[cctalk] Apple II

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Mostly to Bill, but also anyone else hanging out here who's got a surfeit
of 8-bit Apple stuff:

If you're planning on selling the Apple II, and it's not a ][+, I'd be
interested in buying.  Not, perhaps, at optimistic eBay prices, but I have
a lot of ][+s and //es, most of them in working shape, some of which are
parts machines; however, I don't have either a II or a //c .

Also happy to trade if I've got things you want.  I don't have anything
super-exotic, but feel free to HMU and ask.

Adam

[cctalk] Re: IBM VM "CMS" tape format

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Seems like rather than going through MUSIC/SP it'd be easier to just fire
up VM/CE 1.2 (which is VM/370 r6) and use CMS TAPE (which is present)
directly from the CMS UI.  You can probably attach the file you've got as a
tape device; not entirely sure Hercules will like the format, but it
wouldn't hurt to try.

Adam

[cctalk] Re: Emacs on v7

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I picked that one because it said it had derived from a 1986 original, so I
guessed that if I went back to the initial GH commit I'd get something that
was K C and not a million miles away from v7, and I was right.

I...can't believe I never thought of just tossing some #defines up top.  I
feel *really dumb* now, especially given the gyrations I went through with
gnusto to rewrite the symbol table to get Frotz to work on TOPS-20.  Yes,
letting the preprocessor rather than sed do my work would have been cleaner.

Anyway, https://github.com/athornton/microemacs-v7

It does, however, seem to be limited to files a couple dozen K in size,
because even MicroEMACS is still kinda large, and a PDP-11's memory is
kinda small.

Adam

[cctalk] Emacs on v7

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I finally got an Emacs running on v7--it's on misspiggy at LCML now as "ue".

It's Microemacs 3.6; what I did was to clone
https://github.com/troglobit/MicroEMACS and check out the first commit.

Some experimentation later, it had the usual problem with v7 and DEC
linkers that not all the function names (er, more generally exported
symbols, but in this case, function names) were unique in the first 7
characters (which is 6 if you're working with DEC OSes).  So a bit of sed
later and I had something that built, linked, and appears to run with
TERM=vt100 set.

Arrow keys, naturally, don't work, but C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n do.

I think I'm going to just make a GH repo of it, but I'm happy to send the
tarball, or tar.uue, upon request.  I find UUCP kinda fragile on my simh
installation, and I don't know how to get to Miss Piggy's (although the
uucp commands are there), so, well, uuencoding, a pasteboard buffer,
iTerm2's "Paste Slowly", and cat will work as a file transfer mechanism.

Now I'm going to run over to TUHS and announce the same.

Adam

[cctalk] fredmacs?

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I have heard rumors of one "fredmacs" which is a more-or-less emacs that
will run on PDP-11 v7 Unix.  Since I've gotten "s" onto v7 and behaving
mostly happily, now I'd like an editor I actually _like_ rather than
_tolerate_.

Does anyone know where to find the fredmacs sources?

Adam

[cctalk] Divestiture and sqlite3

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

To clarify a couple of things in response to queries: my time for
divestment is "not yet"--but rest assured, when it arrives, I will
certainly see who wants things from my assortment (don't get too excited;
there's nothing super-rare or valuable in it, and I've always been more
concerned with restoring functionality than maintaining period-correctness;
I am one of those collectors who restores stuff to play with it, not to
then put it in shrinkwrap and preserve it for some uncertain future).  And
should that time arrive suddenly, well, argh, I've been putting off making
a will too long, but I know who I'm going to put in charge of "everything
computery," and I trust her to make good decisions about the things she
doesn't want.

My understanding of sqlite (and it could be wrong) is that concurrent
writes aren't supported, and reads should block if a write is in progress
until the write completes.  In practice it seems like most things are
one-sqlite-file-per-process and if that process is threaded, one would hope
the programmer understands what they're doing well enough to make it work.
There are fairly few cases I've seen where a single sqlite file is shared
between unrelated processes, which would take filesystem locking working
correctly to ensure correctness.  Which is generally OK for local
filesystems, but NFS is still a bucket of worms when it comes to locking
behavior, and the number of people running systems that genuinely
understand NFS has been declining for decades.  (I do not count myself
among those people.)

[cctalk] Little Databases

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Have you considered sqlite3?  It's a SQL engine, but the backend is just a
file.  So it doesn't support concurrent access by multiple users, but if
that's not a concern, it gives you the ability to do real SQL queries
without the bother of setting up an RDBMS.

Adam

[cctalk] Disposition of stuff

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Been thinking about it a little recently, and, no, I definitely don't plan
to send my stuff to a scrapper.  I have some younger friends with an
interest in retrocomputing.  They want my stuff when I'm done with it,
sure.  And if they want _just a little_ of my stuff I'll probably strike a
deal like, "you can have the SGI Indy if that box of IDE drives goes with
it, and you aren't allowed to throw it away until you're somewhere I'm not
going to see it by the side of the road."

Adam

[cctalk] How much memory?

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

>  640K was maybe "enough for anyone"

>
> Weird but I even seem to remember someone saying "who woukd been more than
> 64k"
> Ed# SMECC
>
>
>
And let's not forget "what's the hardest part about emulating Gerald Ford
on a PDP-8?  Figuring out what to do with the other 3K."

[cctalk] z9 (s390x) mainframe up for grabs in Melbourne, FL

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

From the "Mainframe Enthusiasts" Discord; I don't have any other contact
for him but I can send you a link to the Discord if you can't get there
yourself.  This is one of the first (maybe the first) of the 64-bit zSeries
(descendant of S/360, S/370, S/390) machines.  You would have to pay IBM a
lot of money to legally run a modern z/OS or MVS or VM or z/VM or VSE or
z/VSE on it (and current versions won't work, but, like, z/VM 4.4 would).
You could run MUSIC/SP for free, and of course VM/370 and MVS 3.8 are in
the public domain (although I do not know offhand if the z9 can run those
late-70s OSes).  It will also run S/390 and z/Linux of the right vintage,
which are free but maybe difficult to acquire these days.

From Member @Booper : Z9 mainframe, ds8000 storage array , tape drive and
misc components are scheduled to go to scrap at the end of the month. If
someone wants to chime in and throw some money my way, i can sign the whole
storage unit over to you. Located in melbourne fl.

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 89, Issue 21

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

The 11/83 question sounds like a job for SCSI2SD to me.  Install a system
with simh.  dd the resulting disk image to your sd card.  Hook the SCSI2SD
up to your 11/83 and boot from the card.  Copy the contents of that drive
to your real SCSI drive.  Done.

SCSI2SD cards are not expensive and are a tremendous value for money.

AOL diskettes

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> From: Grant Taylor 
> 
> I wince at the idea of running with QIC tape.  But my experience is with 
> QIC-80 tapes of the '90s which were so unreliable as to be in the same 
> category as AOL floppy disks during the late '90s around the transition 
> to CD-ROMs.  As in I would trust an AOL floppy disk to better hold my 
> data for a week than I would a QIC-80 tape to hold data for a month, 
> much less a year.  ...and I didn't even trust an AOL floppy to go from 
> computer to computer for 5 minutes.  --  Talk about a race to the bottom 
> for quality.

I wish I'd kept some.  I had some AOL CDs from slightly later that made decent 
coasters for decades.  Although I guess with the shutter, the floppy wouldn't 
really have made a very good coaster.

Adam

Re: The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
>
> And what happens when you wake  up one morning to find archive.org is
> gone, too?
>
>
Fundamentally, eventually we're all going to be indistinguishable
mass-components inside the supermassive black hole that used to be the
Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies anyway.

Smoke 'em while you got 'em.

Adam

RE: Terminal Emulator

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I used ZOC, and loved it, when I was an OS/2 user decades ago.  I’m glad to 
hear it’s still around.

Adam

OpenVMS/VAX license expiration

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

You might want to search the Github repositories of a certain "athornton"
looking for something called "yarr".

Obviously it would be wrong to use it.  So don't.

Adam

Koning TECO

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Paul Koning may be pleased to know that his implementation of TECO has
supplanted Blake McBride's TECOC as the standard TECO in the Rubin
Observatory's Science Platform Interactive Notebook Aspect.

https://github.com/lsst-sqre/nublado/blob/f6b186081c0a3c9e12a1935db304ee2b31840e2c/jupyterlab/stage2-os.sh#L17-L25

Of course if there is sufficient outcry from the user community I could be
convinced to include both in the image, at least until my boss catches me
doing it.

Adam

Re: cctech Digest, Vol 80, Issue 5

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Message: 18
> Date: Thu, 6 May 2021 15:18:04 +0200
> From: Liam Proven 
> To: Jay Jaeger ,  "General Discussion: On-Topic and
> Off-Topic Posts" 
> Subject: Re: That VAXStation4000vlc 3W3 video connector
> Message-ID:
> <
> camtencgkync++ct2gfpcvvnttjv-frvivhuoxlcjwdesf2w...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> On Wed, 5 May 2021 at 17:59, Jay Jaeger via cctalk
>  wrote:
>
> > I, for one, did find this helpful - one could make one of these up to
> > test before possibly forking over the funds to build one properly.
>
> If anyone were up to making a small batch of these, I'd be happy to
> pay for a few, plus shipping etc. I have 3 ? 4000VLCs and only 1
> monitor for 'em, and I hope to get them running again sometime...
>
>
>
I'd buy at least one, seeing as how it was my original question, and
whatever I end up stitching together will be really gross.

If whoever is doing it would ALSO do the much simpler DEC 15-pin to VGA
adapter, I'd probably buy some of those too.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 80, Issue 5

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

From: Liam Proven 
> To: "Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" 
> Subject: Re: Motor generator
>
> I think because for lesser minds, such as mine, [APL is] line noise.
>
> A friend of mine, a Perl guru, studied A-Plus for a while. (Morgan
> Stanley's in-house APL dialect.) He said to me that "when I came back
> to Perl, I found it irritatingly verbose..." and then was immediately
> deeply shocked at the thought.
>
> I seriously think this is why Lisp didn't go mainstream. For a certain
> type of human mind, it's wonderful and clear and expressive, but for
> most of us, it's just a step too far.
>
> Ditto Forth, ditto Postscript, etc.
>
> Plain old algebraic infix notation has thrived for half a millennium
> because it's easily assimilated and comprehended, and many arguably
> better notations just are not.
>
> The importance of being easy, as opposed to being clear, or
> unambiguous, or expressive, etc., is widely underestimated.
>
>
Yes, that.  C is a great assembly language preprocessor for a PDP-11.  The
PDP-11 is a beautiful, intelligible architecture, where things happen one
at a time in sequence.  This is easy to think about.  Unfortunately it's
got very little to do with the way that modern high-performance silicon
gets stuff done.

(Aside: it's also weird that the one-thing-at-a-time sequencing is the
thing that feels logical and intuitive to us since it is absolutely not how
our brains work.)

I would argue that Forth and Postscript are hard to understand for a
different reason than APL: APL is inherently vectorized, and requires, more
or less, that you treat matrices as single entities.  Not many people's
brains work that way.  It's hard enough to learn to treat complex numbers
as single entities.  Forth and Postscript require you to keep a really deep
stack in your brain to understand the code, and people aren't really very
good at doing that for more than three or four items (much fewer than 7 +/-
2).  Both of these are much more difficult for most people to work with and
reason about than something imperative and infix-based.

The fundamental problem is the impedance mismatch between the way most
people think (which would at the very least take a radical reframing of
curricula to change, and might not work anyway: look at the failure of the
New Math, which was indeed very elegant, taught mathematics from first
principles as set theory, and was not at all geared to the way young
children _actually learn things_) and where we can continue to squeeze
performance out of silicon.  This is really not tractable.  I think our
best hope is to make the silicon really good at generating and figuring out
graphs so it can dispatch lots of pieces of what feels like a sequential
problem in parallel and come out with the same answer as you would have
gotten doing it the naive one-step-at-a-time way.  But we've already done
that, and, yeah, it mostly works, but the abstraction is leaky and then you
get Meltdown and Spectre.

I don't have any answers other than "move to Montana, drop off the grid,
and raise dental floss."

Adam

That VAXStation4000vlc 3W3 video connector

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I assume it would be way too much to hope that HD BNC would fit it?  Does
anyone have a pointer to the actual physical dimensions of the itty-bitty
BNC-ish connector in the video port of the VAXStation4000vlc?  If I can get
red, green, and blue out (assuming since there are only 3 connectors it's
sync-on-green) I can put together a sync splitter and turn it into VGA.  I
have at least one decent multisync VGA monitor still, although none with
the RGB BNC inputs.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 77, Issue 3

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

As long as we’re talking about divesting: if anyone has a VaxStation that 
they’d sell me for substantially less than eBay prices, I’d be interested.  I 
have a 3100M38, but it doesn’t POST; indeed, a replacement mainboard would be a 
place I could start.  (I did try burning new ROMs and replacing them, but that 
wasn’t the problem).  I’d even consider swapping an 11/730 in unknown condition 
(this is from the Kaur collection) for a working VaxStation, on two conditions: 
you have to pick it up, and you have to take an RM80 drive with it and dump it 
far enough away from my house that no one thinks it was me what done it.

Adam

Re: cctech Digest, Vol 76, Issue 16

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I seem to recall that in "how to shoot yourself in the foot in various
programming languages," APL is something like "There's a bang.  Your foot
is missing.  You don't remember enough linear algebra to know how it got
that way."

Re: IBM lamps required

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> 
> On 12/16/2020 05:40 PM, robinson--- via cctalk wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I am setting up an IBM 2803 and 2804 INTEFACE test panel.
>> I need some lamps and lamp holders for it,
>> lamp voltage not important,
>> lamp color not important.
>> 
>> Does anyone have any for sale
>> or know where I can get some please.
>> 
>> 
> These are going to be VERY hard to find.  Some people have 
> saved 360 front panels, but are not likely to part with the 
> bulbs.  What you might need to do, if function is not 
> required, is to get a single lamp from somebody, and 3D 
> print some pieces to assemble into a facsimile.

Last time I was at the Living Computer Museum, I talked to the guy restoring 
their 370 panel, who was using LEDs, because the original bulbs are all but 
unobtainable and do not lave a long service life.  This is likely to be 
something you end up needing to approximate with modern components.

Adam

e: Gateway Electronics Sale this Saturday from 9am to 4pm

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

If anyone goes to the Gateway sale, please, please tell Doug that Adam
Thornton is doing fine in Tucson but misses him and the store greatly.

Thanks,
Adam

Re: Microvax 3100 VMS 7.3 password reset

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I for one was thrilled to see that there will be x86_64 hobbyist licenses for 
VMS.  I have an emulated VAX on a Raspberry Pi (I don’t know if my 11/730 
works, but I doubt it—it’s nowhere near a 220V power supply and it’s not been 
much of a priority, and I have a VAXStation 3100 that doesn’t pass POST even 
with a freshly-burned ROM) running OpenVMS 7.3, and a real AlphaServer 800 
running 8.4.

I mean obviously the NEXT thing to do is start bugging VSI for ARM 
support—given that the OS runs on VAX, Alpha, Itanic, and x86_64, how much 
really crucial and hard-to-port assembly can be left in it?—and given the way 
datacenters are trending, it might not even be a commercially stupid move.  I 
want to run VMS on my phone (or my next Mac).  Doesn’t everyone?

Adam

Re: VMS on x86-64/ARM/RISC-V? - was Re: Microvax 3100 VMS 7.3 password reset

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On Nov 14, 2020, at 5:20 AM, Camiel Vanderhoeven 
>  wrote:
>  

...

> 
> One thing I'm better at than crystal ball gazing though, is I can give you an 
> idea of how much hard-to-port assembly is left, since I wrote most of the x86 
> assembly code in it :-)

I replied to Camiel off-list, but I just did want to say to the list in general 
how great it made me feel that my idle BSing got a thoughtful reply from 
someone who is in a—indeed, in *the*—position to know about it.  I mean, I 
realize I shouldn’t be surprised that VSI has a presence on here, but…I was!

This is one of the things I love about this place.  Wanted to make sure my 
gratitude was heard.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 73, Issue 13

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I agree that whether a student learns has much more to do with the student
than what in particular they're studying.

I quit my undergraduate physics degree when I had a moment of clarity that
even if I managed to squeak through my Partial Differential Equations class
with a C (I did) I'd still be on a trajectory where _solving PDEs was what
I would be doing with my life_.

My undergrad degree is in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations.  My MA is in
History (but, hey, the History of Computing).  I dropped out of the Ph.D.
program I was in for a variety of reasons, to be honest crushing depression
probably chief among them, but also because I was a fairly decent
practitioner, and I had more fun playing with computers than I did writing
stories about people who'd played with computers a couple generations
before I had.  It being the late 90s, my job prospects were decidedly
better on the Not A Professional Historian side of the fence.

That was 22-ish years ago.  I'd been making beer money all through college
and grad school with IT jobs, and I've stayed in IT-related fields ever
since.  Consulting, systems administration and engineering, these days
software development-but-also-devops.  My lack of appropriate degrees
probably only didn't hurt because I started a not-unsuccessful consulting
business with my mentor after I quit grad school, and by the time I was
ready to move on from that, I had enough years of broadly varied experience
under my belt that it didn't really matter.

But that's tangential.  The actual point was: the fuzzy stuff is only
contemptible if you've got Physicists' Disease.  History is hard, and it
has a lot more in common with debugging that is obvious at first glance.
In both cases you are presented with "Here's what happened," and it's your
job to figure out "why?"  In both cases, the ability to break the end-state
down into a set of much smaller components which contribute to it is
key--and although that ability probably _does_ have a lot to do with innate
personality or preference, it's also very, very much a learned (and
trained!) skill.  The thing with debugging is that you usually are afforded
the opportunity the repeat the experiment while changing parameters.  With
history, you're not so lucky, and thus you never _really_ know the root
causes (you also usually don't know "what really happened", but by
cross-referencing your sources you may be able to emerge with some sort of
decent-consensus guess), but you can make more or less plausible and
persuasive hypotheses about them.  The idea that you are interrogating a
recalcitrant witness is common to both history (and I would guess many of
the humanities and social sciences) and creating and maintaining working
software.

I'll grant that it's _harder_ to surf blithely through an engineering
degree than it is through a liberal arts degree, mostly because there are
less-subjective metrics (particularly in lab courses) as to whether you
actually learned something about what you're supposed to be doing.  If I
were being snarky, perish the thought, I'd say that the engineers who
didn't really want to understand what they were doing were pre-meds.
Nevertheless, a degree--and particularly an advanced one--is indeed much
more about the discipline to put your head down and swallow what's put in
front of you than about smarts.

I was told a couple of decades ago I'd regret not having stuck it out for
my Ph.D.  I'm still waiting for that regret to kick in; in the meantime,
many others have come and gone.

Adam

What's the secret to LK201 leaf springs?

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I got an LK201 recently that was a little damaged in transit.  A couple of the 
keycap assemblies and their corresponding leaf springs have come off.  I can 
see how the leaf springs fit on the little posts on the keycap assemblies, and 
I can see where those snap into the board, but what I don’t see is how to get 
that put together and then keep it together while I turn it over and then get 
it in place.

Clearly there is some simple trick I am missing.  What is it?

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 70, Issue 28

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Once you've put your soul at ease regarding use of pakgen, and found a
copy, and built it (it is a C program), you might find the following
repository streamlines the process of application.

https://github.com/athornton/yarr

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 70, Issue 22

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

If it's actually running on real z hardware Linux is probably already
running under z/VM.

If it's running on Hercules, thenOK, but the host system could have
handled the Infocom games without ever even blinking.  But I've been known
to do silly emulation tricks too:

https://www.fsf.net/~adam/NT-on-390-desktop.png

Adam

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 10:00 AM  wrote:

> Send cctalk mailing list submissions to
> cctalk@classiccmp.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
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>
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>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of cctalk digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>1. RE: AlphaServer 2100s available (Rob Jarratt)
>2. Re: AlphaServer 2100s available (Antonio Carlini)
>3. Adventures online  (8...@128.ca)
>4. Looking for copy of BASIC ROM for HP 3396B Integrator II
>   (martin.heppe...@dlr.de)
>5. RE: Adventures online  (Ali)
>6. Re: Adventures online  (Kevin Lee)
>7. RE: Adventures online  (Ali)
>8. Re: Adventures online (Kevin Monceaux)
>9. Re: Adventures online (Kevin Lee)
>   10. RE: AlphaServer 2100s available (Rob Jarratt)
>   11. HP3000 Microcode is in SYSDUMP (backup) for WCS machines
>   (64,68,70, 37,...) (Rodney Brown)
>   12. Re: Adventures online (Doug Jackson)
>   13. Re: Adventures online (Chris Zach)
>   14. Re: Adventures online (Chuck Guzis)
>   15. Re: Getting files off a 7300--Mission accomplished
>   (David Gesswein)
>   16. Re: Getting files off a 7300--Mission accomplished
>   (David Gesswein)
>   17. Re: Getting files off a 7300--Mission accomplished (Chris Zach)
>   18. Re: Adventures online (Grant Taylor)
>   19. Altair 8800 reproduction (Tom Hunter)
>   20. Re: Altair 8800 reproduction (Bill Degnan)
>   21. Re: Adventures online (Grant Taylor)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 19:40:13 +0100
> From: "Rob Jarratt" 
> To: "'Dave Wade'" , "'General Discussion:
> On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'" ,
> , "'Antonio Carlini'" <
> a.carl...@ntlworld.com>
> Subject: RE: AlphaServer 2100s available
> Message-ID: <00c101d66057$89b6fb20$9d24f160$@ntlworld.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;   charset="UTF-8"
>
> I would like to come to see it when you get it Dave. I wish I could take
> one too, I wonder if I could make room as the dimensions don't seem *that*
> huge.
>
> Regards
>
> Rob
>
> > -Original Message-
> > From: cctalk  On Behalf Of Dave Wade via
> > cctalk
> > Sent: 21 July 2020 22:16
> > To: anto...@acarlini.com; 'Antonio Carlini' ;
> 'General
> > Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' 
> > Subject: RE: AlphaServer 2100s available
> >
> > Antonio,
> > Happy to take one. Can collect. Be a nice companion for VAX and IBM P390.
> > Keep hearing of Alphas but nothing has appeared.
> > Dave
> >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: cctalk  On Behalf Of Antonio
> > > Carlini via cctalk
> > > Sent: 21 July 2020 20:58
> > > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> > > 
> > > Subject: AlphaServer 2100s available
> > >
> > > I have three AlphaServer 2100 systems in storage in the UK
> (Oxfordshire).
> > > The storage, however, is due to be demolished (soon, but no fixed
> date).
> > >
> > >
> > > I won't have room to store these three systems, so if anyone would be
> > > interested in offering them a home, then please get in touch!
> > >
> > >
> > > I can probably get some pictures in the next day or two.
> > >
> > >
> > > These systems were SMP Alphas and could sport as many as 4 CPUs. I'm
> > > not sure of the configuration of these systems but I can probably find
> > > that out soon.
> > >
> > > They have not been run since ~2003 so they may be in need of some TLC.
> > > OTOH they are not rusted to death so you have a chance of getting them
> > > back to life.
> > >
> > >
> > > Just so you know what you might be dealing with these systems are
> about:
> > > 700mm H x 430mm W x 810mm L.
> > >
> > >
> > > I can't find the weight in any of my references right now but they are
> > > very heavy. Three people can move them up a slight slope with some
> > > effort but you would not successfully lift it into a car (assuming
> > > that it would fit). I'm planning to dismantle them to move them (i.e.
> > > remove PSU/PSUs etc. until they are light enough to move). A tail-lift
> > > would probably be the sane way to go (and is, indeed, how they got to
> > > their current location.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm hoping that someone can step forward and offer one or more of
> > > these machines a new home. Please contact me off-list (once you're
> > > sure you understand what you are getting into :-)).
> > >
> > >
> > 

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 68, Issue 25

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On May 25, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote:
> 
> 
> The topic for my talk next week. Unix had virtualization in 74. The second
> Unix port ran under OS/360's VM in 78.

_Ahem_.

It ran under VM/370.  Most (all?) models of the IBM 370 had virtual memory, as 
had the (not widely-available) 360/67.

OS/360 is one of several operating systems for the IBM 360 and successors.

I grabbed the Princeton v7-to-370 port sources, and I have a VM/370 r6 machine 
set up on Hercules, but I have not yet made the attempt to combine the two.

Many years after that, also at Princeton, I sysadminned PenguinVM, which as far 
as I know was the first publicly-available Linux/390 machine.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 67, Issue 6

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

On Apr 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote:
> 
> They play with the
> pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
> food or nasal suppositories, 

I was with you up till here, but wait, what?

I’m one of those kids who was just the right age.

Five years older and I would have been in the Car Club, and would have ended up 
being a damn good mechanic without a lot of career opportunities.

Five years later and not every damn computer on the planet would have come with 
a BASIC interpreter in ROM and who knows what my tinkering instinct would have 
led to.

But I, born in 1971, had an Atari 2600 and its BASIC programming cartridge, and 
in the fall on 1982 I got a VIC-20, and sometime in 1983 my parent bought me an 
Apple //e.

So I did grow up with Microsoft BASIC as my first language, and, sure, it 
doesn’t lend itself well to structured programming, but then when I wanted to 
know “well how do you do _that_?” I ended up in 6502 assembly, and picked up 
P-System PASCAL and Logo along the way.  Then in the summer of ’89 I interned 
in a physics department, and got OK at Turbo Pascal and 
sort-of-vaguely-able-to-write C.

College brought REXX on (IBM VM/CMS; I didn’t get an Amiga until the 2010s, 
well after its relevance) and Perl and Scheme and SPARC assembly, and grad 
school (both for irrelevant degrees: Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and 
History…but wait, there’s a footnote) 680x0 assembly and Java.  (The footnote 
is, well history of computing, so I got a lot of deep-dive stuff into other 
languages and architectures.)  Since then, whatever I needed to learn when I 
needed to learn it.  I’ve programmed COBOL for money, which has joined the 
ranks of things I’m not super-proud to have done for money but hey it paid the 
bills when I needed it.

Since then…Python, C, Go, TypeScript, whatever was needed.  These days it’s 
mostly Python.

But really what it was was that I was lucky enough to be in that small age 
window where computers were, one the one hand, something middle-class families 
could afford while still being capable of doing cool things, and on the other 
hand, simple enough that a smart adolescent could pretty much understand them 
more-or-less in their entirety.

Adam

TOPS-20 networking

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

*TOPS-20*

The set of config files you need to edit in TOPS-20 is found here, about
halfway down the page:

http://www.ldx.ca/notes/tops-20-notes.html

I'll paste it here:
Configuring the system

The *Panda Distribution* README has this to say about initial configuration:

You’ll need to edit the following files. EMACS is installed on this system,
along with TECO and EDIT. [More on these editors later.]
SYSTEM:7-1-CONFIG.CMD to set your timezone
SYSTEM:HOSTS.TXT to define your local host name and network
SYSTEM:INTERNET.ADDRESS to define (again!) your IP address – must be the
same as in klt20.ini. Also define your netmask here as LOGICAL-HOST-MASK
SYSTEM:INTERNET.GATEWAYS to define your IP gateway
SYSTEM:INTERNET.NAMESERVERS Don’t bother with SYSTEM:INTERNET.NAMESERVERS.
That is the configuration file for DEC’s resolver; although it’s simpler it
has some interoperability problems with MMAILR which haven’t been resolved
yet.
SYSTEM:MONNAM.TXT to define your system name
DOMAIN:RESOLV.CONFIG to define your DNS servers, your default domain
(replacing MYDOMAIN.COM) and any users in addition to OPERATOR who can send
control messages to the resolver.

To actually edit any of those, you'll probably need to ENABLE first, eg:

@ena
$

The dollar-sign ($) prompt indicates that your privileges are enabled.
*Linux Host*

On the host side, I like to convert my ethernet to a bridge so I can add
virtual interfaces easily.  Here's the script I use (requires sudo, and
that the user running it be in group adm, and that the tuntap devices be
owned by and writeable by group adm):

#!/bin/sh
eth0text=$(/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet ")
HOSTIP=$(echo "${eth0text}" | awk '{print $2}')
HOSTNETMASK=$(echo "${eth0text}" | awk '{print $4}')
HOSTBCASTADDR=$(echo "${eth0text}" | awk '{print $6}')
HOSTDEFAULTGATEWAY=$(/sbin/route -n | grep ^0.0.0.0 | awk '{ print $2 }')

# Change as we add more guest OSes with network stacks
_maxtap=2
#
for i in $(seq 0 ${_maxtap}); do
/usr/bin/tunctl -t tap${i} -u adam -g adm
/sbin/ifconfig tap${i} up
done
#
# Now convert eth0 to a bridge and bridge it with the TAP interfaces
/sbin/brctl addbr bridge0
sleep 1
/sbin/brctl addif bridge0 eth0
sleep 1
/sbin/brctl setfd bridge0 0
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0
/sbin/ifconfig bridge0 $HOSTIP netmask $HOSTNETMASK broadcast
$HOSTBCASTADDR up
# set the default route to the bridge0 interface
/sbin/route add -net 0.0.0.0/0 gw $HOSTDEFAULTGATEWAY
#
# bridge in the tap devices
for i in $(seq 0 ${_maxtap}); do
/sbin/brctl addif bridge0 tap${i}
/sbin/ifconfig tap${i} 0.0.0.0
done

For some reason this seems to work even though that should be group
netdev.  I guess because "adam," who is running the emulator, owns the
tun/tap devices.

I have this in /etc/udev/rules.d/99_net_tun.rules:

KERNEL=="tun", GROUP="netdev", MODE="0660", OPTIONS+="static_node=net/tun"

I don't think that's standard; I think I added that at some point.

And then in klt20.ini, I have a statement that looks like:

devdef ni0 564 ni20 ifc=bridge0 ipaddr=192.168.248.249 dedic=false

And then finally the dnpni20 executable is setuid root.

All of this together gives me a TCP/IP stack on klh10 that allows the
emulator to run as me, not as root, and bridges the TOPS-20 host into my
real network.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 65, Issue 22

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On Feb 29, 2020, at 11:00 AM, cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, my Googling turned up nothing on the OS, although I did find a 
>> Robert Knight at Princeton, but no information on stuff he's done.  I will 
>> likely email him to ask about it, but wanted to ask here first if anyone 
>> knows anything about it.
>> 

When you do, please tell him Adam Thornton says “hi.”

I worked for him at Princeton for a while.  IIRC he wrote the LPR RFC.

Adam

52-pin D-Sub?

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I work at an astronomy facility.  I get to do some fun dumpster diving.

I recently have pulled out of the trash a plugboard with a male and a
female D-Sub 52 connector.  3 rows of pins, 17-18-17.  I took the
connectors off the board: there's nothing back there, so this thing only
ever existed so you could plug the random cable you found into it and its
friends to see what the cable fit.

I can't find much evidence that a 52-pin D-Sub ever existed.

Is this just Yet Another Physics Experiment thing where, hey, if your
instrument already costs three million dollars, what's a couple of grand
for machining custom connectors?  Or was it once a thing?

(also posted to COFF)

Adam

Re: Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

So, it's _mostly_ a 64K problem.  All z-machine games have, in the file
header, a "high memory" address above which it's safe to page data in and
out as needed, because it's all read-only.  Trinity's header claims what
smells like an implausibly high value for a z4 game to me: 0xf771.  There's
no way it needs _that_ close to the 64K limit for writable store.  Its
"restart address" is 0x9310, though, which is also quite large, so maybe it
does do a lot more with RAM than most z-machine games?

The pure/impure and caching system is actually quite simple.  Everything
below the "high memory" mark stays in RAM, everything above is divided into
512-byte pages which are paged in and out of the disk file as
necessary...so you need enough to cover dynamic memory, plus at least one
page, plus whatever your program requires.  Cache replacement is simple
LRU.  This works quite well in practice.

I'm already running with split I/D, which did help quite a lot, but not
enough to let me run something that claims to need all but 2K of the
potentially-writeable memory map.

ZEMU is much, MUCH tighter than ZIP, but of course it's in MACRO-11
assembly, not C-compiled-with-the-2.11BSD-C-Compiler, which isn't all that
tight a compiler by modern standards, and ZIP wasn't written to be
optimized for memory consumption anyway.

I tried compiling ZEMU with m11 on 2.11BSD, but there are zillions of
errors, and I certainly won't have time to figure it out (and write an
OS-dependent piece) by next Saturday.  However, I may put ZEMU and a bunch
of games on the RSX-11 system on the PiDP-11 instead.  But first I gotta
replace the spinner in my MAME cabinet.

Adam

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 10:54 AM Ethan Dicks  wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 12:12 AM Adam Thornton via cctech
>  wrote:
> > I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in
> Tucson...
>
> I'm a bit far off but it sounds cool.
>
> > So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my
> > PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a
> real
> > terminal.
>
> Fun!
>
> > Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP
> > https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp
> > https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/
>
> Thanks for this.
>
> > My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite
> > Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't
> > allocate enough memory to start it.
>
> Is this just a 64K segment problem?  Perhaps there needs to be some
> examination and optimization of the impure and pure storage and
> caching design?
>
> One can play larger games with 128K of total RAM on microcomputers,
> but most of those engines are written in assembler not C so the engine
> is tightly coupled to the processor architecture.
>
> -ethan
>

Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in Tucson,
or want to come to Tucson for it, you're invited; email me for the address
and time).

Although the party is Elvis-themed, it's really about boardgaming and
classic videogaming.

So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my
PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a real
terminal.

Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP (which I
have renamed "zterp" for obvious reasons) to 2.11BSD on the PDP-11, and I
also wrote a little utility I call "tmenu" to take a directory (and an
optional command applying to files in the directory) and make a numbered
menu, so that my guests who are not familiar with Actual Bourne Shell can
play games too.

These things are at:

https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp

and

https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/

Both are K C, and compile with the 2.11BSD system C compiler.

My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite
Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't
allocate enough memory to start it.  Other than that, V5 and below seem to
work mostly fine; V8 is in theory supported but no game that I've tried has
little enough low memory that I can malloc() it using C on 2.11BSD.

Adam

Re: cctech Digest, Vol 64, Issue 1

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I remember chatting a bit with John Fry who saw the sales margins in
electronics and compared them to food sales his family's supermarket
chain.  He figured that the marketing that worked so well in the grocery
business would be a winner in electronics sales.  Because of his
family's connections, he could also offer popular food items.  High
volume and low margins.

That answers my question about why Fry's the supermarket chain (acquired by
Kroger's a few years ago) has a logo like the electronics store.

The Fry's down near NASA in Houston was also a creepy ghost town a month or
so ago.  Micro Center in Houston seemed to be doing fine.

On Wed, Jan 1, 2020 at 11:00 AM  wrote:

> Send cctech mailing list submissions to
> cct...@classiccmp.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctech
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> cctech-requ...@classiccmp.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> cctech-ow...@classiccmp.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of cctech digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>1. One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (Tom Gardner)
>2. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (Chuck Guzis)
>3. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (Fred Cisin)
>4. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes (Ali)
>5. RE: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes (Ali)
>6. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (jim stephens)
>7. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (Fred Cisin)
>8. Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (John Herron)
>9. New Member Introduction (Mike Begley)
>   10. RE: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
>   (Mike Begley)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:34:27 -0800
> From: "Tom Gardner" 
> To: 
> Subject: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
> Message-ID: <002301d5c008$ef5ba650$ce12f2f0$@computer.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain;   charset="utf-8"
>
> Palo Alto Fry?s closing <
> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-locations-Frys-Electronics-closed-14939907.php>
> .  Sad, but not the end of an era ? apparently the loss of lease
>
>
>
> I remember visiting an early Fry?s (first?) in Sunnyvale (541 Lakeside
> Dr?, near Oakmead and around the corner from Shugart Associates where I
> then worked).  I marveled at the selection of steaks, diet cokes,
> resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc.  They had partially converted a
> supermarket into an electronics store but I heard they at first kept the
> food to keep some cash flow.  I think I bought steaks J  The engineers and
> technicians at Shugart more than once ran over there to get breadboard
> parts.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 11:24:27 -0800
> From: Chuck Guzis 
> To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> On 12/31/19 10:34 AM, Tom Gardner via cctalk wrote:
> > Palo Alto Fry?s closing
> > <
> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-locations-Frys-Electronics-closed-14939907.php
> >
> > .  Sad, but not the end of an era ? apparently the loss of lease
> >
> >
> > I remember visiting an early Fry?s (first?) in Sunnyvale (541
> > Lakeside Dr?, near Oakmead and around the corner from Shugart
> > Associates where I then worked).  I marveled at the selection of
> > steaks, diet cokes, resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc.  They had
> > partially converted a supermarket into an electronics store but I
> > heard they at first kept the food to keep some cash flow.  I think I
> > bought steaks J  The engineers and technicians at Shugart more than
> > once ran over there to get breadboard parts.
>
> I was at the grand opening of the Sunnyvale Fry's.   A great place to
> purchase Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge soda, which was all the rage
> back then.  A friend purchased it by the caselot.
>
> I remember chatting a bit with John Fry who saw the sales margins in
> electronics and compared them to food sales his family's supermarket
> chain.  He figured that the marketing that worked so well in the grocery
> business would be a winner in electronics sales.  Because of his
> family's connections, he could also offer popular food items.  High
> volume and low margins.
>
> Sigh.  It was a time when factory reps would come and give live
> presentations of their good stuff.   And rows and rows of pegboard with
> plastic bags of components with red-and-white labels.   At some point
> they got some sort of deal with Everex (which 

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 62, Issue 19

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I might have had something to do with

https://www.sinenomine.net/products/vm/njeip

And as far as I remember, at least some of it was BSD licensed, so if
that's what floats your boat...knock yerself out.

MicroVAX 3100 ROMs

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

My MicroVAX 3100 gets stuck in boot with the leftmost 4 LEDs on, which
indicates it's executed some instructions from ROM.

That in turn may indicate that the ROMs are corrupt.

From
http://gentiane.org/~miod/machineroom/machines/digital/vax/3100-30/bare_mobo.jpg
it looks as if the ROMs are a pair of M27C1024s.

Mouser doesn't have those, but they do carry AT27C1024 in two different
speeds.  Those look like they should work.  It looks like my ROM burner
will support that, with an additional, not horrifically expensive, adapter.

The machine is probably a ka42b CPU (I can check when I get home).  That in
turn suggests that the file simh/VAX/ka42b.bin (which is 256K, which is
nice, since that is two megabits) is probably the image I need.

So my major remaining question is: how are those chips laid out?  Since
they're 16 bits wide, I assume that what I really have is a 64kword memory
image...but is one the bottom 32kwords and one the top?  Or is one the left
16 bits of 64kwords, and the other the right 16 bits?  In short, how do I
slice the image from simh to put it into the replacement ROMs?

Adam

Electr* Engineering

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

At Rice in the early 90s the department was "Electrical and Computer 
Engineering" if my hazy memory serves.

The genealogy of Computer Science departments (and their curricula) (at least 
in the US) is also weird and historically-contingent.  Basically it seems to 
have been a tossup at any given school whether it came out of the 
Electr[ical|onic] Engineering department, in which case it was memories and 
logic gates and a bottom-up, hardware-focused curriculum, or out of the 
Mathematics department, in which case it was algorithms and complexity analysis 
and a software-focused curriculum.

Adam

Raspberry Pi write cycles

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I did have a case where the Pi I was using as secondary DNS/DHCP and as the
secondary backup server (using USB spinning disk) destroyed its SD card.

But then it turned out not to be the load at all.  No matter what I ran on
that Pi, it would corrupt its SD cards in a matter of weeks (the symptom
was that the fourth bit of some bytes would just stick on).  I assume it
was just something broken in the Pi itself.

I will state here, for the record, that if someone can spam effectively --
or be a botnet C node -- from TOPS/10 on a PDP-10 emulated on my Pi, my
irritation at having my systems abused will probably be overwhelmed by my
admiration at their dedication.

(Traffic encryption via simh is incredibly painful.  You have to turn login
delay way up to run NetBSD on VAX on a Pi if you want to be able to ssh
into it; the machine itself runs fine-ish, but the zillions of cycles to
encrypt the traffic swamps it in no time.)

And, you know, if you manage to cause my SD cards in those machines to
fail, well, gosh, guess I'm out $10 or so for a new one.  I'm not bothering
to back up any of the stuff inside 'em, btw (so those of you using 'em,
seriously, save your work elsewhere if it's precious--and, um, yeah, unless
you're on OpenVMS, TOPS-20, or ITS, you don't have a TCP/IP stack and since
you don't have a direct terminal interface into it, that probably means
copying and pasting from the terminal session...but if you have something
you really want off it that's larger than a couple of screens full, just
write me a note and I can likely extract it for you more reasonably).

Adam

Re: I'm sharing a toy

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On Aug 8, 2019, at 11:52 PM, Boris Gimbarzevsky  
> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for putting it up.  First time I've logged onto old Unix in decades 
> (should try getting my copy of V6 up on simh).
> Have a couple of RasberryPi's kicking around that just fired up once to play 
> with.  Only part that simulation doesn't let you do is to connect up all 
> sorts of lab hardware to A/D's and D/A's.  Have lots of PDP-11 code that 
> wrote in 1980's that can't use as no-one has written additions to PDP-11 
> emulators which will make one think one is dealing with 80's era data 
> acquisition hardware and digital I/O boards which are far faster on modern 
> microprocessors than there were then.

Well, you say that, but…..

I just ordered https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 
 , and it contains a 
prototyping area now so you can do stuff like 
https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11-temp-barometer-hack 
 .  
But, I mean…that’s a modern micro that looks to the PiDP-11 as if it were a 
Unibus peripheral, so it’s a decent model for what you want to do.

And then there’s the Unibone….http://retrocmp.com/projects/unibone 
 if you want to drop some modern stuff 
into a real Unibus backplane.

Adam

Re: I'm sharing a toy

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Yeah, you might be able to DOS my Raspberry Pi.  Maybe you could break out
of simh and start using the Pi itself to mine bitcoins.

That could cost me like literally dozens of cents worth of power.

I suppose I should be a little concerned that once you've broken out of the
simulation into the Pi, then you are on a machine which has access to the
rest of my network.  In which case, assuming you can exploit a remote
vulnerability (or crack a credential), then, yeah, you could indeed
somewhat inconvenience me.

Well, here's hoping that there is lower-hanging fruit with more compute
power out there.  I suspect there is.

Adam

On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 8:15 AM Adrian Stoness  wrote:

> Be careful eh about posting credentials right to a public mailing list
> like eh
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Aug 8, 2019, at 12:18 AM, Adam Thornton via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > https://mvsevm.fsf.net
> >
> > Currently, the TOPS-10 guest account (42,42) and the Unix v7 account dmr
> have no passwords.
> >
> > Please treat the dmr account respectfully.
> >
> > I will get to account requests…eventually, probably.  TImeliness is not
> guaranteed.  All systems are hosted on Raspberry Pis (the 36-bit ones on a
> Pi 3B+ and the 16-bit and 32-bit ones on a Pi 2B+) on Debian Buster.
> Absolutely no guarantee of availability or usability is made.
> >
> > Adam
> >
>

I'm sharing a toy

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

https://mvsevm.fsf.net

Currently, the TOPS-10 guest account (42,42) and the Unix v7 account dmr have 
no passwords.

Please treat the dmr account respectfully.

I will get to account requests…eventually, probably.  TImeliness is not 
guaranteed.  All systems are hosted on Raspberry Pis (the 36-bit ones on a Pi 
3B+ and the 16-bit and 32-bit ones on a Pi 2B+) on Debian Buster.  Absolutely 
no guarantee of availability or usability is made.

Adam

Re: A few VT-320 and keyboard questions

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On Jul 31, 2019, at 7:25 PM, systems_glitch  wrote:
> 
> You can use a LK201 or the seemingly less desirable LK401 with the VT320. 
> There are a number of LK201s on eBay right now for reasonable prices. The 
> cheap ones are always going to be untested/dirty/possibly missing a key or 
> two.
> 


I ended up springing for one that was a bit more than $50 shipped.  The lot of 
9 for $150 is very tempting, especially if I could talk them out of some of the 
shipping since I am also in Tucson and wouldn’t mind picking ‘em up, but that’s 
way more keyboards than I am ever going to have DEC terminals, I think.

Adam

A few VT-320 and keyboard questions

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I just picked up a VT-320, with no keyboard.

I have some questions:

1) the price on DEC keyboards, at least on eBay, is insane.  Does anyone have a 
VT-320 keyboard they’d be willing to let go cheaply?

2) …or, failing that, I found a posting of someone who’d done an Arduino-based 
key code mapper that let him use a PS/2 (or maybe it was an AT) keyboard as a 
replacement.  The link to the actual project was dead, though.  Anyone have 
schematic and source code for such a project?

3) If anyone's got a DB-9-or-25-to-MMP cable you’d sell cheap, I’d be happy to 
buy it instead or making my own.  OK, that’s not really a question.  There’s a 
blank insert where the 25-pin connector usually is; was that a “feature” of the 
B2 model?  (that’s a question but not much of one)

…and while I’m here, another question.

4) I have a number of Apple IIs and one III that have sustained some keyboard 
damage.  Where can I get/what is the name of the little plus-shaped keyboard 
stems for those?  If I had a couple dozen that would be most helpful.

Adam

Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 58, Issue 9

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On Jul 9, 2019, at 10:00 AM,Tomasz Rola wrote:
> 
> BTW, you would like a ride to the past? I would like a ride to the
> future. Although from what I have seen so far, maybe not...

Spider Robinson did a story about this, entitled “The Time-Traveler.”

The method, while as easily-implemented now as it was then, is not pleasant.

Adam

Question about Apple ///

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I have an Apple /// that I've had for many years; it's never worked.

When you power it up, you get a checkerboard screen, where half the squares
are solid white, and the other half have a little mosaic pattern in them.

Looks like this:
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0NHNkEG9ssPsi65ojivBteKaQ

Does this failure mode ring any bells?  Obviously the video signal is being
generated well enough to sync a composite output.  Any idea whether I
should start by replacing the CPU or the ROMs?

Adam

Kaur Collection Inventory

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Last Saturday I went out to the location where the collection mentioned by 
Kristina Kaur resides, to take photos, create an inventory to the best of my 
abilities, and help her solicit proposals for the various items.  

I’m going to lead off with one of my last sentences in this email: PLEASE DO 
NOT WRITE KRISTINA, OR ME, DIRECTLY WITH YOUR OFFERS.  Use the contact form in 
the Google Drive folder (see below) I’m pointing to and send your proposal to 
la...@rubinbernsteinlaw.com  .  I have no 
power over the disposition of any of this—I am just the chronicler—and Kristina 
wants to route all proposals for acquiring these things through the family's 
lawyer.

The basic background is this: all of this stuff belongs to a man who has run a 
bulk-mailing business for many years, and who wrote a bunch of his own software 
for PDP-11 machines to do that bulk mailing.  He has continued to use the 
PDP-11s until, apparently, quite recently.

He also, unfortunately, has recently had a stroke, and although he is expected 
to recover, he is not going to be able to continue running the business, and 
particularly not from these machines.  So his daughter, Kristina, has decided 
to make the collection available to people who will do right by it (preferably 
in a public museum), rather than just send it to the scrapper, which is awfully 
nice of her.

I want to express my gratitude to Kristina for allowing me to go out there and 
root through the collection, and to Ruthann, who provided good company during 
the digging and invaluable service during the search.

There are three locations for all these items.  Computing equipment is either 
in a climate-controlled garage, and apparently has been running until quite 
recently, or it is in a warehouse, which I do not believe to be 
climate-controlled but is walled and roofed and kept dark, which are all good 
things in Tucson.  All the manuals were on a bookshelf in the home office, and 
were kept climate-controlled and relatively dust-free.  The manuals are in 
excellent shape considering their age, with no environmental damage, although 
some of them are clearly worn from use.

Let me get a couple things out of the way first: it was rumored there was an 
11/40 here.  I didn’t see one, but I saw a mystery PDP-11 in the garage that I 
believe to be an 11/70.  As near as I can tell, there are two PDP-11 systems in 
the garage (the mystery 70 and an 11/45), which I believe to be in running or 
near-to-it shape.

There’s also a *lot* of stuff out in the warehouse, much of it apparently 
bought from the University of Arizona at auction over the years, largely 
shrinkwrapped (sometimes to pallets, sometimes not) or stored in plastic bags.  
My guess would be that the things in the garage were in general never used 
after their acquisition, although some may well have been migrated out there 
after their useful lifespan was over. This is a GUESS.

I have no idea of the condition of any of it, or what was cannibalized as 
spares for other things; I can say that, in general, it’s been stored out of 
the weather and doesn’t seem to be water damaged or (for Tucson anyway) very 
dusty.

I (and the Kaur family, and everyone) make NO GUARANTEE AT ALL of the condition 
of any of this.  Everything here is sold WHERE IT IS and AS IT IS and it may or 
may not work or be restorable.  It is YOUR responsibility to pick it up, and if 
it can’t reasonably be restored, tough luck.  We don’t know, and the one man in 
the world who DID know is not in any condition at the moment to tell us.

As you might expect from a bulk-mailing business, this collection is 
super-heavy on printers and various paper-handling devices, as well as tape 
drives.  These are things I know almost nothing about: I have mostly collected 
8-bit micros and videogame systems, and only recently have started acquiring 
and restoring DEC equipment.

There may well be pictures of things Kristina doesn’t want to include as part 
of this lot—all the more modern printers and paper-handling stuff is destined 
for people in the printing-and-mailing world in Tucson.  But there’s an awful 
lot of stuff here where “uh, it looks like a lineprinter to me, and maybe you 
connect it to a PDP-11?” or “that’s probably a disk drive?” or “it’s a 
controller for _something_.”

So among the things I’m asking you to do is to please help identify what I took 
pictures of.  I’ll call out the things I find particularly interesting and 
baffling.

I have already offered first pick of the manuals to Al Kossow and bitsavers.org 
, the Living Computer Museum and Labs, and Jason Scott 
at the Internet Archives, since that is likelier to get them scanned and 
preserved than if they just vanish into people’s private collections.  The LCML 
has indicated interest, and I have not heard back yet from the other two.  If 
there’s something from the manual collection you particularly want, and one of 

Kaur collection inventory

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Last Saturday I went out to the location where the collection mentioned by 
Kristina Kaur resides, to take photos, create an inventory to the best of my 
abilities, and help her solicit proposals for the various items.  

I’m going to lead off with one of my last sentences in this email: PLEASE DO 
NOT WRITE KRISTINA, OR ME, DIRECTLY WITH YOUR OFFERS.  Use the contact form in 
the Google Drive folder (see below) I’m pointing to and send your proposal to 
la...@rubinbernsteinlaw.com  .  I have no 
power over the disposition of any of this—I am just the chronicler—and Kristina 
wants to route all proposals for acquiring these things through the family's 
lawyer.

The basic background is this: all of this stuff belongs to a man who has run a 
bulk-mailing business for many years, and who wrote a bunch of his own software 
for PDP-11 machines to do that bulk mailing.  He has continued to use the 
PDP-11s until, apparently, quite recently.

He also, unfortunately, has recently had a stroke, and although he is expected 
to recover, he is not going to be able to continue running the business, and 
particularly not from these machines.  So his daughter, Kristina, has decided 
to make the collection available to people who will do right by it (preferably 
in a public museum), rather than just send it to the scrapper, which is awfully 
nice of her.

I want to express my gratitude to Kristina for allowing me to go out there and 
root through the collection, and to Ruthann, who provided good company during 
the digging and invaluable service during the search.

There are three locations for all these items.  Computing equipment is either 
in a climate-controlled garage, and apparently has been running until quite 
recently, or it is in a warehouse, which I do not believe to be 
climate-controlled but is walled and roofed and kept dark, which are all good 
things in Tucson.  All the manuals were on a bookshelf in the home office, and 
were kept climate-controlled and relatively dust-free.  The manuals are in 
excellent shape considering their age, with no environmental damage, although 
some of them are clearly worn from use.

Let me get a couple things out of the way first: it was rumored there was an 
11/40 here.  I didn’t see one, but I saw a mystery PDP-11 in the garage that I 
believe to be an 11/70.  As near as I can tell, there are two PDP-11 systems in 
the garage (the mystery 70 and an 11/45), which I believe to be in running or 
near-to-it shape.

There’s also a *lot* of stuff out in the warehouse, much of it apparently 
bought from the University of Arizona at auction over the years, largely 
shrinkwrapped (sometimes to pallets, sometimes not) or stored in plastic bags.  
My guess would be that the things in the garage were in general never used 
after their acquisition, although some may well have been migrated out there 
after their useful lifespan was over. This is a GUESS.

I have no idea of the condition of any of it, or what was cannibalized as 
spares for other things; I can say that, in general, it’s been stored out of 
the weather and doesn’t seem to be water damaged or (for Tucson anyway) very 
dusty.

I (and the Kaur family, and everyone) make NO GUARANTEE AT ALL of the condition 
of any of this.  Everything here is sold WHERE IT IS and AS IT IS and it may or 
may not work or be restorable.  It is YOUR responsibility to pick it up, and if 
it can’t reasonably be restored, tough luck.  We don’t know, and the one man in 
the world who DID know is not in any condition at the moment to tell us.

As you might expect from a bulk-mailing business, this collection is 
super-heavy on printers and various paper-handling devices, as well as tape 
drives.  These are things I know almost nothing about: I have mostly collected 
8-bit micros and videogame systems, and only recently have started acquiring 
and restoring DEC equipment.

There may well be pictures of things Kristina doesn’t want to include as part 
of this lot—all the more modern printers and paper-handling stuff is destined 
for people in the printing-and-mailing world in Tucson.  But there’s an awful 
lot of stuff here where “uh, it looks like a lineprinter to me, and maybe you 
connect it to a PDP-11?” or “that’s probably a disk drive?” or “it’s a 
controller for _something_.”

So among the things I’m asking you to do is to please help identify what I took 
pictures of.  I’ll call out the things I find particularly interesting and 
baffling.

I have already offered first pick of the manuals to Al Kossow and bitsavers.org 
, the Living Computer Museum and Labs, and Jason Scott 
at the Internet Archives, since that is likelier to get them scanned and 
preserved than if they just vanish into people’s private collections.  The LCML 
has indicated interest, and I have not heard back yet from the other two.  If 
there’s something from the manual collection you particularly want, and one of 

Kaur Collection Inventory

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Last Saturday I went out to the location where the collection mentioned by 
Kristina Kaur resides, to take photos, create an inventory to the best of my 
abilities, and help her solicit proposals for the various items.  

I’m going to lead off with one of my last sentences in this email: PLEASE DO 
NOT WRITE KRISTINA, OR ME, DIRECTLY WITH YOUR OFFERS.  Use the contact form in 
the Google Drive folder (see below) I’m pointing to and send your proposal to 
la...@rubinbernsteinlaw.com  .  I have no 
power over the disposition of any of this—I am just the chronicler—and Kristina 
wants to route all proposals for acquiring these things through the family's 
lawyer.

The basic background is this: all of this stuff belongs to a man who has run a 
bulk-mailing business for many years, and who wrote a bunch of his own software 
for PDP-11 machines to do that bulk mailing.  He has continued to use the 
PDP-11s until, apparently, quite recently.

He also, unfortunately, has recently had a stroke, and although he is expected 
to recover, he is not going to be able to continue running the business, and 
particularly not from these machines.  So his daughter, Kristina, has decided 
to make the collection available to people who will do right by it (preferably 
in a public museum), rather than just send it to the scrapper, which is awfully 
nice of her.

I want to express my gratitude to Kristina for allowing me to go out there and 
root through the collection, and to Ruthann, who provided good company during 
the digging and invaluable service during the search.

There are three locations for all these items.  Computing equipment is either 
in a climate-controlled garage, and apparently has been running until quite 
recently, or it is in a warehouse, which I do not believe to be 
climate-controlled but is walled and roofed and kept dark, which are all good 
things in Tucson.  All the manuals were on a bookshelf in the home office, and 
were kept climate-controlled and relatively dust-free.  The manuals are in 
excellent shape considering their age, with no environmental damage, although 
some of them are clearly worn from use.

Let me get a couple things out of the way first: it was rumored there was an 
11/40 here.  I didn’t see one, but I saw a mystery PDP-11 in the garage that I 
believe to be an 11/70.  As near as I can tell, there are two PDP-11 systems in 
the garage (the mystery 70 and an 11/45), which I believe to be in running or 
near-to-it shape.

There’s also a *lot* of stuff out in the warehouse, much of it apparently 
bought from the University of Arizona at auction over the years, largely 
shrinkwrapped (sometimes to pallets, sometimes not) or stored in plastic bags.  
My guess would be that the things in the garage were in general never used 
after their acquisition, although some may well have been migrated out there 
after their useful lifespan was over. This is a GUESS.

I have no idea of the condition of any of it, or what was cannibalized as 
spares for other things; I can say that, in general, it’s been stored out of 
the weather and doesn’t seem to be water damaged or (for Tucson anyway) very 
dusty.

I (and the Kaur family, and everyone) make NO GUARANTEE AT ALL of the condition 
of any of this.  Everything here is sold WHERE IT IS and AS IT IS and it may or 
may not work or be restorable.  It is YOUR responsibility to pick it up, and if 
it can’t reasonably be restored, tough luck.  We don’t know, and the one man in 
the world who DID know is not in any condition at the moment to tell us.

As you might expect from a bulk-mailing business, this collection is 
super-heavy on printers and various paper-handling devices, as well as tape 
drives.  These are things I know almost nothing about: I have mostly collected 
8-bit micros and videogame systems, and only recently have started acquiring 
and restoring DEC equipment.

There may well be pictures of things Kristina doesn’t want to include as part 
of this lot—all the more modern printers and paper-handling stuff is destined 
for people in the printing-and-mailing world in Tucson.  But there’s an awful 
lot of stuff here where “uh, it looks like a lineprinter to me, and maybe you 
connect it to a PDP-11?” or “that’s probably a disk drive?” or “it’s a 
controller for _something_.”

So among the things I’m asking you to do is to please help identify what I took 
pictures of.  I’ll call out the things I find particularly interesting and 
baffling.

I have already offered first pick of the manuals to Al Kossow and 
bitsavers.org, the Living Computer Museum and Labs, and Jason Scott at the 
Internet Archives, since that is likelier to get them scanned and preserved 
than if they just vanish into people’s private collections.  The LCML has 
indicated interest, and I have not heard back yet from the other two.  If 
there’s something from the manual collection you particularly want, and one of 
those three also wants 

KCC on TOPS-20 linking question

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

So, I've been porting Frotz to TOPS-20.
https://github.com/athornton/tops20-frotz

It's been going fine, except that I have something going on with the linker
I don't have enough expertise to understand.

On Mark Crispin's panda distribution, "cc -o frotz *.c" does the trick.
But on TOPS-20 on the LCML's TOAD-2, I get a bunch of undefined global
symbols, which all seem to be from libc.

That suggests to me that KCC at LCML isn't configured to automatically
trigger the linker with the right library path (something like
unix:) for the C standard libraries.

So the first question is: where's the KCC configuration stored, so we can
add the right library path, and the second one is, failing that, how do I
link all my .rel files against the C library to get a working executable
(an answer simplified from "read the linker manual" would be appreciated;
I've started that but it's a little daunting and I suspect it will take me
a while to chew through)?

Adam

PDP-11/40 available, Arizona

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I have been invited out to the site tomorrow morning to take an inventory of 
what’s there (I live near the machines).

I imagine that I may well have a lot of photos that I bring to the list and say 
“what is this?”

The owner has assured me the machines will not be sent to the scrapper and that 
there are multiple interested parties, which is good, because I really don’t 
have a good place to put 8 cabinets of PDP-11.  Not that having an 11/40 
running Sixth Edition Unix wouldn’t be cool.

I’ll report back once I have an inventory.

Adam

Re: Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

> On May 14, 2018, at 11:29 PM, Dave Wade <dave.g4...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> -Original Message-
>> From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Adam Thornton
>> via cctalk
>> Sent: 15 May 2018 03:03
>> To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
>> Subject: RE: Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390
>> 
>> I Frankensteined a P/390 together out of a P/325 server and the PCI P/390
>> card back in the day.
>> 
> 
> I am told the PCI card is rather choosy about which servers it will run in. 
> The system came with most of a P330 as well, but no case.


It is pretty picky.  It did not run in a whitebox PC I had at the time, but the 
PC Server 325 was close enough to its expected host that it was happy.  I would 
guess that any of the IBM x86 server machines from the right general era would 
work.

That machine now lives at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, although I do 
not know if they have it available for use.

> 
> 
> It’s the RAID card that’s the problem, and it seems to have always been 
> temperamental. Did you use RAID in your P/325?


I don’t think I did.  Have you tried just putting a different (OS/2-supported) 
disk controller in and just not doing RAID?

> 
>> 
>> I used mine to run VM/CMS and Linux (under VM) quite well.
>> 
> 
> I was thinking of trying Linux. I assume you ran Debian? 


Indeed I did, although also SLES.  I assume you found my NASPA article on 
Debian on 390 from 2004?

Adam

RE: Restoring a PC Server 500 P/390

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

I Frankensteined a P/390 together out of a P/325 server and the PCI P/390 card 
back in the day.

I assume you do have the LIC for the P/390 card, without which you’re dead in 
the water.

At least the PCI model wasn’t picky about the disks it used.  And I’m pretty 
sure it’ll work with whatever the final Warp Server release was (4, maybe?) by 
which time the native TCP/IP support was a lot better.  It was a nice little 
machine for its day, although Hercules is now many times its speed on modern 
hardware.  

I used mine to run VM/CMS and Linux (under VM) quite well.

Adam

Speaking of detached keyboards

[Adam Thornton via cctalk]

Among the things I found when I was unpacking into my new house was a
keyboard (minus a couple arrow keys) from a Model 40 Teletype.  I
apparently paid $5 for it from the Island of Misfit Toys at the back of
Gateway Electronics in STL.

Anyway.  As keyboards go, it is super-duper clicky.

It has a 9-pin rectangular connector at the back.  Fritz Mueller pointed me
to the service manuals, but I was wondering, before I embark on any heroic
and stupid endeavorshas someone already built a
conversion-to-USB-or-PS2-or-AT keyboard kit for one?

Adam