Hi, Anyone interested in a trade? I have a PDP-11/84, it is missing the 8191 Unibus adapter... what I really want is a PDP-11/x3 Qbus system, preferrably something along the lines of an 11/73 or maybe an 11/83 in a Microvax type chassis, but I'm not picky. I've been waiting a while on several people to put together some systems for me, but I would really like to get a working Qbus system as I just got my CDC-9766 and I've been spending nearly a week tearing it down, cleaning and checking it and I have an electrician come next week to install my 220v line so I can power it, so I really would like to get this beastie cozied up to a nice PDP-11 along with my RK05. Anyone interested? Curt

I guess I should add in that if you're not local, I will take my system down to Forward Air shipping and ship it to your local hub near all major airports and I would pay for it and I would also pay for shipping of your system to me. Curt ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred N. van Kempen" <waltje(a)pdp11.nlTo: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 10:37 AM Subject: Re: Anyone wanna trade??? PDP 11/84 available... got cleaning 220v cozied up Collector/Archivist http://www.pdp11.nl/VAXlab/ http://www.pdp11.nl/ USA

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Jochen Kunz wrote: Correction: I have those for *qbus*, not unibus.. my collection of Unibus gear is, um, rather pathetic. Which of course I will blame on my parents: when I *did* have all that stuff, they didn't let me keep it because it took too much space in the garage. I ended up taking it to a fellow list member (Sipke) and trade it for the MicroPDP-11 (which I still have). *sniff* i want em back, sipke :( Damn, Jochen.. now you got me all depressed while remembering that :( --f

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Jochen Kunz wrote: Yeah, me too. I also have an 11/34 which needs lots of goodies before it will be usable. The funny thing is... someone here in nL recently offered me an RL11.. mine to be had for only about EUR 75. *lol* Um, ya know... no. Thanks for keeping me in mind tho ;-) Cheers, --fred (back to his MV3100-85 and installing OpenBSD on it)

On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 20:02, Ron Hudson wrote: I worked on the 8088/MSDOS card back when. The machine was a Z80 CP/M machine (with every chip known to Zilog in it; the designer was a real ahrdware guy...) The Z80 had an expansion slot that had a little 8-bit-wide IO prot, only. No access to peripherals, the screen, memory or disk. The 8088 side was the CPU, memory and an EPROM, and a fast buffer chip to talk to the Z80 via this (essentially a) parallel port. There was Z80-side software that consumed 100% of the cpu, and simply waited for the 8088 to issue commands to the Z80, which would go off and service them. I wrote the Z80 code, and I thik some of the 8088, but maybe not. It was a horror. The 8088 had hardware that detected references to PC-side things like "memory mapped video": when the 8088 referenced a reserved hardware address, the 8088 was put into an infinite wait state, the Z80 got an interrupt, read a code from the 8088::Z80 interface, figured out what needed to be done (say, write to CRT line 2, col 3), calculate the appropriate Z80/Otrona IO address from the 8088 "PC memory mapped video" address, issue all the commands. Slower than dog doo. Same for every character read/written to the serial port, disk, keyboard, etc. FOr things handled within the MSDOS BIOS (I wrote that) there were explicit commands issued to the Z80 for disk-block-read, etc. (Recall this was before the IBM PC caught on, so all the things you might assume for that machine, eg. ROM BIOS, standard serial ports at 0x3f8 and all that, didn't exist. When you got say a word processor program, you had to tell the program what kind of screen hardware you had. For the Otrona MSDOS, you used ANSI.) Historical footnote: The first Fido/FidoNet BBS software ran on one of these things, until the CRT module caught on fire (eg. smoke & flames). I sold it to some guy via eBay (maybe on this list!). I had two Attache's, the Fido/burned up one which was the 8088 hardwaqre prototype and not saleable, and this other one I wangled out of them. I once had the nylon carrying case. It's all gone now... I have copies of all the Otrona software (binaries) and CP/M stuff, as well as other junk, if anyone cares. I oughta put it up on the net I suppose. tomj The MSDOS "memory mapped video"

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Probably earlier than that as their BIOS & BOOT software was Copyright 1981. - don

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, David Vohs wrote: I am almost certain that a GRiD was the first laptop to go into space. At least this has been the conventional historical anecdote. I don't doubt what you write above. I've always thought the Otrona came out much later than the Osborne 1 (which was also 1981) so this changes what I know. GRiD was founded in 1979. The first Compass into production was almost certainly in 1982. More research needed... -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]