27 Oct
2005
27 Oct
'05
6:17 p.m.
I have developing somewhat of an interest in Japanese computers lately,
and recently on a.f.c., someone pointed to the museum at:
http://www.ipsj.or.jp/katsudou/museum/
Great pictures!
I noticed that some of the pictures appear to be of survivors - old
machines from the 60s and 70s that are still around. Does anyone, perhaps
a Japanese list member (are there any?) know anything about the computer
museum scene in Japan?
William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org
27 Oct
27 Oct
6:35 p.m.
Discussed a little bit at one of their English pages:
http://www.ipsj.or.jp/katsudou/museum/index_e.html
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of William Donzelli
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 9:17 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Japanese computers
I have developing somewhat of an interest in Japanese computers lately, and
recently on a.f.c., someone pointed to the museum at:
http://www.ipsj.or.jp/katsudou/museum/
Great pictures!
I noticed that some of the pictures appear to be of survivors - old machines
from the 60s and 70s that are still around. Does
anyone, perhaps a Japanese
list member (are there any?) know anything about the
computer museum scene
in Japan?
William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org
6:58 p.m.
I have developing somewhat of an interest in Japanese
computers lately,
and recently on a.f.c., someone pointed to the museum at:
http://www.ipsj.or.jp/katsudou/museum/
Great pictures!
The pictures *are* nice, but it seems to have forgotten about the Tomy line
and a number of not-so-me-too MSX systems. I don't expect ultraobscure
systems to appear (the Commodore Ultimax comes to mind), but the Pyuuta
series, at least, did seem to be produced in some numbers as they are not
hard to find on Japanese auction sites.
Pyuuta reference (yours truly): http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/pyuuta/
--
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Please dispose of this message in the usual manner. -- Mission: Impossible -
28 Oct
28 Oct
6:58 a.m.
William Donzelli wrote:
I have developing somewhat of an interest in Japanese
computers lately,
Somewhere we have a stack of 1960's Japanese Electronics Industry
magazines (written in English, curiously enough), in which there are
some interesting articles and pictures of Japanese computers.
The bulk of the magazines are about transistor radios and refrigerators,
but there's still the occasional computing article in there.
It's interesting to see how worried the Japanese were at the time about
the US getting ahead of them in the component fabrication game!
I'll see if I can find them when I get back to the UK and scan any
interesting bits in.
cheers
Jules
7:32 p.m.
Everything big IBM makes has built in casters.
Leveling pads are only dropped once it is in place in the computer room.
Some times it takes a few people to push and navigate, but even a 370/168 would
roll down the hall when the pads were lifted.
In the referb center we pushed them off moving vans and
moved them all over the warehouse and staging areas.
Bob
On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 19:02:40 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 10/28/2005 at 8:33 PM William Donzelli wrote:
>PCs (micros) are best used as chocks for the
casters of real computers
>(mainframes).
I've never used a mainframe that was on casters.
Your mainframes must be
smaller than mine...
Cheers,
Chuck
8:12 a.m.
vrs wrote:
From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at
BRADLEE.ORG>
Most IBM retail kit (the stuff they use for EPOS) would survive that
quite happily. You might want to reseat some cables and reboot, just
like we tell the people in the stores to do.
Gordon.
In the referb center we pushed them off moving
vans and
No wonder there are so few of these machines left ;-)!
(I have always heard that the van should be stopped, and
the machine lowered slowly :-).)
Vince 
9:49 a.m.
Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
vrs wrote:
I can attest to that. Pat Finnegan shipped me a 7013-591 last year.
It's a deskside POWER RS/6000, roughly the size of a DEC BA123
chassis. It's a reinforced composite frame, so much lighter than a BA123.
Patrick padded and boxed it with his usual zeal, but it arrived at my
house looking like FedEx towed the carton to my house on a rope.
Several of the memory boards were unseated, as were the SCSI and
ethernet MCA cards, and the frame itself was cracked.
The design of that system prevents any of the boards from bouncing
around inside even after coming out of their slots. I reseated
everything, checked all the heatsinks and system board connections, put
a BandAid on the frame break that's visible, and put it in service.
Doc
From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at
BRADLEE.ORG>
Most IBM retail kit (the stuff they use for EPOS) would survive that
quite happily. You might want to reseat some cables and reboot, just
like we tell the people in the stores to do. In the referb center we pushed them off moving
vans and
No wonder there are so few of these machines left ;-)!
(I have always heard that the van should be stopped, and the machine
lowered slowly :-).)
Vince 
5:10 p.m.
Doc Shipley wrote:
I can attest to that. Pat Finnegan shipped me a
7013-591 last year.
It's a deskside POWER RS/6000, roughly the size of a DEC BA123
chassis. It's a reinforced composite frame, so much lighter than a BA123.
That's a *very* nice machine. That's the IBM plastic which is stronger
than steel. 8-)
Patrick padded and boxed it with his usual zeal, but
it arrived at my
house looking like FedEx towed the carton to my house on a rope. Several
of the memory boards were unseated, as were the SCSI and ethernet MCA
cards, and the frame itself was cracked.
Time for someone to be drawn and quartered in effigy.
The design of that system prevents any of the boards
from bouncing
around inside even after coming out of their slots. I reseated
everything, checked all the heatsinks and system board connections, put
a BandAid on the frame break that's visible, and put it in service.
Excellent!
Peace... Sridhar
7:54 p.m.
New subject: RS/6000; Was Re: Japanese computers
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Patrick shipped it signature required. It was signed for by "P.
Orch". Even the FedEx claims department were not amused. I never
collected on the damage (because they insisted I let them pick it up
"for instection" and that Pat file the claim, and I wasn't about to give
them another chance to break it), but they did make the driver come
apologize in person for leaving it without a signature.
It's awfully hard to kill an RS/6000.
Doc
Doc Shipley wrote:
Yes, and by the well-known principle of "like attracts like", I now
have 2 of them. The second has 2GB RAM, FWD SCSI, and 10/100 ethernet.
It and an F40 cost me $50.
I can attest to that. Pat Finnegan shipped me
a 7013-591 last year.
It's a deskside POWER RS/6000, roughly the size of a DEC BA123
chassis. It's a reinforced composite frame, so much lighter than a
BA123.
That's a *very* nice machine. That's the IBM plastic which is stronger
than steel. 8-) Patrick
padded and boxed it with his usual zeal, but it arrived at
my house looking like FedEx towed the carton to my house on a rope.
Several of the memory boards were unseated, as were the SCSI and
ethernet MCA cards, and the frame itself was cracked.
Time for someone to be drawn and quartered in effigy. The design
of that system prevents any of the boards from bouncing
around inside even after coming out of their slots. I reseated
everything, checked all the heatsinks and system board connections,
put a BandAid on the frame break that's visible, and put it in service.
Excellent!
30 Oct
30 Oct
1:33 p.m.
New subject: RS/6000; Was Re: Japanese computers
Doc Shipley wrote:
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
I've been looking for a well-priced 595 for a while. Although a newish
rack model would do too.
Peace... Sridhar
Doc Shipley wrote:
Yes, and by the well-known principle of "like attracts like", I now
have 2 of them. The second has 2GB RAM, FWD SCSI, and 10/100 ethernet.
It and an F40 cost me $50. I can attest to that. Pat Finnegan shipped me
a 7013-591 last
year. It's a deskside POWER RS/6000, roughly the size of a DEC BA123
chassis. It's a reinforced composite frame, so much lighter than a
BA123.
That's a *very* nice machine. That's the IBM plastic which is
stronger than steel. 8-) 
8:03 p.m.
New subject: RS/6000; Was Re: Japanese computers
Sridhar Ayengar declared on Sunday 30 October 2005 04:33 pm:
Doc Shipley wrote:
You just have to look in the right place. I've seen 3 595's go through
Purdue's salvage op in the past year... One I got, one I gave to a
friend, and one that was quite trashed and sitting in a dumpster when I
found it :(.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
I've been looking for a well-priced 595 for a while. Although a
newish rack model would do too. Doc Shipley wrote:
Yes, and by the well-known principle of "like attracts like", I
now have 2 of them. The second has 2GB RAM, FWD SCSI, and 10/100
ethernet. It and an F40 cost me $50. I can attest to that. Pat Finnegan shipped me
a 7013-591 last
year. It's a deskside POWER RS/6000, roughly the size of a DEC
BA123 chassis. It's a reinforced composite frame, so much lighter
than a BA123.
That's a *very* nice machine. That's the IBM plastic which is
stronger than steel. 8-) 
9:59 p.m.
New subject: Modcomp Mini Photos
A while back (month and a half) I put out notice for a Modcomp needing rescue
at my local university surplus (UC-Santa Barbara, California). Someone has
saved it and is in the process of arranging pickup. I promised photos to the
list and here they are:
http://www.soupwizard.com/temp/modcomp/
Jeff
7 Nov
7 Nov
2:48 a.m.
New subject: Modcomp Mini Photos
A while back (month and a half) I put out notice for a Modcomp needing rescue
at my local university surplus (UC-Santa Barbara, California). Someone has
saved it and is in the process of arranging pickup. I promised photos to the
list and here they are:
http://www.soupwizard.com/temp/modcomp/
Jeff
Thats a great save. Looks at first glance like a ModcompII. The circuit boards
are great.. From the labelling it was one of Johnson Controls JC80 Air
Conditioning and Control systems which used Modcomps as the processors.
At least it would have clean air. We had a JC80 system here in Sydney
Australia which ran the airconditioning for the Sydney Opera House through
to at least 1996 or so. It used Modcomp Classics 78xx but what you've got
there is earlier than that.
I have a range of Modcomps in my collection, ranging from 7870's through
to 9230's in the proprietary range, and 9820/30/40's in the Motorola VME
based systems, dating from an association in Australia with Modcomp.
NASA used to and probably still has a lot of them for uses ranging from the
Deep Space Tracking Network to the Shuttle launches.. Modcomp made a VME
emulator of the ModcompII for NASA, to replace the orginal computers delivered
in the seventies, because it was easier to replace the Shuttle launch systems
with an emulator than to rewrite and recheck all the launch code..
Cheers
Ken Kirkby Terrigal Australia.
30 Oct
30 Oct
4:56 a.m.
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 17:12:55 +0200, Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net>
wrote:
vrs wrote:
I remember a case when an NCR Century was dropped onto the pier in an
unloading accident. The packing crate was splintered, and the insurance
agent immediately wrote it off. A couple of NCR CEs bought it as scrap,
straightened the bent brackets holding the core modules, and had it up and
running in short time. I think they made a tidy profit on that.
--
-bv
From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at
BRADLEE.ORG>
Most IBM retail kit (the stuff they use for EPOS) would survive that
quite happily. You might want to reseat some cables and reboot, just
like we tell the people in the stores to do.
In the referb center we pushed them off moving
vans and
No wonder there are so few of these machines left ;-)!
(I have always heard that the van should be stopped, and the machine
lowered slowly :-).)
Vince
29 Oct
29 Oct
9:53 a.m.
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:53:31 -0700, vrs wrote:
From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at
BRADLEE.ORG>
> In the referb center we pushed them off moving vans and
No wonder there are so few of these machines left ;-)!
(I have always heard that the van should be stopped,
and
the machine lowered slowly :-).)
Vince
Takes the fun out of it :)
We had a 158 come in one day, we had one of those back into
the building and down a hill kind of loading docks.
While waiting for his turn, one driver began "preping to unload"
in the lot. When it came his turn he came in a bit fast and a MG
came off the back of the truck when he hit the stops hard.
This was before the dock hand could put the flat ramp in place
to cover over the "gap" between truck and dock.
I answered a cattle call to help getting it back on a smooth surface
where the casters acted as wheels and not as keyways.
There was a story where one of the other FE's dropped an MG
over the edge into an open floor section during installation.
I was assured that it was not fun to lift it back up to floor level.
Bob
5:11 p.m.
Bob Bradlee wrote:
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:53:31 -0700, vrs wrote:
Where were you working at the time?
Peace... Sridhar
From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at
BRADLEE.ORG>
>In the referb center we pushed them off moving vans and
No wonder there are so few of these machines left
;-)!
(I have always heard that the van should be
stopped, and
the machine lowered slowly :-).)
Vince
Takes the fun out of it :)
We had a 158 come in one day, we had one of those back into
the building and down a hill kind of loading docks.
While waiting for his turn, one driver began "preping to unload"
in the lot. When it came his turn he came in a bit fast and a MG
came off the back of the truck when he hit the stops hard.
This was before the dock hand could put the flat ramp in place
to cover over the "gap" between truck and dock.
I answered a cattle call to help getting it back on a smooth surface
where the casters acted as wheels and not as keyways.
There was a story where one of the other FE's dropped an MG
over the edge into an open floor section during installation.
I was assured that it was not fun to lift it back up to floor level.
5:31 p.m.
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 20:11:26 -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Bob Bradlee wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:53:31 -0700, vrs wrote:
>
>
>>From: "Bob Bradlee" <Bob at BRADLEE.ORG>
>>
>>>In the referb center we pushed them off moving vans and
>
>
>>No wonder there are so few of these machines left ;-)!
>
>
>>(I have always heard that the van should be stopped, and
>>the machine lowered slowly :-).)
>
>
>> Vince
>
>
> Takes the fun out of it :)
>
> We had a 158 come in one day, we had one of those back into
> the building and down a hill kind of loading docks.
> While waiting for his turn, one driver began "preping to unload"
> in the lot. When it came his turn he came in a bit fast and a MG
> came off the back of the truck when he hit the stops hard.
> This was before the dock hand could put the flat ramp in place
> to cover over the "gap" between truck and dock.
> I answered a cattle call to help getting it back on a smooth surface
> where the casters acted as wheels and not as keyways.
>
> There was a story where one of the other FE's dropped an MG
> over the edge into an open floor section during installation.
> I was assured that it was not fun to lift it back up to floor level.
Where were you working at the time?
Peace... Sridhar
4:54 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 10/28/2005 at 8:33 PM William Donzelli wrote:
The CPU racks of my ES/9021 are on casters and they are quite large and
water-cooled.
Peace... Sridhar
PCs (micros) are best used as chocks for the
casters of real computers
(mainframes).
I've never used a mainframe that was on casters. Your mainframes must be
smaller than mine...
9:26 a.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
It's not actually in a rack. It's bolted onto brackets in the back of a
Nissan Micra.
Gordon.
The CPU racks of my ES/9021 are on casters and
they are quite large and
water-cooled.
water-cooled casters? They expected you to mve the thing at high speed,
huh? ;-)
6:08 p.m.
On 10/29/2005 at 7:53 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Tell it on the Mountain, brother!
Peace... Sridhar
There IS an aspect of Japanese micros that I dabbled in for a while back in
the early 80's. That dealt with the problem of supporting the Kanji
character set on 8 bit systems. Initially, the Japanese made do with the
Katakana alphabet, which is a simplified phonetic system and not
ideographic as is Kanji. However, Katakana (and Hiragana) characters are
usually used only for foreign words in Japanese and are not considered the
normal way to write. (As an interesting aside, Hiragana is generally held
to have been developed by women, where Katakana being more angular is held
to have been developed by men.)
We tend to take public literacy for granted here in the West, but in Japan,
public education (at least as far as teaching Kanji reading and writing)
didn't begin until after WW II.
There are two problems to overcome in dealing with the several
(7,000-9,000) Kanji used in everyday literate Japanese. The first is
character entry and the second is character display. Obviously a 7,000
key keyboard is out of the question. The most successful scheme was
marketed by NEC in the 1970s and involves building up a character from its
basic elements with the computer offering choices on an on-screen menu as
alternatives are narrowed.
The problem of display (using 1970's technology) is more thorny. Kanji
symbols are quite complex and detailed, requiring very good video displays
and character generation. Printing presents its own issues. While the US
and Europe was quite happy with 9-pin dot matrix printheads, the Japanese
of necessity introduced 18 and 22 wire printheads to deal with the problem
of Kanji character generation. Daisy-wheel technology was clearly not an
alternative!
While we in the western world take for granted "universal" character
encoding such as ASCII and EBCDIC, there were a number of competing systems
in Japanese, such as DBCS and Shift-JIS.
I've still got some product brochures and notes in my files that I
assembled back in the early PC days on how the really tough problem of
handling Japanese writing was handled.
All of this should be taken with the grain of salt that my very fuzzy
recollection deserves!
Cheers,
Chuck
31 Oct
31 Oct
8:05 a.m.
On Oct 29, 2005, at 9:08 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The problem of display (using 1970's technology)
is more thorny.
Kanji
symbols are quite complex and detailed, requiring very good video
displays
and character generation. Printing presents its own issues.
While the US
and Europe was quite happy with 9-pin dot matrix printheads, the
Japanese
of necessity introduced 18 and 22 wire printheads to deal with the
problem
of Kanji character generation. Daisy-wheel technology was clearly
not an
alternative!
I've seen a Japanese typewriter... quite a beast!
FWIW. The early NEC PC9801 was very much like the IBM PC of the time,
but with some strange omissions/changes in the BIOS (which, when
disassembled had a marked similarity to the IBM PC BIOS), like
routines for displaying characters. Instead they had a 16 bit VRAM
that you wrote to directly... and you could do some really
interesting things in that space, like doing simple character
animations etc.
The one Japanese machine I'd love to get my hands on would be one of
the 5th generation computing projects prolog machines... the Japanese
response to Symbolics LISP machines (Symbolics ended up belonging to
Shin Nitetsu or somesuch from memory). There was a purple one that
NEC made (I think), about the size of Sun E250.
8:37 a.m.
A bit of Japanese computer history that gets very little play here in the
US (and I suspect, in other places) is the Japanese TRON project. Started
in 1984, it was intended as an all-encompassing architecture for everything
from commercial data processing to embedded systems:
http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html
For those of you who are curious, there's a CTRON kernel available for x86
and 6809 at:
http://www.sakamura-lab.org/TRON/CTRON/home.html
Cheers,
Chuck
28 Oct
28 Oct
5:35 p.m.
I'll see if I can find them when I get back to the
UK and scan any
interesting bits in.
I am specifically looking for info on the parametron computers of the late
1950s, and the Hitachi AS/6 (may be called a HITAC in a Japanese
context) of the late 1970s.
William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org
29 Oct
29 Oct
6:11 a.m.
William Donzelli wrote:
I'm almost certain there was some mention of Parametron, amongst others.
Probably way too early for HITAC. I seem to recall an article about a
project to build a one mega-word memory unit too, which I suppose was a
rather impressive size for then (particularly if you wanted to make it
reliable!). Our machines of that era are all around the 4KW mark...
I think the magazine must have been aimed at business analysts - which
means the level of detail isn't as much as us techies would like (and
articles tend to be half-page affairs), but it's still probably worth me
recording the computing side of it.
Give me a prod in a month if I haven't mentioned it again, as knowing me
I'll forget by the time I'm back in the UK :)
cheers
Jules
I'll see if
I can find them when I get back to the UK and scan any
interesting bits in.
I am specifically looking for info on the parametron computers of the late
1950s, and the Hitachi AS/6 (may be called a HITAC in a Japanese
context) of the late 1970s.
6768
days inactive
6778
days old
32 comments
16 participants
participants (16)
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aw288＠osfn.org -
Bob＠BRADLEE.ORG -
bv＠norbionics.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
gtn＠mind-to-mind.com -
jdaviscl2＠soupwizard.com -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
kenacms＠pindar.net2net.net.au -
news＠computercollector.com -
pat＠computer-refuge.org -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
toresbe＠ifi.uio.no -
vrs＠msn.com