On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Erik S. Klein wrote: It used to be free in it's entirety. I wonder when he started charging to read all of it? At any rate, it's an interesting revenue stream :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Lawrence Walker wrote: I don't blame him at all. He deserves every penny. I'm sure it's a great launch point for attornies doing prior art research. It's a clever way to leverage your work and turn it into $$$ :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

I was musing about the state of VT100s and other dumb terminals and had a few ideas zing by... Many of DECs dumb terminals are Z80 based with custom video hardware, yes? Has anyone ever decompiled or reverse-engineered the code to analyze the core code? I know that Kermit has a more-than-adequate terminal implementation in it, but Kermit is more suited for a machine with an OS and a C run-time library, not embedded devices. Has anyone on the list ever worked with complete BIOS replacement on a commodity Intel motherboard? ISTR Tony Duell or someone here was contemplating doing some task by removing the ROMs from a 5150 board and replacing them in their entirety. With a decent terminal emulator package, that would be one way to implement a DIY dumb terminal. Where I'm going with this is embeddability and portability. Obviously, for use such as we had in the old days, a real Wyse or real VT100 or VT220 is the way to go... simple and easy... plug it in, turn it on. I have used my Palm Pilot as a portable terminal for reconfiguring Cisco routers (VT100 app and a travel cable and the appropriate RS-232 dongles). My boss at the time flipped when he saw me do it (everybody else dragged a laptop into the server room). There are just times when I'd like a laptop-sized-or-smaller ANSI terminal. I can forego double-high/double-wide chars, inverse video and the like for simplicity's sake (hardly ever used them in an app except at the South Pole), but it should be complex enough to run a screen editor (vi or emacs) and/or basic curses apps (Rogue/Larn/NetHack and the like). One place I thought BIOS replacement might be handy was in a sub-486 laptop.... just pull it out, plug it in and *voila*, it's a dumb terminal weighing a few lbs. Yes, it's possible to drop an OS on a floppy and add Kermit (I've already done that with a dual-720K- floppy Zenith 8088 portabie). I'm thinking of a dedicated "instant- on" experience. I also have some "Net Stations" with a 5"x5" 486 motherboard stuffed under a PC keyboard (with 4 30-pin SIMM sockets, IDE, serial, video, and NE2000 network built-in). They don't run off batteries, but neither do they have an intergral screen. I've also tried to think of ways to adapt a Palm Pilot with a permanent keyboard, but I'm not sure there's a way to do it with only one serial port (terminals typically have at least two, even if one is dedicated to servicing the keyboard and somewhat "invisible" to normal operation. The final angle I've worked on is to recycle the main board in a VT220 (being somewhat physically small), but I don't have schematics and I don't know what signals go over the ribbon cable to the PSU/ Analog board under the CRT. So has anyone else wrestled with how to cobble up a portable VT-100? Anyone get any further? -ethan __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com

I don't think this is as easy as it used to be, with all the chipsets, etc. On an old PC, you could put a magic header and a checksum on a 2716, and basically load an .EXE file into the EPROM. After initialization, the PC BIOS would look for "extra" chips just "under" the BIOS and above the EGA area for additional code. To this day, I beleive that this is the way network cards with BOOTP capability work. on a "real" PC, you can remove the BASIC chips and do this. --- Doc Shipley <doc(a)mdrconsult.com> wrote: __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com

On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Tony Duell wrote: An appreciation for how much nicer they are than the later stuff? .COM style code (without the ORG 100h) would be one of the easiest ways to do it if one wanted to use "modern" development tools (such as MASM 1.0, LINK, EXE2BIN) On a REAL 5150, you don't need to remove the BASIC. There is already an EXTRA ROM socket! [Unverified CCUL: IBM asked Microsoft how large the ROM BASIC would be. Microsoft said, "32K". IBM's engineers figured that things might not go entirely as planned, so they put in one extra ROM socket "in case it went over the targetted 32K". The Microsoft people were miffed that their guess of 32k hadn't been taken as being accurate. So, when they were done (at about 30 or 31 K), they padded it out with incompletely implemented stuff to bring it up to EXACTLY 32768 (32K) bytes.] But even [particularly] the earliest had the EXTRA ROM socket. 'Course it's nice to put your add-ons on an ISA card, so that they can be switched more easily to other machines, including NEWER stuff, like 5160 (XT) and AT. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

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Alexander Schreiber wrote: [snip] It actually uses Datalight ROM-DOS -- a ROMable version of MS-DOS 5.0 with most of the utilities removed. Someone (an IT tech, no less) once asked me if I could run Windows 98 on my HP 700LX. My response was "You are joking, right?" :) 200LXs make very nice portable terminals. I'm planning to add an RS232 buffer to mine before it gets connected to any unknown equipment. I've even had the thing grab my e-mail and then dump it into cc:Mail. Lots of fun. And all this with a 1MB RAM drive and an 8MB Sandisk Compactflash card... Do you mean Datacomm? I don't think it's capable of VT100 emulation; I've never seen it, anyway. You can use the FCI Minitek connectors (total pain to wire up without the $200 crimper), but I wouldn't recommend using them. The Harwin 2x5 2mm-pitch connectors look like they'd work, too. Indeed it is - my 700LX has been dropped onto a thick carpet once, a thin carpet once (broke the case latch) and concrete from 4ft in the air once. And it still works. Anyone want to do that to a Palmpilot? I know of a Psion 3c that fell 3ft off a bookshelf (with the clamshell shut) and the LCD glass got shattered! I know the feeling. Linux coredumps, DJGPP SIGSEGVs, Windows bluescreens and the HPLX just locks solid. Later. -- Phil. philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote: Nope. I just use my Psion Seris 5. It does everything you describe (portable instant on VT-100 terminal) and more ;) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

Ethan Dicks wrote: I have a gadget called a Cybiko, which is a handheld computer designed for teenagers to run games on and chat via a wireless link. It has a serial port, there's a terminal emulator for it, and there's also a Linux-based development kit for it. You can get them in a variety of fashionable colours! :-) -- John Honniball coredump(a)gifford.co.uk

There is a fairly active community of Cybiko developers. It's a popular platform because it's got a keyboard, LCD, AVR controller, Hitachi H8S main CPU, 512K FLASH, 512K 'disk' (RAM), 1.5MB of memory, USB port, etc. Cybiko has, IIRC, been very cooperative in providing information. They also have their own developers kit that is either free, or very cheap. You can find this on eBay really cheap. --John On Friday 29 November 2002 02:13, Philip Pemberton wrote:

J.C.Wren wrote: And a Google search returns "about 62,500" matches. That settles it - I'm going to get one. Purely for research purposes, you understand :-) Fact: Nearly anything can be bought on Ebay. Later. -- Phil. philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/

On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Philip Pemberton wrote: I got one that was on clearance at the local office supply store. I love it. I bought it more out of "oh, here's something I should buy while it's cheap" and haven't really explored it beyond the game "Phat Cash". You really need to get two to play with the ultra-cool features, such as setting up your profile and the profile of a romantic interest so that when two Cybiko's that have matching profiles come within proximity of each other they set off alarm bells. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

The nice thing about that is, if the MOTAS really does own a Cybiko set up like this, he/she must consider it 'ultra-cool' be default ... no problem ;-) -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- In independent studies, research was found to cause cancer in rats. --------

Philip Pemberton wrote: I've got two, and I'm nearly 41! I quite like the transparent plastic, actually. I usually use that on my beige PCs. -- John Honniball coredump(a)gifford.co.uk