19 Jul
2000
19 Jul
'00
6:02 p.m.
Hi everyone! It's been a bit since I allowed myself the luxery of 'dropping
in' I've missed you guys.
I've been playing around lately with a pretty complete TRS-80 Model 1 setup( LNW EI,
RS EI, Holmes EI (real cool), Plug&Power, LightPen, Voice Synth, Floppies, Exatrons,
Plotter, Quick Printer, LinePirnters, Acoustic and dc modems, sans software) . Anyone have
some trs-dos or newdos systems disks and software and I'm especially looking for the
software driver to run the voice synthesizer. One day I'll find a Voxbox too. Also
been tinkering with the RCA Cosmac Dev 4, what a cool machine.
I also finally got the processor board I needed to get my PDP 11/05 running. Can someone
help me out with a 'restoration checklist' for the machine? (no docs...cept' a
11x processor handbook)
And of couse I was able to interleve in some classic computer hunting with the many
temporary bouts of insanity and on a low budget I must brag.
First, at a school sale, I picked up a Commodore PET 4008, and a PET 40032, and a TRS-80
Plotter 1 for $1 each.
Then, a comrad going through spacial compression, ;), yielded 2 station-wagon fulls of
stuff including a TRS-80 m1 monitor, 3 minidisks, a128k mac, 3 ][+'s, 15 ][e's,
many ][ and /// monitors, many ][ drives, a Commodore 1581 floppy and light pen, two Adam
floppys (one boxed), and more. He wouldn't take money. I had to fight being given
money for the "work done cleaning."
A Tandy 4D, one of the few RS computers through the 6000 that I was oddly missing.
Then, found a great apple 2gs system with a Mac Crate card and 30mb harddrive with gsos 6
on it. It rocks! and cost $5
Then, found another Osborne 1 at a fleamarket. Heh, when I opened the keyboard lid, water
drained out. Lets say that negotations began then. ;) At that same fleamarket I also
found the oldest Commodore that I now own for $5. It's a logo'd model 202
electromachicanical adding machine that's beautiful and works.
A Tek 464 Storage Scope for $9.
And then the sequence began that would put some wood in the ole pants...
I won a lot at the auction for $15. Under the pile was a 1988 NeXT Cube (fist year of
production after six years of umm, development), matching NeXT laser printer, and
keyboard, and mouse. Trading the rest of the cart off got me also a 21" radius
monster for free that I niavely hoped I'd be able to use with the Cube.
I got the Cube home and after first glance I realized that I wouldn't even be able to
turn it on. I was missing the MegaPixel display. Mouse plugs into keyboard, keyboard
plugs into monitor, monitor plugs into the Cube, Cube plugs into wall, funny bone's
connected to the... Anyway, the power switch is on the keyboard. I coudn't even
turn it on because of the missing monitor link.
I thought that one was going to take a *long* while to find. I 'got a fix the only
way I could' by reading "Steve Jobs: The NeXT Big Thing" by and recommend
it. Early PARC and a little Apple is touched upon, and Jobs stewardship of NeXT and more
is evaluated pretty openly.
Anyway, employing blue feather technologies, not the company, guess what, the MegaPixel
display showed up the *next time* at the same auction. Major probability earthquake! This
time though, someone else was intereted in something else on the cart (all junk) and it
took $40 to win it. Damn! Auction dynamics in action, At other times it would have been
$5. But the other bidder was known to 'just sit' on purchases and desperate
situations call for desperate measures. I marginalized $20 and scored!
I rushed home with my new MegaPixel, fondiling it along the way, and immediately hooked
everyting up. Power! ...Well, it boots. I get to the NeXT rom monitor ver 1 rel 46 and
can exercise the machine from there. It doesn't have the floptical in it and a 'b
sd' boot command returns a read capacity error on the scsi hard disk. With the rom
monitor I can boot to an ethernet attress or scsi target. Is there anyway I can get a
disk image of ole NeXTStep on a compatible scsi drive and can I use something like an
Apple scsi CD-ROM with it?
That's all of it for the 'new stuff'' section, I think I also owe some
people documentation (Allison and Doug) and will get those copies out early next week.
I'm very sorry it is taking so long
Also been trying to organize the collection, an inhuman feat. One of my Mt. Everests,
among many.
Joe, where are ya buddy? I'd have been down there earlier but my car's been
acting up. D'oh. Howzit going?
And, should anyone find themselves in or going to Jacksonville FL, drop me a note for a
little north Florida VCFing.
Cheers
- Mike: dogas(a)leading.net
19 Jul
19 Jul
7:54 a.m.
Hi Mike,
Good to hear from you. I've been wondering where you've been. I have a
pile of Exorciser stuff for you. I finally finished helping Avitar pick up
all the loads that they bought. Whew! I picked up a SGI Onyx Reality Engine
2. Man, That sucker is huge! It's as big as two full size refrigerators put
together. I called Bob R and he promptly came over and bought it (for a
very reasonable price, IMO. The thing was delivered to MMC in 1993). I
helped him load it and take it home. I didn't think we've ever get it
loaded and unloaded. We checked it out, it has 8 R4000 CPUs and 1 Gb of RAM
in it!!! But the dammed thing needs 240 volts 30 amp 3 phase power! Bob
says that that may finally give him the incentive to move into his own
place. BTW Bob loves SGIs and he bought one of these for work a few years
ago so he has all the docs and software for them. He's happy as a pig in a
wallow! That's about all that's new around here.
Joe
At 11:02 PM 7/19/00 -0400, you wrote:
Hi everyone! It's been a bit since I allowed
myself the luxery of
'dropping in' I've missed you guys.
I've been playing around lately with a pretty complete TRS-80 Model 1
setup( LNW
EI, RS EI, Holmes EI (real cool), Plug&Power, LightPen, Voice
Synth, Floppies, Exatrons, Plotter, Quick Printer, LinePirnters, Acoustic
and dc modems, sans software) . Anyone have some trs-dos or newdos systems
disks and software and I'm especially looking for the software driver to
run the voice synthesizer. One day I'll find a Voxbox too. Also been
tinkering with the RCA Cosmac Dev 4, what a cool machine.
I also finally got the processor board I needed to get my PDP 11/05
running. Can
someone help me out with a 'restoration checklist' for the
machine? (no docs...cept' a 11x processor handbook)
And of couse I was able to interleve in some classic computer hunting with
the many
temporary bouts of insanity and on a low budget I must brag.
First, at a school sale, I picked up a Commodore PET 4008, and a PET
40032, and a
TRS-80 Plotter 1 for $1 each.
Then, a comrad going through spacial compression, ;), yielded 2
station-wagon fulls
of stuff including a TRS-80 m1 monitor, 3 minidisks,
a128k mac, 3 ][+'s, 15 ][e's, many ][ and /// monitors, many ][ drives, a
Commodore 1581 floppy and light pen, two Adam floppys (one boxed), and
more. He wouldn't take money. I had to fight being given money for the
"work done cleaning."
A Tandy 4D, one of the few RS computers through the 6000 that I was oddly
missing.
Then, found a great apple 2gs system with a Mac Crate card and 30mb
harddrive with
gsos 6 on it. It rocks! and cost $5
Then, found another Osborne 1 at a fleamarket. Heh, when I opened the
keyboard lid,
water drained out. Lets say that negotations began then. ;)
At that same fleamarket I also found the oldest Commodore that I now own
for $5. It's a logo'd model 202 electromachicanical adding machine that's
beautiful and works.
A Tek 464 Storage Scope for $9.
And then the sequence began that would put some wood in the ole pants...
I won a lot at the auction for $15. Under the pile was a 1988 NeXT Cube
(fist year
of production after six years of umm, development), matching
NeXT laser printer, and keyboard, and mouse. Trading the rest of the cart
off got me also a 21" radius monster for free that I niavely hoped I'd be
able to use with the Cube.
I got the Cube home and after first glance I realized that I wouldn't even
be
able to turn it on. I was missing the MegaPixel display. Mouse plugs
into keyboard, keyboard plugs into monitor, monitor plugs into the Cube,
Cube plugs into wall, funny bone's connected to the... Anyway, the power
switch is on the keyboard. I coudn't even turn it on because of the
missing monitor link.
I thought that one was going to take a *long* while to find. I 'got a fix
the
only way I could' by reading "Steve Jobs: The NeXT Big Thing" by and
recommend it. Early PARC and a little Apple is touched upon, and Jobs
stewardship of NeXT and more is evaluated pretty openly.
Anyway, employing blue feather technologies, not the company, guess what,
the
MegaPixel display showed up the *next time* at the same auction. Major
probability earthquake! This time though, someone else was intereted in
something else on the cart (all junk) and it took $40 to win it. Damn!
Auction dynamics in action, At other times it would have been $5. But the
other bidder was known to 'just sit' on purchases and desperate situations
call for desperate measures. I marginalized $20 and scored!
I rushed home with my new MegaPixel, fondiling it along the way, and
immediately
hooked everyting up. Power! ...Well, it boots. I get to the
NeXT rom monitor ver 1 rel 46 and can exercise the machine from there. It
doesn't have the floptical in it and a 'b sd' boot command returns a read
capacity error on the scsi hard disk. With the rom monitor I can boot to
an ethernet attress or scsi target. Is there anyway I can get a disk image
of ole NeXTStep on a compatible scsi drive and can I use something like an
Apple scsi CD-ROM with it?
That's all of it for the 'new stuff'' section, I think I also owe some
people documentation (Allison and Doug) and will get those copies out early
next week. I'm very sorry it is taking so long
Also been trying to organize the collection, an inhuman feat. One of my
Mt.
Everests, among many.
Joe, where are ya buddy? I'd have been down there earlier but my car's
been
acting up. D'oh. Howzit going?
And, should anyone find themselves in or going to Jacksonville FL, drop me
a note
for a little north Florida VCFing.
Cheers
- Mike: dogas(a)leading.net
Attachment Converted: "C:\ATTACH\It'sbeen.htm"
8:09 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Mike wrote:
I've been playing around lately with a pretty
complete TRS-80 Model 1
setup( LNW EI, RS EI, Holmes EI (real cool), Plug&Power, LightPen,
Voice Synth, Floppies, Exatrons, Plotter, Quick Printer, LinePirnters,
Acoustic and dc modems, sans software) . Anyone have some trs-dos or
newdos systems disks and software and I'm especially looking for the
software driver to run the voice synthesizer.
You DON'T need one.
It is set to accept PHONEMES, NOT English language words. To use it, you
need to spell phonetically from a chart of their phonemes. There are
additional characters added for some phonemes, particularly to handle the
multitudinous vowel sounds. That results in some scrambled LOOKING
words. For example, IIRC, "H38L8^U" (second to last character is an up
arrow) will produce a marginally acceptable "Hello".
I have a copy of the docs and get get you a list of the phonemes and what
letters to use for each.
There DOES exist some software (IIRC, after-market) that attempts to
translate English words into their equivalent phonetic spellings.
Though you can imagine how that task is tough enough to get through.
Such software is generally VERY unsatisfactory. And even with careful
phoneme translation, it will never sound better than "a martian in a tin
can".
Some of the fancier software operates as a TSR, and on appropriate hotkeys
will read whole screen, content at cursor position, etc.
But I have a blind friend who used to program using one; she ran it at a
considerably faster rate than normal speech, and said that you get used to
it; that eventually it's just like a friend with a very heavy accent.
BTW, most blind folk are NOT happy about transition from TRS-80 and MS-DOS
text mode over to Windoze and WWW with excessive visuals.
there. It doesn't have the floptical in it and a
'b sd' boot command
returns a read capacity error on the scsi hard disk.
Will the Insite Floptical fit? I have two, and would consider selling
one.
I thought that the Next used a 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite disk.
The Floptical is 20M by adding optical alignment to Barium Ferrite disks.
You COULD use the expensive 20M flopticals in a 2.8M drive and just ignore
the extra optical stuff.
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366
Berkeley, CA 94710-2219
9:09 a.m.
On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 10:09:26AM -0700, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
Will the Insite Floptical fit? I have two, and would
consider selling
one.
I thought that the Next used a 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite disk.
The Floptical is 20M by adding optical alignment to Barium Ferrite disks.
You COULD use the expensive 20M flopticals in a 2.8M drive and just ignore
the extra optical stuff.
No it's a big CD-sized disc in a cartridge and I think it held something
like 300 megs if memory serves.
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud(a)bigfoot.com
(_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd(a)kb7pwd.ampr.org
__) | | \________________________________________________________________
Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903
9:33 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:
The NeXT optical disk stored 256 MB on a single-sided cartridge.
Third-party manufacturers offered media which could be written to on
either side for a total of 512 MB per cartridge, but you had to flip the
disk over yourself. This was supported on 25 MHz ('030 or '040) cube
systems only.
The '040 machines (all) supported the use of an ED (2880 KB) 3.5" floppy
disk drive, as well. It shipped standard on all NeXTstations, and quite
possibly on all new (not upgraded) '040 cubes as well.
ok
r.
I thought that
the Next used a 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite disk.
The Floptical is 20M by adding optical alignment to Barium Ferrite disks.
You COULD use the expensive 20M flopticals in a 2.8M drive and just ignore
the extra optical stuff.
No it's a big CD-sized disc in a cartridge and I think it held something
like 300 megs if memory serves.
10:35 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
The NeXT optical disk stored 256 MB on a single-sided
cartridge.
Third-party manufacturers offered media which could be written to on
either side for a total of 512 MB per cartridge, but you had to flip the
disk over yourself. This was supported on 25 MHz ('030 or '040) cube
systems only.
NOT "Floptical"
The '040 machines (all) supported the use of an ED
(2880 KB) 3.5" floppy
disk drive, as well. It shipped standard on all NeXTstations, and quite
possibly on all new (not upgraded) '040 cubes as well.
That's the 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite. I think that it actually
used a "perpendicular (vertical) recording"!
How was the reliability on those?
I used a MicroSolutions Backpack 325 2.8M on a PC for a few years; had a
number of diskettes fail FORMAT.
In contrast, the Floptical (SCSI interface) was reliable, but very slow.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
10:26 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:
"Floptical" was a registered trademark that was used for a 20M diskette
(Barium Ferrite with added optical alignment) Same form factor as
3.5" floppy - the drive had an extra head assembly to be able to also do
1.4M.
So, ... The Next had an "Optical" disk, but NOT "FLOPTICAL"!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
Will the
Insite Floptical fit? I have two, and would consider selling
No it's a big
CD-sized disc in a cartridge and I think it held something
like 300 megs if memory serves. 
10:24 a.m.
There is a scan of the TRS-80 VS-100 voice synth documentation at
http://www.asub.arknet.edu/wade/wintrs80.htm. Look near the bottom of
the page for the link.
Tim Mann tim.mann(a)compaq.com http://www.tim-mann.org
Compaq Computer Corporation, Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA
11:16 a.m.
New subject: TRS-80 Voice Synth (was: It's been awhile (hi, new stuff,
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Tim Mann wrote:
There is a scan of the TRS-80 VS-100 voice synth
documentation at
http://www.asub.arknet.edu/wade/wintrs80.htm. Look near the bottom of
the page for the link.
Thank you!
Assuming that that is the same as the 26-1180 that I had; I think that the
internals were Votrax.
In my previous post about the phonemes, I forgot to mention the
interface. It's memory mapped to the last 32 byes of video RAM! And it
takes a '?' to enable/disable it. Therefore, that "hello" would be:
PRINT AT 992, "? "; "H38L8U"; " ?"
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
8770
days inactive
8770
days old
8 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dogas＠leading.net -
mann＠pa.dec.com -
red＠bears.org -
rigdonj＠intellistar.net -
rutledge＠cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com