On Fri, 10 Nov 2000 10:49:06 -0600 Tarsi <tarsi(a)binhost.com> wrote: Absolutely. It was just like an 8086, as far as the programmer was concerned, but it had a few on-chip peripherals. I used a very early laptop in 1986 called the Tava Flyer. It was a twin-floppy MS-DOS machine, CGA graphics on an LCD (mono, no backlight) and an 80186 CPU. Worked fine. -- John Honniball Email: John.Honniball(a)uwe.ac.uk University of the West of England

Atari Games had some interesting pieces of silicon. What is that T11 CPU that I see in game units like APB and Paperboy? (circa mid 1980s) They had a 6502 in tow, but I suspect all it did was I/O. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- Mistakes are often the stepping stones to catastrophic failure. ------------

John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com> wrote: [...] Presumably you meant "as Atari Corp. crashed and burned."? Atari Games was around for quite a few more years, though they eventually got acquired by Williams, then Midway.

Shure ? I had to go thru the same kind of decision, and I learned to love the 186 - shure, one needs a little push to start, but later on it's just great - eventualy the best _sixteen_ bit CPU around. If you look at the 8080/5, Z80, 8086 and 80186 family, the 186 is the finest of all. Sleak and simple - compared the 68K looks quite bloaded and clumpsy (ok, it's 32 bit, but still the most compared competition at it's time). Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen http://www.vintage.org/vcfe http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe

Soft and Handware - well, the Hardware is more or less simple (Although the integrrated components where quite handy back then) A simple programming model (shure, not a /370 ISA, but who's perfect), a well tuned instructionset. in my eyes, the 186 (and 286) has been the summit of x86 development. Brr - If I have to do a VAX alike micro, I'll prefer the NS for shure. I did all 3 in Assembly - 186 on PCs (and SBCs), 68k on the Atari ST, and NS32032 on Unix servers. Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen http://www.vintage.org/vcfe http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe

minor details - just I liked the on chip components a lot. The CS logic can be used under special circumstances almost like a MMU, and the DMA chanels are very handy (and usable unlike the PC style DMA). You may have up to 3 I/O operations running at the same time - two via DMA and one by INS/OUTS. And if your application needs to shovel memory around within a tight time limit, the DMA will do the job faster than the CPU. Bait Taken. One has to select his favorate definition, and I selected the largest data size supported by most (all) basic instructions. In case of the 8080 it's 8 Bit (even there are some 16 bit instructions), for the 186 its 16 bits, and for the Motorola it's 32. (It has to be added here that we're only talking about basic instructions on GP CPUs - no FP, no vectorandwahtever data) There are different measurements around, like data path size, register size or _marketing_ size. Now let us look at the 68K family 68000: Data path: 16 Register: 32 ISA: 32 Marketing: 16 So if this is a 16 Bit CPU, what's a 68008 ? 8 Bit ? Still the same CPU core - and further more, is a 68020 now 32 Bit ? Again, wheres the 'new' 32 Bit part? Hard to see a fundamental Difference. Ob, even further, take the NS 16032 vs NS 32032 enhancment - a 16 Bit CPU (with 32 Bit bus) versus a 32 Bit CPU - isn't it ? Rubbish - both are exactly the same chip - just marketing department decided that it's time to hit the new emerging 32 Bit market. Around 1978 when NS and Mot did come up with their 32 Bit design everybody was asking (hypeing?) for 16 bit CPUs (instead of 8 bit ones), so marketing named the stuff the 'sellable' way (Remember, Intel did just around this time a grande flop with their i432 32 bit CPU). Well, this part is marketing, you still may argue that a external data bus is a valid scheme for naming - nice, but then every x86 chip since the original Pentium is a true 64 Bit CPU. Sounds wrong, huh ? But it's true! (according to said scheme) During my practice with several generations of /370ish mainframes I learned that there is basicly no measurement based on physical aperance that cant be twisted. So the ISA is (for meone :) the only measurement with _some_ creditibility. /360&up-ish CPUs where available with ALUs from 8 to 32 bits, internal data pathes from 8 to 256 bits, external data pathers will doubt that they are all 32 Bit CPUs. Next in line. :) Gruss H. P.S.: And when you think a bit further you'll notice that the physical implementation of an ISA doesn't matter at all - the only relevance is the resulting speed - and here the inpact of some more megabytes of cache can be more important then buswidth, ALU size or whatever. Eventualy a turing machine may wind its tape below your beautiful 64 bit ISA, without any implications for your task. -- VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen http://www.vintage.org/vcfe http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe

"Eric J. Korpela" <korpela(a)ellie.ssl.berkeley.edu> wrote: Actually, using this metric, the 8080 and Z-80 are 4-bit processors, the IBM 360 Model 30 is an 8-bit processor, the PDP-8/S is a 1-bit processor, and the IBM 1620 is a zero-bit processor (no ALU). It's a stupid and mostly useless metric. Try asking programmers what width processors are instead of hardware engineers. They'll tell you that the 8080 and Z-80 are 8-bitters, and that the 68000 and IBM 360 (most models) are 32-bitters. Actually there is a 64-bit integer ALU in most recent x86 processors. Describing where it is and what it does is left as an exercise to the reader. The reality is that there is no single "correct" measure of the "bitness" of a processor.

Earlyer you defined the 68008 as 16 Bit - just, the timing influence of the 8 Bit bus is several times the one of the ALU, so where to go ? A CPU is always the implementation of an ISA, and thus the may use a vide variety of details which all together doesn't matter for the programmers view. If you have to count cycles to perform your task, you're not doing (for instance) 68K code, but rather code for a 68xxx Version Y stepping Z. Jep - there's a seperate ALU for 64 Bit integer, including a seperate register set for its operation. the MMX Unit is _not_ part ot the FPU - the MMX data registers are only _mapped_ to the FPU registers - this trick has be invented to make the MMX-Unit compatible to task switching in existing multi tasking OSes - making the new register set visible as seperate entity would have made MMX unusable on these systems until a new task switcher was ready to switch also MMX content - which may have taken years (Windows) or would never happen on some systems - remember how long it took for PC Unixes to recognize and support 287s and up. Now what ? So 'the' bulk ALU is the one to take ? Gruss H. Ps:.: I love it :) -- VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen http://www.vintage.org/vcfe http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe

http://www.sbrowning.com/vintage/ vintage computer adverts -- Gareth Knight Amiga Interactive Guide | Team Amiga | http://amiga.emugaming.com | BenchPress |

Tarsi wrote: Not really about the 80186 itself but for more info on the TRS80 model 2000 http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757/T2000.HTML It's Jeff Hellige's site. He helped me alot get this thing going again... Claude

Tony Duell wrote: Research Machines produced a 80186-based PC called the Nimbus. If there were compatibility issues they may not have been visible in the locked-in education market.

On 11 Nov 2000, Iggy Drougge wrote: I never heard of the COMPIS....I do remember a Swedish computer called the ABC-80...never actually saw one of those, but someone wrote an emulator for it...really bad, TRS-80 Model I type graphics but it did have a decent pinball game that someone wrote in BASIC... Whoo-hoo. Do tell...

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Iggy Drougge wrote: It gets better :-) . It is a multiplexed data/address bus; thirteen wires including ground and power, that's it. Four lines are data/address. The rest control the bus state and the soft configuration of the base addresses of all devices. The original saturn processor in the HP71 can access 1 meganibble, though. In a typical cycle, first, you need to write the address to all devices; this needs 5 clock cycles, one for each nibble in the address. However, once the address is written, up to sixteen contiguous nibbles can be read/written without having to put an address in the bus. This is optimized for bcd arithmetic. -- Carlos Murillo-Sanchez email: cem14(a)cornell.edu 428 Phillips Hall, Electrical Engineering Department Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: Hi We all agree that the i4004 was a 4 bit machine. It had a 12 bit address on a 4 bit bus that sounds similar to the HP one. The 4004 used register pairs, that doesn't make it a 8 bit machine. It also used 8 bit instructions. The bus does not define that it is a 4 bit machine. The width of the ALU does. Not the instruction width and not the address size or register size. I agree with Tony. IMHO Dwight

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I think it is probably impossible to benchmark machines of different architectures and come up with anything useful. Even back in the z80 dayz, machines were incomperable. A C=64, an Atari 8-bit, and an Apple II might all score about 52 drystones, but both the Commodore and the Atari were much faster at graphical tasks than the Apple because they had dedicated coprocessors for the purpose. PC hardware is not nearly so intimately connected as those old machines were. The AMIGA still does pretty well at video today. More than ten years after the Amiga hit the market, the PC is still struggling to realize desktop video editing. The only way to get any cross-platform numbers is to go for the lowest common denominator because it is impossible to predict how the hypothetical target machine is architected. Something like Drystones/whetstones, Flops, mbits@sec for hard disks, mpixels@sec for video. This has been a particularly thorny issue for me as I'm a cross-platform guy who mainly supports PC systems - most run Windos of some variety. Customers go out and get the latest benchmark and expect it to tell them something useful. - Oh, and install 80mb of highly intrusive 'utilities' guaranteed to trash your registry. There actually are very good tools out there in use by processor manufacturers and chipset makers. They use metrics based on good science and observation which is more than I can say for most tests available to us. For them though, the tests and results are mainly bounced off a theoretical model of the product being worked on. I am sure Intel does not use SpecInt or whatever internally..... A machine testing its self is pretty fishy to me. Operating systems being involved. The only time I ever trusted a benchmark was "CHECKIT" for DOS. You'd boot to a prompt and run the thing. It was pretty trusty but I couldn't share my results with an Alpha owner. Oops, rambling. TTYL Jeff In <5.0.0.25.2.20001115154035.026a5008(a)208.226.86.10>10>, on 11/15/00 at 08:26 PM, Chuck McManis <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com> said: A PIII with 256MB of ram, 128K of cache and 40GB of disk does >not seem "balanced." In this case the processor seems under powered. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

Ahl's simple benchmark is the way to go. 10 rem Ahl's simple benchmark 20 for n = 1 to 100: a = n 30 for i = 1 to 10 40 a = sqr(a): r = r + rnd(1) 50 next i 60 for i = 1 to 10 70 a = a^2: r = r + rnd(1) 80 next i 90 s = s + a: next n 100 print abs (1010-s/5) 110 print abs (1000-r) I remember being pleased that my Epson Equity II came in at 12 seconds in GW-basic. The machine on my desk doesn't have a basic interpreter. Compiled it comes in at about 0.00075 second. Eric

I couldn't resist. :-) I was being as diplomatic as I could be in describing these very good 6502 machines. Really though, there are several points about the three machines that make them unique: The Apple II was very expandable, had fast paralell i/o for drives at the outset, and a very flexible DOS and filesystem which allowed the machine to make use of it's other strengths. It had moderate graphics and poor sound. DOS allowed long filenames, time/date stamping, a directory tree, and a comand line interface. The open buss had expansion capabilities that dwarfed the Comodore line of machines and made the Atari look difficult (stacked like ZX81 vs cardcage like Apple internal). Both main competitors to Apple used TTL serial for drives which hurt performance. The Atari 8-bit had a great DOS/filesystem (Spartados), fast paralell i/o for hard disks and floppies, great graphics, great sound, and the ability to use most any upgrade conceivable (ram up to 4MB, dual sound chips, you name it). In addition the Atari has a real-time clock, time-date stamping of files, a command line interface, a directory tree, and tons of other modern features the original designers didn't think of but provided for. The XE series had a crappy keyboard that I rather liked, and the XE series XF551 drive was as sturdy as toilet paper under a running faucet. Earlier machines weren't so, but for the XE this is true. Fortunately, a modified XL series drive or third party drive worked for everyone and so we were happy. The Atari 8-bits' floppies are ten times faster STOCK (than C=). With a $25.00 mod they are thirty times faster. A hard disk on the C= runs at about 2.5kbit. Stock Atari floppies run at 19.2kbit, modified is 56kbit - the XE tissuepaper drive at 38.4kbps. The Atari's hard disk options, in addition to a real filesystem, run at 3,500,000bps - yes, that is the right number of zeros 3500kbps. In fact, this translates to something like 35Kbytes per second throughput for reads versus a lucky 2kbps for the C=. There is also a practical, software compatible (almost all) network (mux) for the Atari that would be impossible for the C=. I ran my bbs on one for years. It saved me a bunch of money on hard disks for each machine and made multi-line BBS'ing possible. All while running any software I wanted. Spartados is third-party, so is the high-speed fdd upgrade, the real-time clock, the hard disk upgrade and almost all ram upgrades. In fact, most of the cool stuff was third party.... Nevertheless, they are all compatible with original software and interoperate perfectly. There are no comperable C= products, nor are there from other makers for the C= machine. The Commodore 64 had the worlds worst rom operating system ever created. Most publishers just mapped it out and went straight to hardware to get good results. The sound was somewhat better than the Atari and MUCH better than the Apple. The C='s main fault was the i/o. The machine could read tape ok, but to read disks it had to emulate the tape drive and run at it's speed. This is really horrible. My Atari's hard disk is divided into several 16mb partitions (firmware limit is 64mb per partition but that is still waiting for a new dos). Specs are 1428 files per directory with a 254 char limit for a path. You can stack paths but why? A single 16mb hard disk on the C= would have to be partitioned into 180k 'floppy-sized' chunks and then addressed using machine calls to the drive's rom in order to get a simple directory. There are no directories or even CP/M-like 'user areas' to separate data. All that has to be virtualized by each application within it's own code. There is no DOS for the C=. At least none that allows you to run the majority of software. There is none because the i/o and ram schemes never allowed for one. GEOS does not count because it bypasses or manipulates the original ROM os for greater functionality at the expense of near total incompatibility with non-GEOS software. In <200011160250.SAA11566(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu>du>, on 11/15/00 at 10:44 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu> said: -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

In <200011161504.HAA21180(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu>du>, on 11/16/00 at 10:17 AM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu> said: That is something the Atari NEVER had - a reliable tape drive. The tapes were SLOW - 600 baud. Though you could do a poke to triple the speed, the tape would just fail to read anyway. It was really horrible. Most folks got disk drives partly in self-defense. Fortunately, the disk drives are bulletproof (untested at range ;-)). Yea, the Atari's serial buss is a lot like USB also. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was not aware there was any way to address big drives on the C=, but what you say makes sense. The machine and it's mass-storage are so divorced you could use carrier pidgeons for transfers. Spartados, the dos that finally won the DOSwars on the Atari 8-bit is a command-line dos with most modern features like subdirs, a large path size, a system path like MSDOS, I/O redirection etcetera. To allow a user to access your machine via modem it only requires that your modem be set to auto answer and that you enter "print R1: cr/lf - R1: cr/lf" Sparta's redirection takes care of the rest. Syntax ranges from MSDOS - like for earlier v ersions to MSDOS for the flagship Spartados X. They were a bit skittish about lawsuits early on.... Most were menu-driven, but OS A+, DOS XL, and Spartados were command-line. Sparta is by far the best of them and, thank God, provided True random access within files. The funny thing about the some 30 dos(es) for the Atari 8-bit is that they were all compatible with one another insofar as running software was concerned. A lot of effort was spent trying to fix inherent i/o problems. This is fun! I'm learning too! Regards, Jeff -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

That's the part I can't remember precisely, but I believe it is "Keyboard Read and Link" or some such. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- If you cannot convince them, confuse them. -- Harry S Truman ---------------

Yeah, BASIC 2.0 is just vanilla M-BASIC. In a machine that was that sound- and graphics-sophisticated for the day, giving the user no access to it without resorting to low-level control doesn't really make much sense. Look at how quickly Simon's BASIC and the Super Expander came out. Depends on the loader. If it's a commercial loader like, say, NOVATAPE, yes. But the regular stock Kernal loader is highly reliable, just slow as heck. The VIC-20 actually runs it better. In fact, the serial bus is 25% faster on the VIC, and early 1541s have a compatibility mode to support this speed boost. The main problem is the VIC-II interrupting the CPU every time it wants to do DMA (this is part of the reason why sprites turn off automatically when the Kernal LOAD routine starts), which interferes with the exact timing the IEC bus protocol demands. To get this speed boost back, you send the drive a UI+ command, and then turn the 64's screen off with POKE 53265,11. This problem doesn't show up in the 128 when it uses the VIC-II for video because its CIAs are different, and specifically wired for the faster speed. That's the other part of the problem on the 64. I assume cost was the reason it was not corrected -- it is fairly easy to do a board modification to allow fast serial access on the 64 also, but you need a special loader as well since the 64's Kernal does not support it. Largely. GEOS VLIR tries to implement a multi-fork format. If you try to LOAD a GEOS VLIR file with the Kernal routine, you get the info fork, not the data fork. However, the disks are not low-level incompatible -- it is fully possible to read GEOS VLIR files with direct sector access techniques like U1 and U2 commands because they're still regular GCR sectors. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill. -- R. Clopton ------

You get a CPU speed boost also by turning off the screen, but not more than six or seven percent, people have calculated. VIC-II DMA ("badlines") normally occur every eight scanlines, so if you know how many scanlines are on your screen, you can make a rough calculation how much the DMA overhead is (there are some other small factors affecting the value also, but that's the general notion). Sprites worsen VIC-II's hit on the bus. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- Whatever it is, I'm against it. -- Groucho Marx ----------------------------

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: Kiss ass. :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, Cameron Kaiser wrote: "She Blinded Me With Science" ??? :-)

YEAH! :-) (She's poetry in mo---tion ....) -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegcaps awound? ---------------------------------

Yea, yea. Whatever. ;-) Regards, Jeff In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10011181938210.27985-100000(a)siconic.com>om>, on 11/19/00 at 01:53 AM, Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> said: -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10011160656250.22735-100000(a)war.deltasoft.com>om>, on 11/16/00 at 11:08 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb(a)deltasoft.com> said: No, to the machine's ROM. The Basic was a quick hack of Mbasic and didn't take advantage of the custom hardware on the C=. Maybe I did get that from some 80's propoganda. Sorry. The drive was still Godaweful slow. Not because it is serial either. There was something badly wrong with thier design. That was the 1mb floppy right? I didn't know that ran on a different buss. Not by magic. By machine language calls to the drive's rom. This is not a complete dos, but a kernel you can make calls to. Imagine CP/M. Then subtract the command interpreter. Sure, all the calls are there but it's vastly more difficult to use.... If you go ahead and write a ccp you lose compatability because of the ram it takes up. I don't know if there is a cartridge-based DOS for the C=. Spartados X is a 64k cart that bitbangs the ram/rom to avoid bumping memlo. The only reason I can imagine for doing it the way they did is to save ram for applications compatibility. If so, this was poor planning. Maybe some... Yea, there is the Turbo 816 upgrade for the Atari too. It never went very far though. In 816 mode compatability suffers badly. Me too. Back then though a lot of the folks were just ignorant flamers. This group is a bit more mature and knowledgable.... ;-) Regards, Jeff -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Gene Buckle wrote: Retro-BBSing can only follow retro-computing (perhaps even within the same relative time-frame that BBS' popped-up around computing). Once thing I never managed to do was put up a BBS although I spent years writing my own BBS software. Maybe one day, before I die, I'll actually put it up. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10011161049440.22834-100000(a)war.deltasoft.com>om>, on 11/16/00 at 02:43 PM, Gene Buckle <geneb(a)deltasoft.com> said: Not likely. I ran my Carina II bbs until 96'. The internet really killed the BBS. Who wants to pay LD charges to get what they can have for free on the Net'. Don't know if any of the list folk were users, but the board's name was "Cheez Daddy's House of Funk". I know, I know. I got the name from a friend when we were in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He named his tent and I took that name for the bbs.... There are a few still left though. Some have even moved to the Web. The CLOSER TO HOME bbs is up and running via Telnet for instance. I doubt that dialup boards are going to make a comeback even if LD goes for free. There isn't enough content on one bbs to meet the internet head-on. Maybe we should host Classiccmp on some vintage machine? Regards, Jeff -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

Excuse me? $70k spent on stuff from ebay in two years? Some of us don't have the budget for more than a few hundred a year for stuff... And the fact that you pay more than is reasonable (and it appears you have the deep pockets to do that) has a direct affect on the prices of things for the rest of us... No wonder prices on ebay are unreal. Megan Gentry Former RT-11 Developer +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+ | Megan Gentry, EMT/B, PP-ASEL | Internet (work): gentry!zk3.dec.com | | Unix Support Engineering Group | (home): mbg!world.std.com | | Compaq Computer Corporation | addresses need '@' in place of '!' | | 110 Spitbrook Rd. ZK03-2/T43 | URL: http://world.std.com/~mbg/ | | Nashua, NH 03062 | "pdp-11 programmer - some assembler | | (603) 884 1055 | required." - mbg KB1FCA | +--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+

----- Original Message ----- From: "Megan" <mbg(a)world.std.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 5:21 PM Subject: Re: Love 'em or hate 'em... That's 3 times my annual income. Before taxes. Uh, hang on, US$ to AU$, make that 6 times... I begrudge no-one their money, I'm sure you are earning/earned it and deserve to enjoy it, but it does make it hard for those with lesser means to get something through auction. If I knew you were bidding for something, I wouldn't bother, because I'd probably undershoot your opening offer. Still, it's the same old story everywhere, fish aren't aware of water I guess.. Cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au

Bill, We were a service center for Commodore till they went under, There were a number of refurbishers of Commodore equipment, some were authorized but most were not to my knowledge. If you have a blue warranty card with the machine, this was done by a company in the midwest, Don't remember their name, but they put these cards in the box and they were not honored by Commodore. I have seen some machines that were modified and stuffed into cases just to get them out the door by the folks refurbishing. I might even have an errata here at the shop somewhere about the refurbishing of the machines from Commodore. Chances are, the board was refurbished but put into a Vic case. Hope that helps Bill (elecdata1) Bill Layer wrote:

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Gene Buckle wrote: I remember back in the BBS days, the big quest was to get Usenet access (which was, typically, only available to universities, government, large businesses, etc.) Of course there were a few public dial-in usenet bbs's around...all a long distance call from me :-( Now that everyone can get a free AOL disk and have Usenet access...

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 02:19:18PM -0800, healyzh(a)aracnet.com wrote: Speaking of resurrecting old communities... Does anyone have any experience dealing with Tymnet? They're still around, zombie-like and living off of government contracts, but I've been thinking how neat it would be to finally bring my RetroNET idea to life and provide dial-up through Tymnet. My plans for RetroNET have always been to form a separate, non-internet-connected network of hobbyists, retrocomputists, wackos, and misfits who want a place something like the timesharing resources of old. It would consist of VAXen and DECstations and even PCs running more modern Unix-like OSes, communicating over UUCP (since none of us could possibly afford dedicated leased lines). E-mail, Retronet News (think: Usenet without the Usenet), and general dorkiness. And really there's no good reason not to have it connected to the Internet, except for the "purity" factor, and the neatness factor. C'mon, think how cool it would be to have a "retronet!host!username" email address that only other COOL, ELITE DORKS can talk to! Ironically, though I want it not to be connected to the Internet, I've already reserved RetroNET.net and RetroNET.org. Hey, might as well at least have one multi-homed host to let the SLOBBERING PROLES know how neat and SUPERIOR we are. Anyway, just a thought. And to make it real, I'd need a bunch of people who wanted to be RetroNET nodes, and some convenient way to allow people to dial up. Tymnet sprang instantly to mind (primarily because they're still EVERYWHERE, and still allow 300bps dial up! My portable Silent 700 works! Yeah baby!) I'll bet they're expensive, though. Still... anyone want to be a RetroNET node? :) -Seth

----- Original Message ----- From: <blstuart(a)bellsouth.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 5:00 PM Subject: Re: BBS's Nice concept. Keep goin.... You're right. No good reason. In fact, it's a big problem if you are outside the US, and probably a bit iffy if you are spread widely across it.. Yes. But perhaps we should bend the net to our will. IF it were across an ocean or two, on anything like a regular basis, it gets bad pretty quick. Trust me on this. I used to run a BBS back in the dark (2400baud) ages. Ahh. Frontdoor 1.99c. Remote Access. Quickbbs. Masquerade. Opus. External protocols, echomail, netmail. Sigh. Seriously, even interstate or any form of trunk (long distance) calls soon added up if you were moving even fairly modest amounts of news (echomail) and email (netmail). Why not have two bob each way? Would seem to me possible to setup up some sort of VPN via the net, so you can dialin to your ISP and then tie in to RetroNet in some secure manner, heck could even have an encrypted link or something. Best of both worlds, and it makes it possible to have a GLOBAL RetroNet, using the internet as BBS's used the phone network. Hey you VMS bigots, how bout some Decnet over IP? Endless possibilities. just my antipodean 2c worth.... or about 1c US currently :^( Cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au ICQ: 1970476 P.S. It occurs to me that the 'two bob each way' may be a little obscure for our US friends. It comes from the practice, by small-time gamblers on horse races, of putting 'two bob' (ie two shillings, or 20c these days) on the horse 'each way' meaning 20c for a win, 20c for a place, to maximise your chance of winning something. A popular pastime by housewives and the like, especially with small offcourse bookmakers (still a few left here - last place in South Australia where they are still legal) A bit like 'have your cake and eat it too'. Perhaps that would have been a better choice. Hmm, yes. Make it so.

Zane, I'd be up to reanimating my torn apart uVAX II for this. I think it would be a blast. I can drop it on the 'net fairly easily. I still have one of those huge H???? vampire tap ethernet trancievers that I modified for 10Base2 that I can hook up to the DEQNA. g.

If you want to emulate dial-up, it would seem to me what you'd really want is a driver that runs under Windows or Linux over a serial port that would pretend to be a modem, allowing the old machine to "dial" the way it always did. The contemporary box would connect to the net in its own way, but would seem to be a modem to the old box, even though the data is tossed around on a VPN. - John

Looks like setting up DECnet over TCP/IP is a piece of cake. Looks like it's basically a case of setting up the PWIP interface on the VMS system. http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/72final/6499/6499pro_014.html#index_x_717 For those of us with Firewalls and NAT it looks like ports 102 and 399 would need to be redirected to the VMS box. So what services would such a system need to be running? Obviously Mail (but not SMTP), and DEC Notes. What else? I'm guessing that a VMS related file archive would be nice. I've got a bunch of VAX games that were on the original Hobbyist CD, but that don't seem to be available anywhere else. How would user accounts be handled? Also most importantly is anyone seriously interested in this? Zane

From: <healyzh(a)aracnet.com> Last I seriously used TCP/IP on VMS was under MultiNet 3.mumble. But on the hobbyist CD is DECNet Plus and TCPIP 5.0. The docs state that if you install DECNet Plus, you can run DECNet apps over TCP/IP. I haven't tried it. I'd be interested!

Well, better get to work :^) Out of curiousity what have you got for disks on that system? Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Hey, you're actually in good shape then. I was afrad that you were going to say RD53's. However, keep in mind you can probably pick up a SCSI based VAXstation 3100 with decent RAM and disks for less than you could get a replacement disk for that system. Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

There is also the issue of noise and heat! But power and disks are the big two. The only reason I can see to have a Q-Bus based VAX as your main VAX is if you need a specific Q-Bus widget. Of course if you're lucky enough to have SCSI for your Q-Bus VAX..... Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 blstuart(a)bellsouth.net wrote: US interstate rates can be $0.05/minute or even less if you find a good deal. US to Europe can be done for $0.10/minute or less. It's a much different telecom climate than in the 80s. Go for it, SethDood! Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 10:40:31PM -0800, Mike Ford wrote: My mind drifted to Tymnet primarily because they're no cost to the caller -- their cost is only to the parties who talk to Tymnet's X.25 network, the people you dial up to. In the Olden Days, you could call Tymnet to get access to your AOL or Delphi account. In fact I can still dial up Tymnet all I want for free -- I just have nowhere to connect after that! It's a moot point though, it's almost certainly too expensive for me to actually sign up for an X.25 account with Tymnet. Just a wild fantasy of what to do if I were filthy rich. No no no... it just doesn't feel right. There's something missing. I mean, why not just have a bunch of hosts all connected to the public Internet? Boooring! That's so 1995! We're talking 1982 here. I'm not opposed _a priori_ to the idea of a RetroNET<->Internet gateway, though, something to allow email to be exchanged between the two. But really, the idea is "If you don't have a RetroNET node near you, either (1) Become a RetroNET node and exchange UUCP with other RetroNET nodes at 2:00 AM local time, or (2) Call long distance to log in, or (3) Convince someone local to you to be a RetroNET node." I mean, it's just all in fun. It's not like we'd be denying people their rights if they couldn't afford the long distance charges. Tough. I suppose we _could_ have one bastion host be a RetroNET<->Internet gateway that offers public telnet accounts. But... but... UUCP is half the fun!! -Seth

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 06:35:21PM +1030, Geoff Roberts wrote: Ah, I keep forgetting how lucky we Yanks are to live in the United States -- at least, in terms of telecommunications costs. Local calls here are invariably free of charge, included in a flat monthly fee for telephone service. Only long-distance requires a per-minute or per-call fee. Yup ;) Not my problem. View it as a perfect opportunity to form an ARCH RIVAL to RetroNET. Call it... AuNET or something. We can have vicious flamewars about whose is better, and eventually form a backbone cabal. You're simply not being adventurous enough ;) Next Up: Tin-Can-and-Two-Strings-Net, dammit! BWAHAHAHA! -Seth

What if we restrict him to a 1200/75 split channel? :) g.

Gene Buckle skrev: I was rather amused to see the return of split-speed (I never saw the first wave myself, but I'd read about it) when the 56k modems came, which have a 33k6 uplink. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. Alle meine Noten bringen mich nicht aus den N?ten, und ich schreibe noten ?berhaupt nur aus N?ten. --- Ludwig van Beethoven

Don Maslin skrev: Which HST protocol? AFAIK, there were at least two; one 9600 bps and one 16800 bps flavour, as well IIRC a ~12900 flavour for mobile phones. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. Was ist ein Erwachsener? Ein Kind, das vom Alter aufgepumpt ist. --- Simone de Beauvoir

On Mon, 20 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: Because of a mail-server failure I lost the original query on the HST protocal. However, quoting from a 1992 manual for the USRobotics High Speed Modems: "Under V.32 bis modulation, data flows at the same rate in both directions. Under HST modulation, data flow is asymmetrical: the high speed in one direction and 450 bps in the other. The modems switch the fast and slow channels when the volume of data flow changes. Interactive applications appear faster under V.32 modulation, while connection times are faster under HST modulation." - don

R. D. Davis skrev: With former state telecom, I pay 10 ?re a minute, which with today's exchange rates would be about one US cent a minute. And that's only on evenings and weekends. Double that price daytime. And that's for local calls (which have now been implemented on a nationwide basis). Oh, and you pay 50 ?re as a connection charge for each call. I think my ISP will still deliver UUCP (it did to some BBSes some three or four years ago), though I doubt anyone still uses it. How about parabolic transfers? It is wireless! -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. Kyosuke: Jag heter Kurre, Kurre Carlsson! Jag: Det heter du inte alls!

I'm sure that pidgeons and clay tablets would be FAR more reliable. g.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Seth" &lt;sethm(a)loomcom.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 7:32 PM Subject: Re: BBS's ok, if Doh! Yeah, forgot about that. Good point. (evil grin) Seriously, if you can do it, go for it. "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes." I can't afford to be THAT adventurous! LOL. ;^) I play with teletypes a lot, perhaps a global mechanical TTY network, LOL. Cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au netcafe(a)tell.net.au ICQ: 1970476

----- Original Message ----- From: "Iggy Drougge" &lt;optimus(a)canit.se&gt; To: "Geoff Roberts" &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2000 11:10 AM Subject: Re: BBS's building your forerunner to There was stuff like that around until relatively recently. There were RTTY BBS programs, which were your basic BBS msg board etc, but designed to work with Baudot TTY machines. Some survived as an adjunct to Packet, I think the one in Adelaide only closed down it's RTTY gateway last year. Cheers Geoff Roberts Computer Systems Manager Saint Mark's College Port Pirie, South Australia geoffrob(a)stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au netcafe(a)tell.net.au ICQ: 1970476

Sounds good... Mine's up... wanna start swapping systems entries. We can use Cnews over UUCP over TCP/IP and use the local ISP's for connectivity. Those people looking to run on 8 bitters can put up Waffle and use uucp over RS232 serial to tie in. Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | FreeBSD since 1.0.2, Linux since 0.99.10 | Unix Sys Admin since Sys V/BSD 4.2 | Windows System Administration: "Magical Misery Tour"

"R. D. Davis" wrote: Nice thing about UUCP, if configured correctly it could go over either medium. Fails on IP it can jump to dialup and you could limit the dialup to certain times of day, day of the week, depending on the host and could even drop kick to a backup dialup (IIRC). (The rest deleted as it's reading too much into a system that was designed that way). -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry rutgers.edu!kb2ear!njc(a)diane.uucp Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, R. D. Davis wrote: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

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R. D. Davis skrev: The InterNet is automatically routed, whereas dial-up UUCP traffic is not. If one of the nodes you're relying on breaks down, you'd have to step in and find another feed. The InterNet has not been down a single day for the five years I've been using it. Even when a trawler cuts off a cable, traffic will be routed through another network. Perhaps slower, but always there. After all, that's what the net was built for. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. I use OpenBSD 'coz it has a cool blowfish logo. The other BSDs look satanic. - Anonymous Coward

I agree. I've got a 24/7 net link and it would be fun to use it for something other than serving web pages and playing Air Warrior. :) g.

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: Of course, these packet switched networking companies charged the online services (Source, Compuserve, PeopleLink, etc) quite a bit. I think Peoplelink eventually went out of business, partially due to high packet switch network costs. But I could be wrong... P.S. anyone remember PC-Pursuit and StarLink? These were outdial services that allowed users, for a $25/mo fee (too high for me back in the day) to call BBS's all over the US, without worrying about running up a high long distance bill.

At 01:09 PM 11/17/00 -0600, you wrote: I knew people that used PC-Pursuit, and even considered using it myself since I called a number of boards on the west coast while living on the east coast. I never did though. People seemed to like it well enough. Jeff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Power Computing PowerCurve, 288mhz G3, Mac OS 9 http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757 Home Of The TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: Anyone remember PC Pursuit? Using codez does not a phreaker make. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

Sellam Ismail wrote: No but knowing what 2600 & KP1-4 does. Also knowing that the internal system still works that way does. :-) Got my "E & O ..." right here, anyone know of a booth that still does ground start? -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

ESS? Ewwwwww. :) I'd much rather have a step by step or crossbar switch to play with. :) g.

On Sun, 19 Nov 2000, Neil Cherry wrote: Do you design in-band signalling features into your systems to allow one to seize a trunk with a 2600HZ tone? :) Well, it depends on what payphones you're talking about, but the Bell phones have a ground-start line. The private payphones (a.k.a. COCOTs) generally use a standard business loop-start line, or in some cases a specially provisioned COPT (Coin Operated Pay Telephone) line that has certain features useful for billing. But anyway, the provisioning of the line has nothing to do with being able to "phreak" (in a blue box sense) from a payphone. In the old days, when you had to put in a coin before you got dialtone, you used to be able to steal a dialtone by grounding the phone (like the trick David Lightman used in _War Games_). With the old phones, the coin caused the line to be grounded, and since the trunk was ground-start, it would signal the central office to return dialtone. So you had to pay even for information and operator calls, although the operator could return your coin (if you didn't have a coin to begin with you were screwed :) Since it was assumed the only way the line would be grounded was by inserting a coin, it was considered secure. The Bells then changed their phones out to ones that had dialtone first that you couldn't fool in this manner, but there was still a way to fool them into making free local calls by grounding the line while dialing. A very simplified discussion, and of course pertaining to US payphones, but the basics are there. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

healyzh skrev: I still dial BBSes, but now usually with a telnet client over the InterNet. You'd be amazed at how large the remaining BBSes can be. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. Iggy tipsar: Vill du l?sa en PDF-fil, men saknar l?sare, skicka den till pdf2txt(a)adobe.com, du f?r den tillbaka som ren ASCII till din epostadress.

Few, actually. It runs in 6502 emulation most of the time, but the timing really isn't a problem because it talks to the bus at the regular 1MHz and also keeps IRQs at the regular 60Hz frequency. So a lot of software, amazingly, works unmodified, and there's a lot of software now that is being patched to run native. And CMD does still make them. http://www.cmdweb.com/ -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- If you're not very clever, you should be conciliatory. -- Benjamin Disraeli

Z80 vs 6502. Eric

Hey, everybody's target is the king. ;-( -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. --

Ohhhh!!!! Don't start me!!!! (Shuffles away, kicking at the ground, mumbling incoherently).

How about a GE TermiNET 300? *gd&r* g.

Yep. It was a 300 baud band printer with a keyboard. It had two capstans on either side of the printer with a rubber belt looped around them. The belt held little metal fingers that had a letter on one end. When the right letter would pass the right spot on the page, one of 132 little hammers would whack the letter. It was pretty noisy, but impressive to watch with the lid off. :) g.

I had mine wired up to a Royal Alphatronic PC that I have. It worked great until the "E" finger broke off. :) g.

Cameron Kaiser writes: ADDS Consul 980 Black characters on a white screen yellow and orange keycaps, and a piercingly loud BEL.

Bill Pechter skrev: While we're on the topic of terminals, my friend has got an old Tandberg terminal which won't interoprate as it should due to uncommon protocols. Does anyone have a termcap or a description of the control codes so that one may roll one? -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. Take a ride / Take me aside / Push me up to the life /?Down to Prag / We go far /?I guess we'll crash slowly into tar When I come home from the trench /?I telephone my friends / We take a car / We may go far / I guess we'll crash slowly into tar Strangers will come /?Hold on... And late at night / we go to clubs /?where no one else is dressed up / And when it's done / I must return /?I guess we'll crash slowly into tar Crash Slowly - Strasse, 1981

Bill Pechter wrote: Emacs is better than vi! (This one goes way back!). -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

"JimD." wrote: I got started with emacs back in 81 when I was using the Atari Macro Assembler package. It has the same key strokes for many of it's commands. I was also using vi for on the schools Unix machine. I found vi's modes to be annoying but later found it to be a good editor when dialed into a customer network (I'll post my history later). I use emacs for most of programming, I even wrote a diary program in lisp. So I like emacs because it's the editor I've used the longest and I have on most of my systems. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

Cameron Kaiser wrote: Although vi beats modern EMACS for quirkiness, the original EMACS (written in TECO, not LISP) beats vi, at least once you start doing programming. -- Derek

Iggy Drougge wrote: When I started using it it wasn't an OS yet. ;-) -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

I believe that if one were to actually look at the Serial-Bus on the C-64 (and VIC-20), one would notice a striking similarity to the IEEE-488 (or GPIB-488). I don't recall Commodore's name for the IEEE-488 which they used on the PET series. I purchased the IEEE-488 adapter, an 8050 drive, and had over 2-Megs of floppy storage. I also took my 'little' C-64 to work, and wrote an application in C-64 BASIC that was controlling all sorts of HP equipment. Spectrum analyzer, Sweep Generator, etc. It was a sight to see the engineer's faces when they saw the results. They quickly made me take my stuff home, though. Couldn't have a 'toy' doing this real important work - and controlling expensive equipment. <grin> Regards, James Jackson Gene Buckle wrote:

Eric Smith wrote: I thought I'd add a fan ... Hmm, seem to recall the same for the Apple II and ZX81 :-). -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

On 16 Nov 2000, Eric Smith wrote: It was rather difficult to buy an Apple II as well. After all, it was an Apple machine and had as a matter of consequence an Apple price tag.

On 16 Nov 2000, Eric Smith wrote: Apple also had one other ace in the hole--*schools*! They managed to donate a lot of computers to schools back in the early days, so many families bought Apples so that the kids would have the same programs, disks, etc. both at school and home. Apples were a lot more expensive too ($1000+ rather than $300-500 or less for the C64, Atari, etc.) so many not-too-savvy folks thought they were necessarily "better", I bet...that's probably why Apple kept their prices higher, as a marketing ploy. Also, Atari, in particular, was sort of "typecast" as a video game company, so many folks thought that Atari computers were *only* good for games, not "serious work" like word processing. Of course that was patently untrue, there were good word processors, etc. for the Atari as well. But this type of popular opinion, like most other stereotyping, dies hard...

On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Cameron Kaiser wrote: The fun with the Apple ][ was making it do things the other computers could do, (although not nearly as adequately, but still), without all the adjunct hardware :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: I hung around Radio Shack back in the 80's, playing w/the Coco. I even got into those "hidden" graphics modes (Semigraphics). Never got into the Flex or OS9 stuff, though...

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote: It wasn't quite as popular as the black-and-white TRS-80's, or the Apple/Atari/Commodores, if I recall. But it wasn't a bad little machine, though.

There is. Roger Merchberger. Haven't seen him on the list for a while tho. Altho I have 4 COCO's and OS9 I don't qualify. ^^^^^^^^^^CALLING MERCH ^^^^^^ Love the thread guys. ciao larry Reply to: lgwalker(a)look.ca

Sure, a Dragon counts even more than a real coco if you ask me. The Dragon is pretty rare here in the states. I bet there are fewer over here than Radio Shack has stores.... How hardware compatible is it with the standard COCO machines? Can you use most/all RS peripherals/roms etc? Regards, Jeff In &lt;456.357T1000T2654929optimus(a)canit.se&gt;se>, on 11/18/00 at 10:15 AM, "Iggy Drougge" &lt;optimus(a)canit.se&gt; said: -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey S. Worley President Complete Computer Services, Inc. 30 Greenwood Rd. Asheville, NC 28803 828-277-5959 Visit our website at HTTP://www.Real-Techs.com THETechnoid(a)home.com -----------------------------------------------------------

THETechnoid skrev: They can't have been all that popular here, either. This is strictly Commodore country. I'm not sure. Is there some more experienced Dragon user here who'd care to enlighten us? At least I know that it's got the same quirky joystick ports, a Microsoft BASIC and will run OS9 when equipped with drives and 64K of RAM. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6. "It's better to have loved and lost, than to be gang raped in a Turkish prison."

Eric Smith wrote: Hey there are still those of use who have managed to write an asm prog for a PIC based Cheese box in less than 50 bytes! -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)home.net http://members.home.net/ncherry (Text only) http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lightsey/52 (Graphics) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge)

ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: Hi As example, my Nicolet has a 20 bit ALU/data bus and a 16 bit address. I just wish I had the full 64K by 20 core in it :) As you can see, the numbers can be all over the place. Dwight

Nope, the 80186 was designed to be a high-integration version of the 8086 architecture to support embedded applications. I was the Systems Validation engineer responsible for it at Intel for a short period of time. It was the first example of a chip that did things in a way that Microsoft hadn't expected and so MS-DOS wouldn't run on it without tweaking. They are also found in the DEC TQK50 controller card. --Chuck