An old HD magnet can do wonders...Put the disk to spin and swipe it over the disc cover. Of course, do it with the drive opened :o)

On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Philip Pemberton wrote: some wiping with a refrigerator door magnet may do. Could you twist up a cable? PC usually uses a twisted cable and drive select "B" (I'm reluctant to use numbers, because some number 1,2,3,4 and some number 0,1,2,3) Most others use a straight cable and drive select "A" for the first drive. If your FDC can do a 300,000 bits per second data transfer rate, then you can compensate for the 360RPM, . . . I hope that one or more of Liam's drives will work out for you - I posted some model numbers to compare against. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

I finally did an inventory (of sorts), and this is what I have: 2 - vaxstation 4000/60s no hard drives2 - dec 3000's likely with hard drives1 - vaxstation 3100/M38 likely with hard drive2 - vaxstation 3100/M76 SPX with floppy drives and hard drives1 - vaxstation 3100/M76 with floppy, no hard drives I also have, 5 sun Sparcs to get rid of,a few sparc 5'san ultra-2Eand 1-2 ultra-10s, 1 with AMD 486 board last I checked I have also got an O2 somewhere and an SGI IRISas well as a next station (no memory, no drives) Dan.

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 06:56:56PM -0400, Dan Gahlinger wrote: The Inmos Transputer's current descendant is the XMOS XS-1 microcontroller. Very very cool CPUs -- the base instruction set is unpleasant (looks like what simple-minded C compilers put out) but the event-handling and hyperthreading architecture kicks much ass. Cheap at digikey.com. John Wilson D Bit

On 16/08/13 7:12 PM, BE Arnold wrote: The Transputer was actually a very simple and elegant design -- and very fast for its time. Not sure that the x86 family can claim the same. --Toby

On 17/08/13 8:12 AM, Dan Gahlinger wrote: I still use them; typing this on a G5 :-) It's still much more computer than I need :) --Toby

On 8/17/2013 5:12 AM, Dan Gahlinger wrote: Care to elaborate how the x86 ISA is "holding us down?" What can you do with ARM or PPC instructions that you can't with x86? Be specific. - Josh

On 8/17/2013 1:19 PM, Mouse wrote: Somewhat agreed, although I somehow doubt Intel is spending most of its time on the emulation layer. ARM's performance/watt is still very compelling. How is this any different than the historical "all the world's a VAX" (or more modern "all the world's a 32-bit Linux machine") attitude that often plauges/plagued *nix software compatibility across architectures? I don't hear anyone suggesting that VAXen or Linux machines are to blame here, or that eliminating them would somehow eliminate this problem... I guess my argument here is "if it wasn't x86 causing this problem, it'd be something else." Agreed, but I'd argue that 99.9999% of the time no one will ever have to see the ugliness or deal with it directly, so its ability to "hold us down" is very limited. Unless you're a compiler developer or you have to write directly in assembly for these CPUs (in which case you have my sympathies), it's not something that you ever have to care about. And don't discount compatibility as a major advantage. Sure, you and I can recompile our code to whatever platform we want to run it on, but there are people who can't (for various reasons, valid and invalid). - Josh

On 18 Aug 2013, at 0:58 , Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: LOL .tsooJ -- Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, its called EVERYBODY and they meet at the bar. -- Joost van de Griek <http://www.jvdg.net/>

On Aug 17, 2013, at 6:58 PM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: Actually, that wasn't terribly uncommon, especially for SCSI cards. My CQD-220 has both PDP-11 and VAX code baked into the ROM which you can run a sequence of console commands to dump it into RAM and execute from there. It's primarily only the setup utility, so it's not exactly *necessary* for the card to run, but 99% of people need to use it to set up their drives. Of course, Unibus and Qbus were only used by PDP-11 and VAXen (not counting microprocessors on the cards themselves, like the 8086 that runs the CQD-220). PCI is another matter; Intel may have been one of the primary driving forces behind its implementation, but it was VERY rapidly adopted by architectures other than x86 PCs. I'm more than a little annoyed that OpenFirmware style portable boot bytecode didn't take off beyond the OpenFirmware world (Suns, Macs, various IBM machines) with the advent of PCI, which was a much more portable bus architecture than, say, ISA or VME. Exactly. It's a lot like the situation with Linux and buggy BIOS implementations in the '90s and early 2000s (and probably still today, albeit in a somewhat more limited sense). Most motherboard manufacturers just hacked on the BIOS until it booted Windows, which occasionally left some seriously nasty surprises for folks booting other operating systems on a BIOS that didn't set things up exactly to spec. It's laziness, sometimes born out of quite constrained resources. - Dave

On Aug 20, 2013, at 4:46, Christian Corti <cc at informatik.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote: Oh geez, I really should have remembered the DECSystem one, since we just catalogued a bunch of DEC stuff in MARCH's collection that included one. My apologies, and thanks for correcting my blatant misinformation. - Dave

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 04:19:27PM -0400, Mouse wrote: [...] So just put the damn thing into long mode and the legacy compatibility warts go away. Segmentation, gone. The broken BCD stuff, *poof*. x87, uh, still there but at least we can ignore it and use SSE and friends instead which are guaranteed to exist. There are some odd corners such as %r8-%15 not supporting direct access to the byte at bits 15-8 of a register like you can with e.g. %ah, but that's no weirder a limitation than being unable to do byte operations on %a0-%a7 on the 68000.

Where are they located, Dan ? Regards SPc. 2013/8/25 Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com>

Yes. I used a couple for my Ph.D. work and I've yet to see a processor that is easier to interface or program. I feel that they were intially mis-marketed. They were pushed as a processr for doing parallel processing (which in a sense is true) with the result that peopel ignored them becuase they didn't need to do parallel processing. In fact ther wrre a very nice _microcontroller_. They were almost ideal for high-performance embedded systems -- like fast data acquistion devices (what I used them for) and the like. :-) -tony

On 17/08/13 3:02 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I still want to build a homebrew SBC based on one or two. Yes. The product line was even helpfully segmented along these lines, between the T2xx, T4xx, and T8xx, along with a good palette of glue chips from Inmos for I/O, etc. In particular the Transputer had markedly better single-chip integer and FP performance than typical workstation/PC chips of the era (e.g. 68K). They were only overtaken later by more familiar RISC designs. --Toby

On 18/08/13 3:28 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Thanks very much for the information and encouragement. Dave McGuire says I should get hold of some C011 chips too. http://archive.org/details/bitsavers_inmostransr_245349 Also, very cleverly, binary compatible (if you stick to common capabilities). --Toby

Thanks very much for the information and encouragement. Dave McGuire says I should get hold of some C011 chips too. See also Ram's excellent archive @ http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/

On 8/16/13 4:12 PM, "BE Arnold" <bearnold at outlook.com> wrote: Nah. The transputer was one response to what I like to call the 'topology wars' of distributed parallel computing. At one time, everyone was trying to argue that a star vs. a ring vs. a hypertoroid vs. a hypercube topology was the best way to do parallel computing. The transputer was very cool in that it incorporated the communication element into both the hardware and the instruction set of the part. But not too long after, networking advanced to the degree that it was possible to create massively parallel computers that were effectively all-way connected. One might say that no one won the topology wars, because fast networking offered a Gordian solution. I wonder what might have happened if Inmos hadn't expected everyone to learn Occam in order to use their part? Not that Occam wasn't pretty cool, but I still remember the immense effort into 'parallelizing' existing languages. Funny enough, FORTRAN showed the most benefit, which most folks attributed to the belief that it was so awfully slow to begin with. -- Ian

I don't know what you did, but I just typed "transputer" into Google and I get back a whole bunch of links ... =-O

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:33:27PM -0400, Dan Gahlinger wrote: Now called XLINK. Extremely slick. Hyperthreads on the same chip can talk to each other at effectively infinite speed, and talking between chips can be done with 2 or 5 wires (per direction), which look the same to software but 5 wires gives faster speed. Cores can boot over XLINK too, so you can use one flash ROM to hold the code for several chips. John Wilson D Bit

On 22 July 2013 15:06, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Oops. I probably should have said - I'm in CR4 3SB, SW London/Surrey borders. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Liam Proven wrote: No wrath! In this context, it is completely clear what types of drives you are referring to. Some of the many confusions in the past have involved more obscure systems, people who refer to 40 cylinder double sided drives as "80 track", lack of differentiation between 96tpi DD and 96tpi "HD", etc. To do "360K" with a "1.2M" drive requires EITHER: drive switchable between 360RPM and 300RPM OR FDC capable of a 300K sata transfer rate to compensate for the 360RPM I'm glad that Liam stepped forward! My boxes of drives are not easily accessible, other than one apparently new but untested drive in one of the boxes of books. Since these are PC (or more likely PC/AT) pulls, we can assume that few, if any, are 96tpi DD (aka "720K 5.25"). If they are "half-height", then there are probably no single sided, etc. First step: Do any of them have a star/asterisk embossed on the faceplate? If so, then those are fairly recent 40t/DD WHen IBM introduced their 1.2M drive, they realized that they needed to label the two types. But, being rather less than clueless, they chose to label the wrong one. A special mark on 1.2M would have solved/prevented the problem. Instead, they marked drives for which there already existed, even from their own factories, MANY unmarked ones. Therefore, if there is NOT a star/asterisk, then the drive is a 40t/DD from before the time of the mark, a 40t/DD from a manufacturer that didn't go along, or a 1.2M. In general, the easiest ID will be by model number. On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Al Kossow wrote: Here's a few more drive model numbers to check against: TEAC 55FG 1.2M/"720K" 80T DD/HD TEAC 55F "720k" 80T DD Hitachi HFD505 360K HFD516 1.2M JVC MDP-200 360K MDP-2000,MDP-1000 1.2M Mitsubishi 501, 4851? 360K 504,4854 1.2M (I used to have an early one of those that had 50 pin edge connector, for drop-in 8" replacement) 4853 "720K" NSA FB502 360K Canon MDD422 1.2M MDD516 1.2M MDD211 360K Okidata 3315 360K 3305 360K Qume Qumetrak-142 360K (needs SLOW stepping) Ricoh RF8160 360K RF5160 1.2M Shugart/Matsushita, . . . 455 360K 40T 465 720K 80T/DD 475 1.2M 80T HD Tandon TM50-2 360K TEC 503 360K Weltec M16-P Bizarre 1.2M drive for XT 250K data transfer rate This batch of numbers is mostly from NCC'83 and the like; some numbers changed later. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Tony Duell wrote: which is why although excessively PC-Centric (easily 250K to 400K), "360K" and "1.2M" are unambiguous. Phillip referred to 40track/DD, which is also unambiguous due to the non-existence of 20 cylinder drives, and 80track/HD, which is also unambiguous due to the nonexistence of high density 40 cylinder drives. If he were to have asked for 80track/DD, THEN it would have been ambiguous. hence "probably" my assumption, as well. much less, have them handy at boot sales, etc. BUT, that provides more accurate information than relying on the labels on the drives, AND eliminates any that won't turn or step. "putting numbers on the face would CONFUSE anybody who is as clueless as we are" don't know. Most manufacturers' numbering systems have some clues in them. "16" within the number often means 1.6M unformatted (1.2M formatted) "-4" might mean 80cylinder double density, or it might mean 80 cylinder "high" density. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Sorry, this was meant to be private ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nico de Jong" <nico at farumdata.dk> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, August 30, 2013 8:56 AM Subject: Re: WTD - 40-track (360K) 5.25in floppy drive -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter has removed 1114 of my spam emails to date. Get the free SPAMfighter here: http://www.spamfighter.com/len Do you have a slow PC? Try a Free scan http://www.spamfighter.com/SLOW-PCfighter?cid=sigen