On 05/17/2013 04:39 PM, Jim Stephens wrote: I still have the little board I made to exercise (probe, hex dump, etc) an ATA drive. I could try it with a SATA drive and one of those adapters. I bet it'd work. The only potential issue I can think of is if the adapter doesn't speak PIO 0, which is the easiest and most common way for microcontrollers and similar "tiny" systems to access ATA devices. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: I definitely prefer the SCSI protocol. ;) Are we talking ATA-proper, or ATAPI? -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

Consider sticking with period-appropriate storage devices but integrate emulation-support (rather than interfaces to hard-to-get hardware): DF32, RL01/RL02, RK05, RX01/02, possibly others ... ? Maybe even TU56 (and TU58). For example, see: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?35525-RL02-RL01-simu… On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 5:12 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:

On 05/18/2013 04:07 PM, Philipp Hachtmann wrote: Yebbut...having a grand old system like a PDP-11 on "life support" by connecting it to a PC is something that I (and others) find extremely distasteful. A standalone device would definitely have a market. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 5/18/2013 3:39 PM, allison wrote: Actually I think fitting a 12-bit word into two bytes of disk is really sensible. My PDP8 FPGA used the same bits-on-disk format as SIMH and can use any of the available PDP8 SIMH disk images without modification. It also makes transferring files between a PC and the PDP8 FPGA trivial. I don't miss kermit. An SD card is a nice removable media - kinda like a disk pack that won't break your foot if you drop it. At less than 5 dollars for a 4 GB SD Card, who cares about packing efficiency? Rob.

On 18/05/13 6:39 PM, allison wrote: +1 Way, way too much. Isn't the problem there that you need new drivers to use it as a disk? Or am I misunderstanding you? And, fast enough? --Toby

Am 19.05.2013 11:29, schrieb Christian Corti: =0 You forgot one thing: I personally do not differenciate between a PC and one of those high performance single board toys. They have Ethernet. They can attach USB anything. They run reasonably fast. They even can run big Linux distributions. Why is everybody loving this raspberry pie (sic!) board? Have never used mine. I prefer the beaglebone. Raspberry pi and it's Broadcom chip are a bit too closed source for me. And it has nearly no expansion pins. Philipp -- Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Philipp Hachtmann Buchdruck, Bleisatz, Spezialit?ten Alemannstr. 21, D-30165 Hannover Tel. 0511/3522222, Mobil 0171/2632239 Fax. 0511/3500439 hachti at hachti.de www.tiegeldruck.de UStdID DE 202668329

On 5/20/2013 7:03 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote: Can we *not* do this conversation again? I think we had our last one about two months ago and I'm still recovering. - Josh

On 05/20/2013 10:47 PM, John Wilson wrote: I agree 100%. But I think starting there is better than not starting at all. The trouble comes, just like Arduino, when people won't take off the training wheels. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

The analogy is somewhat flawed IMHO. As I understand it (never having ridden a bicycle), you learn with the training wheels, when you are able to blanace the machine on your own, you take them off and ride without them. The point being that when you take the training wheels off, you carry on with essentially the same skils you were using before. This is not the case with a lot of the 'toy' programming languages and environments where you do have to re-learn things when you move on to other languages and systems. My views are totally opposite to most teachers (on the other hand they have worked well for me) in that uyou should _never_ learn a simplified viersion that had to be un-learned later.. Lear nthe real thing form day 1. Learn to solder early on, you will need to solder anyway. Learn to use a proper programming language. Darn it. learn assembly language early on if you are going to be workign with embbedded systesms. You may well write the final code in a higher level language, but you should have an understanding of what the machine can and is actually doing. Anybody who tried ot inflict those on anyone I knew would end up having to enter the entire OS-8 sysem on the frontpanel switches... -tony

Sure, but as you ho on to say, the concepts are the same. If you learnt about valves (vacuum tubes), you would ahve to re-learn soem details if you wanted to use bipolar transistors (transistors come in both polarities, there are no valves that use positrons rather han electronics ; bipolar transistors are current controleld, valves are voltage controlled; etc). But the concepts of amplidiers, oscillators, impedance, ohms law, krichoff's laws, etc do not have to br re-learnt. What a procedutre is, what a function is (OK, C doesn't have procedures, but I think a void function is essentially the same thing), what formal parameters are, loops, recursion, etc, etc, etc. You don't have to relarn anything like that. Of course. You ahve to start with a simplified version. No sane person tries to learn all the keywords and syntax of their first computer language at the sart. Jsut as nobody tried ot learn the entire vocabularly of a human language at the start :-) [...] And of course relativeity, even genraly relativity is an appoximation too. It does not apply to very small objects. You need quantum mechanics for that. All phycial theopries are (IMHO) approximations. This does not make them non-uyseful, or not suitable to be taught. Heck, fo jsut abotu everythign I do now, newtonain mechanics is more than accurate enough. Nor do I, hence those 'last 6 words'. Agreed. But this started from 'toy' programming environments/languages that do not teach the concepts needed to go further. And where yuu essentially do ahve to forget everything you learned when you want to do something more advanced. Case in point. Compare the classic Philips 'EE' series of kits with 'Snap Circuits'. The Philips EE kits contains 'real' loose compoentns. Individual resisotrs, capacitors, audio transformers, etc. The later series of transsitors and all ICs were pre-mounted on little PCBs but with nothing else. Jsut hte termianl brought out to make them easier to conenct to. And you joined them together with spring terminals. The manual included real circuit diagrams and theory sections. With the trivial exception of how to use the spring termiansl, everything you learnt from those kits carried over to when you started buying loose components nad solderign them togehter yourself. Now Snap Circuits. The first problem is that there are ridiculous number of 'black box' modules. They are undocuemtned in the manual (yes, there is some docuemtnation o nthe web, but that has to be hunted for). And compoennts are used in very odd ways. Almost nothing you learn can be carried on. The later Philips EE kits included a circuit for an FM radio receiver. You got to wind the tunig coils, they were resoianted with a varicap diode, etc. You got to understnad how such sets owrk. The Snap Circutis one seems to consist of an 'FM radio module', an 'Audio Amplifier module', a speacker, and not much else. Oh well... -tony

I doubt that anybody knows the entire vocabulary of any living human language. In a sense it isn't. I guess it's a matter of degree... For example, let's conisder 'buildign a computer' You might start from various ores dug out of the groudn and refine your own materials. You might start with metals, etc and make your own electronci components. Copper oxide transsitors, albeit poor performers, can certainyl eb made at home. So can point-contact germanium transsitors if you have sutiable germanium crystals. I know of nobody who has made a computer startign there, though. You might start from simple electronic components, discrete transistors only. Peophe have certainly done that. You would prboably start by designing and building flip-flop and gate circuits that could easily be reproduced, and use those as the basis for your computer design You might start with SSI and MSI ICs (TTL) You might use an LSI procesosr (a microprocesosr) You night bolt a ready-made moterhboard into a case, plug in the PSU cables, the hard disk, some memory modules, etc. To me, the last is not 'building a computer', it's 'assembling a computer'. All the others do count as building one to me. But if you claimed ot have 'made a processor', I don;t think that soldering a Z80 onot a bit of stripboard is wqutie ewhat is normally meant by that. To 'make a processor' you need to start with something simpler than the processor. And I guess that's how Ifeel about 'buidling a radio' by connecing an RF/detector moduel to an audio amplifier module. The parts are too high level. The other thing is tghat TTL devices are somethign that are/were gernally used. There are excellent databooks for the giving intenral scehatmics for the simpler devices. But the FM radio module you find in an electronics kit is not something you will come across elsewhere. It's probably possible to do things like this, but there are no clues as to how to go about it, and the modules are not that well docuemtned. A true hacker can peroblaby do it, but the kits are not aimed at such people. It ias _amazing_ how few prople truely understnad the 555 timer IC. IMHO there is a differnece between learnign and using (yes,this might partly contradict my idea of not learnign things you have ot unlearn, it's more that ymay have to learn thigns you don;'t actually use). There is probalby nothign wrong with using an op-amp as a black box. Until, that is, you tun into problems fro mthe input current, or the slight offset, or... Or you end up using many mode components than you have to becuase you don;'t realise you cna use a particualr IC in a different way. And aexample of that. The 7474 Dtype flip-flop has acrtive-low direct set and dirct clear inputs. They work like an SR flip-flop. And the behaviour if both are asserted at the same time is docuemtned. Both ! and Q/ go high at the same time. This condition is not latched, if either set or rest goes high and the other remains low, the flip-fliop does what you'd expect. What this means is that if you tie reset low (say, then Q/ is high. But Q will be the inverse of the set input. It has rather more of a porpaction delay than a 7409, but I once used this when I have half a 7474 unused, not other gates fee, and I needed ot invert a slow-ish signal. A lot of people would have fitted anotehr IC. I beleive it is impossible to be totally consistent. And to understand why you reson the way you do. Part of it is 'gut feeling; To me, here, it's the idea that at least when learning you should use thigns considerablly simpler than the device you are making And that you should, if at all possible, learn with real components that you will come across later. I also feel that if you are nto careful, just plugging modules together (which includes things like Arduino boards), although economically sensible in that it cuts development tiem and production coses, can end up with an over-complex and less reliable device. If yopu are elarning you should elaern how to start from first principles. -tony

On 23 May 2013 22:27, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: It used to have 900 core words in about 1884 when it was first published, but that was a very long time ago and within a decade, the 2nd edition was substantially bigger. -- Sent from my phone - please pardon brevity & typos.

On Tue, 21 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: I agree. I agree as well! It's far better than that stuff. ;) -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On Wed, 22 May 2013, Tony Duell wrote: That's more challenging than most first-person shooters! ;) -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On Mon, 21 May 2013, John Wilson wrote: Yeah...It's also a waste of power and time. ;) Going the custom route is more educational, too. ;) -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

On 05/21/2013 06:23 PM, Richard wrote: You either didn't read or didn't understand John's post. I suppose it's also possible that you did, but just don't understand the concept...but while I can't stand you, I know that you're not a complete idiot...so it would really surprise me if this were the case. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

(I have some remarks on these, which I'll save for later.) I think tony's right, here. Recently, I was involved in a project which wanted to turn a small camera on for maybe a second or two every couple of minutes (it was doing time-lapse filming of a building construction project). And it was battery-powered, so just discarding most of the frames in software wasn't much of an option. The principal other person immediately thought of an Arduino. (These days, perhaps a Teensy instead - this was before Teensies, I think.) I thought of a 555. (I used an external transistor as a switch; the Arduino design was never firmed up enough to know, but it probably would have had to do something similar.) I breadboarded it and the 555 way turned out to draw something like 20% the power of an idling Arduino. This meant the battery life was substantially extended; given the difficulty of replacing the batteries, this was a not inconsiderable gain. But someone who jumped to the "use a microcontroller" answer would have missed it entirely. Not always. But it is certainly possible for it to be. No...but `abundance' in that sense is not present here. At least not for the sense I understand you to mean: abundance as in "there's such an excess that there's no point putting a price on it because everyone can have all they want and we'll still have plenty left over". I'm not sure I agree, but I don't think it matters, because there _is_ virtue in the absence of wastefulness. Whether using a full-fledged computer to drive a blinkenlight or two is wastefulness is something that it is reasonable to debate. Personally, I think it is, even today. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 05/23/2013 02:54 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I got my start on a 65-in-1 when I was 7 years old, and it has basically defined the rest of my life. I no longer have THAT one, sadly, but I have one just like it. Lawyers. Lawyers won't understand (not that they're incapable, but their expertise lies elsewhere) that it would be virtually impossible to start a fire or injure someone when wiring up a "different" circuit. They're trained to be paranoid, and they insist on such disclaimers and instructions in documentation to try to avoid any possible situation in which the company might get sued. It's absurd on several levels, of course, but that's why. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 5/23/2013 12:54 PM, Tony Duell wrote: ater. The proper way is to pay big $$$ for I.P. logic to that. My biggest problem with FPGA's is the partitioning my logic for design. Once I get the dummy hardware partionned out I can then concentrate testing each segment, with the lights and switches I have handy. Ben.

On 21 May 2013 02:43, Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote: Because it's so very cheap, and it can run a full desktop OS - about 4 or 5 of them, in fact. It also makes a decent media player. The Beaglebone is a tool for a hardware hacker. While the Ras? appeals to them too, it also appeals to those who think a Volt is a model of car and a pin is something dressmakers use. OK, it's a fairly rubbish Linux desktop computer, but it works, it's tiny and convenient and solid-state, it needs only simple generic COTS peripherals, and it's so cheap that you can give them to children to play with and it doesn't matter if they break them - because each unit costs roughly the same as a basic restaurant meal. I agree. I still want one, though, because it runs RISC OS and I used to love that OS in the 1980s. This does not matter at all to me, nor to most would-be owners, I think. If I wanted to play with hardware, I would not have sold my Lego Mindstorms kit. -- 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, 20 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: I think it was a combination of dirt cheap and all the effort they put into community building before the board ever shipped. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!

On Tue, 21 May 2013, Tony Duell wrote: [whining snipped] I swear to god Tony, you'd complain about the caliber & brand of round used at your firing squad. Every time the Pi is mentioned, you stick your oar in and whinge about it. We get it. His nibs doen't like the Raspberry Pi. Shut up about it. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!

Yes, it was me. Yes, I do have an RPi (and FWIW, I feel if you're going to moan about something you should have some experience of it). Yes, I do use it, as I said, to transfer to/from USB memory devices. It works for that. But I have _serious_ reservations about using it as an embeedded controller (physical layout, lack of I/O, etc) or an educational tool (poor documentation, not 'open'). But it appears that the RPi has got a religious following.... -tony

On the beaglebone you have access to the GMC bus. That is a system memory interface... And I have experience with other systems that bring out reasonable CPU busses! Philipp

On 5/20/2013 1:12 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: I still favor polished brass and hardwood, rather than cheap plastic; looking at my DE1 board here. I was looking around if I could get a brass front panel made using one of the Front Panel designer sites on the internet.I was hoping to use it for tube audio project and have VERY good ground. How ever looking around found this page with a Steam Punk view point on revising old TTY's http://www.aetherltd.com/index.html They do sell some TTY supplies and seem to give good advice for older mechanical things. I hope this will give some help for the people with TTY's and computers. Ben.

On 05/20/2013 03:12 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: This is true, though small boards are getting real cheap. Actually thats not much of an issue. For the PDP-8 and serial mass storage case it's easy no one(save maybe me) is using a real TU58 so the protocol "tuned" for PDP8 is up to the designer. Things like a simple boot loader and simplified block addressable packet protocol is not difficult. The real trick is a one page driver to OS/8. PDP8 and anything serial. It was also the easiest bus to hack devices for. Allison

Am 18.05.2013 22:50, schrieb Dave McGuire: I did NOT mean serial TTY. I meant the serial bitstream between the controller and the drive's read/write part! The discussion went into another direction. For RK05 it IS trivial. I read the manual in the meantime :-) No, my solution would be a card with a mass storage interface that can be plugged into the bus. It would then play controller+drive(s)+media. Who would be willing to pay $300+ for an RK05 or RL01/02 emulator which can be plugged in instead of a real drive? Another aspect of drive level emulation is that you would have to store raw sector data which could not be used on a PC without a tool playing the specific controller in software... Philipp -- Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Philipp Hachtmann Buchdruck, Bleisatz, Spezialit?ten Alemannstr. 21, D-30165 Hannover Tel. 0511/3522222, Mobil 0171/2632239 Fax. 0511/3500439 hachti at hachti.de www.tiegeldruck.de UStdID DE 202668329

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote: Someone with three kinds of busses (Omnibus, Unibus, and Qbus) who doesn't want to buy three different $300+ boards. That's just tools - we used to use Exchange to read/write one type of filesystem from another type of machine. It doesn't matter what the target format is, only that you can get files in and out of where you need to. -ethan

It may be the "hard way", but as a PDP-8 user, I applaud it. Emulating the drive rather than the bus interface means that one drive will work with more than one machine type (and that tends to be Q-Bus-only because of what's out there and in what quantity). Also, you should be able to put this on the same drive chain with "real" drives. Of course there is a place for bus-level device emulation (since not everyone has an RLV11, an RL11, and an RL8A), but they are out there and it's good to have something to attach to.

Hi Paul, Am 19.05.2013 11:51, schrieb Paul Birkel: One could assume that. But... One controller connects to more than one drive. And my RK8E experience is bad. I have two or three working RK8E controllers. And around 15 or so RK05 drives. To clarify again: It was not my primary intent to build anything that helps to substitute vintage drives or controllers. I wanted a fast and reliable data path between a pdp8 and a PC. Which helps at least me to backup and restore real vintage media spinning on real hardware. Some are actually talking about that. See above. What I would do to build such an emulation: - Take a small computer - in my case probably beaglebone - Do a board with interface facilities to the controller and a nice FPGA which is connected there and to the little PC's bus - Write the board emulation This is not really a simple task. You have to emulate the drive with several aspects of it's original behaviour. Then you have to work with raw sector data (written before) which is not directly usable on a PC. And the conversion between raw disk data and user data varies. It depends on the controller in use. If the emulation is then running with one controller there is a quite good chance that it does NOT with the next type of controller. Just because of subtle differences between the emulation's and original drive's behaviour which matter for one controller but not for another one. For me this is more complex than building a single board PDP8 with lights and switches on the backside of the PCB. And I don't think that there are people who want to pay $$$$$ for such a solution. Some might build their own at home. But that's it. Kind regards Philipp -- Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Philipp Hachtmann Buchdruck, Bleisatz, Spezialit?ten Alemannstr. 21, D-30165 Hannover Tel. 0511/3522222, Mobil 0171/2632239 Fax. 0511/3500439 hachti at hachti.de www.tiegeldruck.de UStdID DE 202668329

On 05/17/2013 11:32 PM, der Mouse wrote: Well yes. If you keep a SCSI bus as short as the average IDE bus, it will usually work unterminated. Electrically, IDE does actually need terminators...they're just not required by the spec, nor provided for in drives or cabling. To be fair, it was never intended as an external bus, and very rarely used as such, while SCSI was intended to be such from day one. I agree. At the time it was simply a shortsighted decision, as were nearly all decisions that brought the PC into existence. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 05/17/2013 08:48 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: From a software point of view, ATA made sense. It succeeded ESDI, which, in turn succeeded the ST-412 interface. In fact, from a software viewpoint, it's difficult to distinguish a PC ESDI drive from a 16-bit ATA drive. So, there was a software protocol that was somewhat smarter than ST-412 already around, so it made sense to move that to ATA/IDE. ESDI drives were about as fast as SCSI drives of the time--and about as expensive. Not that I loved ATA/IDE--early drives could be very fussy about what other vendor's drives they shared the bus with. --Chuck

On 17/05/13 4:12 PM, David Riley wrote: I'm not an expert, but I thought it was more or less SCSI encapsulated... aren't the O/S drivers in some cases closely related to the SCSI drivers? (e.g. Linux') --Toby (who has written a PIC18 ATA/ATAPI library: http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/picide )

On 5/17/2013 2:35 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: quoting Toby above, agree. I compiled the PDP8 simh emulation for the heck of it for the 32 bit part on MPLAB a couple of years ago as a proof of concept to make a PDP8 chip with this Microchip part supplying the processor heavy lifting I see your choice of parts @ Microchip is suggested to be replaced by the PIC32. I may have to revisit and see if one could pull off a PDP8 + hard drive (of some persuasion) in the microchip, and produce a hardware emulation of the pdp8. the other bit of the puzzle would be blinking lights and inputting I/O, but given the limited I/O it would probably be serial and be just fine. BTW the biggest problem was the limited space for executable in the PIC parts. the cpus have lots of gopower, and probably would run the emulation just fine. Certainly with the PDP8/S as a low end performance datapoint, It would have to exceed that. There of course would be quite a bit of tinkering to make the PDP device map to the IDE, but at least Toby did the heavy lifting as far as moving data. Thanks Jim

On 17/05/13 5:35 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Coming from you, that's a real compliment. This library was "meant" to be a first step to a QBus disk interface, but real life demands sidelined the project indefinitely. We - my ex-boss who designed the board and I - also dropped the MCU plan, to consider an FPGA instead (which is why I have this cute Terasic TREX C1 sitting around here). But I had a great deal of fun getting ATA and ATAPI this far, in PIC18 macro assembler which is deceptively fun to write, and making it compatible with at least the random drives I had lying around. It's GPL, though of course it makes lots of assumptions about the PIC board it's running on... --Toby