On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 4:50 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote: Indeed. I turned a tiny Packard-Bell 486 into a Linux Router Project router a while back, but, surprise, surprise, it lasted only as long as the (proprietary-form-factor) PSU. I have fired up my TRS-80 Model III in the past two weeks. *looks out at the other M3 owners on the list* Have you?!? ;-) I have to check, but I think I am still having a RAM chip issue - it's either bad sockets or a bad 4116. The machine is loaded with 48K, but may only have 32K working reliably. It won't successfully boot any of my M3 Infocom games (which is why I had it on recently). I just ran FreeDOS last month, booted from a Knoppix live CD. I needed to boot to "DOS" to twiddle something on a 3COM NIC before doing a PXE boot on an otherwise blank machine. I haven't specifically tried to build a "1990 Dream Machine", but I still have my last 486 configuration intact (c. 1996). I use it for 5.25" floppy work since it has a combo 3.5"/5.25" one-bay drive I bought new when they first came out. So did I. -ethan

2009/5/18 David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>: Yup. Sony is a large content-provider, too. They crippled MD so badly it never came into its own. I still use them. They hold more data than I could ever dream of ever having to store back when some of my hardware was current. And even on some of my more current machines I have internal drives. For those that don't, I have FireWire and USB ZIP750 drives, and SCSI ZIP250's. On some machines with slow network interfaces, ZIP sneakernet is a nice and fast way of transfering larger files. They're dirt cheap on eBay, nowadays. Never suffered click-of-death, either. Trouble was, though, people thought of them as removable hard drives, instead of really big floppies. .tsooJ

David Griffith wrote: Aye, too true. I am, however, still keeping my MZ-RH1 (that'll be MZ-M200 to anyone on the other side of the pond) on the grounds that it's the best tool I've found to record lectures *and* listen to music on the train. I've never met anyone who could talk for long enough to fill an entire HiMD disc on Hi-LP mode (IIRC that's about 35 hours). Crippling NetMD (the PC <==> MD transfer system) to only allow transfers from PC to MD (and prevent you deleting those tracks even if they weren't covered by SonicStage's DRM -- you can get around this with a CD emulator and a copy of Simple Burner) was a terrifically bad idea. Though that said, at least they left the optical output relatively unmolested. The RH1 seems to have been built as a "last ditch" by Sony. Something along the lines of "this may well be the last MD recorder we ever design, so let's make it *really* *friggin'* *good*". The lack of any significant volume limiting on the headphone output of European RH1s (unlike previous MD units) and the HD-Digital amplifier were the icing on the cake. They have carved themselves something of a niche though -- nearly every journalist I know or have met either owns or has access to a Minidisc recorder. I've heard they're popular with musicians as well (sound quality vs. cost, I guess). You can have my Minidisc recorder when you pry it from my cold dead hands! -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 20:49 +0100, Tony Duell wrote: AT commands are alive and well and in your mobile phone - how else do you talk to the radio stack? Why? Because it would be rude not to, at that price. Four in one of my cars, two of which controlled the heating system. No, I don't know why the heating required more CPU horsepower than the ABS controller. Gordon

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 05:18 -0700, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Nope, not pulling your leg. ATDT doesn't seem to do anything useful, although it may be trying to place an ISDN call. Have a look at the crappy code in http://www.gjcp.net/~gordonjcp/radiomap.tar.bz2 You'll see that I sent AT+CSQ to query the phone's RSSI, and AT+CREG? to determine LAC and CellID. There's a huge list of possible commands, including things like manipulating the SIM card, sending text messages, placing calls, answering calls, reading CLID, *all* kinds. Gordon

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote: Yeah... just whistle. If it "talks" back, you did it right. ;-) -ethan

At 07:18 AM 5/20/2009, Cameron Kaiser wrote: I was helping a client with a contemporary cellular modem recently and it had serial-port emulation and AT command set compatibility, too. - John