On Thursday 20 January 2005 05:28 pm, Jules Richardson wrote: You might want to check -- the available partition types list from the kernel on my laptop (linux 2.6.8.1) is: ? ? [*] Advanced partition selection ? ? ? ? [ ] Acorn partition support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Alpha OSF partition support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Amiga partition table support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Atari partition table support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Macintosh partition map support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] PC BIOS (MSDOS partition tables) support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Windows Logical Disk Manager (Dynamic Disk) support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] SGI partition support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Ultrix partition table support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] Sun partition tables support (NEW) ? ? ? ? [ ] EFI GUID Partition support (NEW) (from the screen in "make menuconfig") I wouldn't be suprised if there are patches out there for more partition types, too. -- Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) "we are content if we can describe a multitude of other things in terms of... fundamental incomprehensibilities. science is an activity that takes place on the shore of an infinite sea of mystery." chet raymo, "doctor seuss and doctor einstein"

I'm not as sure about UTekV, but the earlier Utek versions did use a pure 4.2BSD filesystem structure. I recall the big fuss over converting Utek away from a BSD base to a SystemV base, and thus, I'm wondering if the XD88 and other machines that ran UtekV may actually have a more standardized SystemV layout. As for the boot block and partition tables -- you've got me there -- I'm pretty sure that they are totally unique to Tektronix, not matching anything by BSD, Sun, DEC, SGI or other. I seem to recall that the first logical cylinder of the drive is allocated to the partition table and boot blocks, but that is a *very* old memory, and subject to wetware bitrot. Of couse, that also is only for the older BSD-based Utek. Once I get through this house building stuff, I've got to dig out the old Tek 6130, 4132 and 4319 and fire them up, at least to grab disk images. Hope they'll still run. I had a lot of fun in the old days at Tektronix. I built a 6130 from parts ordered through Tek's Engineering Stockroom, at cost+10%, allowing me to put together a nice little Unix system at a time when everyone else was running CP/M and Apple & Atari floppy-based Disk Operating Systems. The 6130 was a desktop form-factor Utek workstation with 32016 CPU, ST-506 disk interface (usually with a Micropolis 20 or 40MB hard disk), 5 1/4" floppy drive, 1MB of RAM standard with expansion boards that could push it up to a whopping 5MB, two serial ports, a GPIB port, an AUI Ethernet port, and add-on boards that offered Dual RS232, Dual Parallel (Centronics), add-on RAM, SCSI, and GPIB. Later, I got a 4132, which was essentially a redesign of the 6130 that eliminated the ST-506 interface, replacing it with a built-in SCSI interface, and replacing the floppy drive with a QIC-24 cartridge tape drive. Then, even later, I got a 4319, which was the "2nd generation" Unix workstation machine from Tek. They abandoned the National 32xxx architecture and went with a Motorola 68K (68020, I believe), ported Utek (and made some enhancements, mostly in the network stack, which really was bad un the 320xx-based Utek), and added a built-in framebuffer and X11. The XD88 was the end of the line for Tek in the computer workstation biz. Used the Motorola 88K, and really had some great innovations, especially in the graphics engine, which (for the time) was quite amazing. A great machine for doing CAD, visualization, and the like. Never did manage to get my hands on one of those machines. Tektronix was really fickle when it came to computers. I can tell the story of the Tektronix "Magnolia", which was an amazing machine that long predated the 320xx-based 620x and 613x machines. Magnolia was never made into a product, but it was could have been if Tek would have understood the market. The machine was based on the Motorola 68000. It was a standalone machine, with the hard disk drive (an 8" Micropolis fixed drive, 40MB, I believe, with a parallel, semi-SCSI-like interface), in the base of a pedestal, CPU and raster graphics engine in the pedestal, with an integrated keyboard and a simplistic three button mouse, with the monochrome monitor sitting on top. It was a noisy machine as there were a lot of fans to cool everything, and the disk drive was really noisy. The biggest problem they had with them was that people sitting at the machine tended to move their feet, kicking the pedestal...right where the hard disk drive was, which tended to cause disk crashes. I recall that the machine ran a V7 UNIX kernel, with a windowed GUI, which I seem to recall being somewhat derivative of the early Xerox PARC window environments. I recall that some folks in the development team had come from PARC. The primary development language on the machines was SmallTalk. The machines were truly way ahead of their time. This was all in the late '70's timeframe, before Sun even existed, and predating Xerox PARC's producized machines (though PARC did have numerous different machines running in their labs). If Tek had seized this opportunity, and implemented the marketing, sales & support well, they could have gotten a great start in what became the boom of the computer workstation market. Needless to say, the Magnolia never made it to market. I wonder what happened to all of the pre-production machines that I used to see in use all the time in Building 50 at the Tek main campus. This is a very historical machine, even though it didn't make it to market, and hopefully, someone out there has one or more squirrelled away somewhere, and someday it'll come to light. Sorry for the rambling...the days I was at Tektronix were really memorable, and when people start talking about old Tek stuff, I can't help it! Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Web Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Jules Richardson wrote: The Tektronix 4051 was more advanced than any other microcomputer on the market circa 1976 by a longshot. It had excellent graphics generating capability, built-in screen, a fast, high capacity tape drive, and a very advanced built-in BASIC interpreter. Compare this against what was contemporary for the time: The Altair/IMSAI, Apple-1, etc. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Tony Duell wrote: The HP9830 is certainly a nice machine. I've got one, and considering it has almost all the same features as the Tek 4051 (substitute a 40-character, 1-line LED display for the CRT) but came out 3 years earlier it's definitely comparable overall. I've never had a chance to play with my 9830B but I wonder how the BASIC compares to that in the 4051. True, true. The keyboard leaves a lot to be desired on some models of the 9825 though. Indeed. But my point was that people marvel over the early micros like the Altair, etc., touting features such as "first with graphics display", "first with mass storage", "first with integrated CRT", etc., and fail to realize that there were much more powerful systems available that were years ahead of the hobbyist micros. Sure, they were thousands of dollars more, but there they were. It offers a much different perspective on the hobbyist machines of that era. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Tony Duell wrote: A little but of all those reasons, I'm sure. Woz's proposal to offer the machine to HP first was done so out of his obligation to his employer. I read that it went up a couple levels in management and that there was no interest (I'm sure Owen Linzmeyer's book _Apple Confidential_ has the full scoop). Unless you really knew the hobbyist computer market of the 1970s, which HP obviously did not, there wasn't anything to differentiate Woz's hackish, minimalist design (which was probably foreign to the HP culture) with what HP was already producing. The people who made these decisions are most likely still around. It would be interesting to ask them about this if I ever bump in to them. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

This Tek's almost out of disk space, so I got to working out how to add a second drive to it... I found an 'hdsetup' program on the disk, and also a definition file for the partition table of a 300MB drive (whether that's the same drive as the failing one that came with the machine, I don't know). Seems like a drive *always* has 9 partitions, although some may be left empty in the raw table on the drive and padded with zeros. Partition entry 0 is a root partition, entry 1 is swap, entries 2-5 are 'user' partitions, 6 corresponds to 'whole disk', and 7-8 I'm guessing are something to do with bootstrap (3MB and 2.5MB, possibly a data partition containing a mini kernel and filesystem drivers to boot the main kernel, and a swap partition??) hdsetup won't let me create a root partition, or types 7 & 8 (fair enough given that it's a post-install program) Looking at the raw disk image I've saved, I've worked out where the partition table is within the image (it's at offset 0x280). Most of the stuff preceding it is zeros, except for a few flags and one place that seems to be total size of the disk in blocks *including partition table data*. I'm now wondering if I can clone the OS onto a bigger drive without install media :-) If I copy partition table area and the 'boot' partitions (7 & 8 - which happen to be at the start of the disk) then it might work. I'll have to manually edit the table (and disk size field) on the new drive, leaving the boot partitions as they are. Then boot the Tek with the new disk as an auxiliary, format the root partition on the new disk, and copy everything across via dump/restore to the new drive. *if* partitions 7 & 8 really are to do with bootstrap, and they contain filesystem drivers to find and boot the main kernel, and I leave them in the same place on the new drive as the old, then in theory it could work... (sorry, I'm getting quite into hacking here ;) I've hosed two 1.2GB drives already using Tek's hdsetup prog though :-( I have a feeling it doesn't cope with drives having more than 1024 cylinders for some reason - when it formats the drive (which it says it needs to do before it'll let me partition it) it all works fine on the Tek until the next boot, at which point the drive vanishes. Putting it into a PC at that point shows it to be broken too, it doesn't even respond to inquiry at initialise time. Grrr! The Tek must have trashed the drive firmware somehow. At least with the previous OS cloning theory I don't need to use hdsetup at all. On the 'mounting under Linux' front, I've had no luck so far. Seems that ufs is the fstype I want under Linux, which in turn covers about 8 different ffs types. Unfortunately none of them seem to be compatible with Tek's idea of ffs... (it's possible I'm pulling the wrong blocks out of the raw image though - maybe the partition table's relative to cylinder 1 rather than 0 say, to compensate for boot area... I'll have to try that) Phew. I'm having fun anyway - I miss this kind of messing around with old hardware :-) cheers Jules