Hi, Pete Edwards said: We were using it into the '80s until we switched computers to a Univac. Interesting ICL 1900 info here: http://www.fcs.eu.com/icl1900/index.html -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

Hi, Andy Holt said: It's amazing how quickly and completely the ICL stuff vanished, after all there were quite a number of them - they were virtually compulsory in local government, which is why we had one. I remember one of the engineers telling me about warehouses full of unwanted kit, presumably it all got scrapped. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

Hi, Andy Holt said: [RE: ICL 1900] The only ICL souvenir I have is a dark red 4-ring binder that once contained a GE termiprinter maintenance manual (manual long gone unfortunately). I I found it in a filing cabinet behind my desk years after the computer went. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

\begin{aol} Me too! \end{aol} Mopre seriously, I have such an ICL binder with the Termiprinter field service manual still in it (I also have a couple of the Termiprinters). Alas the manual is a boardswapper guide with no schematics, and there's enough custom LSI stuff in the Termiprinter to make tracing out schematics a long job. And the printing quality was very poor. Some of the signal names, etc, are illegible now. I rememebr when I got my first Termiprinter, with the manual, I needed to take it apart to clean it. I took out the hammer bank and stripped it down, cleaned out the gunge, etc, and then looked in the manual for how to reasemble it. All it told me was that the hammer bank was not field-repairable. ARGH!. Yes, I got it going again, it wasn't even very difficult. I think I have a cassette drive manual in a similar binder that's also pretty hard to read in places. I am not sure you'd call them ICL souvenirs, but I do have 4 PERQs and associated documentation. At least the PERQ AGW3300 was an ICL design. -tony

Hmmm.. I remember the fluorescent lamp across the front to illuminate the printing, the column display on the KSR model (since you couldn't see where the carriage had got to as there wasn't carriage), and the wonderful keyboard. What a nice feel. It was, of course, electromagnetically encoded -- each key bar carried an I-core that fitted onto a U-core in the PCB. Pressing a key completed the magnetic loop, increasing the coupling between the PCB tracks. Each core carried a clock track and the aprorpriate data output tracks -- these occured in pairs, normal and inverted for each bit, each core had one or the other. The signals from each pair went to differential amplifiers in one of the ASICs I believe. I started out with a 75-column KSR and a 118 column RO. By moving parts around, I got the reverse (118 column KSR, 75 column RO). The only problems was that column display I mentioned. It wasn't fitted on RO models, and was either 2 or 3 digit as approriate on the KSRs. I fitted a red LED to the left of it, wired to the appropriate signal (the counter board could handle 3 digits, maybe with a link swap). Not original, but the chances of finding one of those 7 segment filament displays and its socket are close to zero. -tony

Why? Are you sure you don't mean "with Sun OSes" rather than "with SPARC systems"? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Julian Wolfe wrote: If Elvis is a machine, and it's currently running and on the network, and you ping it, the ping command will respond "elvis is alive". Peace... Sridhar

[top-posting and entire-quoting repaired manually -dM] I'm not sure *I* do. But the only thing I can think of is that SunOS (and quite possibly Solaris) ping doesn't act like BSD ping (reporting individual packets) unless specifically told to with a flag; instead, it just reports liveness. And the message when a machine is up is of the form "%s is alive"; this leads to amusement when the target machine is named elvis. That's why I said that you need Sun OSes rather than SPARC machines. I, for exmaple, have lots of SPARCs at home and not one of them exhibits such behaviour, because I'm not running any Sun OSes. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Julian Wolfe wrote: If you ping another system from a Solaris box, instead of the verbose return info from ping you get in most OS's, Solaris simply returns: <hostname> is alive There was a huge cult/contingent in the US for many years that maintained Elvis Presley had staged his own death, so making your Solaris machine say "elvis is alive" is the joke. Doc

At 2:28 PM -0600 1/9/06, Julian Wolfe wrote: No compiler, that was a teco alias. John

Well, as long as we're on the topic, what the heck: http://pintopc.home.cern.ch/pintopc/www/cois&lois/Unix_err.htm