Re: Writings on AI from 17 years ago....

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Penske and others rent tractor-trailers to those with a CDL, so ... 8^O

Maybe the real estate arm of Allen’s empire has a deal on a warehouse that
Amazon hasn’t already turned into office space?


On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 4:03 PM Mark Huffstutter via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> If They eventually have a local garage sale I'm going to head down there
> With my Explorer and a U-Hump trailer to pick up the CDC 6500...   ;>)
>
> Mark
>
> -Original Message-
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chris
> Zach via cctalk
> Sent: Monday, May 24, 2021 9:53 AM
> To: Jason Howe; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> Subject: Re: Writings on AI from 17 years ago
>
> Well, if this happens I guess I'll have to schedule a trip out there and
> a long ride back in a U-Hack. Then what do I do with it?
>
> C
>
>

Re: Writings on AI from 17 years ago....

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

I’m not a lawyer (thank goodness!), but you have to know what they plan to
do and when.  If they don’t “happen to see” your associated paperwork and
intend to scrap it, the only notice may be via some “public” announcement
in an obscure local periodical, as is customary for foreclosure sales.  If
no one sees it, it didn’t happen.

I would hope locals formerly associated with the museum will see something
like that, but you just never know.  Paul Allen left a lot of stuff for the
executors of the estate to deal with, and the going businesses (mostly real
estate, sports teams, etc.) are no doubt the highest priorities, as they
could continue generating revenue to keep some, if not all, lower
priorities going.

The medical institutes (plural) are probably the next highest priorities
after the businesses, to ensure continuity of operations, and because they
were very important to his survival, as long as it lasted.  The arts
efforts haven’t seen anything from him since 2014, and they’re very nervous.

The LCM+L may survive into perpetuity if it gets spun out into its own LLC,
as happened with the Museum of Pop Culture (née Experience Music Project,
etc.) a number of years ago.  I would guess that the LCM+L had a place deep
in his heart based on strong memories of his geekiness going back to his
boyhood.  However, if he hadn’t already protected it, it’s up to the
executors of the estate as to what will ultimately happen.

At least the building hasn’t been sold off and the utilities and security
are apparently being maintained, along with the existence of the website.
Releasing the staff was likely the fastest way to reduce cash outflow the
most until its potential future could be analyzed.  There are a ton of
qualified people who could at least get it reopened and operating again, if
not former employees with the most expertise on its history and inner
workings.

Consultants on an as-needed basis, and volunteers could fill in the holes,
if needed, over time.  One thing that’s required long-term is transitioning
to a younger generation of enthusiasts, as those of us with the required
expertise are not getting any younger, faster with every passing day.  We
will also suffer Paul’s untimely fate sooner than anyone would like, even
if it’s years into the future, but it’s gonna happen eventually.

Just my buck-two-eightie’s worth (two cents, adjusted for inflation since
bootup!).


On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 1:38 PM Daniel Seagraves via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> > On May 24, 2021, at 3:31 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > Well if it winds up in the dumpster then that's yet another lesson to
> not trust "Museums". It's actually funny than MC was taken from the storage
> shed and turned up at another "Museum”.
>
> I would expect them to sell it to some wealthy investor who wants to put
> it in a basement for eventual resale as “The first AI computer” or
> something like that in a decade or two.
>
> In any event, us mortals would never see it again.
>
>

Re: LCM (was: Writings on AI from 17 years ago....)

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Wasn’t there a question as to whether LCM + L was ever going to open again
because Paul Allen’s estate’s executors are closing down things that don’t
interest them (permanently?), and COVID-19 provided an excuse to completely
lay off staff?  The website still says “closed ... for now”.

Another Allen non-profit institution, the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly
the Experience Music Project, then EMP, then Experience Music Project and
Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (“EMPSFM” for short-ish), then EMP
Museum) is now open Fridays through Mondays.


On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 8:39 AM Zane Healy via cctalk 
wrote:

> On May 23, 2021, at 6:34 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk 
> wrote:
> >
> > The funny part is someone replied "Donate it to a museum" and I wrote:
> >
> > "*nod* Unfortunately, after the Boston Computer Museum debacle, I'm a
> bit wary of museums. Other problem is it would just get stuck in a back
> room and eventually tossed like it almost did at Digex."
> >
> > Sometimes I wonder if I did fail. Anyone know if the LCM will be open
> this summer? I'm going to be in Seattle for a day in August, wouldn't mind
> stopping by and seeing how it was doing
> >
> > CZ
>
> Having donated a sizable amount of material to LCM, I’m wondering the same
> thing.  I’ve never been able to find the time to get up there.  I’d hoped
> to make it up there last summer, but like my other plans, that didn’t
> happen.  I delayed my Sabbatical by a year, so on it now, and now I’m
> simply working on projects around home, including repairs/upgrades to my
> DEC gear.
>
> That’s one thing about Covid-19, it’s given me time to work on my old
> systems.
>
> Zane
>
>
>
>

Re: Does anyone have an H11 and need a H27 card?

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 3:12 PM Chris Zach via cctalk 
wrote:

> It is the way


The Force is strong in this one ...

>
>

Re: Tape baking page by Wendy Carlos

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

http://www.wendycarlos.com/bake%20a%20tape/baketape.html

Wendy Carlos is the performer who produced "Switched-On Bach", the
soundtrack for "A Clockwork Orange", "Sonic Seasonings", and a bunch of
other amazing recordings created on single-voice Moog synthesizers, using
multi-track tape recorders equipped with the sound-with-sound feature, to
build upwards of dozens of simultaneous chords and parts.


On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 1:42 AM jim stephens via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I ran across a reference to this on FB.  It appears to be from 2008, so
> may be well known or obsolete material.
>
> The other interesting info at the end of the article is the contact name
> and info about someone who restores or works on tape heads.
>
> Might be interesting to at least contact and ask if he's still around
>
> http://www.wendycarlos.com/bake%20a%20tape/baketape.html
>
>
> Contact John French, at JRF Magnetic Sciences (973-579-5773) for further
> details on magnetic tape head restoration and storage, and other related
> services and products.
>
> FB page with the info.
>
>
> https://www.facebook.com/ReelToReelTapeRecorders/photos/a.532104240183459/3658145454245973/
>
> The fellow who does a lot of tape recorder (reel to reel) repair has a
> FB group worth dropping in on.  This is the link to a photo with a
> pretty bad Ampex head.
>
> thanks
> Jim
>

Re: Apple 1 and memorabilia up for auction in Boston (NOT on Epay)

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 3:07 PM Glen Slick via cctalk 
wrote:

> Anyone that was seriously going to put up the money for this would know
> how to go about authenticating this item.


It's been estimated by experts that a third to half of the "original
artwork", previously valued at a total in the tens of billions in museums
and collectors' places, are counterfeits.  There have been a number of
well-researched news stories, including a full segment on "60 Minutes" a
couple of decades ago, where a counterfeiter was interviewed and showed how
he executed his craft.  One counterfeiter was so good that he sold
paintings for tens of millions of dollars that were never even painted by
the purported original artist, but were hinted at or described by art
historians, based on rumors going back into the mists of time.

Caveat emptor ...


On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 3:07 PM Glen Slick via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 8:23 AM W2HX via cctalk 
> wrote:
> >
> > What am I missing? The picture shown on RR auctions shows the board with
> no chips?
>
> Watch the (unlisted) video linked to the auction listing from Corey
> Cohen. From what I have seen in the past he is pretty much the expert
> on Apple 1 restoration and authentication.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDTchQuP_Ec
>
> In any case, it doesn't really matter too much what any of us here
> think. Anyone that was seriously going to put up the money for this
> would know how to go about authenticating this item.
>

Re: Al Lasher's electronics closing.

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

I spent many a happy visit to Al Lasher's when the microcomputing
revolution was just turning over its starter in the SF Bay area.  The acid
in the oil/perspiration from my face is probably still etched in the
windows of East Bay buildings that used to house IMSAI, CompuPro, etc.
(assuming they're still even standing, which is not a good bet, given the
crazy property values these days).  I would peer in during stops while
driving down to the East Bay on Sundays from the Navy Nuclear Power School
at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, to look for the magic that was happening.

The answer to Fred's question below about will any remain, is yes, as long
as you consider Eastern Europe within commuting distance.  You can still
get vacuum tubes and core memory for a pittance from there, often with
circuit boards having the appropriate sockets and edge connectors that make
it a cinch to connect things together.

The USAF SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) systems provided the
ability to display, analyze, and share tracking data from the Distant Early
Warning (DEW Line) radars in the Northern U.S., Canada, Greenland, Iceland,
and the Faroe Islands, as well as shorter-range radars across the U.S., and
directly control anti-aircraft missiles and interceptor aircraft via their
autopilot.

SAGE was in operation until the last station was decommissioned in 1984,
but the U.S. had ceased production of vacuum tubes by the mid 1970s.  So,
through CIA-established front companies in Western Europe, tubes were
purchased from commercial manufacturers in Warsaw Pact countries,
especially Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

EPrey is the usual route to find these suppliers, many of whom are also in
Russia.  That's hilarious when you consider that the local Communist group
in Berkeley met in a rented space above Al's place (he was a WW-II vet),
that the FBI monitored closely through the 1970s.  As Russian
comdeian Yakov Smirnov said, "In United States, you watch television, but
in USSR, television watches _you_."  Now, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc.,
provide that service to the highest bidders, at least in terms of where you
surf the web, what you search for and buy, and so forth, if not outright
"monetize" your Alexa/Echo, Hangouts, FaceTime, and other personal video
and audio streams.

All the Best,
Jim  KJ7JHE


On Sat, Dec 5, 2020 at 2:47 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk 
wrote:

>
>
> Will ANY remain?
>
> --
> Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
>

Re: Tutor needed for college student

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Cindy - if he can't find any other alternative, please feel free to forward
his contact info to me, or send my e-mail address to him (a Reply To will
expose it), cc: me.

The rest of this is background for those who may be curious about the state
of our educational system from someone on the inside - those with lives may
return to them now.

In the olden days, before CS was offered Pretty Much Everywhere, discrete
math courses were often disguised by titles such as Finite Automata and
State Machines and offered in Science or Engineering departments, while
courses on Predicate Calculus, and Number Theory (e.g., Groups, Fields, and
Rings) were typically required to be taken in Math departments.

Some requirements have been gradually sliding down into earlier grades, to
the point where Number Theory is now taught in small bites (pun fully
intended) starting in middle schools as early as 5th grade (beginning the
hierarchy with Whole numbers).  Eventually, a number type or two,
properties, identities, etc., are added, potentially up through Real
numbers in high school, depending on whether Physics and/or Advanced
Electronics is going to be taken.

Some states are mandating CS fundamentals in every grade, from K through 12
(Virginia has come up with one of the best I've seen, as it includes
sample lesson and unit plans in addition to the curriculum requirements).
CS in K - 12 may sound ridiculous, but the sooner you can expose kids to
the most basic concepts, it's much more likely they'll be able to continue
the progression.  I've taught binary math to kindergartners using pennies.
They don't know that a penny is 1/100th of a dollar, because they can't
understand what either of those concepts are, but they do know that pennies
are shiny (I go to the bank to get rolls of new ones) and they see that
others who are older use them to buy things.

I just use pennies to represent ones, and absence of pennies as zeroes in
binary, usually in egg cartons to immediately show the organization of
bits, and making more obvious where the absences are.  Kids learn how to
read and say binary numbers (e.g., 10 isn't "ten", it's "one-zero", and
they haven't learned decimal ten yet anyway, which is a good thing).  It's
much easier to teach binary math first, and higher-order number
representations later, than the other way around.

Then, we go through the four rules for binary addition - zero plus zero
equals zero, zero plus one equals one, one plus zero equals one, and one
plus one equals zero and carry a one to the left.  It's easy for the kids
to learn this by handling the pennies and moving them between egg carton
depressions in accordance with those rules.  In later grades,
multiplication by two by moving each penny one space to the left is
likewise a piece of cake, as well as division by two by moving each penny
to the right.

When kids learn a concept, they get to keep the pennies used in that day's
lesson, and kids will do lots of things to become shiny penny hoarders.
That includes stealing other kids' pennies, whereupon, when, not if caught,
we make a detour into computing ethics, which is one of the sets of
concepts required to be covered in every CS course!

BTW, one of the reasons that we have to get girls exposed to STEM in a
friendly way as early as possible is because peer pressure against them
excelling in STEM starts around the fourth grade.  I've actually overheard
conversations among girls that young that go something like this: "Oh, you
don't want to be too good at math and science because then you'll make the
boys not like you because you're smarter.  Then, they won't ask you out on
dates, you won't get married, and you'll never have kids and grandkids."  I
am not making this up, and there are geographic/ethnic groups that
reinforce this in spades - girls are supposed to get married after high
school, have kids, and raise a family ... period.

Based on what I've observed going on in K - 12 STEM in most states, I'm
seriously wondering who will be keeping the lights on, let alone the rest
of our infrastructure running, when I'm at the age where getting my
favorite flavor of pudding will be the high point of my day.  People with
humanities degrees (almost no universities offer true liberal arts programs
any more, where science and math are given equal emphasis to literature,
history, etc.) are now preferable to become STEM teachers than people with
STEM degrees.

Part of it is because there are now ten people with humanities degrees for
each job opening requiring them, but there are upwards of two STEM jobs for
each person with such a degree, so people with humanities degrees are
simply cheaper to hire.  It's even worse in education, where recruiting
people with STEM degrees is very difficult due to competition from
commercial organizations, especially high-cost-of-living metro areas.
Educational administrators almost all have humanities degrees now, as the
old-timers who have STEM degrees and come up through 

Re: Old mainframes in Finland

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

If you try to access the paper describing the 2017 - 2018 restoration work,
you soon crash into an academic publication paywall, but if you're
persistent enough, as my frugal, self-funded computing and robotics
students and I are, you will eventually find this link to the PDF of the
paper at the authors' institution, Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza University of
Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland:

http://senster.agh.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ms_version_Senster_Reactivation_of_a_Cybernetic_Sculpture_Leonardo.pdf

Enjoy!
Jim  KJ7JHE


On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 5:47 PM Gavin Scott via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 7:29 PM Paul Koning via cctalk
>  wrote:
> > The sculpture skeleton also still exists, quite amazingly.
>
> Seems to be doing even better than that...
>
> http://senster.agh.edu.pl/
>

Re: Apple 1

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Starting in 1987, future Mac product circuitry and VLSI designs were run on
a Cray X-MP/48 for hardware and software simulations under Unicos Cray’s
licensed version of Unix System V:  Apple was the first company that Cray
allowed to access their Network Systems Corporation (Minneapolis) developed
high-speed channel, operating at 850Mbits per second, which Cray called its
HSX channel.

https://www.cbronline.com/news/apple_uses_cray_x_mp_and_unix_to_design_your_next_macintosh/



On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 8:16 PM Ethan O'Toole via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> > He didn't know of anyone doing much other with it either.  I think it
> was
> > bought before there was a unix type OS under the Macos.
> > thanks
> > Jim
>
> https://wiki.c2.com/?AppleCrayComputer
>
> They bought it to use to design the next Macintosh CPU I thought (break
> away from the 68000 but never did), but that page talks about electronics
> layout.
>
> - Ethan
>

Re: Living Computer Museum

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

A, Rich, now you've gone and taken all the mystery out of it, and the
fun of complaining about something over which we have no control!  Unfair
to Local 12 of the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union!  :D

On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 2:25 PM Rich Alderson via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Just to make sure everyone knows that we haven't lost our minds:
>
> Nothing is going in the skip/dumpster/e-waste recycling bin.  It's a long
> pause, that's all.
>
> Rich Alderson
> ex-Sr. Systems Engineer/Curator emeritus
> Living Computers: Museum + Labs
> 2245 1st Ave S
> Seattle, WA 98134
>
> Cell: (206) 465-2916
> Desk: (206) 342-2239
>
> http://www.LivingComputers.org/
>

Re: State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Speaking of COBOL and Admiral Grace Hopper, I have one of her actual
nanoseconds, a piece of insulated solid wire about 11.2 inches long, when
she was a Superintendent's guest lecturer.  Since I was a Navy MSCS
student, she "signed" it with stripes and gaps in magic marker, as the ones
and zeroes in ASCII representing her name.

An enterprising headhunter scoured retirement communities in Florida,
Texas, Arizona, etc., in 1999, looking for COBOL programmers who knew where
the two-digit dates were in the code.  In many cases, the source had been
lost by the 1990s, so they really had to know the code.  AIUI, the Federal
Reserve and many banking systems still run COBOL executables that have been
wrapped to enable them to be run on modern OSes on current hardware, much
as FORTRAN executables run on NASA missions, such as the Mars orbiters,
landers, and rovers.  Rewriting such code would introduce bugs galore,
especially anything contracted out by the government to the lowest bidder.

As for learning computing, I have a slightly different range of students
that are my charges than present company.  It starts with kindergartners
and ends with adults of all ages in colleges and universities.  OK, so what
the heck can a kindergartner possibly learn about computing?  Notice that I
didn't say computer science, that's a subset of computing.  Computing
encompasses mathematics, physics, science, engineering, hardware, software,
and all of the more specialized areas under each of those major
categories.  Programming isn't even up toward the top, any more than
soldering is, although my students all learn some things that will be
useful throughout their lives, no matter where they wind up career-wise.

Here's what kindergartners can learn about computing: the concepts of
something and nothing, and that there is literally money in computers.
Huh?  The little ones don't even see a one or a zero when I start them out
- we start with one of the most fundamental concepts in computing that even
some freshman CS students often don't comprehend, the difference between
something and nothing.  I ask them to identify opposites that they can
sense, such as light and dark, a marble and an absence of a marble, left
and right hands, magnets that attract and magnets that repel, etc.

Eventually, we graduate to pennies: nice, shiny, brand-new-from-the-bank
pennies that, to a kindergartner, are actual gold.  They play with the
pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
food or nasal suppositories, under careful supervision by multiple adults.
They also find out that there is another opposites concept: heads and
tails, which we acknowledge as what we educators call a scaffolding
element, upon which other concepts will be built later.

They're then provided egg cartons, which enables them to start learning the
concept of organization, which even many adults never get close to
mastering.  After a while, the tykes are encouraged to toss the pennies
short distances and they learn that the pennies just happen to fit nicely
at the bottom of the egg-holding parts of the cartons.  That's when I begin
repeating the mantra to them every day: "There's literally money in
computers.  There's literally money in computers ... "  When they start
repeating it at home, their parents/guardians thank me profusely when they
see me.

Now the magic begins - the kids are shown that patterns can be created with
shiny pennies and not-so-shiny empty holes.  I collect egg cartons from
institutional kitchens that use real in-the-shell eggs, e.g. breakfast
places like IHOP, Denny's, etc., that serve eggs sunny-side-up/down.  Very
few kitchens use real eggs any more unless they're serving dishes with
actual yolks and whites - omelettes, scrambled eggs, baked goods, etc., are
all made with powdered eggs or liquid egg mixtures, even at what you might
consider upscale restaurants.  The cartons they use are upwards of
eight-by-eight eggs in size, which stack nicely for storage, as well as
rapid access to make lots of whole, fresh egg dishes.

You might be seeing where I'm going with the eight-by-eight cartons,
because they're ideal for representing arrays of bits as bytes, with rows
potentially representing successive memory locations, registers, graphics
buffers, etc.  Of course, the kindergartners aren't going to understand
anything about those sorts of concepts, but by the time I do get to them,
they don't think twice about manipulating pennies in egg cartons.

In the higher grades, I teach them binary  math after we map pennies to
ones and the egg holes to zeroes.  They haven't learned decimal numbers and
math at that point, yet, so this is a terrific opportunity to get them
comfortable with bits without the confusion of seeing 10 and reflexively
reading it as ten - it's always pronounced "one zero".

At that point, they can learn the four rules for binary addition:  0 + 0 =
0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 0 = 1, and 1 + 1 = 0 and carry 1 to the next 

Re: Fwd: Crypto AG

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 4:08 PM Toby Thain via cctalk 
wrote:

Is this blather on topic?
>
> If so I need to be on a different list.
>

Go ahead, if you think you can enjoy ignoring the reality that exists
outside an imaginary bubble.  Computing was, and is, used for all sorts of
useful purposes, including protecting people from their own negligence.  We
crossed the Rubicon in the late 1980s when it comes to preventing world
hunger, because without computing and high-speed telecommunications,
production and distribution of food world-wide for a population closing in
on eight billion people would be impossible.  Likewise for pretty much any
economic undertaking in any sector, anywhere, these days.  Look what's
happening to the supply chains coming out of China now that 1.3 billion
people are increasingly being quarantined in response to a virus with a
speck of RNA that kills.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,
even if subsequent stanzas may only rhyme.  That includes computing
history, as it's been entwined in making all of our existences possible.

Re: Fwd: Crypto AG

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 2:49 PM Holm Tiffe  wrote:


> You are talking from the US, right?
> There is no other country on the world that fit's that nicely to your
> described symptoms.
>

See the foregoing posts.  There is no other country in the world outside
the U.S. capable of saving, let alone willing, unlimited numbers of
thankless, forgetful, sanctimonious examples of limited vision and
knowledge of real history.  BTW, what were your predecessors doing between
1933 and 1945, Holm?

Jim

Re: Fwd: Crypto AG

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 7:36 AM Will Cooke via cctalk 
wrote:


> > Would the US prefer to not use arbitration at all ? Then it would be
> asimple matter of who is the strongest.
>

Worked pretty well for Teddy Roosevelt and the rest of yes, we, the U.S.,
over history, who saved most others' bacon over and over again.  That
includes my father starting with the 101st AD at Normandy and ending at
Berchtesgaden, with a POW stint in between after the Battle of the Bulge,
when he lost a third of his body weight thanks to the Nazi cleanse.  I've
spent over a third of my life in similar pursuits of pulling posteriors out
of fires of their own making.  Don't even _think_ of lecturing me on this
kind of subject.


> Mr. Manley doesn't speak for all of the US.
>

Just the parts that matter.


> I respectfully request this stay at least vaguely on topic.
>

And I used multiple PDP-11/70s running RSX-11 on RP-04s and RP-06s to do
the above, and much more, as an engineer and a computer scientist.  So,
there ya go, back on topic, Will.

Most respectfully,
Jim

Re: Fwd: Crypto AG

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Not everyone on this list was even alive when much of this happened, and
others of us were busy dealing with other very important things going on in
The Real World then, so this is a very interesting story for many.

Anyone willing to do business with the terrorists in Iran knew why they
were getting the big bucks to do it.  It's like being surprised when you
get eaten while swimming with Great White sharks - it's in their nature.  A
regime that repeatedly violates sovereign foreign territory in the form of
embassies and consulates should have been cut off from the rest of
the world on Day One until they dried up and blew away.  They laugh when
others treat them with civility and grant them unearned respect as a
legitimate government.

The Enigma machines were made by a company that produced earlier commercial
versions that didn't have the plugboard on the front of the Enigmas, and
the rotors were wired differently from those provided for the Enigmas. The
commercial predecessors were common in banks and larger businesses that
needed to maintain the confidentiality of company-internal and/or customer
information, and that needed to be communicated quickly to distant
locations.


On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 2:47 AM jos via cctalk 
wrote:

>
> >
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/?fbclid=IwAR2s7TrU9nXVXx4kUy-n7-LnXz3GM754uEzJjlPeTRa-TrOWhqm_QcH1HUI
>

> Very old news, I am afraid.


> n a related note : Enigma type machines were used in the Swisss army. A
> few of these found their way in the Swiss army surplus shop, sold for a
> pittance.
>
> If only  I had  known  then that these would be worth between 50-100K USD
> today
>

Re: Vintage computing spots in Chicago?

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi John,

You may already be aware of it and visited if you've ever been to Chicago,
but, the Museum of Science and Industry is well worth a visit if you don't
find anything more computing oriented that's more interesting.  You can
check out their current exhibits and search for computing exhibits at
https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here.

Any Uber driver will know where it is, but just in case, the physical
address is 5700 S Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60637.  There are tons of park
area surrounding it, but, at this time of year and with it being right on
Lake Michigan, you might need to stay indoors lest you become yet-another
ice sculpture!

The captured Nazi U-boat, U-505, is now inside its own nice, warm exhibit
hall, high and dry, and can be entered for tours, along with its Enigma
encryption/decryption machine artifacts on display adjacent to it.  The
machine, rotors, encryption settings books, etc., are all there, that were
captured before the crew could send off a radio message warning that the
material had been compromised, and before the sub could be scuttled.

All the Best,
Jim


On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 7:30 AM John Herron via cctalk 
wrote:

> Made the mistake of not defining that path early on so mostly personal/home
> computing. But anything I find interesting or historically interesting
> often finds a way home. I think my largest sets are Commodore and
> Tandy/radio shack.
>
> I see a store called freegeek and "Chicago computer club" which seems to be
> a store but geared towards businesses? I'm wondering if either of those
> would be worth a visit.
>
> On Tue, Jan 7, 2020, 12:11 AM Tom Uban via cctalk 
> wrote:
>
> > On 1/5/20 5:39 PM, John Herron via cctalk wrote:
> > > I'll be in Chicago for a week soon for a work event. Limited time for
> > > myself but I'll have some time Sunday to maybe Uber around. Any
> > suggestions
> > > or cool spots for a computer collector to hit?
> > >
> > > I see a museum of broadcast communications is close to where I'll be
> > which
> > > may be neat. Not sure if there are any used stores that might have
> > vintage
> > > computers but always willing to try.
> > What do you collect?
> >
>

Re: The information age

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

" ... like to write their own version"

It's a good thing no one else ever wrote their own version of history ...
oh, wait, _everyone_ does that!  They once called it "To the victor goes
the spoils (of victory)."  Jealously will get you nowhere, by the way.
Inferior products and services can only be marketed for so long before end
users find and demand something better, so, anything that lasts more than a
marketing flash in the pan is more likely to be satisfying a real need.

For a long time, IT nerds who were getting payola from certain convicted
monopolists forced end users to suffer with inferior hardware and software,
but, when it came to spending their own money, users found the better
products that weren't hamstrung by a registry, that weren't marketed solely
by comparing meaningless MHz and MBs, that were based on hardware capable
of supporting upwards of half-a-dozen first-digit major version OS upgrades
provided at no additional cost, that were based on close observation of
actual humans using prototypes of next-version products and responding with
improvements based on voluminous user feedback, that were copied endlessly,
but with inferior results, etc., etc., etc.

Estate and garage sales of retired engineers' collections who are
downsizing are lucrative sources of ... sources!

If anyone wants 4004 code, just open up one of those shiny silver or dark
green boxes on a corner of any intersection with a traffic light ...

It's "lawsuit", not "law suite", BTW.  Slingers of code and CAD layouts
have to get every single character and trace absolutely correct.


On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 12:15 PM dwight via cctalk 
wrote:

> It is such a shame that in the "information age", we have lost so much of
> the information. It doesn't help when we have people like Jobs that like to
> write their own version.
> It is even worse when companies think it is a law suite risk to keep
> information more than a year. It is all lost.
> "The information lost age"
> Dwight
>
>

Re: First Internet message and ...

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Don't spoil the spirit of excitement over this sort of thing, even if they
get every detail wrong.  You weren't present for this event, and even
"expert" historians routinely also get a _lot_ of things wrong.  I lived
through this era, and have spent the last two decades conveying the
importance of such things to current-day scientific and engineering
researchers, as well as the public, as a volunteer senior docent and
restoration engineer at the Computer History Museum, as well as a STEM
teacher.

I'd commit some high crimes and misdemeanors if I could get any of my high
school and college students to exhibit even one percent of this level of
excitement about the stupendous things that happened just in 1969.  Beyond
the first successful remote login between heterogeneous computers via a
standard interface (not the first time a "message" was sent over the
"Internet"), that included the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the first Concorde
test flight, the debut of the Boeing 747, the first version of UNIX being
developed, the first microprocessor being produced, etc., etc., etc.

It's not just about fawning over the past accomplishments for nostalgic
reasons, but, to also learn from the mistakes that led to the advancements,
and there are many more errors than there are successes.  It has to be that
way, but, we don't celebrate the goof-ups and we absolutely should - let
those who have never failed cast the first stone, as it were.

One of my special tours at the CHM is "Mistakes That Kept Getting Repeated"
because, as we now know, those who don't learn the lessons of history are
doomed to repeat them.  It's not so simple though, because history doesn't
exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and we have to be observant and
clever enough to recognize the meter as well as the lyrics.  Complaining
about the small stuff doesn't contribute to that and should be avoided so
that we don't scare off the enthusiastic newcomers and others not so
steeped in the details as we are.

All the Best,
Jim


On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 5:11 PM allison via cctalk 
wrote:

>
> OK, this is gibberish, word salad, English words mangled meaning.
> Pick a topic and get concise.
>
> Gah,
>

Re: Question about Apple ///

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

The first 15,000, or so, Apple ///s had a problem where the very large,
dense, poorly mechanically-supported motherboard would warp as it heated up
after power-on.  That resulted in ICs popping up in sockets enough to break
contact, as well as micro-cracks in printed circuit board traces.  The
warping would occur after about 10 - 15 minutes badly enough to cause the
problems.  Apple quietly replaced those systems when people brought them
in, including mine.

If any of the ICs on your board have popped up enough to cause problems,
reinserting them may not be enough to fix the problem.  High humidity and
fine dust can cause socket contacts to become corroded or dirty, making
operation of the computer flaky.

Micro-cracks occur as the board warps while heating up and stretches the
traces on the expanding side of the board.  They open when expansion is
sufficient and close when the board cools down enough, generally causing
operation to cease and resume after a fairly constant amount of of time
being powered on and powered off, dependent on the ambient temperature.
The warmer it is, the shorter the time, and vice versa when it’s cooler.

One potential solution, if the warping is occurring, is to remove the board
and drill the mounting holes out to slightly enlarge them.  Then, when
remounting the board, don’t fully tighten the screws, allowing the board to
“float” and expand without pushing against the screws and warping.

It’s possible that at least one hole is being used as a connection to the
metal base as a frame ground, which helps reduce RF emissions that might
interfere with very sensitive devices, especially nearby and/or on the same
AC power circuit.  Not tightening associated screws might prevent that
interference-reduction from occurring, but, that’s secondary to solving the
failure to boot.

ICs can be swapped out one at a time with those in a known working board,
if one IC has failed.  However, extreme care in not bending any pins when
reinserting them must be performed.  If more than one has failed, the
combinatorics of the number of swaps needed increase exponentially with the
number of failed components.  Use of an o scope, logic analyzer, etc.,
along with extensive digital signal troubleshooting knowledge (especially
without documentation, including schematics and timing diagrams) may be the
only recourse.

Should you or any of the IM Force be caught or killed, The Secretary will
disavow any knowledge of your actions.  This device will self-destruct in
five seconds.  Good luck, Mr. Phelps.

FFSHSHSHSHKIKIKIKIK!!!


On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 12:39 PM Adam Thornton via cctech <
cct...@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> 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
>

Re: AlphaServer ES47 in Portland

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Benjamin,

I’m a high school teacher and am building up a computing lab with donated
and other items out of my own pocket.  This would be perfect, especially
with the networking hardware, as I have a few ES45s and a RAID disk array.
I’m in Montana, but, school just got out and going to the coast when it
starts getting hot here is always nice.  I will be in Vancouver, WA (not
BC, unfortunately), on 8/8 - 8/9 for a teacher professional development
event.   When do you need it to disappear?

All the Best,
Jim

On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:32 AM Benjamin Huntsman via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Anyone in the general vicinity of Portland interested in an AlphaServer
> ES47, for approximately $500 obo?
>
>
>

Re: Uniprobe

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

http://retrocmp.com/tools/uniprobe

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:44 PM Marc Howard via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> OK, stupid question time.  I'm at work and I can't find retrocomp's
> website.  Can you point me to it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marc Howard
>
> On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 2:36 PM Brian Roth via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> > If anybody is interested in building  Jorge Hoppe's Uniprobe, I have some
> > PCB's available. I made a few extra to keep the price down. Price is $40
> ea
> > shipped in the CONUS. These have Silver fingers rather than Gold but
> should
> > still hold up well. Build information is on Retrocomp.
> >
> > Brian.
> >
>

Re: Raised Floors

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

No firefighter in their right mind is going to knowingly pump a drop of
water anywhere near or in the direction of a data center, let alone into
it.  That's why they're equipped with Halon or other oxygen displacement,
cooling, and flame suppression systems, and the FDs are equipped with
appropriate Class 2 (Electrical) firefighting equipment.  FDs conduct
periodic inspections of all on-site fire-fighting equipment and the local
station shifts do walk-throughs to review their procedures.  If any
hazardous materials are present (guaranteed in a DC), they're also taken
into account.

The FDs that serve industrial sites are equipped to fight fires where the
fuels can range from paper through plastics, up to actual petrochemical
fuels.  I worked in the last semiconductor fab still operating in Silicon
Valley and worked with the City of Santa Clara FD on their plans, which had
to deal with the presence of extreme toxins and corrosives such as
hydrofluoric acid used to etch silicon wafers. They used to be responsible
for the Intel fab next door until it was shut down and the fab in
Hillsboro, OR, took over all R production.  They said it was a nightmare
waiting to happen because of the volume of extremely hazardous chemicals
used on-site.

Someone should be sued and go to prison for signing off on permits that
would allow water to get anywhere near a DC - it's a violation of the
National Electric Code, for starters.  If anyone sees something like that,
it should be reported immediately, and not within the organization, since
the facilities people are either incompetent or complicit in keeping quiet
about it.  That's what anonymous.hotlines are for, and the media, if no
action occurs with the hotlines - we're talking about the possibility of
serious injury and death here.


On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 11:12 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 5/21/19 5:33 PM, Craig Ruff via cctech wrote:
> > The NCAR Wyoming Supercomputer Center has raised floors of about 20 feet.
>
> Did the support posts go all the way down?  Or was there some sort of
> grid work that supported the raised floor above an open area that
> contained the PDUs?
>
> I ask because the PDUs in the DC in my office are wider (and longer)
> than a floor tile.  As such, it would require some special
> accommodations if the support posts were 20 feet tall.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>

Re: that AGC DSKY auction

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Bidding hasn't ended on the display electronics, but, it's not clear when
bidding will end, so, bid high and often! :D

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 8:05 PM Adrian Stoness via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> weird this only went for 220 bucks
> https://www.rrauction.com/bidtracker_detail.cfm?IN=5109
>

Re: Plane of core memory

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Jussi Kilpelainen's page cited above (
https://www.tindie.com/products/kilpelaj/core-memory-shield-for-arduino/)
refers to the work of Ben North and Oliver Nash to create another core
memory shield for Arduino Unos.  Their site inspired Jussi to create his
shield kit, which can be viewed at:

http://www.corememoryshield.com



Ben's and Oliver's home page contains a link to the files:

http://www.corememoryshield.com/Core-Memory-Shield.zip

It also contains a link to a page with the detailed explanations and
schematics for core memory circuitry needed to read and write to core:

http://www.corememoryshield.com/report.html


Wayne Holder shows how to build the most minimal circuit using an SN754410
driver IC (http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/sn754410.html, about
$2.50 each for one, and a bit over $2.00 each for 10) and an Arduino Nano
(about $5.00 each for one, and around $3.50 each for 10) to address one bit
of core memory and, more importantly, how to expand the circuit to address
larger numbers of bits/cores using more SN754410s:

https://sites.google.com/site/wayneholder/one-bit-ferrite-core-memory

There's enough information on Wayne's page to build the circuitry to access
any arbitrary number of cores, with the number of cores/bits being
addressable increasing by a factor of four for each doubling of the number
of driver ICs.  ePrey has lots of old core memory planes available for as
little as $30 each for about 500 bits, with intact wiring (from Russia or
the Ukraine, which developed much of the Soviet Union's weapons systems and
advanced commercial electronics).  So, you can just wire the above circuits
to their pins instead of going through the hate and discontent of testing a
ziplock bag of 500 ~2,000 teensy-weensy cores (from Bulgaria) to find
enough with the right properties, and then having to weave your own plane.

All the Best and Enjoy!
Jim

Re: %20 nonsense

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

To those of us who develop AI in the real world, it stands for "Artificial
Incompetence".  We're not talking about just the software, but the
practitioners.who should know better than to allow anyone (especially
themselves) to overpromise and shamelessly promote AI being able to do
things that are simply ridiculous ...



On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 10:16 PM Adrian Stoness via cctech <
cct...@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> u mean the inteligence of bloated software
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 11:13 PM Jeff Woolsey via cctech <
> cct...@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> > > whats with the weird tag on this thread?
> >
> > Oops, sorry.
> >
> > Clicking on an address in the mailing list viewed as a web page via
> > http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2019-April tries to fire up
> > MacOS X Mail, which I don't want because I use Thunderbird.  So I "Copy
> > Email Address" and paste it into a Thunderbird compose window To: field,
> > and it has
> > cct...@classiccmp.org?Subject=Re:%20'd_subject_line_mess  I
> > copied that into the Subject: line, and thought something would do the
> > right thing with them upon receipt.  Oh well, there I go overestimating
> > the intelligence of software again.
> >
> > --
> > Jeff Woolsey {{woolsey,jlw}@jlw,first.last@{gmail,jlw}}.com
> > Nature abhors straight antennas, clean lenses, and empty storage.
> > "Delete! Delete! OK!" -Dr. Bronner on disk space management
> > Card-sorting, Joel.  -Crow on solitaire
> >
> >
>

Re: 50Hz Pulley for 8" Floppy Drive Mitshubishi M2894-63B

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Jos,

Thanks very much for posting about the NinjaFlex material.  That will come
in very handy as my students design robotic parts, although I'm sure it
won't be long before custom-made "rubber" bands will be flying around the
lab, and new-fangled slingshots ("wrist rockets") won't be far behind those
... heavy sigh.  "You'll shoot yer eye out, kid!"

I loved listening to Jean Shepherd on the radio as a kid, spinning yarns
from his own childhood, including his obsession with acquiring a Red Ryder
BB gun from the Big Ol' Fat Guy in the Red Suit.  He eventually
consolidated many of his best tales into the movie script for, and
narrated, "A Christmas Story", which is now mandatory holiday watching in
our house.

All the Best,
Jim


On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 10:27 AM jos via cctalk 
wrote:

> On 10.11.18 13:03, Riesen Thomas via cctalk wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> > Any suggestions where to find two 50Hz-Pulleys for the 8" Floppy drive
> > Mitsubishi M2894-63B?
> >
> > If there also the appropriate ribbon gummies available, I would be very
> > happy.
> >
> > Regards
> > Thomas
> >
>
>
> Thomas's floppydrive is currently on my bench : as we were unable to find
> the rights parts I proceeded to 3D print them.
> A sleeve for the existing 60 Hz pulley was made from PLA, a replacement
> belt was printed using "Ninjaflex".
>
> The resulting combination is already running for several hours, the belt
> is as flexible as the original and shows no signs of wear yet.
>
> ( This particular drive has the distinction of using a true rubber belt,
> not the reinforced textile band you normally see )
>
> This ninjaflex  material could potentially be very useful in producing
> capstans
> Experiments will follow as soon as time permits !
>
> Jos
>

Re: a timer for the PC - screen tme for the kids

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Randy,

Here’s how to do it in Windows 10 (and probably 8):

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/set-time-limits-windows-10


For Windows 7:

https://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/6900/windows-7-how-to-set-time-limits-for-a-child/


All the Best,
Jim


On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 00:17 Randy Dawson via cctalk 
wrote:

> Before I develop this, I thought it may already exist, and the classiccmp
> mail list might be the place to ask.
>
> What we have, is the screen time problem with the kids.  If we are not
> there hounding and policing them, they will be on for hours.
>
> All the medical community says, we need to limit their screen time, as it
> contributes to their AD disorder and schoolwork, homework failures.
>
> My idea was initially do this in hardware, with a timer, and a solid state
> relay to gate the AC to the PC.
>
> On further thought, I should be able to do this in software, with a timer
> that lets the PC run for an hour, and then shuts the PC down until the next
> 24 hour cycle.
> (Installs itself on windows startup)
>
> Has anybody seen this, before I re-invent the wheel?
>
> Randy
>

Re: E01 (Was: Raspberry Pi floppy interface.

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Did someone say "punched cards ... with steganographic bits in chads that
are only attached along a couple of edges"?

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 4:36 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk 
wrote:

> On 2/4/19 3:22 PM, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
> > At 04:49 PM 2/4/2019, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> >> And, of course, a lossy compression, such as MP4 leaves room for an
> enormous amount of steganographic data, with documants and data hidden in
> porn.  (MANY different MP4 files will still play the same movie)
> >
> > That would be a very sneaky criminal if they were still using floppies.
>
> As opposed to, say DECtape?
>
>

Re: Orphan HP Alphaservers looking for a new home

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Andrew,

If it’s any consolation, the users of these components will be high school
students in an extremely rural area at the lowest level of poverty in the
U.S.  The students are eager to learn  computing and networking principles,
and these will provide opportunities for that in spades.

The performance level of these, compared with current technology, is
unimportant, as getting the right answers is more significant than how fast
they were computed.  These components were used for data services, so that
fulfills the trifecta of computing, data structures, and networking (and at
fiber channel speeds, AIUI).

We’ll make some videos eventually as they puzzle their way through getting
software licenses acquired and installed, things are configured to work
together, and we get proof-of-life command line prompts.

I hope you are able to acquire your own Alphaservers and whatever other
techno-toys you covet in the near future.

All the Best,
Jim


On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 2:58 PM Andrew Luke Nesbit <
ullbek...@andrewnesbit.org> wrote:

> Dear Richard,
>
> Thank you for replying in such a considered way.  Please see below for
> comments.
>
> On 25/01/2019 00:07, Richard Loken via cctalk wrote:
>
> > All of you have at one time expressed interest in all or part of this
> > rack full of Alphaservers and one of you even talked about driving a
> truck
> > up from Montana and taking it all home.
>
> All I can think of at this moment is how beautiful it must be to go on a
> road trip in Montana.
>
> > Are any of you still interested?
>
> I remain tremendously interested in learning about AlphaServers and
> acuiring another one or two.
>
> But I live in London, UK.  I was considering paying for the cheapest
> slow seamail.  Other people have less crazy ideas.  I doubt that my idea
> is appealing to Richard either.
>
> > First priority goes to anybody willing to come up here and pick up all
> > or part of the collection.  I will consider shipping if that is what it
> > comes down to but the packing and transprotation will be expensive for
> > the DS15 and extremely expensive for the other units.
>
> From reading the rest of this thread, it looks as though you've already
> found your collector/s and arranged a date.
>
> I'm very happy that these are going to a good home.  It's fabulous that
> the flame is carrying on.
>
> For future reference, if anybody sees AlphaServers or similarly
> interesting hardware closer to home (UK or EU), then please do let me
> know!  Thank you!!
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Andrew



>

Re: Orphan HP Alphaservers looking for a new home

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Richard,

I've got everything lined up to do a full pickup, except the timing.  It
will have to be next Saturday, 2/2, or preferably 2/9, but I appreciate
that the owner has waited this long.  The only potential bugaboo could be
the weather, but the cycle seems to be favorable at the moment.  However, I
just heard that the dreaded  Polar Vortex may bust out of The Great White
North and cause Al Gore to switch from air conditioning to heating in his
oversized 50,000-foot environment-unto-itself mansion in Tennessee.

Thanks and All the Best,
Jim


On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 5:08 PM Richard Loken  wrote:

> Gentemen,
>
> All of you have at one time expressed interest in all or part of this
> rack full of Alphaservers and one of you even talked about driving a truck
> up from Montana and taking it all home.
>
> Are any of you still interested?
>
> First priority goes to anybody willing to come up here and pick up all or
> part of the collection.  I will consider shipping if that is what it comes
> down to but the packing and transprotation will be expensive for the DS15
> and extremely expensive for the other units.
>
> --
>Richard Loken VE6BSV   : "...underneath those tuques we
> wear,
>Athabasca, Alberta Canada   : our heads are naked!"
>** rllo...@telus.net ** :- Arthur Black
>

Re: Motorola M88K books & user manuals (looking for)

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

RISC was never just about compiler and hardware simplification for improved
performance of the most frequently-executed instructions.  It's also been
front-and-center in low-power (e.g., mobile) and embedded (now including
Internet of Things) applications, which each far outpace the number of
devices produced for traditional desktop and top-end computing
(high-performance computing, originally aka supercomputers).  It's a big
reason why no one is using Windows Phones, or IoT components based on
x86/x64 hardware today.

Microsoft and Intel made big bets on their accumulated legacy code and
hardware bases being shoehorned into everything imaginable, with what
should have been obviously poor results for most of the application areas
pursued.  Anyone remember trying to run Excel on a Windows Phone with
largely the same mess of menus, submenus, subsubmenu items, dialogues,
etc., as on the desktop version?  IoT devices like door locks don't need
scads of registers, instructions, caches, etc., and can you imagine an
Apple or Galaxy Watch with cell capability running on a multicore x64
processor with a battery smaller than that for a vehicle?

A Blue Screen of Death is truly fatal for a product that depends on an
embedded device, like an ATM in the middle of dispensing over half a grand
in cash, a DVR in a satellite TV receiver that requires upwards of ten
minutes to restart and get back to where the viewer was (minus the
permanently lost live recorded cache), or a self-driving vehicle at any
speed above zero.  Yes, BSoDs continue to happen when memory runs out
before users run out of things they want to do all at one time.  Windows
systems can still routinely get to the point where it becomes impossible to
dismiss a modal dialog, close a tab or window, bring up the Start menu or
Task Manager, or other critical user interface element actions that should
always be instantly accessible.  This lack of attention to user experience
is endemic to the Wintel way of doing things, going back deep in the
estimated ~100 million lines in their code base.

The x86/x64 instruction set complexity hasn't been helpful in reducing the
security vulnerability of software running on those architectures, either.
The multiple parallel pipelines that make possible speculative execution of
a number of branches before associated decisions are computed, have
resulted in the whole new class of security vulnerabilities such as
Meltdown, Foreshadow, and Spectre.  This isn't limited to x86/x64, however,
as the most recent multicore ARM processors have also fallen victim to such
issues, they've just been late to the game as the most advanced (and
complex) features have been pursued (somewhat for me-too marketing
purposes), so fewer families/generations have been affected.

Re: More old stuff incoming

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Grant,

It can be different stroke for different folks.  For many, it's the layout,
feel, and sound of the keyboard, joystick, buttons, etc.  There is a huge
market for early "clicky" keyboards with non-linear actions (keys somewhat
resist pressure until a threshold is passed, then they allow full travel) -
some are going for thousands of dollars ... each.  For others, it's the
graphics on a real, honest-to-goodness glass tube TV or monitor, smeary
color blocks, bleepy-bloopy sounds, and all.  It may make no sense to some
people, but crystal-clear digital graphics on an LCD display look nothing
like the originals on glass tubes, and yes, we have a couple of 27-inch
analog TVs with both VHF and NTSC inputs.

A big problem with emulators that attempt to be all things to all games, as
was pointed out, is that there are timing issues when not running on native
hardware that's not multitasking with a million things being spawned and
generating interrupts that the emulator has no way to predict and account
for accurately.  Many games depended on the predictability of the hardware
to perform certain things behind-the-scenes that fail running in
emulators.  Then, there's the problem of the timing being different from
platform to platform with wholly different hardware, OS, and other
application interactions.

I was the first in the U.S. to receive a Raspberry Pi (March 22, 2012, from
the first batch of 10,000) and established one of the first Raspberry Jam
enthusiast gatherings in the world, at the Computer History Museum.  We've
been running the emulators for the Pi, and while they're fine for showing
what the games were _like_, they aren't the _same_, and we have all of the
original game software and hardware right there to compare.  I've gotten
hundreds of Pii (as in the plural of octopus is octopi) since then, as they
really fulfill the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and
they've been given to students where I teach, as well as kids participating
in after-school activities.

All the Best,
Jim

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 9:51 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 12/21/18 1:07 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote:
> > no, emulators will not cut it
>
> Would you please expand upon that?
>
> Are you saying that things like a Raspberry Pi running RetroPi (I think
> that's the name) don't suffice / satisfy as the real thing that they are
> emulating?
>
> Or are you including things like the new retro consoles that original
> vendors are coming out with?  (The palm sized SNES from Nintendo comes
> to mind.)
>
> Do you have any idea why these newer things are not cutting it?
>
> I've also had great success with running '90s era games in DOSBox on
> what ever computer happens to be handy.  Does that not work at all for
> you / your crew?
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>

Re: Merry Christmas

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

My early Christmas present was finding all of the wonderful and amazing
people already gathered here and on other fora concerning classic
computing, especially S-100 systems that I missed the development of while
at a service academy, stationed overseas, and forward-deployed aboard ships.

Donations of, and discounts on, systems, boards, components, parts,
software, etc., for my 7th - 12th grade Computing and Science classroom in
very rural Montana have been additional much-appreciated gifts.  Stockings
stuffed with help from the friendly folks here has been the icing on the
cake.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night, in the broadest sense
Office and was  the spirit of all of the Winter holidays.

Jim


On Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 06:27 Tom Manos via cctalk 
wrote:

> ++Tomasz
>
> Merry Christmas, all.
>
> May there be classic computing under your tree and in your life every day.
>
> My exercise this month is to refurbish a Mac Quadra 800 and install A/UX
> 3.1
>
> Tom
> --
>
> On Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 8:19 AM Tomasz Rola via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> > Folks, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, thanks for all interesting
> > reading matter and let there be plenty of interesting stuff to read
> > about in a future, too.
> >
> > :-)
> >
> > --
> > Regards,
> > Tomasz Rola
> >
> > --
> > ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
> > ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
> > ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
> > ** **
> > ** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
> >
>

Re: More old stuff incoming

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

I teach 7th - 12th grade Science (all of them) and Computing at a very
rural Little Red Brick K-12 Schoolhouse beyond The Middle of Nowhere in
Montana.  Even waay out here, there are kids who just love, love, love
retro 80s games, and no, emulators will not cut it, thank you very much.
We recently received a graciously-donated SX-64 (a Commodore 64 with a
color display, keyboard, floppy disk drive, etc., integrated in a box), and
the kids stand in line waiting excitedly to run simulations (some might
incorrectly confuse them with games) and create sonic renderings (again,
some might confuse this with playing music).  The system came with a C
Power compiler, assembler, and linker, and the built-in BASIC has plenty of
capabilities to enable students to create pretty much anything they can
imagine.  I acquired a second SX-64 that, despite a somewhat wonky
keyboard, is just as popular as the first one we received.

A really well-designed and executed game will be a hit, even with chunky,
clunky graphics with only 16 colors, half of which are black, and goofy,
calliope-like music!  Text-based games based on great stories still have
rabid fans, with new audiences as each successive generation that discovers
them.  Photorealistic graphics tend to highlight flaws in 3-D models, such
as eyes that don't seem to be looking in quite the right directions to
represent focus at an appropriate point.  Our visual system craves matching
what we're currently seeing with what we recall seeing before, and even
tiny dissonances get our acute attention.

This detracts from playability by being a major distraction, even if it's
happening at a subconscious level.  Great stories transcend
much-less-than-perfect special effects, precisely because they allow the
players' imaginations to fill in the missing pieces.  The fans of retro
games want to escape the virtual reality of high-resolution graphics and
all of the gore that's typically associated with it.  The results of the
desensitization of young people through realistic-looking violence and,
frankly, pornography, are pretty clear from the suicide, mass shooting, and
sexual assault statistics and headlines.

Re: OT RE: 3D printer $179.99 (today ONLY) (Was: 8-Update

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

There’s a lot to be said for the Navy manuals because we (22 years in my
case), as all of the branches of the military and, increasingly, industry,
have had to educate our enlisted people in STEM principles, concepts,
practices, and skills.  That’s because the K-12 “education” system has
largely punted on doing this because it’s largely run by people with
humanities degrees and teaching experience.  Kids are more likely to be
asked how something feels about being oppressed by gravity and jackbooted
thugs that walk on them, rather than calculating the force of gravitational
attraction, per g*M1*M2/(r^2).

I know this because, following my Navy and SillyCon Valley careers, I’ve
been teaching 6 - 12 grade STEM and Computing in multiple districts in four
states and have been continually battling to get equitable funding and
administrator/board support everywhere, all the time.  One school district
thought nothing about spending three million dollars for an AstroTurf
football field with a state-of-the-art scoreboard and stadium bleachers,
but my annual budget was a whole $200 for equipment, materials, books,
software, etc.

STEM textbooks were upwards of 12 years old - the periodic tables in
chemistry books didn’t contain the 10 most recently fabricated elements
(atomic numbers 109 - 118).  The Earth and Space Science books had nothing
more recent about planetary probes/landers/rovers since the Voyagers were
launched in 1977 (which I witnessed).  On-line/optical-digital companion
material didn’t exist for any of the STEM textbooks at any price.

I could have taught at universities and colleges, but I discovered that
none of the students were from the local region because they just didn’t
have strong enough STEM academic performance to be able to succeed at the
post-secondary level.  I suspect that the administrators of these
institutions were also swayed by foreign students whose authoritarian
governments are more than happy to pay full freight in tuition, etc.,
because it’s not their money, anyway.  The result is that tuitions, fees,
etc., are rising even faster than they had been due to loan guarantees,
grants, and scholarships.

I’m doing as much as I can as a lone voice in the wilderness.  The
humanities types are complaining that my incessant howling is oppressing
the snail darters, though ...

Re: OT RE: 3D printer $179.99 (today ONLY) (Was: 8-Update

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 3:31 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Dec 2018, Jay West wrote:
> > Some are casting metal parts by 3d printing molds.
>
> Besides printing molds, I have heard that there is now a filament
> available that can be melted out/away, for a variant of lost-wax
> [sandbox?] casting.


PLA (polylactic acid) will easily evaporate/burn if you pour molten metal
into a sand mold packed tightly around a 3-D printed positive (pattern)
made of that material.  Be aware that you need to allow for the pattern's
dimensions being about 4% larger than those of the final part's, for
aluminum after it cools, due to its high thermal expansion coefficient (or
contraction, in this case).  The coefficients for other metals/alloys have
to be looked up, but will generally be less than aluminum's, which also has
one of the higher melting points.

There's a YouBoob video from a few years ago somewhere that I can't find
any more, made by a crazy guy in Idaho.  He shows the whole process for
making a large CNC lead screw bearing mounting part, from a 3-D printed
pattern, including mixing plaster with sand using an electric hand mixer in
a stainless steel bowl in his kitchen (obviously a confirmed bachelor, or
he has the most awesome wife _ever_!).  He also shows how to use small
pieces of cut-up rigid insulating foam to form channels (where molten metal
enters) and chimneys (where gases from pattern/channel/chimney materials
evaporating/burning escape).

Best of all, he's in his fuzzy slippers outside on snow with an aluminum
high-temperature firefighters pants, jacket, and hood on, pouring molten
aluminum (with pieces of copper pipe melted in to improve pourability) into
a sand mold from a crucible heated in a homemade furnace.  The latter was
made from a 20-gallon steel barrel found in the dump ... I mean, "recycling
center", into which he had poured a cylinder of firebrick mortar formed by
a smaller steel barrel placed in the center of the larger one as a form,
which was removed from the inside after the mortar had hardened.

He referenced a website that shows how to make awesome propane burners from
cut and drilled iron pipe, then showed how he cut tangential holes through
the barrels and had inserted a pipe through the holes before pouring the
mortar, the same diameter as the burner.  The combustion gases would then
swirl up around the crucible inside the mortar cylinder for the fastest
melting of the metal, when the burner was inserted through the tangential
holes and where the placeholder pipe had been.

The money shot is when his Husky/Malamut keeps walking back and forth, in
and out of frame behind him during the video, restrained by a chain
attached to an elevated wire line, and then at the end the dog sits down.
The dog is looking at him with this priceless, straight-man expression with
narrowed eyes and appears to be thinking something akin to, "Are you done
with this foolishness yet, so we can go inside to get some chow and warm
up?"

BTW, he cited his source for all of his knowledge as the WW-II era U.S.
Navy manual for casting metal, from back when sailors just made whatever
parts were needed.  They had well-equipped and stocked shops on larger
ships and tenders, with furnaces for casting all the way through lathes,
milling machines, and drill presses for final machining.  Those manuals are
on-line and contain a wealth of industrial technical information about
every facet of metalworking, electricity and electronics, radio, steam and
diesel engineering, etc., but in language that boys off the farm could
understand quickly and comprehensively.  I sure hope that there are copies
stashed in that critical human history document vault, that the Long Now
Foundation (LongNow.org) is building, with a mechanical clock that will be
able to run for 10,000 years with no maintenance, to be installed
underground in a remote part of West Texas (kinda redundant, I know!).

Re: P112 redesigned for Z280? terminal

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

This?

http://searle.hostei.com/grant/MonitorKeyboard/index.html

It's much more efficient for a poster to provide URLs than for umpteen
others to have to go off searching.

You're welcome.

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 2:04 PM allison via cctalk 
wrote:

> >> That is the easy part, where is the 99 cent dumb terminal to go with it?
> >> Ben.
> >
>
> Ben,
>
> look at Grant Searle's display system, not the Z80 CP/M but his three
> chip display system.
> Take two Atmel Atmega328Ps and a 74ls166  monitor and P2 keyboard required.
> That yields a 24line x 80char display that is a subset of Vt100/Ansii.
> Its not 99cents but
> at list prices under 7$ Monitor and keyboard not included.
>
> Or you can use an arduino with a 40char by 4 line LCD.
>
>
> Allison
>

Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 3:28 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 11/30/2018 02:33 PM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote:
> > There's enough slack in the approved offerings that electives can be
> > weighted more toward the technical direction (e.g., user interface and
> > experience) or the arts direction (e.g., psychology and history).  The
> idea
> > was to close the severely-growing gap between those who know everything
> > about computing and those who need to know enough, but not everything, to
> > be truly effective in the information-dominant world we've been careening
> > toward without nearly enough preparation of future generations.
>
> I kept thinking to myself that many of the people that are considered
> pioneers in computers were actually something else by trade and learned
> how to use computers and / or created what they needed for the computer
> to be able to do their primary job.
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>

Most people know that Newton's motivation for developing calculus was
explaining the motions of the planets, but not many know that he served as
the Warden, and then Master, of the Royal Mint, as well as being fascinated
with optics and vision (to the point where he inserted a needle into one of
his eyes!) and a closet alchemist.  His competitor, Leibniz, was motivated
to develop calculus by a strong desire to win more billiards bets from his
fellow wealthy buddies in Hanover, the financial capital of Germany at the
time, while developing the mathematics of the physics governing the
collisions of billiard balls.  Babbage was motivated to develop calculating
and computing machines to eliminate the worldwide average of seven errors
per page in astronomical, navigational, and mathematical tables of the
1820s.

Shannon and Hamming (with whom I worked - the latter, not the former!) were
motivated to represent Boolean logic in digital circuits and improve
long-distance communications by formalizing how to predictably ferret more
signal out of noise.  Turing was motivated to test his computing theories
to break the Nazi Enigma ciphers (character-oriented, vs. word-oriented
codes) and moved far beyond the mathematical underpinnings of his theories
into the engineering of Colossus and the bombes.  Hollerith was motivated
by the requirement to complete the decennial census tabulations within 10
years (the 1890 census was going to take 13 years to tabulate using
traditional manual methods within the available budget).  Mauchly and
Eckert were motivated to automate calculations for ballistics tables for
WW-II weapons systems that were being fielded faster than tables could be
produced manually.

Hopper developed the first compiler and the first programming language to
use English words, Flow-Matic, that led, in turn, to COBOL being created to
meet financial software needs.  John Backus and the other developers of
FORTRAN were likewise motivated by scientific and engineering calculation
requirements.  Kernigan, Ritchie, and Thompson were motivated by a desire
to perform an immense prank, in the form of Unix and A/B/BCPL/C, on an
unsuspecting and all-too-serious professional computing world (
http://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/unix.prank.html).  Gates and Allen were
motivated by all of the money lying around on desks, in their drawers, and
in the drawers worn by the people sitting at said desks, to foist PC/MS-DOS
and Windows on the less serious computing public.  Kildall was motivated by
the challenges of developing multi-pass compilation on systems with minimal
microcomputer hardware resources.

Meanwhile, the rest of the computing field was motivated to pursue the next
shinier pieces of higher-performance hardware, developing ever-more-bloated
programming languages, OSes, services, and applications that continue to
slow down even the latest-and-greatest systems.  Berners-Lee was motivated
to help scientists and engineers at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN - the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) organize
and share their work without having to become expert software developers in
their own right.  Yang, Filo, Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, et al, were motivated
by whatever money could be scrounged from sofas used by couch-surfing,
homeless Millenials (redundant syntax fully intended), and from local news
outlets' advertising accounts.  Selling everyone's, but their own,
personally-identifiable information, probably including that of their own
mothers, has been a welcome additional cornucopia of revenue to them.

Computer science and engineering degrees weren't even offered yet when I
attended the heavily science and engineering oriented naval institution
where I earned my BS in engineering (70% of degrees awarded were in STEM
fields).  The closest you could get were math and electrical engineering
degrees, taking the very few electives offered in CS and CE dis

Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

> Back on topic, the tools exist, but they are often seen as toys and
> not serious software
> development tools. Are we at the point where the compiler for a visual
> programming
> language is written in the visual programming language?
>
> - Keelan
>

Hi Keelan,

I was going to mention this further back in the thread when visual
programming was first mentioned, but for those not aware, there has been a
shift in emphasis in teaching computing principles to newbies who have no
idea what a bit, byte, assembler, compiler, interpreter, etc., are.  UC
Berkeley's "The Beauty and Joy of Computing" (and a follow-on "The Beauty
and Joy of Data", offered at some institutions) curricula are increasingly
being taught (starting in high school advanced placement computer science,
as well as in freshman coursework in universities) to convey fundamental
computing concepts:

https://bjc.berkeley.edu

The associated courses are taught using a visual programming environment
called Snap!, where the (now browser-based, thank goodness) ease-of-use of
Scratch (drag-and-drop interface, visual metaphors for loops, conditionals,
etc., as well as easy animation tools) is combined with the power of Scheme
(first class procedures, first class lists, first class objects, and first
class continuations).

https://snap.berkeley.edu

Some universities have begun offering Bachelor of Arts degrees in CS, in
addition to BSCSs, where about half of the BACS coursework is
technically-oriented, and the remainder is oriented to more traditional
arts offerings.  TB, TB, and Snap! form a bridge so that students
who ordinarily would never even consider studying CS can become
knowledgeable enough to truly comprehend and appreciate computing's
possibilities and limitations in its role in civilization (or at least
what's left of it).

There's enough slack in the approved offerings that electives can be
weighted more toward the technical direction (e.g., user interface and
experience) or the arts direction (e.g., psychology and history).  The idea
was to close the severely-growing gap between those who know everything
about computing and those who need to know enough, but not everything, to
be truly effective in the information-dominant world we've been careening
toward without nearly enough preparation of future generations.

I haven't worked with Snap! enough yet to know for sure whether it can be
used to develop itself, but I strongly suspect that is the case (it's
actually implemented in Javascript using an HTML5 canvas due to its
browser-based nature).  It wouldn't be suitable for doing systems level
development, unless optimized C code (or equivalent) could be emitted, but
it could certainly be used to demonstrate the logic principles involved in
any level of software development that most people are ever likely to need
to understand.  There's mention of Snap! programs being convertible to
mainstream programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, C, etc., but I
haven't traced to ground in documentation how that's supposed to happen,
yet.

We may be part-way there because Google's Blockly spin-off of Scratch can
already emit five scripting languages (Javascript, Python, PHP, Lua, and
Dart), and it uses a modular approach where emission of code in additional
languages could reportedly be added.  That magic word, "optimized", is the
key to whether the code is fundamentally correct and would need oodles of
hand-rewriting to improve efficiency, or there are ways to automate at
least some of the optimization.

Snap! can be run off-line in a browser, as well as on the on-line primary
and mirror sites, and standalone applications can be generated.  Scratch
has been extended to provide an easy way to control and sense physical
environments via typical robotics components, but I haven't looked to see
if Snap! has inherited those extensions.

For any doubters, note that Pacman was ported to Scratch years ago,
complete with the authentic sounds (including the "shrivel and
disappear-in-death" clip), so ... ;^)

All the Best,
Jim

Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Some computing economics history:

I'm an engineer and scientist by both education and experience, and one
major difference between the disciplines is that engineers are required to
pass coursework and demonstrate proficiency in economics.  That's because
we need to deliver things that actually do what customers think they paid
for within strict budgets and schedules, or we go hungry.  Scientists, on
the other hand, if they can accurately predict what it will cost to prove a
theory, aren't practicing science, because they have to already know the
outcome and are taking no risk.  A theoretically "superior" encoding may
not see practical use by a significant number of people because of legacy
inertia that often makes no sense, but is rooted in cultural, sociological,
emotional, and other factors, including economics.

Dvorak computer keyboards are allegedly far more efficient
speed/accuracy-wise than QWERTY computer keyboards, so they should rule the
computing world, but they don't.  Keyboards that reduce the risk of
repetitive stress injuries (e.g., carpal tunnel syndrome) should dominate
the market for very sensible health reasons, but they don't, either.
Legacy inertia is a beyotch to overcome, especially when
international-level manufacturers and investors have a strong
interest making lots of money from the status quo.  Logic and reasoning are
simply nowhere near enough to create the conditions necessary for
widespread adoption - sometimes it's just good luck in timing (or, bad
luck, as the case may be).

ASCII was developed in an age when Teletypes and similar devices were the
only textual I/O options, with fixed-width/size/style typefaces (font
family is an attribute of a typeface - there's no such thing as a "font").
By the late 1950s, there were around 250 computer manufacturers, and none
of their products were interoperable in any form.  Until the IBM 360 was
released in 1965, IBM had 14 product _lines_ that were incompatible with
each other, despite having 20,000+ very capable scientists and engineers on
their payroll.

You can't blame the ASCII developers for lack of foresight when no one in
their right mind back then would have ever predicted we could have upwards
of a trillion bytes of memory in our pockets (e.g., the Samsung Note 9),
much less multi-megapixel touch displays with millions of colors, with
worldwide-reaching cellular/Internet access with milliseconds of round-trip
response, etc.

Someone thinking that they're going to make oodles of money from some
supposedly new-and-improved proprietary encoding "standard" that discards
five-plus decades of legacy intellectual and economic investment, is
pursuing a fool's errand.  Even companies with resources at the level of
Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., aren't that arrogant, and they've
demonstrated some pretty heavy-duty chutzpah over time.  BTW, you won't be
able to patent what apparently amounts to a lookup table, and even if you
copyright it, it will be a simple matter of developing
functionally-equivalent code that performs a translation on-the-fly.  See
also the clever schemes where DVD encryption keys, that had been left on an
unprotected server accessible via the Internet, were transformed into prime
numbers that didn't infringe on the copyrights associated with the keys.

True standards are open nowadays - the days of proprietary "standards" are
a couple of decades behind us - even Microsoft has been publishing the
binary structure of their Office document file formats.  The specification
for Word, that includes everything going back to v 1.0, is humongous, and
even they were having fits trying to maintain the total spec, which is
reportedly why they went with XML to create the .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.,
formats.  That also happened to make it possible to placate governments
(not to mention customers) that are looking for any hint of
anti-competitive behavior, and thus also made it easier for projects such
as OpenOffice and LibreOffice to flourish.

Typographical bigots, who are more interested in style than content, were
safely fenced off in the back rooms of publishing houses and printing
plants until Apple released the hounds on an unsuspecting public.  I'm
actually surprised that the style purists haven't forced Smell-o-Vision
technology on The Rest of Us to ensure that the musty smell of old books is
part of every reading "experience" (I can't stand the current common use of
that word).  At least I have the software chops to transform the visual
trash that passes for "style" these days into something pleasing to _my_
eyes (see what I did there with "severely-flawed" ASCII?  Here's how you
can do /italics/ and !bold! BTW.).

Nothing frosts me more than reading text that can't be resized and
auto-reflowed, especially on mobile devices with extremely limited display
real estate.  I'm fully able-bodied and I'm perturbed by such bad design,
so, I'm pretty sure that pages that prevent pinch-zooming, and that don't
allow for direct 

Re: NVRAM resuscitation (Was Re: SPARCstation 20 with SCSI2SD)

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

DEC had some employees with clearances all the way up both primary sides of
the classification ladder, General Service (GENSER, which includes some
"black" programs), and Special Compartmented Intelligence (SCI, which has
its own alphabet soup, including other kinds of "black" programs).  They
needed this because magnetic core memory was used in PDP era systems that
processed up to the highest classification levels deemed prudent to not
require completely manual handling (including typewriters and carbon paper,
at least until pressure-sensitive carbonless paper was invented).

That included communications processing systems that, when the hardware
reached end-of-life (which happened to coincide with the upgrades made for
Y2K), the software was wrapped essentially in virtual machines that ran on
current-technology hardware and OSes.  The cost of porting the original
code would have been horrific because it had been mathematically proven to
be correct, and introduction of a single bug could not be tolerated.  Long
after PDP hardware had become commercially extinct, but the government
never throws anything away, DoD was still paying DEC lots of pretty pennies
to maintain a special secure version of the RSX-11 OS for feature
enhancements until the wrapping could be performed.

Core was so expensive that it was economically necessary to repair it,
rather than just replace it, especially in overseas systems where supply
lines were tenuous, at best.  As you might have heard, core never forgets -
at the Computer History Museum, when we resurrected our 1960-vintage IBM
1401, every bit of the auto parts database that it ran when taken out of
service was still intact over 30 years later.  That meant that military
commissioned officers had to escort double-wrapped/sealed/authenticated
packages containing such core devices all the way from almost-literally
Timbuktu back to DEC.

Plus, because of two-man rule handling requirements, two people with the
necessary clearances had to keep it in their presence when it wasn't
secured in a vault, and it was signed in and out every time it moved or
changed hands.  One of the benefits of volunteering to do this when flying
space-available on leave was that such couriers got to get on military
aircraft before anyone else, so we got first choice on seats.  Well, it was
as "choice" as it gets when often on tactical aircraft with jump seats used
by special forces and conventional paratroopers.

Civilians would describe the seats as ballistic nylon material stretched
between round aircraft-grade aluminum tubes ... aka a high-speed, low-drag
cot ... with nylon webbing, similar to seat-belt material, cross-woven
vertically/horizontally, with gaps equal in width to the webbing, hung
behind serving as a "back rest".  Military aviation seat belts were
thoughtfully provided passing through the webbing and secured to the inside
bulkheads of the fuselage ... mostly to make it easier for recovery crews
to gather the bodies in case of a crash ...

So, yeah, there's a whole world of physical security associated with NV
memory devices, alone, even if the technology has changed.  BTW, it's not
physically possible to reliably degauss every bit on rotating magnetic
storage media with a flux density higher than about that of a 1.44 MB
floppy disk, no matter how strong a field is produced.  It has to be
physically reduced to dust smaller than a specified particle size, or
incinerated.

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 7:47 AM Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
>
> > On Nov 28, 2018, at 9:43 AM, Ethan via cctalk 
> wrote:
> >
> >> As an aside - once upon a time I worked for a company that made their
> own Sparc boards to fit inside a supercomputer and several of them were
> inside secure military/government establishments. Sometimes a board would
> fail and have to go back for a fix - and then the RTC/NVRAM chip had to be
> removed because - you know, those 64 bytes of battery backed RAM might just
> hold some state secret or something...
> >> Fun days.
> >> -Gordon
> >
> > Surprised they knew about it!
>
> One of the documents hardware engineers have to generate is a "Statement
> of Volatility" that lists every component in the system with persistent
> memory of any kind.  For each, it says what is in that memory, where it is
> located, and how (if it can contain anything like user data or
> configuration settings) it can be erased or removed.
>
> The NVRAM chip Gordon mentioned would show up in such an SOV.
>
> paul
>

Re: George Keremedjiev

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

I spent six weeks at MSU Bozeman this past Summer integrating a
performance-boosting, wide-area network-distributed database enhancement to
an augmented reality project sponsored through the Western Transportation
Institute there.  I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the museum, which is a
couple of blocks from WTI, and I was working some weekend and Summer time
into my schedule to volunteer there.  However, with George’s passing, that
means I’ll need to step up even more, despite the 6.5-hour round trip from
where I’m teaching STEM, including computing and robotics.

I started as one of the early senior docents at the Computer History Museum
when it was in the uninsulated metal Butler buildings across from Hangar
One at Moffett Field.   Then I participated in the move to its current
location in Silicon Graphics’ former international marketing building on
North Shoreline Blvd,  followed by the opening of the R|Evolution exhibit.
I then worked on the exhibition of Babbage Difference Engine Design Number
Two, Serial Number Two, which I presented, operated, and maintained.
That’s real vintage computing, where the operator isn’t just the power
supply, but also provides critical timing as the clock, cranking steadily
despite a change in required force from a few pounds up to about 25 pounds
during each cycle!

All the Best,
Jim


On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 20:31 Al Kossow via cctalk 
wrote:

>  This has not been a good few months for historical/vintage computer people
>
>
> https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/bozeman-founder-of-american-computer-museum-dies/article_cad693eb-f70e-5f1c-94d4-78590e64b430.html
>
>

Re: VCF PNW 2019: Exhibitors needed!

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi  Mike,

I teach science (all of ‘em!) and computing at a small, rural, K-12 school
 in Montana (we graduated our Senior (sic) last year!) and we’re trying to
figure out how to get all of our mini proto geeks to the museum (and house
them) to both volunteer and exhibit some of our vintage systems at VCF PNW
2019.  They’ve started to recognize me at all of the convenience stores in
the five surrounding counties, so knocking over any more of them for petty
cash is out!

Going further than a surrounding county in Big Sky Country can mean
traveling upwards of a thousand miles, or at least it feels like that.  We
have counties that are bigger than a bunch of those teeny-weenie states
back East!

Anyway, we’ll figure out how to get something through GoFundMe, etc.  The
kids are very motivated, but we don’t have any businesses that can sponsor
and support us.  In fact, The Gas Station just not only closed today, but
they dug up the gas tanks and trucked them off with the pumps and sign out
front!

All the Best,
Jim

On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 13:36 Michael Brutman via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I'm trying to throw a party, but like any good host I'm worried about
> the food and entertainment and if anybody will show up.  We already
> know there is no food at the museum so I need really, really good
> entertainment ...  Right now we have seven exhibitors who have
> formally registered.  We really need a total of 20 to 25 to make this
> work.  We are still a few months away so I'm not in full scale panic
> mode yet, but I can feel it coming. ;-0
>
> If you are interested in joining the party again, please register.  An
> overview of what it means to be an exhibitor and the link to the
> registration form can be found here:
> http://vcfed.org/wp/vcf-pnw-exhibitor-registration/ .
>
> If you participated last year and don't want to do it again, I can
> understand that.  To keep things interesting I'm trying to minimize
> the number of repeat exhibits.  However, you can still help in a few
> ways:
>
> - Know somebody who should join the party? Talk to them about
> exhibiting at 2019. A little nudging and mentoring from a friend can
> make it easier to bring new people in.
>
> - Have an interesting topic you want to talk about? We're looking for
> speakers too ...
>
> - Can you volunteer a few hours?  Many hands makes light work, and
> also gets you into the museum for the weekend for free.
>
> Have any leads on people I should talk to or ideas for making the show
> better?  Send them along ... I'd be happy to discuss.
>
> One final note: Contrary to any previously sent communication, we are
> not "selling" spots ...  I'm actively trying to get rid of the
> exhibitor fee entirely, and will guarantee that it will be no more
> than $20 this year if it is charged at all.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
> VCF PNW President, CEO, and Executive Floppy Disk Shuffler
>

Re: desoldering (was Re: VAX 9440)

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

All this yammering about fancy desoldering gizmos harkens back memories of
a "desoldering station" consisting of a hot soldering iron ... made of a
hefty amount of copper (the kind you put in a pit of fire to heat up!) and
a long, skinny screwdriver, or two, used to _very_ gently pry up ICs from
each end while you ran the iron along the pins, loosening the IC a bit at a
time until it popped loose.  Clearing the pin holes of solder involved
blowing through them as you heated up the pads ... with your breath,
hopefully before the pads debonded from the PC board!  There's no skill
involved any more with the fancy-schmancy stuff ...

That also harkens back to my days in the Navy when I would go visit the
local Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office (DRMO), previously just
called "The Dump".  That's where all sorts of DoD-owned military and
commercial grade equipment was sent as soon as the new models came along
that the Air Force always got first (it helps when you don't have to drive
your runways full of aircraft and fuel all over the world, like we do in
the Navy!).  Most of the Navy stuff showed up when ships got decommissioned
... a typical ship can stay in service for four or five decades, s ...
anyone need any vacuum tubes, or a mechanical fire-control computer???  Do
you know why the Air Force always builds the Officers Club first, and the
runways last, on a new base?  Congress will _always_ approve more money to
finish a runway on a typically horribly-underbid DoD contract (that their
brothers-in-law always seem to be involved with)!

Anyway, as I was perusing the offerings, I wandered around a corner and
there was a guy sitting over what can only be described as a medieval
blacksmith's furnace.  He was recovering the gold and other precious metals
from boards and ICs by basically heating everything and collecting the
metals as they dribbled out of the cracking, charring non-metals!  He
appeared to be positioning the materials over time to achieve various
melting temperatures, which allowed him to pretty accurately collect each
metal in sequence as the materials heated up.  I can only wonder whether he
wound up with a medical retirement, as I don't recall him wearing any kind
of respirator, and it was being done in a large warehouse structure.  Come
to think of it, I'm surprised _I_ didn't wind up with a medical retirement,
given the amount of time I spent in those places finding all sorts of great
stuff!

Speaking of inheriting Air Force hand-me-downs, a little-known factoid is
that Admiral Grace Hopper (co-author of COBOL and an operator of the
Harvard Mark IV) used to send her enlisted people around the Pentagon in
the evenings to snag things left in the halls by Air Force offices to be
carted off by the janitors.  That included all of the furniture in her
basement-level office and even the American Flag there (complete with heavy
stand and oak pole with an eagle atop it).  Few able-bodied military
men escorted by armed guards ever wandered around in the basement of the
Pentagon because of the dank, poorly lit (if at all) corridors, let alone a
woman.

However, Admiral Hopper wasn't just any woman, and there are rumors that
the ne'er-do-wells scattered like cockroaches when they heard her coming
(and that was easy to do, as she was always instructing someone about
something very useful in conversations).  I still have a Nanosecond piece
of ~11.2-inch insulated 22-gauge solid wire that she handed out at her
presentations - it's even signed, which means it has little marks that
correspond to where her signature crossed its horizontal midpoint!  She
originally used them to explain to MBA-degreed flag officers why there was
a noticeable delay between the then-new geosynchronous communications
satellites located about 22,300 miles in altitude over the Equator, and
satellite ground stations.

She would show them a Nanosecond wire (the distance it would take for an
electromagnetic wave to travel at the speed of light in one nanosecond) and
then move it along an imaginary line-of-sight from a ground station to a
satellite and start counting, "One nanosecond ... two nanoseconds ... three
nanoseconds ... " until the audience members all exhibited the "Ah-HA!"
moment on their faces.  Then, she would repeat it along another path
between the satellite and another ground station.

Ain't computing history great???

All the Best,
Jim

Re: VAX 9440

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Evan said it was in service until a couple of months ago, so it should
power up OK, if it could all be electrically and mechanically stitched back
together carefully.  The question is probably, could they afford the power
bill?  We have a bunch of Crays and CDCs at the Computer History Museum,
and if they were operational, we'd probably have to take up a special
very-large-hat-passing collection just to pay the power bill for the
multiple,- multi-ton refrigeration units (at least one was about a
seven-ton unit, IIRC)!  Then, there's the problem of replacement parts for
when, not if, things fail, not to mention the labor expertise and
availability.  It's one thing to replace discrete transistors in our IBM
1401, but, it's quite another to desolder and yank various little black
rectangles off extremely dense circuit boards without destroying anything
else ... and then solder in a replacement, if you can find one not already
firmly attached to another board with another kind of failure.  That
assumes that problems can even be isolated, although at least more modern
systems tend to have self-diagnostic capabilities, at least above a certain
level of functionality, or lack thereof.

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 3:26 AM Pontus Pihlgren via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> That is a behemoth!!
>
> Did you ger that huge powerforming thingy that goes
> with it?
>
> Are you crazy enough to atempt a power-up?
>
> /P
>
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2018 at 09:55:07PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote:
> > The VCF museum took delivery of a VAX 9440 today.
> >
> > It arrived in two 28-foot trailers. Here's our forklift driver
> > beginning to unload the first truck:
> >
> >
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E-Q5xrsYXyjrZEZh92xIBhlStvvNUcRV/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > Here's a teaser picture of the main cabinet:
> >
> >
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEpSMzBEeOvuDnzPQ9Npc7iYmDhjZq8c/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > The full system is 30-40 feet long when it's all set up! It is in
> > pristine condition and was in service at a defense contractor until
> > a couple of months ago.
> >
> > Rumor has it that we arranged for another one to land in Dave
> > McGuire's Large Scale Systems Museum collection, and a third to be
> > with Bob Roswell's System Source collection. :)  Perhaps they'll
> > post updates too!
>

Re: modern stuff

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

One of my postgraduate school CS professors worked on the iAPX 432 and his
tidbit about the history of its development was that, whenever the EEs were
confronted with a hardware-level problem by the CSs, the EEs would
universally respond with, "Oh, well, that can be fixed by you software guys
with a SMOP (small matter of programming).", in the microcode, and Intel's
reference assembler, linker, and compilers.

Obviously, he returned to academia before the project collapsed in a heap,
and he might have had to scramble and compete with other departing CS PhDs
(who would also have hung around too long).  Many would probably be looking
at another job where microprocessor microcode, assembler, linker, compiler,
and system-level library development experience would have been highly
desirable, and perhaps where the EEs were more reasonable.  Plus, he didn't
have to put "Served on what became the sunken shipwreck iAPX 432" on his
resume/CV.  That's because it wasn't yet at the Sixth Phase in the Six
Phases of a Project, "Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards for the
Non-Participants".


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 6:35 PM Eric Smith via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 17:45 ben via cctalk  wrote:
>
> > On 10/24/2018 3:58 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:18 PM ben via cctalk  > > > wrote:
> > >
> > > Well I can still run DOS BOX and get my nice 8086 instruction set.
> > >
> > >
> > > I've heard many different adjectives used with regard to the 8086
> > > instruction set, but this is the first time I've heard it described as
> > > "nice".
> > >
> > > Admittedly there are worse ones.
> > >
> >
> > What about Intel's forgotten object oriented kitchen sink processor.
> > IAPX-432 better or worse?
> >
>
> I wouldn't call it a "kitchen sink processor"; some of it's problems are
> actually with things that are missing. However, it's a VCISC, and the
> instruction set isn't really comparable to anything else.
>
> If I had to design a computer for either general-purpose or embedded use,
> I'd definitely choose 8086 over iAPX 432, but that isn't because I consider
> the 8086 instruction set to be particularly good.
>

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 12:55 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr  wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:59 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr 
> wrote:
>
>> An (optional) X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them
>> all the time) but is not part of the base install ...
>>
>
> Apple has been using self-customized, optimized-for their-hardware
> supersets of the VNC protocol (which is X based) for Screen Sharing since
> early versions of OS X, if not from the beginning, and It's (still) In
> There (per Prego spaghetti sauce ads) in the latest versions of OS X.
>
> That’s distinct from the X server and apps that are available as a
> separate download (and I believe that now they point to Xorg).
>

No, it's not.  You don't need any third-party X components to use Screen
Sharing, and it works across all platforms, in both directions, that have a
VNC-compatible client and/or server (depending on which direction you're
looking from, remotely).  I could show you in the source, but, then I'd
have to kill you, if Apple didn't get to both of us first.  There's what's
in the public docs and especially marketing (including technical) material,
and then there's what's actually In There.  It's the sort of stuff marked
with "COMPANY PROPRIETARY" watermarks that, if you try to scan or run it
through a photocopier, produces black output due to opto-molecular chemical
overlays.


> BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the
>> native OS X display rendering framework.
>>
>
> That's not possible, at least when communicating cross-platform, where
> bitmaps are the only representation.
>
> *sigh*
>

Believe me, after developing graphics hardware and software for the past 46
years, I'm starting to think Apple would have the right idea with you, as
noted above.  My first graphics "workstation" was a Tektronix 4014
vector-based display hooked up to a PDP-11/70 (the high-voltage green
flashes that cleared the capacitive display "memory" probably explain the
lack of kids ... as far as I know!).  My second (actual) workstation was an
Evans & Sutherland (yes, Dave and Ivan) Picture System 1 (PS/1), which was
dual-port mind-melded to one MB of static RAM in a box 3 x 3 x 3 feet, that
cost a million bucks all by itself.  The other RAM port connected to the
Mass Bus on yet-another PDP-11/70 that connected to a network from which my
user account files were accessible, from which 3-D vertex-and-edge model
coordinates were loaded into the mega-RAM.

The PS-1 then sucked in the coordinates and performed translation, scaling,
and rotation in custom 3-D optimized floating-point hardware.  However, it
could only display wireframes in real time on a very short-persistence
23-inch diagonal, absolutely flat CRT (that cost somewhere in the
six-figure range).  It was a completely vector-based display in any two
colors you wanted, as long as it was white strokes on a black background.
There was no frame rate, as there were no frames - it just kept drawing
line segments as commanded all day and night (which is what it took to get
things working as intended, not as stated to the machine!).

My third and fourth graphics workstations were a pair of $50,000 (each) SGI
2400s, delivering a whopping 30,000 Gouraud-shaded polygons/second.  My
$5.00 Raspberry Pi Zeroes can each deliver 40,000,000 Gouraud-shaded
polygons/second ... in 1040p60.  Where, oh where, did I park that pesky
time machine, so I could take what's in my pocket now and buy the entire
federal government from three-to-four decades ago???

There are a few more decades of those sorts of things on my ledger.  Let's
just say that "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt of in your philosophy."

As far as OS X is concerned, X is just another OS X application that wants
> to render to the screen.  I use it all the time and it works well along
> side the normal OS X applications which wouldn’t be possible if the X
> server wrote directly to the HW.
>

That's the case for your add-on X components - that's not how it can be
done under the covers, but you apparently don't have access to that level.
Screen Sharing isn't the only function that has this sort of capability, as
also do 3-D graphics and video - they aren't constrained to the low-speed
2-D world for which Display Postscript/PDF, Quartz, etc., were developed.
Performance is everything in these technologies, and they have their own
APIs through which the hardware is accessed (the GPU), because going
through the gobbledy-gook stack that's fine for documents and other
high-drag data structures is a non-starter for them.

All the Best,
Jim

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 9:34 AM Eric Smith via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 02:36 Jim Manley  wrote:
>
> Microsoft did offer a RAM expansion board specifically to allow the
> Softcard to access 64K of RAM dedicated to CP/M,
>
> Even that wasn't dedicated to CP/M. It was a 16K RAM card that was
> equivalent to the Apple "Language Card", which allowed replacing the 12K of
> ROM of the Apple II and II+ with 16K of RAM, of which 4K had two banks.
> Although it was useful with the Softcard, it wasn't in any way specific to
> it.
>

From
https://www.pcmag.com/feature/300240/the-secret-history-of-microsoft-hardware/2
-

"Microsoft RAMCard for Apple II (1980)

Microsoft produced the Apple II RAMCard as an accessory card for its Z80
SoftCard ... The RAMCard plugged into one of an Apple II's free slots and
provided 16KB of additional system memory (brining the total to 56KB) for
CP/M programs running on the SoftCard."

MS's ad for the card appears above the writeup.  Dedicated only applies to
the Premiere Softcard for the //e, which is what I had.

The bottom line is that this Microsoft product was
_developed_for_and_sold_with_their_Softcard_.  The wise (and unavoidable,
without a lot of extra work) benefit to other software running on an Apple
has nothing to do with its primary intent.  Visicalc and other software was
modified to take advantage of the 56K memory footprint this card made
available, but that doesn't detract from its primary intended use with the
Softcard in any way, shape, or form.

All models of the Softcard could output 80 x 24 text, not only through
> third-party cards, but Apple's own 64K RAM and 80 x 24 video combo card,
>
> Which was only available for the IIe. I stand by my assertion that the
> Softcard did not in any way provide 80x24 text. It could use the capability
> if it was separately provided.
>

Oh, really?  Then where did the CP/M 80x24 text bits come from, outer
space?  They came from the Softcard - the means for how it appeared in
front of the user's eyes isn't important.  You remind me of people who
insisted that MHz and MBs were the sine qua non for evaluating systems
during The Spec Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.  Nowadays, no one even pays
any attention to such trivia, because it's meaningless, and always has been.

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:59 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr  wrote:

> An (optional) X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them
> all the time) but
> is not part of the base install ...
>

Wrong.  Apple has been using self-customized, optimized-for their-hardware
supersets of the VNC protocol (which is X based) for Screen Sharing since
early versions of OS X, if not from the beginning, and It's (still) In
There (per Prego spaghetti sauce ads) in the latest versions of OS X.  I do
have some first-gen PowerPC systems that I need to see if they power up
(ironic name, PowerPC!), let alone boot, and then I'll have to find
original OS X boot media ... some of us have actual lives, though, so don't
hold your breath!

BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the
> native OS X display rendering framework.
>

That's not possible, at least when communicating cross-platform, where
bitmaps are the only representation.  Projects such as Wayland and Weston
are attempting to provide a modern alternative to X that fully supports
vector representations (using GPU hardware acceleration), through a
protocol and supporting library for a compositing window manager (Wayland)
and a compositor reference implementation (Weston).  XWayland implements a
compatibility layer to seamlessly run legacy X11 applications on Wayland.
A few years ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was funding this effort, in
part, but it was too soon then, and I don't know what the statuses of the
projects are, at this point, although instructions for building the
software for Linux are Out There.  Support for Retina and HiDPI displays is
mentioned, but I didn't see anything explicitly about OS X or Windows
support in a cursory scan of the associated wikis - I assume they're
talking about running Wayland/Weston on Linux using Apple and PC hardware.
GNOME and KDE are fully supported, since that's where development started.

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 4:16 PM John Foust via cctalk 
wrote:

> At 04:40 PM 10/22/2018, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote:
> >As for multitasking, even Windows 10 can easily get bogged down where the
> >GUI becomes essentially unresponsive to user actions.  MS has never
> grasped
> >that it should never be possible to wind up in a situation where the user
> >is stuck watching a rainbow-colored wheel spin, while some set of tasks
> >consumes pretty much every clock cycle on every core, and the user can't
> >even shift context away from whatever is hogging the system.
>
> There are lots of reasons why that can happen in any OS with a GUI
> You've discovered some computer that doesn't ever crash?
>

These aren't crashes, because if you wait long enough (sometimes days), you
eventually get control back.  The system has been allowed to divert
resources to purposes the user doesn't want, away from what the user is
trying to accomplish.  They have no way to change the precedence, short of
getting an OS command prompt and running something akin to *n*x "nice" to
modify the precedence level of a process, or killing processes outright.
Yes, _if_ you can get the Task Manager up, you can do the latter, but a
typical user isn't going to be aware that they can, and very likely would
have no idea how, especially without blowing away something they shouldn't.



> >The Woz was then challenged about Commodore 64 sales far exceeding those
> of
> >Apple ][ and //e models, and he replied, "At Apple, we were always in it
> >for the long haul.  What has Commodore sold lately?"  Commodore, of
> course,
> >had long since gone bankrupt.
>
> CBM didn't do that until 1994, right?
>

Yep,  April 29th, 1994.  The Woz's comment was made December 10th, 2007,
so, that was 13 years later.  That means the celebration was for the 25th
anniversary of the year of the launch of the C64, not the 30th anniversary
- my bad.  Warning to the young people out there: DO NOT UNDER ANY
CIRCUMSTANCES GET OLD!!!  It may seem like a great idea now, but once you
start down that path, THERE'S NO TURNING BACK!!!

All the Best,
Jim

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Hi Liam,

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 8:15 AM Liam Proven via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
> Cairo was intended to be semi "object oriented" ...
>

This reference to "object-oriented" is way off, conflating GUI "objects"
and true object-oriented software.  OO in code has nothing to do with
manipulating virtual objects (desktops, icons for folders, documents by
type, trash cans, etc.).  It's a combination of attributes supported by
programming languages, such as classes, methods, encapsulation,
abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, delegation, etc.  Even
Ivan Sutherland's 1960 - 1961 Sketchpad truly implemented object-oriented
design at both the GUI and code levels, despite being developed for the
discrete-transistor MIT Lincoln Lab TX-2, with all of 64 K-words (36-bit
word length) of discrete-transistor memory.


> Win95 was astonishingly compatible, both with DOS drivers and apps,
> and with Windows 3 drivers, and yet it was 32-bit in the important
> places, delivered true preemptive multitasking, reasonably fast
> virtual memory, integrated networking, integrated Internet access, and
> a radical, clean, elegant UI which *every single OS after it* has
> copied.
>

U ... no.  You're apparently completely uninformed about MIT Project
Athena, aka The X Window System, or X11, or just X, for short, and no, it's
not plural.  The latter is ironic, because MS Windows only supports one
windowing desktop per user, while X Window not only supports multiple
desktops per user (each with its own context that can be swapped in to
occupy the display area), but natively supports remote desktop access from
a number of users over networks (MS Windows still doesn't support this).

While the early aesthetics of X's icons, windows, widgets, etc., are just
what you'd expect some harried engineer to cobble together well after
midnight the date of a major early release, the underlying technology was
light years ahead of what MS spent decades screwing around with (per your
description of the dead ends).  Unfortunately, X, as well as other earlier
GUI systems, was bitmap-based, and still is, so, the aesthetics haven't
been improved over the past three-plus decades it's been around, despite
incredible advances in graphics hardware, which was designed from the
ground up to largely support floating-point computations necessary for 3-D
and advanced 2-D graphics.

Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has found it necessary to spend
a considerable amount of its meager resources (compared with those in
commercial developers' piggy banks, emphasis on the "piggy") to GPU
hardware accelerate X, that its Debian-based Raspbian OS uses for its GUI
(the changes to open-source code are released upstream to benefit the
entire Debian community).  99% of the die area on a Pi's system-on-a-chip
(SoC) is the GPU, which is what boots on power-up.  The ARM CPU in the SoC
was originally included as just a traffic cop for shoveling video data
coming in from the Ethernet port and routed to the GPU for decoding and
generation of HD video signals in Roku 2 streaming media boxes.  The
acceleration included conversion from the integer bit-mapped
representations used in X to floating-point data structures on which the
GPU is designed to primarily operate.  When you're limited to one GB of
RAM, your CPUs are RISC-based, and the CPUs' clock speed is limited to 1.4
GHz, you need all the help you can get.

BTW, MacOS X is based on Mach, the version of Unix that was designed for
multiple, closely-coupled processors, and it, too, uses X as a basis for
its GUI.  Even in its early days, the Mac graphics system had a lot to
admire.  When the Mac II brought color video and full 32-bit processing to
the product line, the OS was very cleverly provided a single System32
extension file that only had to be dropped into the System folder to make
older black-and-white-only, 16-bit external-to-the-microprocessor (even the
68000 is 32-bit internally) Macs compatible with the new 32-bit,
color-based graphics architecture.  No changes were necessary to
applications, with colors merely mapped to dithered patterns of
black-and-white pixels having equivalent luminance as the colors on the
older hardware.

As for multitasking, even Windows 10 can easily get bogged down where the
GUI becomes essentially unresponsive to user actions.  MS has never grasped
that it should never be possible to wind up in a situation where the user
is stuck watching a rainbow-colored wheel spin, while some set of tasks
consumes pretty much every clock cycle on every core, and the user can't
even shift context away from whatever is hogging the system.

Other than completing a valid low-level task, such as flushing queues to
large-capacity storage, the user should always be in control of what the
foreground process with highest precedence is.  Loading ads from an
incoming network connection for products and services, that the user has
absolutely no interest in, is never 

Fwd: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

[ Accidentally only sent to Eric originally ]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2018 at 3:41 PM Eric Smith  wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 01:46 Jim Manley via cctalk 
> wrote:
>
>> The Softcard was a Z-80 based single-board
>> computer
>
>
> It wasn't. It was only a processor card.
>

Eric,

I'm going to stand by my assertion that the Softcard was a single-board
computer on the technicality that it did have its own RAM - you apparently
forget that registers are a form of RAM - HA!  They're memory, they're
addressed over a bus (that just happens to be within the microprocessor),
and you can directly access any register at any time (random access).  As
for I/O, that's what the Apple ][ bus was for, right?  As Opus from Bloom
County, among other comic characters, was known to utter,
"PBBTT!!! 

Microsoft did offer a RAM expansion board specifically to allow the
Softcard to access 64K of RAM dedicated to CP/M, and the Premium Softcard
//e provided on-board RAM to CP/M for the Apple //e, as you noted.  All
models of the Softcard could output 80 x 24 text, not only through
third-party cards, but Apple's own 64K RAM and 80 x 24 video combo card,
which was often offered in packages, especially through dealers that
supported business customers (that's how my system came delivered).  The
"etc." I mentioned was the functionality provided through the glueware
logic on the Softcard that enabled RAM and 80 x 24 text output, as well as
other I/O over the Apple ][ slots bus.

When I was in the Navy, our ship called at HMS Tamar in Hong Kong, and I
followed verbal directions (26 stops on the then-new subway under the
harbor into the New Territories) to the basement level of a shopping
center.  There, I found clones of everything from Apple ][s and //es to
every expansion board and peripheral available in the early 1980s,
including both the original Softcard and the Premium Softcard //e.
Everything came complete with the floppy disks and every page of the
documentation, not just photocopied, but professionally typeset and
offset-printed.

In your missing-the-forest-for-the-trees response, you completely missed
the point of my post - that the Softcard was an extremely important early
product for Microsoft, the critical connection between the Softcard and the
QDOS prototype for x86 MS/PC-DOS, through Seattle Computer Products, and
that the number of CP/M licenses was much larger on Apple computers than
S-100 systems.

For those that cited the Amstrad systems, I was referring to the S-100 and
Softcard timeframe.  CP/M was only provided with the Amstrad CPC664 and
6128 floppy-disk based models, and the DDI-1 disk expansion unit for the
464 (only CP/M 2.2 with the 664, and 2.2 and 3.1 with the 6128).  The
Amstrads came along four years after the Softcard was introduced, and three
years after the release of the IBM PC.  By that time, Digital Research's
influence had faded into insignificance, despite the full release of
CP/M-86 within six months of the IBM PC's debut (albeit at six times the
price of MS/PC-DOS).  I do know that CP/M was used in European banking
systems well into the late 1990s, mostly because it wasn't broken and
didn't need to be "fixed".  It probably would have remained in use well
past 1999 if it weren't for Y2K's impetus for massive upgrades to current
technology for 2000 and beyond.

All the Best,
Jim


On Sat, Oct 20, 2018 at 3:41 PM Eric Smith  wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 01:46 Jim Manley via cctalk 
> wrote:
>
>> The Softcard was a Z-80 based single-board
>> computer
>
>
> It wasn't. It was only a processor card.
>
> that plugged into an Apple ][ slot, equipped with its own
>> 80x24 character x line black-and-white video output,
>
>
> No version of the Softcard had it's own video output. It used normal Apple
> video  output. If you wanted 80x24, you had to use a separate third-party
> 80-column card, or (later) and Apple IIe, IIc, IIc+, or IIgs.
>
> RAM, etc.,
>>
>
> I'm not sure what you're referring to by "etc.", but the vast majority of
> Softcards and their clones did not have their own RAM, and used that of the
> Apple II.
>
> The PCPI Applicard and it's clones had their own RAM. Some very late
> models of the Softcard had their own RAM.
>
>

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Just to be clear, it wasn't that the CGA hadn't been designed and put
into production by the launch of the PC, the demand for the CGA was
simply overwhelming compared with the much lower demand and relatively
greater supply of the MDA.  Plus, IBM had no experience selling into
retail, let alone non-business consumer channels, which had come to
expect "high-resolution" color graphics built into a system (e.g., on
the Apple ][ motherboard).  There were all sorts of distribution
mismatches for the PC where various package combinations were offered
through various channels that had no relation to reality, demand-wise.
They offered employee discounts thinking that the PC would need to be
promoted from as many directions as possible, not realizing what kind
of tiger they had by the tail.  Its suppliers suddenly had to start a
world-wide scramble just to meet the sudden increased demand for
resistors, let alone color graphics video ICs.

IBM wasn't even aware of the penetration of dial-up among consumers
and very small businesses, or they would have initially offered
modems, at least as options, if not in package combos.  Retailers who
understood the consumer and very small business markets quickly began
offering modems in response to the vacuum that IBM had created.
Another sign that IBM wasn't confident about the longevity of the PC
is that they outsourced the development of its OS to Microsoft,
believing that Microsoft owned CP/M because of an Apple ][ compatible
product described in the next paragraph.

A small business to IBM was much larger than the sizes of businesses
that Apple was typically serving at that time.  Many are unaware that
the largest fraction of CP/M licenses ever sold were for the Microsoft
Softcard for the Apple ][ (about 300,000 sold, all told), not S-100
systems (somewhere around 150,000 systems built by hobbyists, or sold
by small manufacturers).  The Softcard was a Z-80 based single-board
computer that plugged into an Apple ][ slot, equipped with its own
80x24 character x line black-and-white video output, RAM, etc., and
that shared Apple ][  electrical power and floppy disk drives.  The
Softcard was Microsoft's first really successful product, responsible
for its first tens of millions of dollars in revenue and profits.

The Softcard was developed by Seattle Computer Products, the same
two-man company in a Seattle garage that later sold its prototype
8086/8088 OS to Microsoft for $50,000.  Microsoft turned around within
a day and sold it to IBM via a _non-exclusive_ license (a critical
factor that allowed them to field MS-DOS, their self-branded version
of IBM's PC-DOS), for $3 million _plus_ about $50 per computer sold
with PC-DOS.  That model, updated for Windows, is the cash cow that's
still printing profits for Microsoft to this day.

Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

I thought it was just hilarious that Microsoft chose The Rolling
Stones' "Start Me Up" for the theme song at the launch of Windows 95,
unaware of the later lyrics in the song (not played during the launch,
oddly enough), "You make a grown man cry-y-y ... You make a grown man
cry-y-y ... You make a grown man cry-y-y ... "

Who says they lost their sense of humor ... oh, you mean them being
humorous on purpose, not making themselves a laughingstock ... mmm,
not so much.

As for when the lawyers showed up, Bill Gates' father was one of the
most wealthy corporate lawyers in Seattle, so it wasn't much of a risk
for Bill III to drop out of Hahvahd to pursue the launching of
Micro-Soft.  Hahvahd would have allowed him to return, especially
given Daddy's large checks written to cover Bill III's tuition, fees,
books, room/board, etc.

So, Bill II and Bill III undoubtedly had frequent and detailed
discussions about how to deal with IBM (non-exclusive licensing, IBM's
onerous non-disclosure agreements, IBM's likely motivations for
getting into the PC business, etc.).  The PC was developed by the IBM
Data Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, FL - the keyboards,
monitors, and terminals folks.  IBM only saw the PC as a short-term,
standalone product that, in the best case, would simply become a
not-quite-dumb terminal that would increase the access to and sales of
their office AS/400 systems and System 370 and other mainframe
products.

IBM developed a Token Ring card for the PC in time for its launch
based on this intent, long before the Color Graphics Adapters were
available, about six months after launch, and the CGAs were only
produced in response to the completely unanticipated demand for the
PC.  IBM's suppliers were brow-beaten during the early years of PC
production because they suddenly were faced with a need to produce
millions, then tens of millions of parts per year.  This was far
beyond their past parts demand experience, and challenged them in ways
companies never had been before.  As Steve Jobs said in a full-page ad
taken out in the Wall Street Journal upon the PC's launch, "Welcome,
IBM.  Seriously."  Seriously, indeed.

The Token Ring card barely sold any units, in no small part because
IBM was completely unaware that microcomputer hobbyists and small
businesses were using modems, especially the Hayes SmartModem
products, to access on-line services such as The Well, GEnie,
CompuServe, etc.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

All the Best,
Jim

Volunteer Senior Docent
Artifact Restoration Engineer
Geek 2.0 Artifact
Computer History Museum

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 10:58 PM Wayne S via cctalk
 wrote:
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Oct 18, 2018, at 15:01, Fred Cisin via cctalk  
> > wrote:
> >
> > Thank you for the correction.
> >
> > Yes, companies often change their names.
> >
> > Gary Kildall founded Intergalactic Digital Research.
> >
> > George Morrow founded Thinker Toys, which later became Morrow's Micro 
> > Stuff, and eventually Morrow Designs.
> >
> > Greenberg and Grant founded Kentucky Fried Computers, which became North 
> > Star (due to a lawsuit from a chicken place), and eventually NorthStar
> >
> > Can you pinpoint when the microcomputer businesses lost their sense of 
> > humor?
>
> When the Lawyers got involved?
> >
> >> On Thu, 18 Oct 2018, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
> >>
> >> I would like to make a correction: Paul Allen helped to create
> >> Micro-Soft not MicroSoft as I had written. When trying to preserve
> >> computing history it's really not permissable to make such an
> >> error.(It's the prof. in me!)
> >>
> >> Happy Computing!
> >>
> >> Murray  :)
> >
> > --
> > Fred Cisin  ci...@xenosoft.com
> > XenoSofthttp://www.xenosoft.com
> > PO Box 1236 (510) 234-3397
> > Berkeley, CA 94701-1236
> >

Re: how good is the data reliability with CD ROM and DVD RAM?

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

The stability of the dyes is only part of the problem.  Even mass-produced
read-only optical media (e.g., movie/video content DVDs) can become
unreadable over time because the reflective layer (typically aluminum)
under the data-encoded layer corrodes due to the chemistry of the dyes and
encasing plastic, and heat accelerates the process.  The "gold" media may
have enough of a protective layer of that noble metal (it's obviously not
solid gold) that corrosion doesn't occur - only a few atoms' thickness is
required.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 10:58 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 07/21/2018 08:14 AM, Carlo Pisani via cctalk wrote:
>
> > what is your experience?
>
> Generally very good.  But then, my valuable stuff on CD-R was done on
> MAM-A (Mitsui) "gold" media.  Some of it is 20+ years old.  On the other
> hand, no CD-RW disk that still have has survived.
>
> My experience with DVD-R has been somewhat variable.
>
> --Chuck
>

Re: Preserved LGP-30

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

The degradation and attracting bacteria is also why geeks don’t get to
handle humans ... well, the halitosis, body odor, long hair/beards, etc.,
probably don’t help, either! 

All the Best,
Jim

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 9:09 AM js--- via cctalk 
wrote:

>
> Different kind of oils, Christian.  What humans leach isn't
> petroleum-based, and it degrades and carries and attracts bacteria.


> - J.
>

Re: CDC 6600 display character generation

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

Using all of those gates to do brute-force logic for character vector
generation is pretty brilliant.  Edison was truly a genius because he
invented and sold the electric light so that people could stay up late at
night to listen to his phonograph invention that he also sold.  The
electric lights also eliminated the risk of coal tar condensing on the
phonograph cylinders from coal gas lights on the walls.

Seymour Cray was a genius because he observed that the fastest possible
circuit is a wire, and that if you use the same length of wire for each bit
in a word in cables between stages in a computer that you want to go as
fast as possible, all of the bits will arrive at the next stage at the same
time.  That was important for computers that took up entire rooms, with
circuit boards and racks far enough apart that upwards of a dozen
nanoseconds could elapse as bits passed from stage to stage.

IBM "solved" this synchronization problem in the 6600's contemporary, the
Model 3090 (Stretch), using delay lines to hold bits arriving on shorter
cables until bits arriving on longer cables could catch up.  The last thing
you want in a supercomputer is a component that has the word "delay" in it,
and by using equal-length wires for every bit in a word between stages, you
also reduce parts count.

That means that you reduce parts and assembly labor costs, replacement
parts costs, power and cooling costs (a very important function, back
then), system volume and weight (and therefore, structural costs), and the
costs of troubleshooting labor needed to identify which parts have failed
that didn't need to be there in the first place (or additional circuitry to
identify where faults occurred, adding yet-more of all of the above
expenses).

At the time, CDC had 39 employees, including Seymour and the janitor, while
IBM's engineering and technician head-count alone was upwards of 20,000.
The 6600s were the fastest computers in the world for over six years, and
would have held the record longer, except that CDC's own 7600s eclipsed
them.  He hired local women with experience doing mind-numbing, repetitive,
but precision tasks like knitting and needlepoint, to wire the
interconnects between boards on the Cray 1s and 2s.

However, they could gossip about who was seeing whom around town to while
away the hours, for which they were paid less than technicians, but more
than for any other work women could get back then.  I'll bet they made
fewer mistakes than alternative employees would have, too.  Seymour told
them how important their work was to the nation's defense, and they were
proud of it (many Crays were used on DoD projects for advances in pure
science, as well as engineering).

"Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." -- Albert
Einstein (talking about scientific education, but not a bad idea, in
general)


On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 3:26 PM, Paul Koning  wrote:

>
> The crazy thing about the 6000 series display controller is that it
> doesn't use tables at all.  The selection of what stroke step to produce
> for a given character and point in time is defined by a very large
> collection of gates.  The 170 controller does use table lookup (a ROM with
> the equivalent information).  I wonder why a ROM wasn't used in the 6000.
> Perhaps they couldn't find a cost-effective technology that's fast enough?
> Core rope would work just fine for this, but not at 100 ns cycle time.
>
> paul
>

Re: CDC 6600 display character generation

[Jim Manley via cctalk]

When you have "Defense Products Division" in your organization's name,
"high price" comes with the products, ala $10,000 hammers and toilet
seats  (and
"Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation" doesn't exactly evoke
thoughts of Walmart pricing, either).

I grew up a few stones' throws from Clifton - if I'd known when I was a kid
that you would need this info, I could have dumpster-dived a king's
fortune's worth to give to you now, probably along with some samples.
Unfortunately, I would have had to incur the cost of storage for nearly six
decades for that and all of the other "must-have" artifacts that I would
have also scarfed up along with them ...

I'm one of the early senior docents at the Computer History Museum in
SillyCon Valley and yammered on endlessly about the 6600 and its neighbor,
the 7600, but I never thought about character generation on the displays
beyond it being vector-based drawing.  I'm pretty sure it was done via
look-up tables that directed the beams along vectors on the displays for
the operating PDP-1 we play Spacewar! on as often as we like ... usually
against its principal creator, fellow Señor Docent, Steve Russell.

All the Best,
Jim


On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 2:37 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jun 6, 2018, at 3:40 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <
> cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > One of the more interesting things about the DD60 display was the use of
> > 2C43 "Lighthouse" UHF triode tubes to drive the CRT electrostatic
> > deflection.
>
> UHF, yes, but not those.  The final state uses 3CX100A5 UHF transmitter
> tubes.  The 2C43 would not appreciate the 2000 volt plate voltage used in
> that stage.  The driver stages are fairly ordinary looking receiver style
> dual-triode tubes.
>
> > Only being around briefly for the 170 system, I don't know how the
> > magnetic deflection was driven there.
> >
> > I imagine that the cost of the DD60 was due in no small port by the use
> > of the CRTs--I believe they were produced in Germany.
>
> Really?  It is shown as a K2263-P31, manufacturer Fairchild Camera and
> Instrument Corporation, Defense Products Div., Clifton NJ.  I sure would
> like to get my hands on specs for that tube.
>
> In any case, they were sometimes referred to as "radar tubes" which sounds
> somewhat reasonable.  Certainly very different from TV CRTs, and bigger
> than what's used in oscilloscopes, so they were most likely low volume
> which would explain a high price.
>
> paul
>
>