Hold the phone... Maybe other classiccmp readers already know this; I didn't... MLA stands for "Macintosh Liberation Army"...!? Http://www.68kmla.net/faq.php ... wow, and I thought Newton people were the crazed militants. Seems to me that "devoted to the history of the personal computer" ought to start 50 years ago, not with the Mac: http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ronald Wayne Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 2:09 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Retrochallenge, 2005 In a world where people view 486's and obsolete and worthless, is there any point in excluding them? As for MLAgazine being a Mac groupie site, well, it is. The Retrochallenge started with the 68k MLA and we are now trying to expand interest beyond the Mac community. Hopefully that bias will be overcome in the future as more people become interested in the challenge. As for a non-Mac user getting an article published on a Mac website: just think of it as an opportunity to discuss the history your favorite machine. MLAgazine is a site about Apple *history*, as such it has a large readership who will appreciate articles about any old machine.

Worse than that... the Z80, 8085, and 6809 (the first two of which I actually use on a daily basis) are not in the list of qualifying processors. -- John.

Hmmm ... are you the same Ronald Wayne who was the third founder of Apple and sold out for $800? -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ronald Wayne Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 2:30 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Retrochallenge, 2005 Bah, don't let that serve as an excuse. All three of those processors have been added to the list. On 6/14/05, John Hogerhuis <jhoger at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Ronald Wayne wrote: What's the challenge in that? I was online with my Apple //e in 1992. -- 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 ]

From: "Stan Barr" <stanb at dial.pipex.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 2:23 PM In the 70's I was calling up RCP/M's with my SOL-20, who understands bye? :) I think that was before Al Gore invented the internet. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

From: "Bill Sudbrink" <wh.sudbrink at verizon.net> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 4:07 PM I remember the "modem" kits, the same company also sold cassette interfaces (Kansas city format) that were the same basic circuit. At the time most were illegally connected (no DAA) ;-) I remember when Hayes finally came out with a smart 300 baud modem and I could finally go high speed. I have a Hayes S100 modem but it hasn't been fired up in years and wouldn't dare try now, if one of the epoxy modules blew up I'd cry. I should still have a DAA around also. I used some AJ acoustical adaptors also. I had a buddy that just plugged in his SOL-20 cassette port into a coupler he had and would transfer to some other friends at 1200 baud while I was just running my new 300 baud modem. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

On 6/14/05, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Plus in the case of the VIC-20 and C-64, the 300 baud modem was big-banged (the "modem" was literally just a tone modulator/de-modulator hung off of the "user" (parallel) port. The human had to dial a regular phone, wait for the carrier, then unplug the handset cord from the phone and plug it into the "VIC Modem". No sissy Hayes commands here. I got my first VIC Modem in 1982 with a $40 CIS certificate. I didn't like the terminal program that came with the modem, so I wrote my own *in BASIC*! Eventually, I ended up on the beta-test list for VidTex for the C-64 - still have the program and the manual. In 2001, I went to work at CompuServe with some of the same guys that developed VidTex and the early VidTex content nearly 20 years prior. I stuck with 300 baud for a long time because it was *only* $6/hr off-peak. I still had a few bills that ticked off my mom. By 1985, I was using a CiTOH VT100 clone and a Ventel 1200-baud modem borrowed from work... there happens to be an 8-bit processor inside the terminal (8080? 8085? Z-80?), but it's not accessible to the user inside a dumb terminal. One could dial up with that (direct via modem, or through a terminal server and cable modem) to get to lynx, mutt, etc.... -ethan

On 6/14/05, Ronald Wayne <appleto at gmail.com> wrote: Well... my old Amiga 1000 (1985 - 8MHz 68000) was attached to the rest of the world via UUCP starting in 1987. I used to run mail _and_ news on a 20MB (MB!) spool disk (yes, it was a partial news feed). Given that there are web servers and browsers, etc., I don't think an Amiga is much of a challenge, either. I mean, I _like_ my "modern" 300MHz laptop, but I would still be able to communicate with people, write software, print letters, etc., with something 4% as fast with 1% of the memory. I would have to backtrack to an 8-bit as my daily-use machine to really affect my daily routine. If I were using a 486, I'd probably just throw a version of Linux on it that fit the memory footprint (Slackware or RedHat 5), and go about my normal business. Just don't make me mess with dial-up - I haven't used a modem in over 10 years. It was cute and all in 1983. By 1993, POTS lines didn't cut it. -ethan

The 150 points (most protocols) vs. 300 points (HTTP/gopher) is an artifact of the competition being designed for run-of-the-mill personal computer users. The idea was that HTTP is difficult because some machines don't have web browsers available, while most people won't even know what gopher is. Yes, I know that most of the people around here can fire up a telnet client and make HTTP requests and some of you used to use gopher daily, but you're special! There are no restrictions on software. Of course most Linux distributions and software will require an 80386 or better (or a 68020 plus MMU or better), so that doesn't earn you many points. Same idea with getting the machine online: sure it is easy with a 68000 or better, but you simply aren't pushing the challenge to its full potential: try getting online with a lesser machine. Anyhow, my 1/2 hour of research leads me to believe that PDP/11 based machines deserve a multiplier of 2, while PDP/8 based machines deserve a multiplier of 3. Am I facing a lynch mob here?

On 6/14/05, Ronald Wayne <appleto at gmail.com> wrote: Not necessarily a lynch mob, but many 1982/1983 models of PDP-11 are somewhat easy to get UNIX running on (presuming one has enough disk). It's "kinda" cheating, though, because if I were going to pick, say, an 11/23 with 4MB of memory, and a few dozen megabytes of disk (one RL02 doesn't really give enough space), we are talking several thousand dollars of hardware in 1982, vs a couple thousand for, say, a reasonably tricked-out Apple II with no hard disk. In fact, I would probably say $8K-new worth of PDP-11 equipment (now eBaying for far less) would be good enough for a reasonably modern textual daily life. Part of the scaling problem is that PDP-11s came from C-64 sized (LSI-11) up to full server size (11/70), with a similarly scaling price tag. Now... as a hobbyist in 1982, I couldn't afford -11 equipment at home (it came later, c. 1986), but I _could_ afford PDP-8 equipment. The difference, though, is that a PDP-8 w/OS/8 could go online with, say, Kermit, OS/8 is more of an RT-11 or CP/M-kind of an experience (no accident, since they both trace themselves back to OS/8). I love my PDP-8s, but like going back to an 8-bit platform of any kind, I'd take a hit in terms of what I do every day if the -8 was my daily drive (of course, the terminal it's attached to would work great hooked up directly to a modem...) So I'm not really sure if an -8 deserves a multipler of 3, or more than 3... certainly not less, and certainly no less than a CP/M machine. -ethan

On 6/14/05, Ronald Wayne <appleto at gmail.com> wrote: Fair enough... after all, for 99% of the computing public, a PDP-11 is something that they've seen in a movie or something that they'd be afraid to have fall on them, not a computing option for the home... as you said, we are "special". The RA81 is a 450MB "SDI" drive (a proprietary DEC interface). It weighs well over 100lbs, and was, in 1984, $26,000. 4 in a cabinet (max per controller, but multiple controllers are possible) with a CPU is not an unreasonable configuration, but one doesn't need to go that large to run UNIX on a PDP-11... 30MB-60MB is plenty for a basic 2.9BSD system with enough room for kernel sources and some user space (10MB is enough for a binary-only install and virtually no user space). One DEC cabinet is under 6 square feet, and there's room in 6 vertical feet for a lot of drives and CPUs. We used to put two PDP-11s in the 6' cabinets to save floor space - a 10.5"-tall or 5.25"-tall CPU and one or two 10.5"-tall drives (same height as the RA81) A lot of weight, but once you decide to go with a racked system, it doesn't matter if it's a 72" H960 that's at home in the data center, or the shorter, blunter 42" cabs that were occasionally seen in office spaces - it's still about 2 feet wide by about 3 feet deep. I would hazard a guess that the RA-81 was not a common PDP-11 drive, even though it's perfectly compatible with one. I was thinking more along the lines of a $6000-$10000 drive, not a $20000-$30000 drive for someone who wanted to run 2BSD 22 years ago. Either way, completely different league from home equipment. The advantage is that Moore's Law makes such things affordable to regular Joes... I have never sat down and calculated the MSRP of my PDP-8, PDP-11, and VAX collection, but it's gotta be some *stupid* number... my actual price paid is a lot less than even one of them (considering my stuff goes up to VAX-8300, VAX-11/750s, PDP-11/70s, PDP-8 through PDP-8/a...) I've spent more in PDP-8 peripherals (disk controllers, memory...) than I ever did on the CPUs themselves. I only mention this because dragging minicomputers to a microcomputer "fight" (to paraphrase) really tips the playing field. To be sure, lots of people _wanted_ PDP-11 and PDP-8 gear 20+ years ago, but affording it was another matter entirely. Right... a base PDP-8 is 4K (12-bit words), but a 1983 system (PDP-8/a) was easy to load up with 16K or 32K, and possible (but expensive and rare) to load with 128K. If one was planning on running OS/8 on a PDP-8/a (think microwave-oven-sized CPU), 16K to 32K was once common. Colossal Cave probably requires 32K, but not much else _needed_ a full boat of memory. Besides Kermit, I'm drawing a blank on telecommunication software. Since the -8 and C don't get along, it's non-trivial to port modern software to that platform. C grew up on the PDP-11, so even if you are using RT-11 (again, think CP/M for how it handles), one can take modern stuff in C and if it fits in memory (64K programs push one of the limits of the architecture, depending on the exact CPU on hand), one can back-port things to that environment. Of course, at this level, we are well out of the realm of a lot of the Apple and Atari owners of old. Sure, there were plenty of programmers and engineers, but one consequence of pretty colors and attractive sounds is that people who just wanted to "get something done" without building everything from scratch started to come along. I would say that the "average" PDP-8 user in 1982 did more programming than the "average" Apple II user, but they are different machines with different price points filling different market segments. -ethan

On 6/14/05, jim stephens <jwstephens at msm.umr.edu> wrote: And the 680/i for the PDP-10 was -8/i based... but I was thinking more about end-user telecommunication stuff rather than embedded "under the sheets" network infrastructure. One issue, I think, is that most PDP-8s had a single serial port - the console port. You could _add_ serial ports, but except for EDUsystems (single-CPU BASIC timesharing systems), in my experience, PDP-8 serial ports were expensive enough (prior to, say DECmates) that machines tended not to have anything past the console. If DEC had added a second serial port on the DKC8AA, things might have been different, but they chose to load the "standard" PDP-8/a I/O board with one console, 12-bits in, 12-bits out (which could be used as a printer port), and programmer's front-panel interface. Since most -8/a boxes came with that board, it would have set the standard higher. To tie this back into the consumer experience, it was a lightly-loaded -8/a that David Ahl tried to push within DEC as the answer to the surge in demand for hobbyist computers in the 1970s. If I remember his proposal, an entry-level machine might have a smaller chassis (4 slots? 8 slots?), a similarly scaled PSU, a 4K SRAM board, the KK8A processor, and some sort of console, perhaps the DKC8AA, perhaps something with fewer features at a lower end-user price. The starting price would have easily been right at home with what Altairs and Imsais were sitting at, with a much higher production quality, and a *wad* of existing 12-bit programs. I'm not saying that the PDP-8 would have taken over the home hobby world, but the right system at that time would have been quite popular. With the IM6100 and IM6120 microprocessors following the KK8A close behind, things might have been interesting. -ethan

I doubt DEC sold enough 8s in the 80s to make it worthwhile. Board (or more nowadays, chip) shinking only makes sense when the volume is quite large. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Stan Barr wrote: Damn right it does! We (the little garden) ran a whole internet on 40 MHz 386 boxes with KA9Q as router for four member/customers (four serial cards and four modems, with ethernet to a 3COM Brouter or in some cases another KA9Q box as uplink). Around 1992. Real TCP/IP and minimal routing, plus local (keyboard/CRT) support for client and servers. Doesn't get more real than that! These were in 100% uptime service too, not hobbiest experimentation. Reliability was OK, not acceptable by today's standards but considering each cost 0.3 X of a commercial router, we were not complaining. Uptime was fair, and quickly improving when we got actual money and bought Livingstons. Phil Karn deserves a lot of credit for that great software.

I've still got all my KA9Q software and config files (well, I ran the WZ2B variant) on a spinning hard drive in one of my PC's, but I don't have any of the radio gear connected anymore. Just as recently as a few months ago I recall doing an nslookup and noticing that my old "domain" (nq1c.ampr.org) was still showing in the internet DNS, although I was not able to find any functional routes to any .ampr.org addresses. I just looked again, and nq1c.ampr.org seems to no longer resolve, but ampr.org still does. - Bob

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Stan Barr wrote: I'm a ham (kf6qfi, Extra) though I never cared about anything about HF, I wanted only cw on 1- and 2-digit frquencies (mobile, I might add :-) Lost interest pretty fast. Sad, but it's a dead field for me, 802.11 and all the battery computers kilted it dead. Hell my car will soon have freebsd on a soekris box for mp3 and megasquirt, I suppose I could get a 2m rig and do aprs and a bbs and all that stuff, along the way, for free. PS: Our KA9Q boxen were all purpose-built single-floppy machines. They'd boot (slowly!) and run without touching the diskette. It was pretty sweet, actually. If the modem handling had been a bit more robust it would have been reall super. I used to drive there (toad hall, or 824 university) to config them, never really telnetted into them for changes, that was a bit dangerous, and often involved a drive down to fix the "fix" :-)

Tony Duell wrote: Aha! So you *do* have the ability to create PDFs! (ducking) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

On 6/16/05, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: xpdf claims to have a utility to convert pdf to plain text. If memory serves me correctly, almost all of the dependencies disappear if you build it from source without X being present on your system.

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 11:43:06PM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote: Well, there is always aalib, which renders graphics using text ... ducking and running quickly, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On 15 Jun, 2005, at 04:15, Stan Barr wrote: I have an IBM PS/2 286, if I fix the power supply I can boot OS/2 1.3 on it - with TCP/IP and an ethernet adapter. I also have DB2 for it. so it could be an interesting server. Unfortunately, I am not on the same continent as it right now. But - this is all out-of-the-box standard IBM software on unmodified off-the-shelf hardware, so there is not very much challenge to it. -- -bv

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Ronald Wayne wrote: Why not just make it easy on yourself and make the specification "any computer from 198x or earlier"? -- 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 ]

That bothered me as well... AFAIK no ISP uses vintage hardware. So you're going to be connecting to some modern machine. What is the difference between : 1) Using a classic to connect to an ISP that allows shell/UUCP access (with a non-classic at the ISP end), which then speaks TCP/IP to the rest of the world 2) Using a classic to connect to a modern machine that _you own_ using UUCP, and then having your non-clasic talk TCP/IP to an ISP (say using PPP) and thence to the rest of the world -tony

If that's 'instant', you're a darn sight better hacker than I am.... When I was at Bristol University, I needed a larger filespace quota on the departmental VAX cluster. I said to the system manage (OK, rather more politley than this, but you will get the idea) that he could either increase said quota, or I'd bring a couple of RL02s and a Q-bus controller in and stick said controller into one of the microVAXen. Needless to say he increased the quota... -tony

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, John Hogerhuis wrote: Niether are any PDP8 or PDP11 processors, not to mention other minicomputer models that I'm sure people could utilize in the challenge. -- 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 ]

On 6/14/05, Tim Shoppa <shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com> wrote: Heh... I tested an ASR33 w/110 baud DataSet that I picked up at Dayton by hooking it to my phone line and calling the local CompuServe number - they used to have equipment that would sync up - I _did_ get a login prompt. -ethan

Eric wrote... I have very complete docs on the 35 (as well as the 35 to go with). Jay

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Jay West wrote: The greenkeys crowd pooled their Teletype manuals and put out some big DVDs with everything on it. I have a set. Al Kossow, did I not give you a copy? It would be like me to mentally check-off the job as done after merely thinking about it. Reality is overrated.