On 7 Feb 2007 at 22:00, Robert Borsuk wrote: Have you tried methylene chloride as a solvent cement? Old plastic can be a problem because the stuff that keeps it flexible tends to evaporate over time.

I'm looking for a box or two of bog-standard 5081 punch cards. Besides Cardamation, is there anyone else who still has these? Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/

At 7:48 AM -0500 2/13/07, Mike Loewen wrote: What are the dimensions? I might have a bunch of cards from an old coin-op game that look like they could have been punch cards in another life. They have three rounded corners and one corner cut off. About 3 by 8 inches - from memory. So if you do not mind them claiming to tell your fortune (SEGA Astrology game cards) they might help you out... John :-#)#

--- Julian Wolfe <fireflyst at earthlink.net> wrote: Careful! The tube can accumulate a nasty charge even if not powered up recently. Keep your fingers away --Bill

If you can pull that connecotr off faster than the arc developing to your fingers, there's probably a world record waiting for you in some sport or other.... In any case, ripping it off is likely to damage either the CRT or the connector, or both. -tony

You should not need to put your finger under the cup to pull it off (a little suprise might be under there anyway). Most HV anode connections on CRTs can be removed by squeezing the outside of the cup, while giving it a bit of a lifting twist, if that makes sense. Once it comes loose, it can be moved over and touched to something to ground it. I have never been shocked doing it this way, although a couple of times I did get a good spark. A very clean CRT can hold a charge for well over a day. I have been bitten other ways with CRT high voltage, and while not fun experience, the pain is temporary. I am still alive. In fact, I have never actually heard of anyone dying from a CRT zap. The worst case generally involves the muscle spasm that whacks knuckles against the undersides of PC boards. Now THAT hurts. -- Will

On 8 Feb 2007 at 20:32, Tony Duell wrote: True, high-voltage (low current) DC is usually far less dangerous than AC, but there can arise nasty side effects from the involuntary muscle twitch. When I was much younger, I was working on a 3KV transmitter power supply. I *thought* that the bleeder had sufficiently discharged things, but it wasn't so. I brushed the top of an oil capacitor and got nailed. Unfortunately, about 6 inches in back of me was a concrete block wall. The muscle contraction proceeded to slam my elbow with great force into said wall. It hurt like hell for days. I'm fortunate I didn't fracture something. It's truly amazing how many lessons you can learn in the space of a millisecond or so: 1) Never trust a bleeder--they can and do open. 2) Leave plenty of working space around you. 3) Try to work with one hand in a back pocket. Cheers, Chuck

On 8/2/07 23:16, "Bob Bradlee" <caveguy at sbcglobal.net> wrote: I know it's not computer related but when I work on 100A domestic electricals I follow the same rules, as do the electrical people from the 'proper' electric company though they stand on cardboard to ensure proper insulation, I know this because I've seen it. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 18:56:50 -0500, William Donzelli wrote: with bunker discharge Try discharging one of the big 37/38" display monitors, or for that matter my RCA 38" HDTV is a big hunk of glass. It is not only the powersupply, but once it is charged up and turned off, the size of the bang is directly related to the surface area of the glass holding the charge. Big CRT's need higher voltages to operate and have a lot more glass to hold the charge. Those big round radar tubes had a lot of surface area. The only one I ever worked on (outside of AT school) was attached to weapons simulator doing some ECM stuff that I should not get into detail about. Back under my rock .... The other Bob.

On 8 Feb 2007 at 7:07, Richard wrote: Someone's having you on, Richard. It can be quite a surprise to some that a high-voltage charge can be held for weeks by a CRT. Didn't Visual build the Commuter PC into what amounts to a portable terminal? I was loaned one by the company during their chapter 11 phase in the mid-80's. They asked if I would take it as partial payment and I declined--internally, the thing was a rat's nest. Cheers, Chuck

Apart from giving the OP a possible nasty electric shock, what is this supposed to achieve? And the anode _connector_ (not the anode itself, which is a conductive coating on the inside of the CRT) doesn't just pull off in most cases. You have to unhook the ends of the connector from the lips of the metal socket sealed into the CRT glass. But before doing that, you want to discharge the CRT. I use my EHT proble for this (it;'s an 800M resistor in series with a microammeter). Clip the return lead onto the CRT earhing contact,the slip the probe under the conenctor cap until it makes contact with the metal conenctor. Wait for it to discharge, then remvoe the connector. -tony

In article <011c01c74b32$54c67a10$6700a8c0 at HPLAPTOP>, "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> writes: As near as I can tell, there are like 3 people who care about terminals: myself, Paul Shuford (who is the only source of online information about many kinds of terminals) and Paul Williams (who runs and maintains vt100.net). Most terminals do not have graphics capability, just character capability. Color graphics terminals are even scarcer. Terminals that have 3D graphics builtin are even scarcer than that. The Visual 500 therefore is of interest to me because it is older and has graphics. (Not all Visual terminals have graphics, but the 500 does.) IIRC, it was UPS, but it wasn't the fault of the carrier but whoever packed it. There was *nothing* in this box but a bunch of smashed parts. No packing. No peanuts. No bubble wrap. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Patrick Finnegan wrote: The VT340, graphical 3278 and 3279 qualify as "rare". Xterminals don't count. They're basically full-fledged computers. They're not really terminals. The IBM Xstations can even accept internal hard drives for swap and such. If you count them, there's nothing stopping you from counting things like Citrix clients. Peace... Sridhar

In article <200702081119.26990.pat at computer-refuge.org>, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> writes: When you're sick of storing these, let me know :-) I would have taken them even without the boards, but I admit to having an E&S fetish. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

On Wednesday 14 February 2007 02:37, Paul Anderson wrote: Sorry, no. After realizing how much the seem to be worth for some reason (hasn't someone written an emulator yet?), I'll be sure to get it back when doesn't want it anymore.. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing -- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcac

On Feb 14, 2007, at 11:48 AM, Patrick Finnegan wrote: ReGIS emulators have been around for ages. I ran SmarTerm 240 on a PeeCee back in 1989 or so. I suspect the issue is a matter of some people don't necessarily *want* a PC on their desk emulating everything...they want the real thing for some particular reason. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Tothwolf wrote: http://bitsavers.vt100.net/dec/terminal/MP02412_VT340_EngrDrws_Feb87.pdf There's more on Manx (http://vt100.net/manx) Antonio

In article <f4eb766f0702081150s67fda50ak573058800e1ef27b at mail.gmail.com>, "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes: Pictures? Web site? I intend to do a full online history of terminals at some point; something like old-computers.com but just for terminals (there are enough varieties and manufacturers to justify such a huge database; have you ever browsed the TERMCAP stuff? There's tons of terminals out there, but most are rather boring.) I've not heard of Planar before, so I'd like to hear about that one. I don't think Tektronix ever made a terminal that wasn't graphics capable :-) and when they went to raster displays from storage scopes, I believe they were all color capable. I have a 4010, a 4014 and several 4105s and 4205s. The 340s occasionally appear on ebay, but they generally sell for around $350, so I haven't purchased one yet. Oh, I don't know of any extant applications that still care about these kinds of terminals unless we're talking about something as mundane as unix plot. (Although linux seems to have discarded all that terminal functionality that was in the original plot series of programs and just reduced it to Tektronix 4010.) However, since the escape codes are documented in the user manuals and the manuals seem to have survived fairly well for most models, I am intending to write code that will put them through their paces via an ordinary PC. There are the E&S terminals and the other "CAD terminal" vendors of the 80s. SGI's first product was such a terminal, before they started doing workstations in their second generation product line. I don't know that Tektronix ever had a terminal with 3D builtin, but Megatek made stuff in that category and I believe the AED 512 also had 3D builtin. It was the display list based stuff and was the precursor to the graphics workstation. I have two Megateks: a black and white model and a color model, both of which have 3D locally. The intent was that you'd load the model into the terminal's memory and then it wasn't very much bandwidth to respond to user input and send down new transformation matrices to update the position/orientation of the models in the terminal's memory. If you are familiar with GKS and PHIGS, its mental model of doing computer graphics maps very nicely onto these terminals (no surprise there). -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <f4eb766f0702081242s185c172akadce74d7a9d981e9 at mail.gmail.com>, "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes: Great, I'll keep that in mind. Just as I was composing a reply to the list, I stumbled across this site which seems to have the very early TTY style portion of this history covered: North American Data Communications Museum <http://www.nadcomm.com/index.html>. I guess I hadn't stumbled across it before because it focuses on the Teletype and sort of leaves off where terminals begin. Ah. I notice that old-computers.com doesn't have anything on their PCs so you might consider submitting some basic information to them for the PC portion. (I've tried submitting information on terminals, but they reject it as "outside their scope", although they have the ADM-3A in their database.) I'd heard of the LCD displays under that name, but you know how company names tend to get recycled in our industry, you can't always depend that its the same manufacturer. They are essentially the same terminal, but the 4205 has a little more memory and a little faster processing and a slightly smaller case although the tubes seem to be the same size. They are both color raster displays. They have an integrated pointing "puck" built into the keyboard so that does make them a little unusual. There is also this DE-9 (D subminiature) style connector on the keyboard teasingly labelled "mouse", but I've never been able to find out any information on just what kind of mouse you can connect to it. Yeah, I get the impression that the kinds of programs written for these terminals died with the minicomputers and mainframes that ran them. Just think of the hard time Al Kossow has finding old software for vintage machines and multiply the level of difficulty by 10 or even 100 because for as many people as there were with minis and mainframes, it seems that only a small fraction of them did anything with graphics. Nowadays everything has "graphics", but back then it was a significant sum on top of the already significant sum for the computing hardware that you really had to be able to justify the expense. Things like CAD could justify it, but they would be running custom software (now CAD is a commodity, but before the PC I got the impression that each engineering house developed their own CAD system inhouse). The companies that created their own CAD software aren't likely to let their old machines slip out the door with the software still loaded, although I'm sure it happened on occasion. Yeah, the market window for high-end 3D terminals was a small one, I think. That's what makes them interesting to collect from my perspective :-). I am still amazed that I managed to get the color Megatek terminal. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Yep, I've been keeping an eye out for the Ann Arbor terminals, but I haven't seen one yet. Aside from the massive players like DEC VT220s, the lesser known and lesser popular terminal models are fairly rare on ebay (and even the popular ones hardly show up at all on VCM; I've looked). -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

I am reminded of the BitGraph, a rather nice terminal I used at a past job. Unfortunately I didn't get to use it all that much, but I do remember that it had a portrait-aspect-ratio display and downloadable fonts of variable size. Based on memory of the size of the screen and the default font, I'd guess somewhere between 80x40 and 120x75 (colsxrows). By default, of course. Yes, true to the name, it did graphics. I don't recall details. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

In article <BAY130-F3845BEAE7C22A589BA5C17A39D0 at phx.gbl>, "dwight elvey" <dkelvey at hotmail.com> writes: What I don't understand is WHAT DOES ANY OF THAT HAVE TO DO WITH REPAIRING THE CASE? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

I like a good prank as much as anybody, but I don;'t find anything remotely amusing in giving somebody a possibly serious electric shock when they're working on an evacuated glass vessel... -tony

It should be noted that Ebay is overhauling the feedback process. I think it goes into effect in a few months. I do not know many details. -- Will

On 2/8/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote: I found out recently that this doesn't actually work. If you know the item number and the ePay username of the person you're trying to leave feedback for, you can do it forever (there is no 90-day deadline). Also (curiously), leaving a feedback after such a long time (it was getting on for a year in this particular case) "reanimates" the auction listing - now those *do* expire after 90 days, but after I left said feedback, the one for the auction suddenly became accessible again. Weird. Ed.