Meaning me as the moron... I was trying to activate somebodies 11/23-RL02 system this morning and had fun cabling it up, etc. But I was not able to get the RL02 up. I was able to: Find all the power switches including the master. Read the booting sequence from the terse manual. Ensure that the RL02 was cabled to the CPU, and terminated. Get the VT100 to run the bootstrap up to the disk load point. Seat the pack and it's cover and re-close the drive. See the load light come on. Depress the load switch: The light goes off immediately. Hear 15 seconds quiet of revving up. The load light stays off. We did Not see: The load light ever flash or come back on. The Ready light never comes on. Rebooting just the CPU at this point does not change the status. Attempting to load the disk just error dumped to an address. I had used several CDC type pack drives in the early 90's, but never an RL02. Was I doing something stupid? Your help is appreciated. John A.

At 01:53 PM 5/9/2005, you wrote: Hmm, a little quick googling shows them only in circa 1987 references from the Legion of Doom, spreading lists of Telenet nodes, and they're listed as having a TOPS-20 system. Another link turned up a resume that said they were still a service / support bureau in 1995. - John

I wouldn't say you're a moron; sometimes these things have problems. Looks like you got past the first common problem with RL0xs: the RL/RLV controller must be active for the drive to acquire timing information. But as Gordon posted, checking the lights is also important. I needed to replace the bulbs in my drive as well. Found a company here in Pasadena that has them for a reasonable cost, thanks to Tim Shoppa. But sadly, my drive once worked but not longer works also. I am not in a position to spend some quality time with it yet. John

Ands the reason it doesn't boot from that drive is a separate fault? -tony

I don;'t think it does. One of the alignment procedures involves disconnecting the motor signal at an in-line connector and moving the heads by hand. There's no mention of preventing it from spinning down under these conditions. I will have to check the state machine diagrams to be sure, though. -tony

This is an 11/23 (How to do a list there?) with it's primary O/S on That RL02 (no set def command in memory yet). John A.

Anybody on list have a PC program to turn a 2-serial ported PC into an RS232 monitor? My cousin wants somebody to debug a serial device for him. Alternately, anybody in the northeast with a bidirectional serial comm monitor they can loan out for a few days, get in touch. John A.

On Tue, 2005-05-10 10:17:25 -0400, John Allain <allain at panix.com> wrote: The Linux-based OS "Debian" ships with a package called 'snooper', which reads as if it could fulfill your needs: $ apt-cache show snooper Package: snooper Priority: optional Section: comm Installed-Size: 38 Maintainer: David Coe <davidc at debian.org> Architecture: i386 Version: 19991202-3 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5-13), liblockdev1, libncurses5 (>= 5.2.20020112a-1) Filename: pool/main/s/snooper/snooper_19991202-3_i386.deb Size: 15216 MD5sum: 2896d70d54ffdfafe59016242fc19d59 Description: Captures communication between two external serial devices Snooper passes data transparently between two serial (RS232C) devices, capturing and logging the data and occasional comments you want to insert into the logs. . It is useful for debugging or analyzing the communications protocol between two devices that would normally be connected directly to each other, e.g. a digital camera and a personal computer. By sitting "in the middle" (after you connect the two devices to serial ports on your Linux machine) snooper is able to capture data traveling in either direction while also passing it unmodified to the other device. . It is also possible to operate with a single serial device, using your console and keyboard as the second device. MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de . +49-172-7608481 _ O _ "Eine Freie Meinung in einem Freien Kopf | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg _ _ O fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier B?rger" | im Internet! | im Irak! O O O ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(NEW_COPYRIGHT_LAW | DRM | TCPA));

On Tue, 10 May 2005, John Allain wrote: Hi John. I found my copy of the software I referred to earlier. I forgot what it was called (again). E-mail me off-list to get a copy. Your cousin will still need to make up the Y cable to use it. -- 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 ]

First thing : check the bulbs in the RL02 switches. The caps just pull off, then the bulbs pull out (wedge-ended all-glass bulbs). If I need to tell you how to test them, you haven't a hope of finding logic problems in the '11 or drives :-) In particular, make sure the fault lamp bulb is OK. I want to be sure the drive isn't indicating a fault. In fact you might try powering down and disconnecting the controller cable from the RL02. Then power up. The drive fault lamp should come on (loss of the drive clock). If not, then we ened to find out why not. It sounds like the heads aren't loading. There is a mechanical lock on the positioned to lock the heads for shipping. Make sure it's not locked!. Then stick a pack in and take off the drive logic access cover (4 captive screws on top, unhook it from under the drive cartridge access door). Hookl the cover onto the back edge of the drive, then lift the R/W module (in the middle), hook that on the side of its hole without unplgging anything. You can now see the positioner and heads. Power up, hit the load switch, and see if the heads move at all. -tony