In article <200512291441.40178.lbickley at bickleywest.com>, Lyle Bickley <lbickley at bickleywest.com> writes: <http://www.typewriterrepair.org/> :-) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

On 12/29/2005 at 8:17 PM John Allain wrote: Yup, I've been that far. It's that part about pulling the driveshaft that scares me. I think of all of those little springs that are just waiting to go off if I make one false move and I break out in a cold sweat. Maybe if I had a step-by-step list of instructions, I wouldn't be so shy. Belts aren't expensive at all. Cheers, Chuck

In article <20051229233410.52d5dfd3.chenmel at earthlink.net>, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> writes: Hear, hear! Also, there are times when I have to fill out a form or something else and its really just *much* more efficient to power on a typewriter and bang it out in a few seconds than it is to turn on the computer, launch the editor, type in the text, turn on the printer, print it out, and then power everything off again. With the typewriter, its click, whizz whizz whizz (rolling the paper into place), tappety tappety tap, whizz whizz whizz, click, done. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

Not, I daresay, when you have a paper form to fill out. Then you have all the registration issues of making sure each bit of text prints out in the correct place on the page to fall into its field on the form, without the benefit of being able to just adjust it on-screen until it fits. Unless you first go to the trouble of scanning the form, which significantly increases the time required - at least in my experience. And if the form involves carbon (or carbonless "carbon") copies, you _need_ a pressure-based writing device (pen, typewriter, impact printer of some kind, etc, but not the laser or inkjet I imagine any device that does PostScript or PCL6 is). Typewriters are not for everything. But for a job where it *is* the right answer, there's very little else that will do. /~\ 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

Your printers must have more reproducible registration than mine. :-/ It also needs a scratch copy of the form, which isn't much use when you have exactly one copy mailed to you by the relevant organization. Oh, if you have hundreds of them, overhead operations get a lot cheaper. The one time I wanted something of the sort, I ended up scanning the form and digitally inserting the info into it before printing out the resulting image. /~\ 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

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:49:50 -0500 Roger Merchberger <zmerch at 30below.com> wrote: If you are _writing_ as opposed to typesetting your manuscript for distribution, the revision history (forced on you by the fact that you can't just cursor around the page like a little kid rolling the peas around on his dinner plate) is of use. Composing your thoughts on a typewriter, in my experience, causes you to think a bit more before typing. Which isn't a bad thing. Any _writer_ who can type at 110 wpm is either extremely wealthy because of all the money he can bring in from his prodigious output, or writing an awful lot of bad prose. 110 wpm rates are for secretaries transcribing what other people have written. That's certainly what they are training people for in those High School typing classes. The rest of us take the course and learn what 'home position is' etc. but shrug off the speed competitions.

On 12/30/2005 at 10:26 AM Scott Stevens wrote: This really brings the topic around to an aspect of "vintage" computing that I suspect most folks don't remember much (or want to forget). Programming before the days of widely-available online terminals looked like this: 1. Think about what you want to do. 2. Chart it out (flowchart if you were a stickler, but otherwise draw some boxes on a sheet of paper to remind you. 3. Code up your task using a no. 2 pencil on a pile of coding forms. 4. Send the coding form to keypunch (or keypunch it yourself if that was allowed). 5. When the card deck comes back (usually within a day or two), get an 80-80 listing if one was not provided. Swear under your breath at the %##$% keypunch operator who decided that a zero should sometimes be an "oh", regardless of the way you wrote it. Mark and make your corrections on one of the "10 minute limit" keypunches. Get a new 80-80 of the corrected deck. 6. Batch the deck up with the necessary JCL and submit it with any other tapes, etc. at the I/O desk. 7. Barring problems, a few hours later, your deck, etc. will be delivered back to your desk with the abend dump that invariably seemed to result. 8. Scratch your head and try to figure out what went wrong--and restart the process all over again. Those steps 6, 7 and 8 are why I got into OS--you can't debug an operating system on a timeshare basis. So you sign up for block time in the dead of night, which pretty much absolved you from attending anything but department meetings. You could go weeks without seeing your boss. I remember when the first online terminals made their appearance--the managers were shocked that you could just type in source code and run it. The reaction was that quality would suffer horribly. After all these years, I'm not sure. The old way, because of the huge cost in time of mistakes, did tend to make one's approach far more deliberate. There were lots of hours of "stare at the listing and think about what's going to happen"--and I think that the deep understanding of what one's code actually is doing (with all of the side effects) is the big time-eater. The same scenario applies to writing. One can bang out a stream-of-consciousness prose and then go back many times to clean it up, or one can form a prize paragraph of almost crystalline beauty in one's mind and transcribe it fully-formed. I'm not convinced that either way is more productive than the other--or is any faster. Cheers, Chuck

On 12/30/05 3:41 PM, "Bryan Pope" <bpope at wordstock.com> wrote: Yes. ABnormal END Basically, your program crashed for some reason, you could say Something like a missing DASD or the wrong volume names could cause it, or just an error in programming At least, that's what I remember it is, and an abend dump is like a core dump or crash dump on your modern system. If I'm wrong, please don't hesitate to shoot at the youngster :)

On 12/30/05 12:26 PM, "Dave Dunfield" <dave04a at dunfield.com> wrote: Punch card dump or printout? :) I've got an abend dump on punch cards stored in a few boxes in the basment for novelty value... The novelty that A.) it took 3 boxes and B.) they did it on punch cards :)

Aaah.. Like a SIGSEGV! :) And you get a memory address which can sometimes help locating the problem with the help of your .map file... I'll be the youngsterer... Cheers, Bryan

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: If you used the forms enough, you could eventually print 10 point using blank paper.

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 14:32:42 -0800 "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: My father retired after working at IBM for 27 years. He does not have a 'handwriting,' he block prints everything. It helps this that he is left handed.

In message <200512310902.JAA12099 at citadel.metropolis.local> Stan Barr <stanb at dial.pipex.com> wrote: Hmm. I was always told that "if there's any possibility of a zero being mistaken for an 'O', put a forward slash through the zero"... Guess it's personal preference, but I bet it cause{s,d} more than a few problems... "Bob in Engineering slashes his zeroes, but Fred in Software slashes his 'O's. Mix them up at your peril." -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook ... None of you exists, my sysop types all this in!

Philip Pemberton wrote: My gripe is modern displays and printers print 1 ( one ) and l ( lowercase L ) the same.

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: My font is the delault windows netscape mail-reader font.

Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: Well, on the first machine I had that used a Courier-type font, you typed the lower-case-letter-L for the numeral 1 and you typed an uppercase-letter-O for the numeral 0. So they were not only hard to distinguish, they were in fact identical... I suppose that might be "Courier Old" :-). Tim.

On 12/31/2005 at 3:05 PM Jim Leonard wrote: I like Onuava and use it as the font in my command-prompt windows: http://eksten.net/webgraphix/fonts/o/onuava.html (and lots of other locations--just google for it) Cheers, Chuck

In message <43B6F28B.4050901 at oldskool.org> Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: The Proggy series are quite nice - <http://www.proggyfonts.com/>. There's also ProFont - <http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/>. I'm using "Proggy Clean Slashed Zero" at the moment. It looks pretty nice in an Xterm (well, Konsole) and in GVIM. Also means I can get a more than one 80x24 Xterm on screen at a time without the windows overlapping :) -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook ... On the other hand..you have five different fingers

Philip Pemberton wrote: But they are proportional fonts. Using them for programming would be pretty odd. It's a good question, though - why *do* we use fixed-width fonts for programming? Tradition? Or does it just make things easier somehow? They do look pretty good. Gordon.

code My guess is that we in "ye olde days" used chain printers and other printers with fixed character width, so we could make 80/80 listings which looked sensible. For an example of how this looks/looked on RPG forms (the ones I talked about earlier), you can look at the bottom of http://www.farumdata.dk/uk/xxval.asp (View Script File as Text) There were different forms in my time (H(eader) F(ile) I(nput) E(xtension) C(alculation) and O(utput), each with preprinted headers. Writing on standard forms was a big no-no the places I graced with my presence :-) Just imagine writing a RPG II program with e.g. the Operand field 1 column off :-) I still think RPG is a good language for commercial use, as a lot of things happen behind your back, such as file opening, reading, deblocking, decimal point handling, edit masks, etc. Nico

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Philip Pemberton wrote: ^^^^ HARUMPH. I slash my zeroes. Always have; always will. 35/40 years ago, I knew a couple of people who slashed their 'Oh's. 25 years ago, I inherited books, bookcases, etc. when the last one of them died. Is there still anybody alive who does it that way? 'course about 15 years ago, Microsoft was trying to OCR their registration cards, and actually asked the public to use their stylized characters! Not as different as Grafiti, but they did ask for a slash through 'O'hs. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Hi, "Chuck Guzis" said: "One way to indicate the difference is to write the letter as [O with a slash] and the number as 0; provided the data preparation operator knows that this is the rule we are adopting. .... The conventions used above are the ones we shall use in this book." "Computer Education in Schools" ICL CES, 1978 That's what we were expected to do in work (we used an ICL 1904), but for my own use I slashed the zeros as that's what I'd always done with Morse code. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

I know I have some of the BASIC coding forms for the TRS-80 model 1 around here somwehre. One side is a screen display layout sheet (divided up into the 64*16 matrix for characters and the 128*48 graphics matrix). the other side is for writing BASIC on. It has the usual 1-character-per-box bit for writing BASIC lines, and an area down the right hand side where you list the variables you've used. I can't remember the last time I used them, though. I should have some coding forms for the HP9100 calculator around here too, and maybe some for the HP67. -tony

From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" <spc at conman.org> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 10:07 PM Subject: Re: Real Old School Programming (was: Re: Where to buy a Selectric?) match into The layout depended greatly on which language they were to be used for. The most "structured" one I know, is RPG, where everything had to be written in specific columns. Other forms would normally be 80 columns wide, but vertically divided. For Cobol, you could see e.g. that the first 3 columns were blank, the next 3 numbered from 010 to 300 or so, then a divider between between 15 and 16 (IIRC), and again "around" col. 73 (marking for Continuation Line). We would also use special program cards for the card punch (IBM 029 etc); so we could skip to specific columns Oh yeah, those were the times... Nico

columns the Right. Right again, I think my memory bits are rotting a bit. any other non-blank signified a continuation. Area "A" Right. I once made up a deck-copying "program" for the IBM 517 (or was it 519, the card reproducing punch) You could toss in your unnumbered ( or numbered, but with "holes" in the sequence, or whatever), and it would produce a new deck, but without print. Off to the punch room, where they had some 029/129's which could read the cards and print on the top line. Those were the days... It's a long time since I used INSPECT. I can only remember something with INSPECT ... SPACES...., but those bits have rotted away... Apart from that, COBOL is a nice language, if you keep away from the more sinister things like INSPECT, ALTER TO PROCEED TO, REDEFINES in more then 2 levels.... Some nice things are GO TO DEPENDING ON (if you use it carefully), PERFORM VARYING (but that got _ugly_ very fast). For commercial purposes, the record layouts etc are very nice and easily deciphered. Overall, I like it better than PL/I Nico

Well, using a key punch was a sissy add on that came later. In the beginning we moved wire jumpers from here to there and then later in the NEW age, we flipped 20 switches up or down then pressed a "deposit" button. Key punches were for sissy's. On 12/31/05, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: -- Jim Isbell "If you are not living on the edge, well then, you are just taking up too much space."

Gary Sparkes wrote: They had a trained monkey for the other 16 switches. :)

Jim Isbell, W5JAI wrote: Do you know offhand just what computer that was with 10 bit words? Unless of course you were training for NASA and I want to know who got the banana and who got the food pellet?

On 12/31/05, Jim Isbell, W5JAI <jim.isbell at gmail.com> wrote: We got both of them!! In those days "Wizards" were prima donas. We got anything we asked for. -- Jim Isbell "If you are not living on the edge, well then, you are just taking up too much space."

Chuck Guzis wrote: Well the Cyber people called it Deadstart. Other people called it ColdStart. I just call it booting the sytem. Was anyother terms used on how to start up a computer? PS. I got surfing the web for IBM 7070 , a real classic computer.

On 12/31/2005 at 4:25 PM woodelf wrote: The thing you have to remember about the Cyber deadstart is that the DS panel was it as far as switches and blinkenlights went on the Cyber. Push the button under the display and those switches were loaded into PP0. No way to read them after that; no other switches or lights that would tell you a darned thing about any of the PP's or the CPU. Definitely the antithesis of the IBM S/360 operator's panel. If you were modifying the boot process or trying to figure out why your new deadstart tape didn't work, it took a 'scope and a bunch of head-scratching. Those 12 words were barely enough to read in one tape record. Cheers, Chuck

In message <200512311427580067.02BDD6C6 at 10.0.0.252> "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Ye flipping gods! And I thought the toggle switch panel on my COSMAC Elf was bad... -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook ... ASCII and ye shall receive.

On 1/1/2006 at 1:00 PM Mike Loewen wrote: Is that a mock-up reproduction, Mike? It's been a long time since I've seen a 6000 without a CEJ/MEJ switch! It's kind of hard to believe that there would be any left around without one. Let's see if I can still read the code: 0000 7512 DCN 12 0001 7712 4000 FNC 4000,12 0003 7712 0001 FNC 1,12 0005 7712 1100 FNC 1100,12 0007 2000 0160 LDC 160 0011 7412 ACN 12 0012 7112 0015 IAM 0015,12 Which looks sort of reasonable except for the 224 character record length on what's being read. Do you know what system this was set up to deadstart? IIRC, we used some of the 6683 "don't care" bits in the FNC's to set indicators for the deadstart program. Cheers, Chuck

I seem to remember a CDC 3300. was there such a thing? It was about 1961, I think. I think we programed it in COBAL and then later in Fortran. On 1/1/06, Mike Loewen <mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> wrote: -- Jim Isbell "If you are not living on the edge, well then, you are just taking up too much space."

That sounds like the one we used. After I left there I went to the University of Texas where we had the Nova, serial #1. That was, I guess, the first "desktop". We really thought it was something...for its time it was. Many years later we were asked by the manufacturer to return it to them for historical purposes and they gave us a nice new computer for it. On 1/1/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: -- Jim Isbell "If you are not living on the edge, well then, you are just taking up too much space."

Chuck Guzis wrote: I have to ask all of the oldtimers here "fortunate" enough to have worked with punch-card systems: Even with rose-colored nostalgia glasses at full intensity, would you ever in your life wish for a time you could go *back* to *punch cards*? -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org> To be honest, yes, with reservations. Things were not so hectic in those days. In Denmark, it was a tight knit community, everybody knew everybody else, and that gave a large network if you wanted to change jobs. You could also see what you were doing, and correct things on the fly. I was in commerce and statistics, so things might be different for scientific shops and/or others Nico

Like Nico, I might, if enough other things roll back as well. Certainly I wouldn't want to go back to punched cards without rolling back any of the many other changes since I worked with them, which I suspect is what you were really talking about. /~\ 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

On 12/30/2005 at 3:41 PM bpope at wordstock.com wrote: They all bear a family resemblance to one another, usually green. Here's one for IBM FORTRAN: http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf Note one aspect of card-type programming that's largely a dim memory: Fixed-width fields. That "C" for comment in FORTRAN goes in column 6, not 5, not 1, not 7. Similarly, columns 73-80 are ignored by the compiler and 1-5 are reserved for statement labels. Statements exclusive of the label, start between column 7 and 72. A lot of languages, had more stringent placement requirements. An "80-80" listing was basically a printout of the card deck, column for colum. I think the term dates from the unit-record era, when a plugboard for something like a 407 accounting machine could be programmed to mix things up any way you wanted. I used to use one for FOTRAN that added spaces between columns 5-6, 6-7 and 72-73. Made things easier to read. This wasn't as bad as it sounds. If you took the time to punch up a "drum card" for the 026/029 keypunch, the "tab" key would zip you to the next field. Most programmers I knew kept a drum card (usually assembly for program 1 and FORTRAN for program 2) with their basic survival supplies (instruction reference card being an essential other). Abnormal end of program; a crash or ungraceful termination (e.g., the operator killed it because it was in an infinite loop). Depending on your termination options, you would receive a one page short form dump (the registers and the area around the last PC value) or a dump of your entire program area (could be a signifcant part of a box of paper). If you were an operating systems type, your abend dump was a "deadstart dump"; that is, a special program loaded as part of the boot process that would give you as much of the machine state before reboot as possible. If you were one of those unfortunates who were working on CDC 6600 with 4 MW of ECS, the whole shebang was about a box of paper, including PP dumps. If you were debugging a multi-machine cluster, it could run to more. The debugging tools in that case were paperclips and highlighters in various colors--and lots of coffee. Cheers, Chuck

On 12/30/2005 at 10:11 PM Andy Holt wrote: Quite right--another dropped mental bit! Column 1 was used for some dialects of pre-FORTRAN 4 for other things too. On the 7090 running FMS II, a "D" would get you double precision and "B" would result in a boolean evaluation. Did 'I' result in complex arithmetic? I can't recall. this for Yet that 19 card limit was one of the most common "extensions" of FORTRAN compilers. Many set limits that were much higher. IIRC, almost any character in column 6 would be taken a continuation, except for '0'. The custom was to punch a 1 for the first continuation, 2 for the second continuation and so on--a zero in column 6 of the first card let you know that continuation cards followed. Cheers, Chuck

On 12/30/2005 at 9:41 PM Mike wrote: Early S/360 JCL was pretty simple, particularly on the "downlevel" OSes like DOS/360. A "load and go" FORTRAN job on DOS could be as simple as: //JOB //EXEC FORTRAN ...program source /* //EXEC LNKEDT //EXEC ...data for program /* /& On CDC SCOPE JCL was also pretty simple; the same job was roughly like this. Note that the JCL for the entire job comprises the first data record: JOB card with octal time limit(!) RUN(G). 7-8-9 card source program 7-8-9 card data 6-7-8-9 card

Chuck Guzis wrote: This should always be performed no matter the year/environment/skill. That being said, I do prefer to write essays, code assembler, and other tasks on my 8088, because the occaisional pauses in processing give me time to "cure" my thinking a little. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

Tony Duell wrote: Freudian slip? :-) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

Richard wrote: You turn yours *off*? (ducking) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

On 12/29/2005 at 11:34 PM Scott Stevens wrote: A friend of mine resells IBM Wheelwriters (gets a couple of hundred the each, depending on condition). I could never stand the the things--press a key and there's a variable delay between when you hit the key and when the print hammer goes "chunk". The sensation reminds me of playing in an antiphonal brass choir in a large church. You have to time your playing visually by the director's baton--if you try to play by what you hear, the result is a mess because of the time it takes the sound from the other players to reach your ears. So you have to tune one of your senses out. Give me a Selectric (or even an Executive) any day. Did someone mention IBM 1620's using Selectrics? The only 1620's I ever saw used the traditional typewriter mechanism. OTOH, the 1130 used the Selectric mechanism. Cheers, Chuck

It was thus said that the Great der Mouse once stated: You wrote your own editor? -spc (And that's either a slow computer, or you're a very fast typist ... )

der Mouse wrote: When I was young, I thought stuff like that was the bomb. Now, it irritates me -- eclectic and convoluted does not equal "cool" when I'm the guy who has to understand or fix it. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

der Mouse wrote: I'm sure it was the result of someone being familiar with the original architecture and compiler, and made certain decisions that compiled "in his favor". When I discovered similar things I could do in my own environment 15 years ago, I did the same thing -- without commenting, so of course I confused myself a year ago trying to read the code. I was shifting something right one place and then dealing with the carry; I kept looking for bitmask stuff later in the code when I realized after half an hour I was simply dividing by two :-/ So now when I optimize like silly, I keep the original code commented out, and then I optimize, and then I COMMENT my optimizations. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

In message <m1Espze-000IyHC at p850ug1> ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: That thing is one gigantic hack after another. It's great how Woz managed to get the chip count down (especially on the Disk II), but I still consider the Apple II to be a horrendous hack. Not to the level of a Sinclair ZX81, but still a hack. I'd still like to get an Apple II to play with though. They look like pretty fun machines to play with, especially on the I/O side. I kinda like the Atari vector generators. From a technical standpoint, they aren't that special, but the way they were implemented was pretty neat. I've stuffed a DVG into a CPLD, but I'm still working on actually building the PCB board and testing the thing... 208-pin PQFP chips are NOT fun to design PCBs for. -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook ... Happiness: a perfume you can't give away without getting some yourself.

In message <43B832B6.4000700 at jetnet.ab.ca> woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: Which is why I built an X/Y display out of a DG7/32. That's going to be pretty interesting to play with... I suspect the graphics are going to be "just a bit" small... Ah, well, it's still a fun project :) Yikes.. What PCB software are you using? Verilog isn't too hard if you already know C. VHDL is Pure Evil (tm)... -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook ... I'm no stranger, just a friend you haven't met...

Not in my book that is.... Verilog is severly lacking in basic areas : in my mixed mode (analog / digital ) simulations I use "std_logic" for digital signals and "real" for analog signals, bias currents, ref. voltages etc. We also use different types for the different voltages domains in a chip. In VHDL this makes an excellent combination. Verilog just cannot handle this at all. It is suited for simple digital logic only. But since, in future, all designs will be done in System-C, only seasoned C++ progammers will be able to do hardware design.... Jos Dreesen

It was thus said that the Great Zane H. Healy once stated: I've written some specialized input routines---mainly to handle dated numerical input (okay, a program to process lottery numbers, years before the Internet made such information readily available). But not general purpose text editing. -spc (Not that I haven't given it thought ... )

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: You should; it's quite fun depending on what your needs are. I coded a VI clone for my personal use on my 8088 because the clones (CALVIN) didn't have enough featuers or work properly, and the Unix-to-DOS ports (Elvis) were so. slow. you. waited. three. seconds. after. each. keypress. for. feedback. before. the. keyboard. buffer. overflowed. Quite annoying. To this day I have no idea what Elvis does when you hit a keystroke (never looked at the code) but it must be much more than simply inserting a character! -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/

I hope everyone on the list understands that when things get real cheap, you have to guess weather you will *ever* need one of whatever it is, and buy it now. Marketplaces don't care about archival, 2 or 3 years of something being cheap, and it will be gone. John A. BTW, now is a great time to get PCMCIA SCSI adaptors, by the above rule.

In article <b0295dbe0512300714h3591ba7se95df3833ae201fc at mail.gmail.com>, "Jim Isbell, W5JAI" <jim.isbell at gmail.com> writes: When I see them in the local thrift shop they are more expensive, but still sell. If they were only $5 I'd have already bought one :-) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

Haven't heard anything from any collector about causation of a permanent back problem from our hobby, for one possible problem with rooting around pallette loads of scrap. Luckily I'm not at this point yet. Kinda hope you're not too. John A.

Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote: Don Lancaster covers many aspects of real world surplus auctions at his website, http://www.tinaja.com/, when he talks about sources for surplus test equipment etc. He mostly talks about government/military/edu surplus (where the terms are up-front but not always friendly and in the case of the gov't and military are completely inflexible), and has a couple notes about sleazeball commercial surplus auctioneers/practices. Tim.

I have never seen inside a Selectric, but I've heard that to change one of the belts you have to remove the main shaft, which is a major operation. I was told that if you do this, slip 2 belts over the shaft and tape one to the side of the chassis out of the way. Next time it breaks, work that spare one onto the pulleys. -tony