2 Aug
2001
2 Aug
'01
5:29 p.m.
Last night I was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
2 Aug
2 Aug
5:32 p.m.
What I would like to see would be an XMI video card, so someone (ahem)
could use DECsystem 5800-series, VAX 6000-series, and VAX/DEC 7000-series
as workstations. That would be truly a sight to behold. Plus XMI is
fast.
Peace... Sridhar
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Last night I was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field
guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
5:44 p.m.
Sridhar wrote:
What I would like to see would be an XMI video card,
so someone (ahem)
could use DECsystem 5800-series, VAX 6000-series, and VAX/DEC 7000-series
as workstations. That would be truly a sight to behold. Plus XMI is
fast.
well, it may be fast, but I consider a workstation that
measures less than 5x7x2.5 feet, weighs less than 3/4 ton,
and consumes less than 7 kW, and whose original list
price is less than 500 k$ an impractical thing. After all,
microprocessors have no place on the market and who would
ever want a computer in their home? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
PS: has anyone ever manufactured an XMI video interface?
Last night I
was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
5:49 p.m.
Well, how about a VAX9000? I think a VAXcluster of about 20 VAX 7000-860s
would make a pretty nice workstation.
Peace... Sridhar
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Sridhar wrote:
What I would like to see would be an XMI video
card, so someone (ahem)
could use DECsystem 5800-series, VAX 6000-series, and VAX/DEC 7000-series
as workstations. That would be truly a sight to behold. Plus XMI is
fast.
well, it may be fast, but I consider a workstation that
measures less than 5x7x2.5 feet, weighs less than 3/4 ton,
and consumes less than 7 kW, and whose original list
price is less than 500 k$ an impractical thing. After all,
microprocessors have no place on the market and who would
ever want a computer in their home? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
PS: has anyone ever manufactured an XMI video interface?
Last
night I was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
6:45 p.m.
I don't know if I could afford to run an 11/785 as a workstation. The
power bill would be HUGE. As it is, to power up my 11/785 I have to
run extention cords to 3 seperate power circuits in the house (no, I don't
have 3 phase power connected at home).
Sridhar wrote:
> What I would like to see would be an XMI video card, so someone (ahem)
> could use DECsystem 5800-series, VAX 6000-series, and VAX/DEC
7000-series
as
workstations. That would be truly a sight to behold. Plus XMI is
fast.
well, it may be fast, but I consider a workstation that
measures less than 5x7x2.5 feet, weighs less than 3/4 ton,
and consumes less than 7 kW, and whose original list
price is less than 500 k$ an impractical thing. After all,
microprocessors have no place on the market and who would
ever want a computer in their home? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
PS: has anyone ever manufactured an XMI video interface?
Last
night I was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
9:39 p.m.
Tim Crawley wrote:
I don't know if I could afford to run an 11/785 as
a workstation. The
power bill would be HUGE. As it is, to power up my 11/785 I have to
run extention cords to 3 seperate power circuits in the house (no, I don't
have 3 phase power connected at home).
hihi, certainly so. Fortunately I have a 220 V 60 A line run directly
into my basement, so that gives me 13.2 kW. That sounds like enough,
technically. Financially, though, I won't run this thing 24/7. Well,
unless I would put a solar cell grid on my rooftop and a wind-turbine
into my yard, and a water turbine into my sewer line :-). Seriously,
they say a wind-turbine does about 1 kW on a windy day, so take 6
of them...
regards
-Gunther
--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org
7:22 p.m.
New subject: CRAY EL-98
Here's a rather unusual auction on eBay...a CRAY EL-98,
supposedly functional, with OS backup tapes, and which supposedly
came from Apple. If for nothing else, it's interesting for the
pictures the seller has posted.
Jeff
--
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.cchaven.com
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
7:59 p.m.
New subject: CRAY EL-98
Ooooops...forgot the URL!
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1261319145
Here's a rather unusual auction on eBay...a CRAY
EL-98,
supposedly functional, with OS backup tapes, and which supposedly
came from Apple. If for nothing else, it's interesting for the
pictures the seller has posted.
Jeff
--
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.cchaven.com
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
--
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.cchaven.com
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
3 Aug
3 Aug
6:24 p.m.
New subject: CRAY EL-98
We just rescued a Cray J90 from the Washington, DC area. A Vicom came
along with it.
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
Shady Lea, Rhode Island
"Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
2 Aug
2 Aug
6:19 p.m.
Hi guys,
Just got some hardware up & running last week have been meaning to
post the info.. I'm running it on a PDP-11/44 but can't see any reason
it wouldn't work in a vax.
The boards have VT30H printed on them and connect to
a fairly std looking RGB monitor. Each monitor needs a 2 board set
I think these things were reasonably common in industrial control systems.
I'm still not sure how to make use of it properly yet, the RSX driver
is loaded & i've got an application that draws a picture on the screen.
Looks like 16 colours, and reasonable resolution.
The machine it came in had 2 card sets for more than one monitor in
the card cage.
4 cables for red-green-blue-sync
It looks like you can connect a terminal device (software) to the
display driver and use it as a terminal in text mode as well but I
haven't figured out how to do that yet. (under RSX)
I have enough bits & pieces to build up 2 systems so getting the second
machine up & running with unix is the next project.
Cheers,
Steve
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Last night I was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field
guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
cheers,
-Gunther
3 Aug
3 Aug
4:06 a.m.
New subject: DEC 3 fat pin cable
I can't remember who it was looking for something like this, but I brought
home a DEC 3 fat pin video cable that has bare wires on the other end (bnc
removed for some reason, but plenty of room to put some back on). Overall
the cable is around 10' in length. Interested person email me directly.
2 Aug
2 Aug
6:24 p.m.
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10:34 p.m.
All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss(a)subatomix.com
11:08 p.m.
And was it true vector, or was it some pseudo-vector vector-to-raster
stuff?
Peace... Sridhar
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote:
All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this
question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss(a)subatomix.com
11:21 p.m.
All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this
question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
The "Flooney F1" which was a PDP-10 clone. TRON is apparently a PDP-10
opcode. What I can't remember is what OS they used.
Zane
3 Aug
3 Aug
6:58 a.m.
All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this
question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
One company (there were at least three for Tron), MAGI, actually used an IBM
Mainframe programmed with punch cards (I don't know which framebuffer they
used). Not too exciting to watch being done. Remember, CG was and still is
made in non-real-time, only back then it was a little more extreme.
MAGI Synthavision was a real early bird. I remember seeing an article for
it in
Popular Science in the 70's.
John A.
9:43 a.m.
--- John Allain <allain(a)panix.com> wrote:
A buddy of mine I still see on a regular basis, hand-wrapped the frame-
buffer for the 11/780 at Cranston-Csuri, here in Columbus, late 1970s-
early 1980s. At one point, they were one of the premiere graphics
companies in the country. I know they did intros to Sunday sports shows
(if you ever saw a football morph into a basketball and sink on a rim-shot,
that was them) and they did some of the opening graphics (of the Huntington
Bank building, downtown) for "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", a cheesy low-
budget Canadian film starring Raul Julia before he was famous.
C-S died because they were charging outrageous fees per second of animation
and when Apollo and other workstations came along, it became cheaper for
their customers to buy the equipment _and_ staff it than it was to keep
paying C-S for their animations. They were the dinosaurs when the mammals
moved in. Neat toys, though.
-ethan
__________________________________________________
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All this talk
makes me wonder (and I know this question has been
answered before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they
use to do the computer graphics in movie Tron?
One company (there were at least three for Tron), MAGI, actually used an
IBM Mainframe programmed with punch cards (I don't know which framebuffer
they used). Not too exciting to watch being done. Remember, CG was and
still is made in non-real-time, only back then it was a little more
extreme. MAGI Synthavision was a real early bird. I remember seeing an
article for it in Popular Science in the 70's. 
9:45 a.m.
New subject: TRON, was : Re: VAX 11/785 as a workstation :-)
> All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this
question has been answered
> before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
> computer graphics in movie Tron?
There was a pretty long article in BYTE, November 1982 about this movie.
cheers
7:13 a.m.
New subject: Foonly
All this talk
makes me wonder (and I know this question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
The "Flooney F1" which was a PDP-10 clone. TRON is apparently a PDP-10
opcode. What I can't remember is what OS they used.
Zane 
8:49 a.m.
New subject: Foonly
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Bill Pechter wrote:
Foonly F1...
I believe they ran a Tops-10 varient.
Actually, the Foonly ran a variant of TENEX, which was the predecessor to
TOPS-20.
(which reminds me - if anyone has, or knows where to find, a copy of any
distribution of TENEX on magtape, please contact me....)
--Pat.
All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this
question has been answered
before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they use to do the
computer graphics in movie Tron?
The "Flooney F1" which was a PDP-10 clone. TRON is apparently a PDP-10
opcode. What I can't remember is what OS they used.
Zane 
10:20 a.m.
At 09:21 PM 8/2/01 -0700, Zane H. Healy wrote:
The "Flooney F1" which was a PDP-10 clone.
TRON is apparently a PDP-10
opcode. What I can't remember is what OS they used.
I believe that's "Foonly":
http://pdp10.nocrew.org/cpu/f1.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=foonly+f1
- John
2 Aug
2 Aug
7:09 p.m.
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Included was a 3, 4, 5, or so card-set that together comprises a video
interface. Has anybody ever seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter
sets?
I have one, Gunther. It came with a load of other stuff I picked up this
summer. It was made by Jupiter, and and consists of a ~4U rackmount box,
a keyboard, and maybe some UNIBUS boards. I haven't had any time to
investigate it, so I don't really know much about it at all. I do know
that the keyboard looks cool, with a joystick on either side of the keys.
From what I was told, all it needs is a suitable
monitor. Do you want it?
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss(a)subatomix.com
9:33 p.m.
"Jeffrey S. Sharp" wrote:
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Gunther Schadow wrote:
I want everything :-). But can I take care of it? Well, I'd say,
my project is very focused on VAX 6000 and VAX 11/785, so, if it
is a UNIBUS card it would give me incentives to really go get
that UNIBUS extension box as well. Are you serious? Well, I'd say
yes!
regards,
-Gunther
--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org
Included was a 3, 4, 5, or so card-set that together comprises a video
interface. Has anybody ever seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter
sets?
I have one, Gunther. It came with a load of other stuff I picked up this
summer. It was made by Jupiter, and and consists of a ~4U rackmount box,
a keyboard, and maybe some UNIBUS boards. I haven't had any time to
investigate it, so I don't really know much about it at all. I do know
that the keyboard looks cool, with a joystick on either side of the keys.
>From what I was told, all it needs is a suitable monitor. Do you want it?
8560
days inactive
8561
days old
22 comments
16 participants
participants (16)
-
allain＠panix.com -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
at258＠osfn.org -
emu＠ecubics.com -
erd_6502＠yahoo.com -
gunther＠aurora.regenstrief.org -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
jhellige＠earthlink.net -
jss＠subatomix.com -
mikeford＠socal.rr.com -
pat＠transarc.ibm.com -
pechter＠bg-tc-ppp1516.monmouth.com -
steve＠discus.lincoln.ac.nz -
timc＠lexicon.net -
vance＠ikickass.org