Rik, Thank you, but I've read thru everything on bitsavers. There are no schematics of the 2B or the pinout cartridge, nor any way to bypass them. Best regards, Steven On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Rik Bos <hp-fix at xs4all.nl> wrote:

Thanks Geoff. Our good friends over at tech group gave me this; In the Unipak 2B on the 701-1655 Address Card remove or cut JP1 in the left hand corner near TP1 & TP2. It is the 2nd board in pack behind Waveform Generator board 701-1690. The pack will think it is a Unipak 2 and not look for the replaceable socket. You will not be able to program any devices that required the missing socket such as the 2764,27128,27512, etc. until you get the socket (all 28 pin devices). When you find a new socket reinstall the jumper and everything will work properly. Best regards, Steven On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Geoffrey Reed <geoffr at zipcon.net> wrote:

Phew! From all the messages, I was afraid this had degenerated, but instead everyone contributed great content to this thread, thanks. The reason I asked is that over on comp.lang.c++ someone basically asserted that *all* desktop and server OS software was written in C, so I was trying to think of other OSes (whether current or not) that weren't written in C to drive home the point that LMW is not the entire world. (LMW = linux, mac, windows) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

Typical thing of someone that does not knows DOS.

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, Richard wrote: I think the source is online for something like System 1. How much is C, and how much is Objective-C? I honestly have no idea, but as it has run on 68k, x86, x64, Sparc, and PA-RISC, I doubt there is little if any Assembly Language in there. Thought for the day. I Love the Mac, and I hate Windows, so why do I prefer to write software for Windows. :-( Zane

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, Al Kossow wrote: Weren't you involved in getting something released in the last year or so? I'm pretty sure some kind of classic Mac source from that timeframe was released. I had thought it was the OS, but on thinking about it, it might have been an application. Zane

Maybe because you enjoy the rush of triumph over adversity? ;-)

In article <alpine.DEB.2.00.1012010930580.24432 at slate.spiritone.com>, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes: Since it has a BSD kernel underneath, I'm guessing that all of the OS proper is written in C and that all the Apple stuff on top is written in Objective-Cish. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 11:17:29AM -0800, Zane H. Healy wrote: Which causes all kinds of "fun" for developers whose code has to be aware of system details like signal handling. I remember the SBCL folks doing some cursing about it ;-) Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

In article <alpine.DEB.2.00.1012011116190.24432 at slate.spiritone.com>, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes: Sorry, my mistake. I knew there was BSD in there somewhere. Still, I doubt the Mach stuff is written in Objective-C, although I believe it originally came from NeXT, so who knows. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

That's kind of a hard question since Objective-C is a strict superset of C, so it could be argued the whole thing is Objective-C. Objective-C would only be used for the Cocoa-based portions in any case, or anything derived from NeXTSTEP. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. -- O. Henry -----------

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, Rich Alderson wrote: NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, and Mac OS X are all the same OS as far as I'm concerned. I still laugh at the claims Apple ported "Mac OS X" to Intel. The initial versions shipped to Apple developers didn't run on PPC, they ran on Intel CPU's. Are we supposed to believe that Apple was foolish enough to not develop Intel and PPC versions side by side as an insurance policy? The NeXTSTEP origins are still very visable under the hood of Mac OS X. Zane

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Richard wrote: Howzbout: CP/M MS-DOS Amiga-OS Apple Lisa (Pascal?) How much of the Lisa Pascal code was still in it when the first Mac OS came out? Why did Windoze use a Pascal calling protocol for its functions?

On 11/30/2010 8:59 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote: Multics is mostly pl1 of their own making. There is a lot of alm code, But the most of it is in pl1. I can ask on the multicians list and get a count, I'm sure that someone there has heard the question, and has the answer. Multics was complicated on the Honeywell hardware by having Honeywell run both GCOS and Multics at the same time, and that might bring in more assembly code on the GCOS side. It was there mainly to give access to COBOL, and other languages for customers at the time, since they really never figured out who to sell Multics to, current customers, or new ones. We had an OS for the Microdata 1621 written in assembly code in 1972. The media was on disk, but we essentially emulated paper tape on disk with disk files, etc. Primary object was to eliminate the ASR33 usage of course, which was how the MD supplied programs ran. Later projects included adding Lisp, and a nice text editor, but not much else.

"A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language." Assembly language is necessary if one is to get full optimization of performance. Many people don't agree with that, and insist that throwing more hardware at it is easier, particularly for people in a big hurry. ("The hardware is done. Now you can start writing the OS. You have 6 weeks") "Nobody programs in assembly language any more, nor ever will again" - Clancy and Harvey PL/1 was once the language of choice for systems programming. C became the language of choice for systems programming. But "language of choice" was rarely an edict, and there are many reasons why many products were written in languages other than the current "language of choice". Personal preference greater familiarity with something else best fit to the hardware tool availability reuse of some old code overly-specific specs "Baby duck syndrome" I have heard numerous (and, of course, conflicting) accounts of WHY Pascal was chosen for the Lisa. I have even heard multiple (conflicting) accounts of how much the Mac was based on the Lisa. Some day, I might even learn to not believe everything that I hear. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 1 Dec 2010 at 14:45, Ian King wrote: I've seen where a good optimizing FORTRAN compiler can do substantially better than the run of the mill assembly programmer simply because the compiler can cast a wider net (e.g. global optimizations, register allocation, etc.), knows more tricks and usually does a better job of instruction scheduling than the average programmer. Of course, badly-written code in any language can thwart even the best compiler's efforts to generate good code. --Chuck

On 1 Dec 2010 at 16:45, Richard wrote: Indeed. Back in the 80's, we got some very good compiler people together to write an optimizing vectorizing FORTRAN compiler, using a lot of very aggressive methods. Since we'd done all of the heavy lifting, we thought that it would be a good idea to take the same back end and write a C front end for it. Easy money, right? After much hair-pulling, we came to the conclusion that pointer variables are evil; pointers to pointers are extremely evil and C programmers use entirely too much of both. --Chuck

----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 8:47 PM Subject: RE: what was VMS/OpenVMS written in? Coding "optimizing" to me means getting the job done with well commented code in a manner that the average programmer can figure out, maintain, and add to as needed. Sure some people can even do better then a good compiler but will most people understand what is going on with those special tricks and why they were used, plus can people add to the code without screwing something up or it crashing if the hardware is changed?

In article <FF6AB92D97A23A409701CDBF66F03FCD03DC3E71EE at 505fuji>, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> writes: I agree. For instance, templated C++ recursive descent parsers can produce code that is faster than the C library routine atoi. See <http://cplusplus-soup.com/2010/01/08/boost-spirit-v2-x-versus-cs-atoi/> -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

In article <20101202072624.GA21066 at Update.UU.SE>, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at Update.UU.SE> writes: The real-time gaming guys agree with you 100%. By the way, so does the guy who wrote Varnish. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnish_(software)> See, for example, this article written by the author of Varnish. <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327> (No ACM membership required to read.) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

In article <20101202090317.GA27897 at Update.UU.SE>, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at Update.UU.SE> writes: I don't recall cache being discussed at all when I was an undergrad (1982-1986), but it came up in computer architecture courses when I was a grad student. Since then, cache (or memory latency in general) has become the dominating factor in high performance systems. The Cell processor takes what you might call an "architectural left turn" as a result of the size of off-chip memory latencies, by putting fast SRAM in the SPU processors and treating off-chip memory access as essentially an I/O operation akin to getting data from a disk drive. SPU processors have no cache and no direct external memory bus. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

:-) I wonce tranlated a piece of 6502 assembly language line-for-line into Pascal (with interger variables called A,X,Y, a boolean called carryflag, and procedures with names like ADC, etc). This led one of my frieds to observe that 'a hacker can write assembler code in any language' :-) (FWIW, I was working out how the checksum routing in a firmware ROM worked, so I could correclty update the checksum after modifyign some of the code). Actually, i disagree with it. I don't see why, in principle, a compiler can;t produce as tight code as a good programmer. I think you all know my views on throwing procssor power at a problem. Sinec I hand-assembled a bit of machine code a couple of days ago, that is clearly false :-) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ What is this? Acxtually, just about all those arguements apply to using, say, a Z80 + memory+peripheral chips rahter than an all-one-one-chip microcontroller... -tony

Or why I excessively favour *BSD and tcsh, being a product of the University of California and experiencing my first Un*x shell as csh on BSDI/386. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Innovation is hard to schedule. -- Dan Fylstra -----------------------------

On 12/2/10 3:54 PM, John Foust wrote: Huh. Then why am I running Mac OS X and doing most of my production work in VIm? My first exposure to computers was Windows 3.1, followed closely by Win95. I suppose it's no wonder that when I was introduced to AIX and then Slackware Linux, I jumped ship and never looked back. Doc

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Doc Shipley wrote: "baby duck syndrome" is not ALWAYS the first exposure. Sometimes it is the an early (not necessarily first) ENJOYABLE exposure, or the first system that one bonded to. I do not miss "Electric Pencil". much. nor Scripsit. And I'm over my bond with Wordstar. I used Windoze "WRITE" for my PhD written exams (first one in the UC Library and Information school to use a computer for them!) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Oh my yes. Back in the day, I was somewhere between /au fait/ and expert with WordStar (4 & 5, sure, but also 1512 and 2000), DisplayWrite, MultiMate, MS Word 3 & 4 for DOS and various others, not to mention WordPerfect, which swept them all before it before Windows swept it away in turn - meaning Samna Am? at first. Plus a bunch of Mac WPs, two Sinclair Spectrum ones (Tasword and The Last Word), Acorn View, various incarnations of LocoScript and more I've doubtless forgotten. But by the early 1990s, Windows and CUA replaced the lot. CUA-compliant editors ran on DOS, Windows, Mac and now GNOME and KDE. Now I think in CUA keystrokes and it's an effort to recall any other ones. I *really* don't miss them. Not at all. No, not even WordPerfect. Never liked it much, just had to support it. Too many function-key combinations. (Aside: I have recently, for a laugh, got MS-Word 5.5 for DOS running under DOSemu under Linux. And 6.0 for that matter, but 5.5 is a free download from MS. I actually could work in that, still - because 5.5 is the version that went CUA.) FTAOD: CUA = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access What I'd /really/ like as a writing tool would be a CUA mode for EMACS. I find its native UI bizarre and incomprehensible - if I have to edit text at a Unix prompt, I use Vi, badly - but reading comments like Neal Stephenson's in /In The Beginning Was The Command Line/ <http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html> make me think it might be the ultimate writers' tool. I'm damned if I'm learning another new set of keybindings [a] at my age and [b] in a world where CUA has killed off everything else and now rules the GUI world. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

From: Liam Proven Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 6:47 PM You're apparently in luck. Starting with release 22.1, GNU Emacs includes a cua-mode with appropriate keybindings, so that you don't have to do them all yourself. (One of the beauties of the entire EMACS family of editors is that you *can* do anything you want with key bindings. You don't have to accept the defaults.) I learned EMACS on TOPS-20 in 1978. I liked it so much that I studied the TECO sources,[1] and came up with my own variant which I used for years.[2] When GNU Emacs hit Stanford, at version 17.<mumble>, I immediately began to use it under Ultrix on our VAXen at LOTS, and have continued to use it through today. Some of the keybindings I use go back to my personalized version of TECO EMACS. I found the keybindings on MacWrite a little annoying, since my EMACS fingers often tripped on them, but I've gotten used to Word in the last few years (since my current employer uses Microsoft products as a corporate standard). I still trip over <ESC> as "cancel" instead of "Meta-", so I type e-mail into an Emacs window on my Windows desktop, then cut-and-paste into the Outlook window. Because Emacs has continued to be supported and improved, I've never needed to move to another editor. When I'm writing things for personal use, I use Emacs on Mac OS X at home, and run them through TeX for formatting, usually creating a PDF document in a single step. I don't need CUA, but it's there for those who do. [1] In fact, I posted a Y2K fix to the TIME library to the Emacs newsgroups 11 years ago. Both the original author of the library and RMS himself were amazed and amused. [2] Mostly a matter of moving selected functions from standard libraries into my own, to save space. TECO EMACS has never been moved from its original 256KW address space into the modern 1GW world of recent versions of the PDP-10 and its OSes. Editor and document must all fit into the cramped confines of a single memory section. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.PDPplanet.org/ http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, John Foust wrote: WordStar 3.3. ^K^D! g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Thank you... I make the same offer as I've always made. If I receive any personal e-mail about classic computers, I will respond. The repoly may be 'sorry, I have never come across that machine' or '$ccperson is the expert on that machine'. But if you ask about something I have some knowledge off, I _will_ try to help. Period. Oh right... I don't think I suffer from that. The first disk OS I used was not suprisingly CP/M. And yet I find unix much nicer than, say, RT11 of VMS. The first assembly language I learnt was Z80 (and SC/MP at about the same time), but I find 6809 and PDP11 assembly to be a lot more pleasant. -tony

At 05:21 PM 12/3/2010, Fred Cisin wrote: I sometimes think it is due to the high price of equipment in the old days. Our young minds perceived these machines as being unimaginably expensive, something few single people could ever own and operate. Now they're scrap and you can own one. What a deal! - John

On 12/3/2010 5:21 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Quack, quack. Charlie C.

On Sat, 4 Dec 2010, Tony Duell wrote: That's how I got into transputers (and by means of transputers into retro-computing). A friend of mine got a (non-functional) 128-core Parsytec branded transputer machine from university surplus for $75, and then proceeded to let it rot in his parents garage and not let anyone else touch it... I was so jealous I went out and got all the relevant books/hardware that I could get my hands on, at first in an effort to convince him I could make it do something cool, and eventually in an effort to do something cool with my own transputer hardware. I'm still working on it (slowly) 10 years later. Alexey

I really must do somethign with my transputer stuff again. My Ph.D. work involved a couple of hom-ebuilt transputer boards, and I found them one of the easierst CPUs to design hardware round that I have ever used. Since then I've obtained a fair amount ot transputer stuff myself, not just the normal PC-hosted boards, but also an ITEM (Inmos Tranputer Evaluation Machine, a Sun 3 traansputer motherboard with a number of T800 TRAMs on it, asn quite a few other TRAMs, including SCSI, GPIB, VecTRAM, etc. turely an interestign processor... -tony

ALas I don't ahve a Lisa (I can always dream...) But I may be able to offer some advice. Please be warned that last time I sent a message like this it caused yet another almighty flamefest. Let's see if that happens again :-) \beign{rant} There are some people I hope I never meet, beause if I do I will probably do things that I come to regret (like when I'k in court for assault!). The inventor of board swapping is one such. \enf{rant} This si a very clear example of why board-swapping on classic computes is a very bad idea. Firstly, since you have no idea as to the health of any of the parts, you can't deduce anything from the fact that swapping them out makes no difference. Secondly, if there's somethign wrong that is damaging parts (say 12V where it shouldn't be), you might well have just ruined all the aprts you have. Oh well... As I said, I know noting about the Lisa. But a Google search for 'lise schematic' (no quotes) got me to a site with said scheamtics as the first or second site listed. These schemeaitcs incldue the Lisalite board (which I had never heard of) and the main Lisa boards, but alas not the drives themselves. If I am reading the schematics right, the Lisalite is an interface to make a Sony 400K 3.5" drive -- presumably the same as the Apple Mac 400K drive -- look something like the 'Twiggy' 5.25" drive. I don't think it does a complete coversion -- like the PERQ (which I am muich more familiar with), a number of the signals are software defined (they go to I/O port chips), so obviously those could change in meaning. The Lisalite board seems ot be really a PWM generatiro (using TTL chips that are easy to understand) to handle the motor speed control. As I said, there don't seem to be any schematics of the drive available, and I've never worked on one (I have worked on the 80KK drive, but that is quite different). However, IIRC one of the origianls volumes of 'Inside Macintosh' has some information on the drive interface. Just don't expect me to find it :-) I seem to rememebr that the control protocol for thsie drive is a lot more complex than that for a normal floppy drive, there aren't the expect signals on individual connector pins. What I would do now -- actually waht I would have done first -- is grab the Lisalite scheaatic and check the power lines are correct. Check that there's 5V on the TTL chips, check that 5V and 12V are on the right pins of the drive connector. Then find out (possibly from Inside Macintosh) what is needed for the drive to spin. Presumably a PWM singal that's not always 0, but is there a separate motor enable bit too? In any case, see if the PWM scircuit is running, see if the machine is trying to talk to the drive. -tony

Well, I might as well put forward my objections to board-swapping... Board-swapping really has 2 meanings. One is replacing a PCB (or other module) where you know exactly what's wrong with it eithe becasue you can';t get the individual spare component or because you don't have the skill/tools to fit it. For example, replacing a PCB witha failed BGA-packaged device if you only have a normal soldering iron. Or replacing a floppy drive with a damaged head becuae (a) you can't get a spare head and (b) you don';t ahve the alignmet disk anyway. Now that I dislike doing, becuase I prefer to replace as little as posisble both to keep my machines as origianl as possible and to cut down on waste. But it's less objectionable than the other meaning of 'board swapping'. Which is, of course, to repalce parts mroe or less at random until the machine appears to work again. I have plenty of reasons for disliking it : 1) Particualrly in the case of classic computers, you may well not have any known-good parts. Swapping one possibly defectinve part for another possibly defecrtive part is not going to tell you very much. 2) Defects in the amchine can damage the parts you're fitting. The classic (but by no means only) example of this is a power supply problem that is causing one of the supply rails to be overvoltage. You can end up blowing every PCB you fit. 3) Even if the machine appears to work after you've replaced a certain part, you dont know that was the problem, and that it's going to stay working. It may have been a bad connection on one of the connectors that has been temporarily fixed when you removed the old PCB and fitted the new one. Or worse still, the problem could be in a totally different part of the machine. Let me explain. Suppose you have 2 parts A,B that are connected. And supposing there is some tolerance on a signal between them. In fact let's say that it's a pulse train and it's the frequency that's important. Module A outputs a nominal 500kbps pulse train (let's say it's a disk drive ;-)). Module B receives it amd has some kind of PLL circuit that has to lock to it. Now, suppose that A is running slowly, but within tolerance. The PLL on B is drifiting in the opposite direction. In the end, the system fails to work. You replace the drive first, and by chance you pick one that's still withing tolerance, but towards the faster side. The PLL can lock to that, so the system works again. But as you've not cured the real fault -- the fact that the free-running freqeuncy of that PLL is drifitng up, the machine fails again after a short while. Think that sounds unlikely? I've seen it often enough for it to be a real problem! 4) Again particualrly for clasisc computers, you don't knowe that the replacement part is the same revision level as the one you are replacing and you don't know it's going to work correctly with the rest of the machine. Yes, seen that one too. It led me a merry dance in a PDP11/45 until I discoered that the later version of one the CPU boards needed an extra clock signal to be wire-wrapped on the backplane. I learnt how to find faults _many_ years ago. And I learnt that the best way to do it -- heck the only way to really do it -- was to collect evidence as to what the problem was (that is, make measurements) then think about that evidence and then (and only then) make any repairs. Strangely that method still works today. And machines I've fixed, even if I say so myself, seem to keep working... I hate to say this, but that's the first thing I would have done, if only to prevent further damage. I am not a great beleiver in 'stock faults' either. Yes, if there is a known weak spot, I'll check that first, but I won't be suprised if that's no the fault or at least not the only fault. being able to fix, say, 95% of machines by stock faults is great if you have a lot of such machines to repair and can get most of them off the bench quickly. It's less useful when you have just one machine to repair, and when murphey's law dictates that itwill be in the 5% :-) OK, rant over, let's get back to this machine... As I said a Google search found it fairly easily. The Lisalite board looks quite simple (the schematic is just 1 sheet, and I recognisd all the chips on it). I didn't do much more than glance at the schematic, but it seemed to be a dairly simple PWM generator using TTL coutners and '85 comparators. I think the control vaule is bit-serially loaded into a shift register on the board. Can you? I have no idea what these startup checks actually test, but I would have thouht it as possible for one of the I/O chips that links to the drive to havee failed but in a way that it still passes the tests. I wonder how? I couldn't see any way for the machine ot check that the PWM signal (the only signal truely sourced by the Lisalite board) is present and corret. Not really. While the only external cable from the drive does, indeed, plug into the Lisalite board, the shcmeatics show the most of the signals are simply passed (with no buffering or anything) between the 'Twiggy' connector back to the Lisa I/O board and the Sony drive connector. I think it's likely that any problems iwth those signals are not caused by the Lisalite board (broekn PCB tracks are not common). We don;t (or at least I don;t know) what hte diagnostics actually check. There's also the issue that you're using a defective system to diagnose itseld, and while most diagnostics are written assuming that anythign that hasn't been checked could well be defective, some are not. I've seen diagnostics that basically assume that the machine is working correctly, and which don't help _at all_ if there is a fault. I really do think you need to start making some measurements on the drive connecotr and see just what is, and is not, correct there. -tony

I assume you've checked the obvious -- that the spindle motor will turn freely by hand. How do these things detelct that a disk is inserted? I know the 800K Mac drive usese switches on the front of the PCB operated by the disk housing whern it is loaded. Does this do the same thing, or does it use photodetectors, or what? This is a really silly comment, but I'll make it anyway. You are using DD (and not HD) disks, right? The point is that in some drives (certainly some erly Sony full-height osnes), the disk-insered sensor lines up with the HD-detect hole in the latter disk tpye, so if you load such a disk the drive doesn't notice it. I don;t knowwhere you'd find it, but I think one of the origianl Inside Macintosh books has some descrition of the floppy drive control protocol. It might explain how those lines are used. That suggests to me that the Lisalite board isdoing something sensible and producing a PWM signal. I asusme you don;t have a 'scope or logic analyser :-)( OK. So we now know it's not a power problem. That is good in that it means you won;t be damaging any hardware :-) Be careful. I don't know if that manual covers the Liaslite/Sony drive system or just the origianl Twiggy drives, but I could well believe there are differneces between them. control lines come from some parallel interface chips (6522s?) on the I/O board, so their function and timing is determined by software. It's entirely possible (I would say 'quite likely') that these signals do different things when you use the Lisalite/Sony board. I will take a look at the URL you mention and see if I can suggest anything. All I can say is that I remember that feeling all too well :-) At this stage I think I'd concentrate on either trying to work out what the control signals are really doing (but this will be very hard without a logic analyser [1]) or I'd be looking at the drive itself to see if I could find anythig wrong there. It's a pity I've never actually seen one of these drives [1] Yes, there are plenty of ways to manage without one, but as with most things it's a trade-off between equipment and experience. Ifyuo know what you are doing you can make do with a couple of chips from the juk box and a few LEDs. If you have less experience, having the test gear can help (provided you know enough to use it...) -tony

Well, goodness. Tony, good call.. I tried a blank DD 3.5 disk in the slot and volia! The disk spins, then spits out with an expected error 23 (unreadable disk error code). Although I won't know for sure until I get the Macworks disk (who knows if all the keys on the keyboard work), my Lisa 2 seems to be a going concern! Earlier today I had scoured the web for any mention of a sensor in these early 3.5 inch drives which might prevented them working at all with HD disks and found nothing. Nothing in the Lisa forums either although this is less surprising as many people with Lisas also have software on the right type of disks. So tonight I really didn't expect to get a positive result. I'm a happy camper now! Many thanks for your time and input. It's now onto the next project, which is a faulty I/O board in a Lisa 2/10. I want to get that widget drive booting so I can experience the real Lisa office suite! Cheers Terry Stewart (Tezza) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Terry Stewart" <terry at webweavers.co.nz> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 10:19 AM Subject: Re: apple Lisa2. Any advice on non-working floppy drives? > Much obliged for the comments. > > Actually I do have a logic analyser and a (borrowed) scope, so I can see > if > there is a pulse or a waveform. Making sense of the latter is another > matter entirely of course. (-: > >> I assume you've checked the obvious -- that the spindle motor will turn >> freely by hand. > > Yep! > >> How do these things detelct that a disk is inserted? .... > > Not sure Tony. I'm fair more familar with 5.25 inch drives. I'll do some > reading... > >> This is a really silly comment, but I'll make it anyway. You are using DD >> (and not HD) disks, right? The point is that in some drives (certainly >> some erly Sony full-height osnes), the disk-insered sensor lines up with >> the HD-detect hole in the latter disk tpye, so if you load such a disk >> the drive doesn't notice it. > > >> Be careful. I don't know if that manual covers the Liaslite/Sony drive >> system or just the origianl Twiggy drives, but I could well believe there >> are differneces between them. > > Noted. From the reading I've done so far, it seems to cover only the > original Twiggy drives. From what I've read though the Lisa 2 has the > twiggy interface, and the Lisa Lite board allows the Sony 400k drive to be > used with it. As you noted, most of the lines seem to go straight > through. > > Terry > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.872 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3301 - Release Date: 12/07/10 08:34:00

Tony (and anyone else interested), Here is the symptom on this Lisa 2/10 (or Mac XL as they are also called sometimes). It passes all tests until it gets to the I/O board test. It then fails with an error 57 message (disk controller fault). Reading Lisa 2 documentation suggests this is the Lisa Lite adaptor, but with a Lisa 2/10 there is no such thing. The floppy disk is connected straight to the I/O board. I am not sure if the fault is on the I/O board itself, or somewhere on the Widget hard drive controller? I've found the schematics, but no real "theory of operation" docs for the widget drive itself. The Lisa allows you to click on both the hard drive icon or the floppy drive icon even after the error is posted. Neither work. The hard drive comes up with an error 82 which means "Drive doesn't answer". I can't recall right now what the floppy error is, but it doesn't spin up or eject, even with a DD drive. I suspect the fault is on the I/O board itself as the floppy seems dead even when the hard disk is disconnected. However, I'm not assuming anything. This may be just because the I/O has reported an error, or it's functionality may need the widget drive to be on-line. Some other things... 1. With the widget and floppy drive unplugged, the same error occurs (but this might be because they ARE unplugged). The error also occurs with either one or the other plugged in 2. When I switch on, the widget drive spins up, the drive light flashes and I "think" I can hear the "clack" people write about when the brake is released. It's quite noisy but I believe these drives are. 3. I've cleaned all the card edges. 4. I'm fairly sure I have the right ROMS. The machine reports H/E8. H is correct for the Lisa 2/10. E8 (which refers to the floppy disk routine I think) is not documented anywhere. 88 seems more common. It may be a later revision. 5. The I/O board looks in good external shape with no evidence of corrosion anywhere. 6. I've reseated all socketed ICs I could find, both on the I/O board and the widget drive. I have a scope, logic probe and multimeter. I also have the schematics. I have a website where I can post pictures if needed for diagnostic purposes. I have "some" skills at interpretation but I would still class myself as an "advanced beginner" so any guidence as to where I might start is most welcome. Terry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 9:19 AM Subject: Re: apple Lisa2. One working!! - one to go?

I am seriosuly wondering why I am the only person responding to this, given that I've never seen a Lisa 'in the flesh' and have certainly never been inside one. But I don't mind helping... It would be very useful to know if this is a floppy controller error or a hard idsk cotnroller error. Should a Lisa 2/10 be able to boot from the floppy drive if there's no hard drive connected? If so, it would be worth trying to get that working first. OK, I assume the Widget is spinning, etc. I will take a look at the schematics for the I/O board and the Widget. I wonder if it's posssible to easily see if the machine is even trying to access the drive. Right. This is a Sony 400K drive, as in the other Lisa, right? To eliminate the silly faults, I would at least check the power at the drive connector, and also see what the various signals are doing. I wonder if there's some common circuit (address decoder, buffers, I/O chip) that's common to both disk controllers. I will have a look. On the other hand it may mean the system is not looking for either of them for some reason, and therefore doesn;t notice they are not connected. A few very quick checks (I hope). 1) Check the power supplies at the floppy drive. Unlikely to be the problem, but let's eliminate it. 2) Check the logic signals the floppy drive interface connector. Is there any activity (changing signals) here? Anything chenge when you put a disk in? 3) What abotu the Widget interface conenctoe? I will see what the signals should be there... 4) The floppy coitnroller has its own 6504 microprocessor I believe. Can you see activity (changing signals) on the address and data bus of this processor? -tony

I'cve had a look at the I/O board schematics on thw web, the Widget interface seems to be a parallel 8bit data bus + control lines, somewhat akin to SASI/SCSI. It's implemented using a 6522 adn a little TTL. The data lines are used for some other function (contrast control I think), so if that works the 6522 is probably working. If there's a hard disk problem it's in the Widget itself. interface is what I'd expect... That's what I meant. Do any of the signals on the interface conenctor change when you put a DD disk in? Err no. The point of checki nthe signals is not because I suspect the 6504 iteslf, but because I wanty to know if it's doing anything. A microprocesosr cna appear 'dard' becuase it's not getting a clock signal, or because it's being held in the reset state. -tony

I don;t think it relates to a physical knob... There is a DAC on the I.O board (see sheet 5 of the schemaitc I think) that is fed from the same VIA port as the data lines to the Widget (the latter are buffered by a '245 chip) -- I think the CIA and buffer are on sheet 2. I've not traced the output of the DAC in detail, and some bits of schematic don't seem to exist on the site I was looking at, like the backplane, but I thoguht the schemaitc implied that DAC was some kind of software-controlled contrast facility. -tony

On 12/11/2010 03:15 AM, terry stewart wrote: But if you had a working IIGS would you sacrifice its IWM? :-) I know you've said you're sure the I/O ROM says E8, does the sticker on the I/O board confirm this? It's very suspect to me. Also can you confirm that the floppy drive in that Lisa is a standard sony 400K one? If you take it apart, do you see only one head, and the top part of the clamp has a bit of foam? If that ROM is ok, it might well be the 800K ROM from SunRem. I'm guessing that it's either that, or it's corrupt. If either of those cases is wrong, well, you might have a new ROM that wasn't unreleased. Again, you're getting error 57, which is a timeout of the controller's self test, or a bus error during an attempt to access the controller. This has nothing to do with access to the floppy drive, but everything to do with the power on self test that 68000 does to check the 6504 is working. Unless the IWM caused the 6504 to crash, it shouldn't cause a bus error or timeout when the 68000 tries to get status from the 6504. If on poweron the 6504 is fully functional, it does a self test also. Then, it writes the results into the shared floppy RAM, and the 68000 reads this status. Unfortunately, in all cases, you get the same error 57. It might be a timeout, bus error, or an internal 6504 failure, or a RAM failure. The only clue we have is the oddball I/O ROM version. Please, check the sticker on the I/O ROM. If it says 88 on the label, either the EPROM went bad, or the I/O RAM is bad, or something went wrong that prevented the 6504 from reporting its version to the 68000. Does the sticker say E8 on it? Is there an Apple symbol on the sticker? Here's what the code looks like, all roads lead to 57 (EDISK) unfortunately, so we can't pinpoint exactly what went wrong. If you have a logic analyzer with the ability to analyze running 68000 code, and can catch the POST ROM going through this code, you might be able to see where it dies. Perhaps if you can enter Service Mode, you could look at 02AE which is a copy of the result of the 6504's self test. If this is non-zero, it's what reported the error. 02A1 is a copy of the ROM version, which should contain E8. If you can jump into the diag ROM at 00fe1136, it should attempt to see if it can talk to the floppy controller, if you get an error 57 immediately after this (the Lisa might crash without throwing an error, since your're jumping into POST code from service mode) then it's a timeout. 110C| ;---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 110C| ; Test of disk interface - ensure R/W capability to shared RAM, then 110C| ; try disable interrupts command. This test will also verify 110C| ; the results of the disk controller's own self-test (ROM and RAM test). 110C| ;---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 110C| 110C| DSKTST 110C| .IF DIAGS = 1 110C| 110C| 47FA 0078 LEA DSKVCT,A3 ;set up vector in case of bus timeout 1110| 21CB 0008 MOVE.L A3,BUSVCTR 1114| 207C 00FC C001 MOVE.L #DISKMEM,A0 ;set ptr for shared memory 111A| 111A| ; Display ROM id CHG001 111A| 111A| 7A03 MOVEQ #ROMIDROW,D5 ;set cursor ptrs CHG001 111C| 3C3C 0051 MOVE #ROMIDCOL+1,D6 ; CHG001 1120| 702F MOVEQ #'/',D0 ;preceed with / char CHG001 1122| 6100 2616 BSR DSPVAL ;display it CHG001 1126| 1028 0030 MOVE.B ROMV(A0),D0 ;read id CHG001 112A| 11C0 02A1 MOVE.B D0,IOROM ;save in low memory CHG010 112E| 7202 MOVEQ #2,D1 ; CHG001 1130| 6100 0546 BSR OUTCH ; CHG001 1134| 1134| ; Read system type CHG009 1134| 1134| 6162 BSR.S SETTYPE ;determine system type CHG029 1136| 1136| ; Check disk alive indicator 1136| 1136| 4282 CLR.L D2 ;clear for use CHG022 1138| 227C 00FC D901 MOVE.L #VIA2BASE,A1 ;set ptr to parallel port 6522 113E| 0229 00BF 0010 ANDI.B #$BF,DDRB2(A1) ;ensure bit 6 is input 1144| 203C 001C 8000 MOVE.L #DSKTMOUT,D0 ;set up timeout count for 15 secs 114A| 0811 0006 @2 BTST #DSKDIAG,IRB2(A1) ;check indicator 114E| 6606 BNE.S @3 ;skip if set 1150| 5380 SUBQ.L #1,D0 ;else loop until timeout (about 8 us per loop) 1152| 66F6 BNE.S @2 1154| 7439 MOVEQ #EDISK,D2 ;error if not set CHG022 1156| 1156| ; Try read operation and check results of self-test 1156| 1156| @3 1156| .IF DIAGS = 1 1156| 11E8 0016 02AE MOVE.B STST(A0),DSKRSLT ;get results of disk self-test CHG022 115C| 6616 BNE.S INTERR ;exit if error CHG022 115E| 115E| 4A02 @4 TST.B D2 ;previous error? CHG022 1160| 6612 BNE.S INTERR ;exit if yes CHG022 1162| 1162| ; Then try simple write operation to shared RAM 1162| 1162| 7055 MOVEQ #$55,D0 ;set up pattern RM000 1164| 1140 0002 MOVE.B D0,CMD(A0) ;try write 1168| B028 0002 CMP.B CMD(A0),D0 ;verify 116C| 6606 BNE.S INTERR ;exit if error 116E| 116E| ; Finally try a command to disable interrupts 116E| 116E| 6100 0BD6 BSR DSABLDSK ;go issue disable cmd 1172| 640C BCC.S DSKXIT ;skip if OK 1174| .ELSE 1174| .ENDC 1174| 1174| 08C7 0011 INTERR BSET #DISK,D7 ;else set disk error 1178| 4A87 TST.L D7 ;restart if in loop mode 117A| 6B90 BMI.S DSKTST 117C| 6000 021C BRA TSTCHK ;and abort further testing If you suspect that no keyboard isn't working, and your 6522's and the COP421 chips are all socketed, feel free to swap them around, or swap them from the other Lisa. 6522's are very common. Western Design Center may even sell new ones. see: http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/AN-004_W65C22S_Replacements.cfm and find the right version. Take extra care with the COP421 chip! COP421's are unique to the Lisa and can only be found on Lisa I/O boards. (COP421's from anything other than a Lisa will not work since these are microcontrollers with a bit of EPROM built in and burned in for Lisas, so only those coming from a Lisa can be used.) The COP421 handles keyboard, mouse, and the real time clock. The year on the clock has only a 15 year span. So Lisas never had a Y2K problem. :-) Their clock range expired long before 2000, I forget the exact limit, but it's probably 1994 or 1995. One of the VIA 6522s handles the keyboard (and volume + sound control), the other the parallel port (contrast + widget). Swapping the two VIA's around on the same I/O board is helpful in determining if a VIA is bad. If both VIA's are good a known working keyboard doesn't work with your 2/10, this is what you'd check on the I/O board. The Lisa actually has 3 CPU's. A 68000, a 6504, a COP421, and in the first prototypes, they also had a COP421 in the keyboard. These were later replaced with an intel chip. The Lisa 2's (not 2/10's) also had a socket for an FPU.

In other words the drive probably isn't being electroncially accessed (r.g. to check if there's a disk inserted). Now, from what another poster was saying, one of the errors you got means that the 6800 can't access the disk cotnroller RAM (shared with the 6504). I wonder if that 6504 is hackign up for some reason. Either because it's waiting for an I/O device to do something (which could mean a fault in the IWM chip), or becuase it's firmware is corrupted and thus the 6504 is going crazy. Now, you mention that the ROM version is not what you'd expect. I assuem this ROM versions is displayed on the CRT -- that is it somehow involves reading the ROM. If the ROM was corrupted, then it moight report the wrong version. Using your logic probe, check the address and (especially) the data lines on that. Are any stuck high or low? Is there any way you can get a dump of a known-good disk cotroller ROM? If so, eitehr burn it into an EPROM and replace your firmware ROM, or compare it with a dump of your ROM. -tony

May be a problem, may not. 4V is a TTL high, of course, but it's not a short to the 5V line (well, if the 5V line reads 4V, you have other problems :-)). It's entirely possible that the code is running from an area of ROM where A9 is always high, and accessing memory/I/O devives where A9 is always high. It would be well worth trying to do this. Reading a strange EPROM is a lot easier than programming it :-). Once you get to +5V only EPROMs (anything after the 2716, basically [1]), then they all read in much the same way. So it should be fairly easy to make up an adapter to read, say, a 2716 in a programemr that will only do 2764s and larger. Making it program the 2716 is a bit harder. [1] Yes, there wasa 2758 (I think), a sort-of half-good 2716. It's not at all common, and I doubt you'll come across it However, it's also quite easy to use a 2764 in place of a 2716 in the actual machine. What I normally do is make an adapter that will plug into the oriignal EPPROM socket and will tkae the 2764. Most pins just connect across, you need to connect the higher address lines on the EPROM to ground (do this on the adapter, of course). Then program the ROM image into the first section of the larger EPROM, and it should work fine. I sseem to remeber that one of the other people here said the error could be caused by a number of things, one of which was that the shared memory had not been released (in hardware) so the 53~68000 can access it. I think that would be something quite easy to check (let me take another look at the schematics). Of course why it's not being released could well be due to problems with the ROM. -tony

Hi, Just an update on this project. I've found someone local (5 mins drive) who has a Lisa 2/10 in storage plus spare parts and spare boards. After Xmas we'll remove the Lisa from storage and I should be able to swap out the IWM and ROM to see if that tells us anything. His Lisa has a non-working PSU and I have a spare working one so some swapping might be on the cards depending on what's there. I'l let you know how it goes. Thanks for all the help so far. Terry

Yes, there is always the possibility that his ROM or IWM is also faulty but we'll see what happens. The PSU "swapping" I was thinking of is that I'll trade him a working Lisa PSU if he'll trade a working I/O board (that is assuming he HAS such a board in the "spare boards" he mentions). I actually took the working PSU in question apart last right and replaced all six of the old filter capacitors. These are the ones I've found tend to blow and smoke eventually. Terry

No I can't. The Lisa 2 and the Lisa 2/10 I/O boards differ. The Lisa 2 has no IWM but instead used the LisaLight board (which I gather fools the machine into thinking it has a Twiggy drive). The Lisa 2/10 on the other hand uses the IWM to assist with disk I/O Terry

On 12/10/2010 03:28 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That's supposed to be horizontal hold or something, I've never used it either. In most cases if you have video issues, the pots on the video board are far more useful for corrections. That's correct, the contrast is controlled via software. This allows the Lisa to dim it's display all the way down to off when it's not in use. Instead of just a hard off, it used to slowly dim its display down, so it wouldn't create a harsh surprise for the user. :-) The guys that designed this machine knew how to make it human friendly. I don't know of any other machine of that era that did this, or even had a software controlled power supply.

On 12/08/2010 04:47 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: XL just stands for Ex-Lisa. Apple tried to imply Extra Large, as in it looks 2x as wide as a Mac 128, but insiders have mentioned Ex-Lisa repeatedly. Right, that board is needed only by the Lisa's that have a battery pack on the I/O board. Might just need an OS installed, which of course you'd need to fix the floppy issues for. There's a wonderful test suite called LisaTest, but of course, it's useless without a working floppy system. Check the obvious first, make sure the floppy cable isn't inserted backwards, etc. Try swapping the floppy drive to your other working Lisa to see if it works there. At least that way you can eliminate it, though your symptoms are obviously not the drive itself. It's perfectly normal for Widget (and ProFile) drives to take upto 5 minutes to become ready. On powerup, the drive starts scanning for bad sectors. The drive light is a "ready" light. That is, the LED turns off when it's active (or flashes) and turns on steady when it's ready to go. The fact that you're seeing this behavior is a good thing. But 82 means the drive isn't answering, could be a Widget controller issue. http://lisafaq.sunder.net/index.html#lisafaq-hw-hd http://lisafaq.sunder.net/lisafaq-hw-rom_error_codes.html I've never heard of E8. It's either 88 or A8. It may be that you have one that has the 800K floppy hack ROM, though, no one has reported those has having a different ROM version, is your monitor ok, are you perhaps misreading A8 as E8? If not, it could be the ROM might be corrupted. Looking at the boot ROM source, 57 actually means: "57 = bus error accessing disk controller" This means that the Lisa ROM attempted to access the 6504 when the 6504 was busy. There's a signal that prevents the 68K CPU from accessing the floppy RAM while the disk controller is busy. If it tries, it gets a bus error. This is the DISKDIAG line. There's another bit of code where if DISKDIAG is held too long, it will issue the same exact error. Either way, something's wrong with the 6504 disk controller circuitry somewhere. So more than likely, something is wrong with your I/O board, possibly the ROM, RAM, or 6504 CPU are bad. If you can, find another I/O ROM, I think you'll want version 88 for the Lisa 2/10. If you're able to locate the ROM dumps and burn your own EPROMs, that might be another option, it would at least be something to try. The ROM is socketed, and usually labeled with a sticker that has the version number and says "Copyright Apple" somewhere ot. Check the label on it, I'm guessing it would say 88. If you actually see E8, you might want to get a dump of it as it's unknown to me, and might be useful. If you see SunRem or Sun Remarketing or anything like that, that might be the 800K ROM instead. 88=10001000 A8=10101000 E8=11101000 So that's a single bit difference if that ROM was supposed to be A8, but AFAIK, A8 shouldn't be in a Lisa 2/10, that should be 88. Or we could have random corruption on the ROM, it would make sense that DISKDIAG is held locked if this is the case. The shared RAM can also be an issue, as could the IWM chip. It would be great if you had a spare I/O board for the 2/10, because at least you could swap the socketed chips back and forth to see what it might be. A known good board to compare against would be helpful. But if you don't, I'd try to get a replacement 88 ROM, if that doesn't work, try replacing the RAM chips. A spare IWM would be impossible to find - you'd need another 2/10 I/O board for that. Hmm, you might be in luck: http://www.vintagemicros.com/catalog/index.php has I/O ROMs in stock, sadly, no whole I/O boards, but if it is the ROM, that's a very easy fix. You might also want to ask about this on the LisaList as there are a few very knowledgeable Lisa HW folks there that aren't on here. http://groups.google.com/group/lisalist?hl=en_US Let me know if you find anything interesting so I can add it to the LisaFAQ.

Yes. Although it's great to see this first Lisa at least go through all it's checks and spin/spit disks, my excitement is tempered by the fact it's no guarantee there won't be problems found once the software arrives. The drive actually has to load it for a start. Also, I have misgivings about all three keyboards I have. I couldn't activate the special diagnostic routine the Lisa is suppose to have. Despite the keyboard passing it's POST test then, the jury is still out on whether any of the keys actually work! Anyway, we'll see. One small step at a time... Terry

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: Patrick Sch?fer has suggested a different material for repair of Lisa keyboards, the metal-foil-like wrapping from a crisps/chips/fries pack. I have not tried this yet but I am collecting the packaging. Patrick also describes a handy Lisa keyboard tester. http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/patrick/KBDtester.htm

Interesting. It's amazing the gadgets enthuisasts have developed. I'll wait until I get some software and get at least one Lisa booting before worrying about the keyboard. I think this Lisa restoration is going to be one for the long haul. Terry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2010 7:53 AM Subject: Re: apple Lisa2. Any advice on non-working floppy drives?

Not with this Lisa 2/10 Geoff. The I/O board is different from the two earlier Lisa's I've got, and it's the I/O board that has the fault. And I've only got one widget drive. Terry ----- Original Message ----- From: "geoffrey oltmans" <oltmansg at bellsouth.net> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2010 10:07 AM Subject: Re: apple Lisa2. Any advice on non-working floppy drives?

On 12/10/2010 01:53 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I've used sheets of aluminum foil insulated with scotch tape on both sides (to prevent shorting and also to make them stiffer), then cut them out into rounds of the same size as the originals with scissors, and it worked just fine. You don't need to go out of your way to find materials for this. Either that, or maybe he doesn't want someone manufacturing these en-masse and making money off his work? If someone had the source, they could build a full PS2 to Lisa keyboard converter and sell them? Which, IMHO, wouldn't be a bad thing these days considering how rare fully working Lisa parts are versus the proliferation of cheap, disposable pee cee keyboards. But there's certainly enough detail there to build such a thing from scratch, with or without that source if you had access to a Lisa and a keyboard.

Tony Duell, the master of HP, said: I have a thinking about this: - Release everything and sell the product. Because who KNOWS how to do, will do it with or without the sources. Who DOESN'T KNOW how to do, will not do even with the sources. It always worked for me. --- Enviado do meu Motorola PT550

Actually, I am not sure I agree with that description. There are others here who know more abotu HP machines that I do. A lot more. I think we are. Firstly, does it matter if somebody does build their own version (for theire own use)? It's neve worried me... And secondly, I am awkeward enough to want o make my own. Mainly because I could then use leaded solder. And I can put any DIP chips I want to in turned-pin sockets. And I can ... I would certianly agree with that. The project that started this discussion was a Lisa keyboard tester. Just how many of those do you think you could sell? There simply aren't that many Lisa owners around. Or if something happens to _you_ (as the guy who built this and didn't release the source). I could well believe I could accidentally connect myself across a high voltage supply, or whatever. Or modify/fix it themselves. The more people who are able to improve things, the better. -tony

Unfortunately, since the demise of Borders bookshops over here, I can no longer get Circuit Cellar Ink off the shelf. And I didn't find enough of interest in each issue to feel it was worth subscribing to. So I have not had a chance to see this editorial. I've heard it said that tthe extra energy required to heat the solder bath to the highter temperature needed for lead-free solder does more environmetal damage than leaded solder would. Fortuantely, we (in the UK) are sitll allowed to use leaded solder for prototypes/home contruction, and for repairs on things that were originally soldered with leaded solder. But not for devices osld commerically (except for a few specific uses). So you can sell a kit and the builder can solder it with lead/tin solder with no problems. But if you sell the PCB pre-built, you have to use lead-free. Oh well.. Of course like most classiccmpers, I intend to minimiue the environmetal impact of my lead/tin solder by keeping the things I have made/repaired out of the landfill for many, many, years. -tony

The lead from even junk consumer grade circuit boards has been recycled for quite a long time now. We still have lots of wars to fight. Yes, exactly. -- Will

On 18 Dec 2010 at 0:40, Phill Harvey-Smith wrote: I got the TV we use to fit the wall space between two doors. It's a flat-screen 26" Samsung CRT model, not wide-screen. Works just fine for keeping the dogs amused. --Chuck

re you doing the repairs with lead-free solder, or leaded solder? I am told you cna use the later to repair the former (technically), but in the UK it's illeagal to do so commercially. But for your own stuff... I see... A lot cheaper than the official repair of replacing the PCB (in my expeirence car electronic modules are a form of legalised robbery!), and doubtless much more reliable. I don't believe that's got much to do with it!. I am, alas, of the opinion that manufacturers want to make stuff that fails and can't be repaired after a rerasoanbel time (a few years) in the hope that you'll buy a new device. And if they can arrange this in a way that seems 'green' then so much the better. Well, I would if I could. I'd buy adelta-gun CRT-bnased TV if I could. I don;'t mind having to set up the convergence in the position it is to be used. Actually, given the choice I'd not have a TV at all. I cna think of little worth watching... -tony

Yes. I have been told that there are in fact several differnt lead-free solders, and in come cases it can cause (even more) unreliabilty to resolder with the 'wrong' one. On the other hand, lead/tin solder is compatible with anything :-). Quite how I am expected to know what lead-free solder to use on some item for which there is no chance of getting a service manual is beyond me, but I guess this is just another way of making things difficult to repair... Actually, many spares are legalised robbery. I used to joke that DEC stood for 'Darn Expensive Components' after some of the prices they quoted for spares for my PDP11s But that's by no means an isolated case. Your are lucky that they used a recognisable IC. A lot of automotive stuff usese custom parts :-(. Of course this doesn't stop you resoldering them. Actually, the woekshop manual (factory, not 3rd party) for our Skoda says that the Instrument Panel Insert must not be dismantled. Now, the Instruemnt Panel Insert is the unit that cotnaisn the 4 analogue instruments (including the pointers/dials, all actually electroncially controlled), a coupel of LCD displays, warning lights (LEDs), etc. It also contains the odometer (obviously) and the immobiliser controller. So I could understand why there might be secrutiy features in it. But I can't find any more details Oh, and 'special tools'... I can rememebr when special tools were only needed fro rearely-done jobs, when they genuinely were needed, and when you got the drawings ot make them in the back of the workshop manual. Now you seem toneed them for just about every job on a modern car, even the annual service. And the only reason you need them is because it's been designed to need them, it could have been designed so you didn't need them.Jsst another way of exteacting money from you for a special drift or spacer or... that you could turn yourslef if they'd tell you the dimensions... Oh well.. -tony

You're completely right. That is not because you make it avaiable to people, it has to be "public domain". It was made by you, and the copyright is yours.

On 12/11/10 6:16 AM, "Ray Arachelian" <ray at arachelian.com> wrote: That is why I have really come to love the Atari community, most of the hardware upgrades are "open source" they make the schematics and at minimum the jedec or binary files available, many provide the source that you can compile or edit yourself.

Terry, if ONE of the keys is working, there must be a stuck key or a bad contact in the connector betweek the controller board of the keyboard (inside it, of course) and whatever brings the switch contacts to it (probably a membrane). I'm sure you'll be very lucky on that :)

Terry, I don't know much about lisa keyboards, but wait...there is google! :oD Well, seems the lisa keyboard is an entire PCB...So what I said doesn't apply...sorry :(

I once saw a Tektronix-badged Keytronics keyboard where all the metalisation ahd vanished. The foam was fine, the keys felt fine, but none of them worked. Exactly!. Once when I had diagnosed a fault in a friends machine to somehard to get/expensive part he said 'Can't you replace something else'. After wondering just what planet he was one, I replied 'Sure, I can replace any part you want. But if you want the machine to work again I have to replace the faulty part.' I don't get this. As I understand the schematics, the keybaord intereface is 3 wires (on a 1/4" e-pole jack plug as we call them over here).Power, ground and a signal line. I don't see how bad contacts there (or indeed broken wires in the keyboard cable) could leave one key still working. -tony

On 12/23/2010 05:04 AM, terry stewart wrote: Wow, I've not seen too many Lisa keyboards, but none whose mylar was that damaged. Well, let us know how the repair went.

OK, I am not a 'real' classic computer guy then. Perhaps I'm 'integer' or 'complex' :-) More seriously, I will buiy the right spare part if it;s available (and I have an idea that these Keytronics pads are avaialble as you suggest). I make parts when ; 1) the origianl part is simply unobtainable 2) I would have to replace a lot more than I need to (e.g. in the case of the Lisa keyboard if I could only get complete keyboards, rather than just the pads). 3) If the 'right' spare part is ridiculously expensive (compared to my cost to make it). Alas in a lot of cases with my machiens at least one of those is true, which is why I rewind motors/transformers, machine new mechancial bits, add kludgeboards to use chips I can get. etc. But if yoyu can get anf afford the right part, I'd do that. -tony

Erik's marketplace right here http://marketplace.vintage-computer.com/auction_details.php?name=Replacemen… They would need shipping to New Zealand which would add to the cost. Also I have THREE keyboards I'd like to repair not just one. Hmmm...ok, your letter has convinced me. It SEEMS easy enough, and it's not like this has to be done immediately. I can snatch a few hours here and there as time allows. However I'm sure it will take me more than an afternoon or two so I'm not convinced it's "less trouble" (-: . More satisfying and permenant in the end though maybe. I'd certainly replace the foam as most of it is degraded really badly. At work we have some largish corkborers for punching out agar plugs. One of these MIGHT just be a suitable size, which should make the process a lot easier. I'll let you know how it goes. I'l probably get onto it in Mid-January after the holiday season. I've a few family commitments before then. Much obliged for the advice. Terry

On Friday, December 24, 2010 7:59 AM Ray Arachelian wrote: Yep, those are pulls from older but not-as-old-as-vintage keyboards. Mid-90s, typically. The foam seems to be a better composition so hopefully it'll last longer. What usually happens is that the foam degrades and the residue ruins the Mylar. Regardless the "used" stuff probably has at least 20 years left relative to the foams its replacing. Hopefully lots more. I've used it to revive two Sol-20s and have some stashed for my Lisas, Compaq and two or three others when I get to them. The DIY approach is a good one since we'll all need it someday. I've heard of folks using Mylar from anti-static bags to do the one end and overhead projector transparencies to do the other. The trick, then, is finding a foam for the middle that is the right consistency, thickness and composition to work and last. And, of course, cutting the circles properly. Erik Klein www.vintage-computer.com www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum - The Vintage Computer Forums marketplace.vintage-computer.com - The Vintage Computer and Gaming Marketplace I suppose if you could build some sort of circular cutting device that has the right diameter, it would go a lot easier, but that seems difficult. You'd need to find a metal tube of the right size and sharpen it to a blade, then rotate it against foam glued to a mylar/taped aluminum foil layer. (Or against foam/taped aluminum separately and then glue.) I suppose mylar balloons might work if flattened and glued to a thin stiff piece of plastic also? That would work. Perhaps there's some dremel bit sets that would include this kind of cutting tool? I did find a round cutting bit in my collection, but it's specially made to cut round holes in doors for locks. Way too big. But if you can find the right sized tool, or make the right sized tool it would work. I did mine all by hand with an Xacto blade, which is a bit boring and makes for rough work. In some cases the geometry of the aluminum rounds failed to work, etc. But if there was a tool to get them all to be the same shape/size, it would work much better. http://www.amazon.com/Fiskars-93807097-Circle-Cutter-Replacement/dp/B0006HUJ 0S/ Something like the above might work, but I'm not sure about the diameter - the 1" minimum this thing does is too big. Hmmm, perhaps cutting a tin soup can, then sharpening the edges with a file and curling it on itself until it's the right diameter on the sharp end, but makes a funnel on the other end, then attaching the funnel end into a wooden handle could make the right tool. Problem is the edge would need to be sharp and that kind of metal is a bit too soft. Sure, anytime. If you do find a tool, or are able to make one, let me know the details of what worked so I can add it to the FAQ.

On Friday, December 24, 2010 12:15 PM steve shumaker wrote: As near as I can measure they are 7/16ths of an inch (11mm) in diameter, 3/16ths of an inch (5mm) tall. I don't have calipers so these are eyeball on a ruler measurements, but should be pretty close. I can do pictures if you want. Heck, if someone wants a few samples to try and reproduce I can do that too. Does anyone know anyone at Keytronics who might be able to swipe the original machining, specs, etc? Maybe someone high up we can talk into making a few tens of thousands more? :-) Heck, they owe the community for these problems and should do this by way of apology. Give me a good, last-a-century buckling spring keyboard over these mushboards any day! Erik Klein www.vintage-computer.com www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum - The Vintage Computer Forums marketplace.vintage-computer.com - The Vintage Computer and Gaming Marketplace

On Fri, 24 Dec 2010, Ray Arachelian wrote: Howzbout: do some with pulls, some with new, some with homemade variants, and keep track of how well they hold up. What size do you need? Not all hole punches are standard office size. Punches for leather might work. woodworking "plug cutter"? PAPER DRILL bits, although not cheap, are available up to about 1/2" (eBay: "paper-drill bit*") and there certainly are plenty of folk with lathes who could sharpen a piece of tubing for you. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

I haven't been following this whole thread so, not sure if its been posted or not but, here's a web page on how to do it. The Sol 20 keyboard is the same as all the Keytronic foam keyboards from hell. http://www.solivant.com/sol20kbd/ On 12/24/2010 2:36 PM, dwight elvey wrote:

If these spares are actually old parts, then I take back what I said about using them. These parts do decay with age, and there seems to be little point in fitting soemthing that is going to fail again very soon. I seem to remember, though, that Keytronics keyboards were made until relatively recently, and that spares for themn were available. If you could find some of those they would probably be good for 10 years or so and might be worth using. Presumably it's the inside diameter that's crtiical. Why not just bore soemthing out to the right diameter and sharpen the edge? I still wonder if those meatlaised 'emergency blankets' would work. You see them in pound shos over here, and I would think one would be big enoguh for several keyuboards. -tony

Is this the same IWM that was used in the earlier Macs? That might be a source of one. As for the drive, this is the strange 5.25" drive, isn't it? I would love to see insdie one. Hwoever, my first comment is going to be that I suspect an alignment disk for that is even harder to find than alignment disks for standard drives, so whatrver you do, don't disturb the head alignment! I don't think there are schematics of the Widget out there, so you may be somwhat on your own. A drive typically consists of several subsystems -- the spindle motore, the haed positoner (and track 0 sensor), the index sensor, write protect sensor, etcm and the read/write chain. Apple may well have oden without some of the sensors, though. Does the eror you get give any more information? Does thre drive try to spin? Does it move the heads? -tony

Oh yes, of course. I've never actually seen a Lisa. let alone been inside one -- and that is not likely to change. I seem to remember that the Widget schematics are out there, if you need them. I also seem to remember a few custom devices in that drive :-(. It may be nothing more htan a corrupted disk, of course. Or it may be a problem wit hthe drive. Was the HDA a 'stadnard' one for the time? Surely Apple didn't make that themselves. Was it, for example, the HDA from an ST412 or something. Does it try to move the heads? This drive probably uses a stepper motor postioner, and often there's a metal 'flag' on the end of the motor spindle outside the HDA which activates a slotted optoswitch for the track 0 sensor. YOu can seee if this is moving when the machine accesses the drive. IWM = 'Integrated Woz Machibne', I believe. Does anybody know if there's only one form of it, or several? I was under the impression it was sort-of a single-chip version of the logic on the Disk II controller board -- buty how close is it ot that logic? Is it the same state machine, for example? COuld you make a replacement using the know schematics and ROM dump from a Disk II? -tony

Sure, and I can;t beleive that early Macs (Mac Plus, for example) are that hard to find. However, the IWM was a custom part, and it may well have been that the chip was never sold on its own (Apple went in for board-swapping :-(). The supply of them is going to dry up at some point, so it's worth thinking about a possigle replacement made from standard parts. -tony

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011, Eric Smith wrote: Seagate ST506 and ST412 respectively for 5 and 10MB. At least in all the ones I've seen. I'm told that the 10MB model had a custom stepper motor a pitch 2x finer than normal, i.e. 2 pulses were required between tracks. This appears correct, since my attempts at using an ST412 mechanism for a 10MB unit yielded only 5MB of storage capacity (it was skipping every other track). When I get time and energy, I'm going to tack on a simple divide-by-two circuit (single flip-flop) and see if that does the trick. Steve --

Tony Duell wrote: Presumably in 7 MHz mode the state machine is identical or very similar to that of the Disk II controller. In 8 MHz mode, it must have additional states. Eric

That is good news! Well, that's no so bad either. The fact that one key works would seem to indicate that the keypbard microcontroller (I am guessing it's a COP400 series Apple seemed to like them at this time) is working. And the rest of the keyboard electronics is probably OK IIRC, this is a Keytronics capacitive keyboard. Basically on the bottom of eack key pluger is a dis of foam with a disk of metalised plastic (metal side towards the foam) under it. When you press the key, the mtalised plastic covers 2 pads on the PCB, increasing the capacitance between them (the metal deoes not touch the PCB pads, the plasitc layer is in the way). They suffer from 2 main faults. The foam dexays, and sometimes the metalisation does too. You need to dismantle it and have a look. Take off the outer casing first (I ssume screws on the underside). if the keybaord cable is plugged into the PCB, I'd unplug it to make thigns easier to handle. On the bottom of the PCB,m under the keys, are lots of small screws. Take tne out (as a matter of principle, I try to take them out in a diagonal pattern, but it doesn;'t really matter here), and lift off the PCB. You can now see the foam and disks, and hopefully see what;s wrong... -tony

On 12/04/2010 02:40 PM, Tony Duell wrote: In my case they were parallel. I wanted my first PDP-8 in 1969 when I had access, I actually got on in 81. PDP11 was in '79 and a real one in 1982. What drove it was cost, availability and sometimes need. Now its all look back as I don't lust for anything out there thats current mostly. I wouldn't mind having an Ipad running emulators for PDP-8, 11 and VAX. Allison

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, Tony Duell wrote: Just how many "POS" OS's where there? I wasn't aware of this one, but knew about P/OS (stripped RSX-11 for the DEC Professional), and pOS for the Amiga in the late 90's. I would definitely argue that BASIC in my Commodore 8-bit systems is an OS! Zane

The PERQ one is POS (no slash, no lower case AFAIK). It's pascal-based, much of it is written in an extended pascal. The machine code of the PERQ when running POS is somewhat like the UCSD p-code, although the OS is very different (it's command-line based, in fact it feels a little like RT11) Yes that's the sort of thing I was thinking of. Waht about HP's BASIC fo the 9000/200 seires. It boots from disk (there is no OS prompt that you load BASIC from, you just boot the disk and get a BASIC prompt), it manages mass storage devices, I/O, etc. I would claim tht it certainly an OS (I have no idea what it was written in, but I don't think it was C). -tony

Rich Alderson wrote: Bill Atkinson wrote QuickDraw (originally named LisaGraf) in Pascal on the Lisa, then rewrote it in assembly. The assembly version was used on the Mac. My vague recollection is that the assembly version also got used on the Lisa, but I could be wrong about that. If so, it's probably the only shared code. (Not counting MacWorks.) Eric

Burroughs/Unisys MCP, over the last 45+ years, is written in ALGOL or close variants (ESPOL, NEWP, DCALGOL), with only a minuscule amount of lower-level code achieved via bit-bashing machine-code into HLL variables. Some networking subsystems are done in Pascal or C and other languages depending on which part of the company was involved and other circumstances. IBM's early OS/400 operating system for the CISC AS/400 (1988) was written in mostly PL/MI (Programming Language / Machine Interface), which via various steps derived from PL/I. Some layers of IO support was done in Modula-2. Later, for the RISC versions of AS/400 parts of OS/400 (SLIC) were migrated to C or C++ but much of OS/400 stayed with PL/MI or Modula-2. -- [ paraphrased from Dan Hicks in comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc ]

I trust someone here will know. What is this thing ? http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-MOTHER-BOARD-IBM-Module-Machine-invoice-1963-/3…

You can actually transfer ownership of stuff containing asbestos ? I figured you if you had it was your business but, selling it to someone else seemed iffy if you knew. This thing is not a risk to anyone but, I was curious what the rules are. Still what is that ? It looks like a programming board of some sort. Love all the IBM logos on y connections or whatever they are. This from a punch card sorter ? On 11/30/2010 10:39 PM, Joe Giliberti wrote:

Will that apply to only new items ? It's too expensive to make two versions of anything. Except stuff out of places "where they just don't care" I think most manufacturers have all gone RoHS long ago. Not sure there how Walmart will continue in New Jersey though. No more $15 dvd players anyway. On 11/30/2010 10:56 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

Does that include antiques, or houses sided in asbestos tile? On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:56 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: -- Joseph Giliberti Jackson, New Jersey Come Volunteer at the InfoAge Science / History Learning Center Get more information at http://www.infoage.org

Asbestos housing tile is one of the better house siding materials in my opinion. It is very durable, requires little upkeep, and is damn-near fireproof. Mesothelioma usually sets in 25 years post exposure, so you are probably safe, Jim. On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:58 AM, jim s <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:

Don't get me wrong. I was actually curious about legality having seen tents go up on buildings to remove it. It is obviously not toxic until it gets airborne. Like the RoHS rules they have all sorts specific rules about transfer of things like this. Not like many of us have 1960's era machines but, it made me wonder. I'm not so much worried about getting cancer from it as much as if I could run into legal trouble. On 11/30/2010 11:24 PM, Joe Giliberti wrote:

I agree. Asbestos insulated wire is probably the most difficult wire to work with, and in the old days the manufacturers avoided it at all costs unless they had to use it. Stripping the insulation off is a real chore, even in a production environment, as the asbestos chews up all the tooling and leaves everything dull. -- Will

On 11/30/2010 11:08 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: or the fact you are actually a bigot but, qualify everything with "I'm not a bigot but..."

Keep at it. Eventually you'll win. On 11/30/2010 11:46 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: -- This is my sig _,-%/%| _,-' \//%\ _,-' \%/|% / / ) __,-- /%\ \__/_,-'%(% ; %)% %\%, %\ '--%'

On 2010 Nov 30, at 10:19 PM, leaknoil wrote: Before my time so to speak, but it's a program plugboard for some accounting machine, perhaps something like the 604 or 607 electronic calculators, or mayhaps the CPC (card-programmed-calculator). Perhaps someone will recognise exactly which machine. I don't know of any asbestos on IBM plug-board wires. Later plug-board wires were typical plastic insulation, however earlier ones were fabric-over-plastic insulation. It's just a woven fabric. Asbestos fibres wouldn't stand up to the flexing.

As long as asbestos is solid in chunks and not airborne, it is not hazardous. On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:55 AM, leaknoil <leaknoil at gmail.com> wrote: -- Joseph Giliberti Jackson, New Jersey Come Volunteer at the InfoAge Science / History Learning Center Get more information at http://www.infoage.org

On 2010 Nov 30, at 10:55 PM, leaknoil wrote: Looks like it's for an IBM 402/403 accounting machine. The machine is identified at the bottom of the plugboard 'sections', visible in one of the ebay photos. Or compare: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/plugboard.html Also: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/402.html

On 12/1/10 9:28 AM, Paco Linux wrote: Cambridge University TRIPOS and the Alto operating system are in BCPL The classic HP 3000 is in SPL B5000/5500 and others in Extended Algol UCSD Pascal in itself. Smalltalk in itself. The Alto Mesa system in itself DEC SRC Topaz in Modula-2 Plus and on and on

On 1 Dec 2010 at 9:48, Al Kossow wrote: ...and that's not counting the implementation languages that were written specifically for a platform. CDC Cyber in the 70's went from being almost exclusively assembly with FORTRAN sprinkled in to large sections written in SYMPL (based loosely on Pascal). CDC STAR OS was entirely IMPL (LRLTRAN with inline assembly capabilities and some datatype extensions). --Chuck

On 12/1/10 2:07 PM, Brad Parker wrote: I have paper listings for the B5500 timeshared MCP scanned Hopefully, we'll have some money in the budget next year to have John read the 7 track tapes.

I believe that the Xerox Alto Executive was written in BCPL, as well. -- Ian

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 01:03:37PM -0500, Ethan Dicks wrote: Apparently TRIPOS is still very much alive in a strangely mutated form. There used to be some kind of appliance like computer system for insurance agents in the UK. It originally ran on 68k CPUs with native TRIPOS and nowadays seems to run in some kind of 68K emulation environment on Linux (with presumably standard x86 hardware), complete with callouts to the underlying Linux OS for things like tape handling (backups). It looks like it is still use quite heavily in this form by insurance agents in the UK. Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Essentially, yes, though I'd expand "the filesystem portion" to be the part of the suite commonly called AmigaDOS, including various system utilities which sits on top of Exec (the "kernel", more or less, possibly better described as a "real-time message-passing task manager, similar _in concept_ to Mach) and sort-of next to Intuition (the GUI). The major components of AmigaOS are more intertwined than Linux or UNIX, but the divisions are similar. I loved programming on the Amiga, but I preferred system programming to application programming (i.e. - not so much Intuition work, but plenty of work on device drivers for disk and network and I/O cards and lots of console-I/O programs in C and MC68K assembly). -ethan