practice no. I just don't want it. It is big. It is heavy. I don't need it. Moving the rest of the /34 was more then enough for me for quite some time. I don't have any 800 BPI tapes to read. I even don't have the space for it. The /34 takes up my entire hallway at the moment. (The rest of my flat is already filled to the ceiling with all sorts of computing machinery and large format cameras, darkroom, ...) The tape drive will go to ePay. Some other person will take care of it. It won't be my problem and I am glad about that. More motivation to get a different controller with a formated Pertec interface to fit my nice and (relatively) small Cipher 880. :-) And there is still an other option: Slaughter the TC-130 for the UniBus interface chips. Interface some modernish microcontroler to the UniBus and build my own tape (or whatever) controller. ;-) -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On 07/22/2011 01:54 PM, Al Kossow wrote: I keep having small moments of dissonance every time I see TC-130 - the formatted Pertec tape controller that connects my VAX-11/730 to a Cipher F880 is an Emulex TC13... The TC13 should be able to emulate both a TS11 and a TU81, which might be handy. Anyway there appear to be TC12, 13, and 14's available on ePay and so probably through other channels. And plenty of other makes/models, I'm sure. Anybody want to recommend their favorites? In addition to Jochen, I'll probably want to add one to a PDP-11/44 at some point. /--/S. PS - This random semi-contribution was brought to you by Comp-- /Look, a squirrel!/

On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 06:29:42 -0500 Chris Elmquist <chrise at pobox.com> wrote: Something like cribbing was one of my ideas. But with an addition: To stabilize the stack of lumber I would tie the lumber together using tension belts. I.e. the belts running from top to bottom and back to top around the lumber. This will stabilize the stack like prestressed concrete. The other idea is: I have two big shelfes to store smaler machines like desktop workstations. There is a walkway between them. Now all I need is a piece of lumber on the top of the shelfes across the walkway and a tackle. -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 23:22:03 +0200 "Henk Gooijen" <henk.gooijen at hotmail.com> wrote: Well. The part about slauthering the TC-130 was troling. ;-) I have no use for the TC-130, it takes away precious space. (It comes with its own 9-slot UniBus box.) If the TC-130 gets orphaned I am willing to trade / sell it to someone else on the list. I am surely not going to trash it, as UniBus peripherals are somewhat rare. So if you have anything else interresting like a TC13, RL11, ... -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}