Hehe, I've just been having a look at that after someone else sent me the link - 23 BBCs? FIFTY Acorn 3000s? I know I like hoarding stuff but that just takes the biscuit AND the packet the biscuit came in AND the tin :) Particularly since the 'winner' will have to drive to North Wales to get everything. Eep. Cheers w

Fair warning, the following message contains the ratings of a single individual. their computer facilities to PCs... As shown by the above quote, there is a strong anti "PeeCee" bias by many here. While I completely agree that there are significant *problems* with both the hardware and (Windoze) software, I do believe that the more extreme views are off base. Having been involved with computing since 1972, I have worked with nearly all [non-mainframe] systems that are discussed on this board at some point. Many of them had some very interesting, unique (and useful) features that drove computer technology to the next level. I am currently involved in attempting to restore a complete PDP-8 environment myself [with the dream of actually getting a TSS-8 distribution running with TU-56 tape drives. IF the computer industry had remained with a large number of completely different hardware/software environments which required trained operators for even the most basic operations, then computing would not have become a household commodity. Even neglecting price, consider the concept of everyone having a [fill in the machine of your choice] in their home, at school (even at the lower grade levels or preschools!], and in all of the other locations where it is common to find computer access. Standardization of both hardware and software HAD TO HAPPEN, if computers were to become the commodity they are today. IBM/Intel had the technology, manpower, and finances to create a platform that was (reasonably) affordable, and significantly exceeded the capabilities of the current generation of "personal" computers. Bill Gates had the opportunity to develop an operating system [MS-DOS] when Digital Research decided not to agressively persue a new version of CP/M. Once this was the dominant command line O/S, it was only logical that the same company had the best chance to develop a GUI based interface once that technology started to appear Side Note: Many years ago I met Bill Gates and had the chance to speak [along with a fairly large group] with him. Personally I do not like the man's attitude towards many things, but I DO repsect his business sense and drive [leaving the issue of ethics out of the discussion]. So does the PC Hardware Platform have some serious shortcomings? YES Could a machine be build with significant technology advantages over a PC architecture? YES Does Windows have some real technology problems? DEFINITELY Is the current pricing/licensing model out of line? DEPENDS IF YOU ARE A VENDOR OR CUSTOMER <g> Even with these issues, lets face the facts Windows/PC is going to be around [and dominant] in most business and personal environments for a significant period of time, unless something RADICAL happens on the technology level [Bio-Neural-Networks come to mind]. So lets stop the bashing, and just LEARN TO DEAL WITH IT! We should [again my opinion] concentrate on what we can do best. Keep the old technology alive for historical purposes. Prevent items from going to the scrapper whenever possible. If a member finds an item that is aimed at the scrapper, salvage it even if it is not part of their main focus [for later trade/sale/barter], or find someone who can. Share whatever documentation / software we currently have available [a special thanks to Don Robert House is due at this point!], so that all may benefit. I have an uncle who collects/restores old cars [1909 Sears, Stanley Steamer, etc.] each of these cars had some fascinating and innovative features for their day. Although he does complain about many features of the current state of the automotive industry, he never suggests that we should go back to the old way of doing things. Rather the focus is on how things can move forward, addressing current problems and making the best use of new technology. Aside from the Auto/Computer difference I think that our group and his are basically identical. <END OF RANT> Hopefully my next post will be more on a specific topic......

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 11:25, David V. Corbin wrote: I witnessed a school clearance over here last year (I actually got there first and took all the good stuff :-) who were disposing of all their old Acorn 8 bit hardware. They were moving everything over to Acorn RiscPC hardware because they found it was more viable than taking the 'accepted' route of going for expensive obsolete-in-a-second PCs. For where they *had* to maintain x86 compatibility, x86 coprocessor boards for the machines are readily available. The machines could all run Linux happily alongside RiscOS. It was just nice to see somewhere putting together an environment that was reliable, cheap, and did everything that was expected of it. I don't think the Government here lay down the law as to what hardware/software schools use (yet), but once a school takes the typical PC/Microsfot route I suppose it's very hard to go back as the knowledge of alternatives gets lost amongst the policy-makers (remember that traditionally in the UK most educational establishments used Acorn and later Apple Mac platforms, with universities using Unix) I don't know how many households had a home computer in the 80's and early 90's in the UK, but my meory is that it was a lot, at least amongst those families who had children. I'd say the standardization came later, just at a huge cost, both at hardware and software level. At the hardware level there was the PC with it's oddball design, which had crippled progress ever since. At the software level there was, well, you-know-who. That argument's been done to death so I'm not even going to go there. I'm all for standards when they're well-defined and publicly available, but not when a company with too much marketing clout deviates from accepted standards and creates fragmentation, or uses their weight to create a rival 'standard' of their own choosing, or when the standard is poorly designed or over-complicated so that it stands no chance of keeping up with technology advances. I'd disagree on both counts there I think, but that's just my opinion. And the flipside of blaming good marketing is that you can always blame a lazy public who aren't prepared to understand what they're buying and shop around for the best deal (not in terms of cost, but in terms of what suits their needs) Why? GUIs and command-line interfaces are very different animals. My personal gripe is the "computing is good, everyone should have a computer" attitude. I'm forever seeing eldery people struggling to afford computer technology only to find that it doesn't really *give* them anything. Same goes with Third World projects - all very noble, but how about making sure people can maintain basic services for themselves before dumping wireless technology on their heads? Sure, we've come a long way, and computing does have benefits. But I'm a little concerned that it's being treated as the saviour of society and the way forward. Nobody seems to be sitting back and worrying about the biger picture... Maybe every industry has some sort of sweet period though, I don't know. For me I'd much prefer a thirty or fourty year old car because I can understand the technology, can fix it with simple tools, and it does what I expect of a car - it's reliable and gets me from one place to another in comfort and in a reasonable amount of time. I don't care if I have to stop for five minutes if I want a drink because there's no cupholder - life should not be fast enough that I can't afford to stop for that drink anyway. I don't care if I have to wind a window down by hand, or look at a map because I don't have satnav, or (shock horror) scrape ice of a front window on a cold morning because it isn't heated. Personally I'd rather have something that gets me from A to B and doesn't cost a fortune to buy or run because it's not packed full of 'extra' gizmos and technology. Of course, I'm in a minority, preferring simple tools that do a well-defined job, rather than something complex that does anything. It's a nice analogy too, because I feel the same way about computing. And sometimes I do wonder if, deep down, most people would feel like that if they didn't have the marketing departments telling them otherwise... same here :-) cheers Jules

Learn to deal with it, yes. But I don't see that as a reason to stop the bashing. If the criticisms were unfair, perhaps. But even you, in your rant, admit they're broken on many levels (as compared to most other machines); I see no particular reason to stop pointing out something that's broken just because we're stuck with its presence. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I think that the 10-year rule may have to be dropped when that sliding window falls to the era of the PC monoculture. Sun hasn't died yet, so there's a peephole to other architectures, but a small one. Later we may have to rest on a fixed cut-off date. Resurrecting PC's would be as much fun as other computers if it weren't for the software. BTW I like PC _hardware_. The seeming need that MS has for planned obsolescence, a practice that looks like pure deception to me, has made it first hard then later impossible to love. Sure glad there's Linux. There's a secondary issue too, with the death of computers as education tools, replaced by computers as entertainment. That seems like it could even be a cultural dead-end. First Television went from Golden age to cultural wasteland, now it's time for computers to do same. </deep> BTW I have three Pentium 75 systems here for a good cause. I sure seem to have made Chris happy with other off-focus items. John A. Your O/S will self destruct in 6 months, subscribe for updates Now!

For all of you who put up with my rant of yesterday, I thank you. To those who replied (publicly or privately) with comments on my rants, I think some very good points were made [although I may not agree with all of them] and I have responded to some [privately] I really value this forum, and agree with those who believe that there are plenty of OTHER forums for discussing PC/Windows and that this is NOT the place. On the other hand, (as preiously posted) if someone is looking to duplicate the original cassette interface, that would surely be a "classic" issue. [ps: I do have an operational DX4/100 VESA Local Bus machine with 20Meg operational if someone wants to buy it....]. My intended point was that posts which exist simply to say negative things about a topic which is not pertinant to the forum anyway [i.e. PC/Windows] serves no purpose. And in my personal case lowers my opinion of the poster [most of whom I hold in very high regard]. I think that is enough on the subject, and would be greatful if nobody replys [at least on the forum] to this post. Sincerely, David

And now we know the rest of the story... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin" &lt;cisin(a)xenosoft.com&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 3:19 PM Subject: A case for downgrading to PCs (was: WARNING: RANTING COMPUTER NUT... downgraded many

I don't dispute you _can_ teach real computing using PCs, although IMHO Acorn machines (which were designed for eduactional uses) are IMHO more suitable (and of course a room of Beebs or Archs is just as reliable as a room of PCs, I wasn't talking about having a multi-user mini). However, I can assure you this is not what happens in the UK. Beebs were used to teach computing (as in programming, interfacing (remember the Beeb had a built in ADC and user port), etc). PCs are not. And FWIW, according to the current UK educational standards I don't know how to use a computer (!)... -tony

After reading these combined, I just gotta ask, what on earth are you doing still teaching there?? Me neither, probably. :-) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Compared to what's taught in the name of computing these days, that _is_ real computing... -tony

On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 12:19, Fred Cisin wrote: Was it really a few months ago? :-) My how time flies! But it's good to know where it all came from and a bit of history behind it. Thanks. -- TTFN - Guy

Sounds like something for case moders. Just the thing for those clear plexiglass cases that seem to be popular at the moment. Now what they need are the lightbars that show CPU activity or disk activity. I like the JBOD boxes I have on my VMS server as each disk has LED's that show the load on each disk (the greater the load the more LED's lit). Zane

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 11:41:09PM -0500, Doc Shipley wrote: I've seen a pretty easy-to-build circuit to put one of those on a Linux box. I remember something about a simple resistor ladder network D-A and an LED bargraph chip from Radio Shack. The software just puts the load on a spare parallel port, so it's pretty low-impact. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 18-Jun-2004 05:10 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -78.0 F (-61.2 C) Windchill -114.8 F (-81.59 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 9.9 kts Grid 087 Barometer 681.3 mb (10575. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

Hi, ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) said: That's pretty much how the display for the E11 PDP-11 emulator works. It drives 8 LEDs when /STROBE is asserted and another 8 when /INIT is asserted. This gives a 16-LED display by switching radidly between the 2 sets of LEDs. I have the lights fitted in a spare disk blanking plate on the front of my 486 "fake" PDP-11. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

If that's how they did it, then it's a lot more reasonable. However, for bar (as opposed to dot) mode, I'd prefer one resistor per LED (since the total current obviously increases as the number of LEDs goes up). And I'd probably add a buffer chip (something like an 'LS540 or 'LS541, whichever allowed me use it as a current sinking stage (LED + resistor returned to the +5V line). Most printer ports can supply the current needed be LEDs, but I'd not want to risk it, if that port was part of a difficult-to-find multi-IO chip on the motherboard. For PCs like mine, where the printer ports are all built from TTL on add-on cards, and where I have schematics anyway, I'd just connect the LEDs directly to the port. -tony

Err, is it beyond thw wit of modern designers to decode a 4 bit value to drive 16 LEDs using a purely digital circuit. Every LED bargraph chip I've seen drives 10 LEDs. This is not exactly hard to design. To do it purely digitially, you can use a 4 line to 16 line decoder (e.g. a 74x154) if you want 'dot' mode. To do 'bar' mode, it's a simple exercise to design the logic, and if you like burn it into a PAL (or PROM, or...). Not it isn't IMHO... I suppose if you want to multiply an 8 bit value by 3, you'd put it into a DAC, then into an op-amp configured as a *3 non-inverting amplifer, then into an ADC, right? LM3914 for the linear one. There's also the LM3915 and LM3916 which have various flavours of logarithmic scale. -tony

der Mouse wrote: Well if you want real Blinking lights decode using LEDS. :)

If you really want an analogue display (that old meter), can't you connect some resistors (maybe with series diodes) to the parallel port? If the display is a bargraph (more LEDs on for more load), then try something like this : D0 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D1 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D2 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D3 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D4 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D5 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D6 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | D7 --->|---/\/\/\-----+ | (meter) | --- /// Pick the resistors (all the same value) so that the meter gets to FSD when all the otuput bits are set. Diodes can be 1N4148 or similar. This is not going to be a precision circuit, but it should be good enough for this. If the display is just one LED on (D7 meaning more load than D0), then try making the resistor on D0 8 times that on D7, the one on D1 7 times that on F7 and so on. Again, not a precision circuit, but it'll do. -tony

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 08:13:01PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: It's to drive _2 sets_ of 15 or 16 LEDs from _8 bits_, since the BeBox is a dual-processor box. And, yes, the LM3914 sounds about right. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 19-Jun-2004 01:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -74.2 F (-59.0 C) Windchill -113.5 F (-80.90 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 12.3 kts Grid 074 Barometer 682.6 mb (10528 ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Ethan Dicks wrote: I decided that if I could have a BeBox with LED meters, then I'd better make myself my own. I have eight LEDs (four green, two yellow, one orange, one red - fluke in colour arrangement as I was ripping them off from old AT cases), each of which has a 220 ohm resistor in series to a DB25 header. I used a spare straight-through serial ribbon cable to hook it to the parallel port. I use Linux's /proc/stat to read CPU load, and then a extremely simple C library ("parapin") in XS coupled to a perl script (I do better with perl than C) to turn the lines on and off. Works a lot better than I would have imagined, considering how much of a bodge job it is. I'm too embaressed to take pictures of the solder work, lest I croak of shame. JP

The "old" (mid 1990s) Bay routers have a large amount of blinkenlights inside. Pretty neat, but I don't know what they did. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 23:43, Witchy wrote: Ha - I was trying to find a home for an A3000 a few weeks ago. No local interest and the only person wanting one was in north Wales. Somehow I don't think they'll be wanting 30 of the things... cheers Jules