Hi Zane, I think the board he is talking about is a SCSI <==> audio CD interface... The original CD (not CD-ROM) interface is a three (or four) wire affair with Left/Right, Clock, Serial data which is fed into a DAC to produce music... The early CD-ROM drives took these signals, recognized the sector header (00-FF-FF-FF-FF-00 IIRC) and decoded the data. Presumably, some extra signals were added to control seeking, etc... I've got one of these boards, and I suspect the parts removed were: 80C31, 27C256, and NCR 5380 (only parts socketted). The drive is completely useless without these chips. clint On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 healyzh(a)aracnet.com wrote:

Standard ICs. A 5380, an 80C31, and an EPROM. They've both been spoken for, however. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

Long time ago I used an LA100 on W3.11. Don't know if that qualifies for you. I wrote my own paginator (just added <LF>'s, page numbers and the date) in 'c'. Look for a "Generic / Text Only" device, it's still there in 95/8. John A. ----- Original Message ----- From: emanuel stiebler &lt;emu(a)ecubics.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 5:33 PM Subject: DEC Letterwriter 100 & windows Hi, Anybody out here has any experience using this printer on windows ? cheers & thanks

Yes, but I always read the EPROMs from everything I have or come across even if I don't need it, as someone might. I usually leave the parts in place, but I have a need for the 5380 ICs to repair another classic, the 80C31 ICs for another, and the EPROMs are 27C256's, and I'm out of those. In many cases the only way to repair some classic systems is by cannibalizing others. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

So if anyone actually ever wanted to use the boards the ICs could be replaced. Some things aren't worth preserving, like the RRD40. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

FWIW I could use a DEC RRD40 CD-ROM (original 15 pin interface) w/ Caddy if someone has one. I'm restoring yes another MicroVAX II and that is the drive to match up with one. --Chuck

Put on on eBay less than 2 months ago. Went for around $40 as I recall. Chuck McManis wrote:

Maintaining original labels is going to be hard to do, as the EPROMs age. I've already had to refresh some EPROMs from equipment as recent as 1982. That may be true, but one person replied that I could have stripped an IBM PC-compatible SCSI controller to get the same SCSI IC I got from the RRD40 adapter. Why not preserve all those, too, as one day someone will consider those parts classic as well. That may be the case, but where do we draw the line? Of course one man's trash is another man's treasure, but will everything be worth keeping? And how do we justify what we restore and cannibalized? For instance, the MVII I am converting to a PDP-11. I've had good feedback on the conversion, but nobody has said to me that I should keep the MVII intact and sell it complete and buy a complete PDP-11 or all the parts. For the RRD40 drives, I offered them, with the controller board thrown in, but the drives in no way require the controller board to operate. The drives were normally sold to be used with the RRD50 controller; the SCSI adapter boards were just a kludge to get the drives to work with SCSI controllers. I took them out of the Infoserver 100 and replaced them with compatible SCSI CDROM drives so I could have a functioning system. Should I have kept the Infoserver 100 pure instead? That would have meant the Infoserver 100 would have been a paperweight for me, when instead I could use it in my network. I was also able to use the three socketed ICs to restore some other classic equipment. Sure, I could have bought the parts I needed, but I had them available in a socketed board that I would otherwise not have used, so using the parts made sense. I don't believe in cannibalizing special or rare items. Otherwise, I would not have preserved the Burroughs E6000 system complete that I have, which I've already found someone willing to retrieve and restore. You can bet there's a lot of gold in that system, but I would rather have it preserved than scrapped. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

I've actually had an EPROM that would not take the new programming until I erased it, and the programmer did not require the device to be blank first. That's true, if they were old unique drives. I don't think the new RRDxx CDROM drives are unique. I'd rather strip anything from a no-name PC motherboard than a PDP-11. That's a good way to look at it. Well, yes, I am keeping the boards intact. I didn't look at it that way. Oops, LMS. I was thinking LSI. Anyway, the problem with the original CDROM drives is they require a special, hard-to-find and hard-to-use caddy. The system was unusable with the RRD40 drives. The caddies used in the RRD40 drives were hard to load. I've dropped a couple of CDs trying to load the caddies. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

The company I worked for was too cheap to buy more than a couple. I seem to remember the caddies were around $40 each, but that may be just a poor memory. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

I've read a lot of ROM/PROM/EPROM/EEPROM programming algorithms. In my former line of work we used to run into some very odd (and non-conforming) behavior with some programmable parts. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

One thing that always made me nervous was programming some of the more expensive FPGAs. Especially when the part was supported for the first time by the latest software update to the programmer. We'd get some parts in with a unit cost of around $10,000 (I put the comma in there so you'd know I didn't type one too many zeros) in a lot of 50 or so. A mistake can get very costly. Once a group sent us the WRONG pattern to program. They realized their mistake early, but we'd already programmed 10 of the parts. That was $100,000 down the drain since they weren't erasable. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

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Hell, I've got 3 Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum cards with 5380's on 'em I think. Picked em up for $5.00 at a Flea Market. Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | FreeBSD since 1.0.2, Linux since 0.99.10 Brainbench MVP | Unix Sys Admin since Sys V/BSD 4.2 Unix Sys.Admin. | Windows System Administration: "Magical Misery Tour"

You need a KRQ50 interface (M7552). The one with s-box handles is a bit harder to find than the one that has a ba23/123 cab kit. There are two 'ports' on the interface. The interface shows up as an MSCP drive (SUxx) --Chuck At 05:43 PM 4/24/2001 -0400, you wrote:

I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't. It looks just like any other MSCP drive to the VAX. I found an interface w/cab kit for a BA23/123 but don't have a drive to try it out with. It would be _very_ interesting to see if someone could boot an RT-11 distribution from it :-) --Chuck At 03:52 PM 4/24/2001 -0700, you wrote: