[cctalk] Re: Experience using an Altair 8800 ("Personal computer" from 70s)
From: CAREY SCHUG > I used 1620s, and 360/30s, a 360/40, and others as a personal > computer at times, for things like writing a Tim Conway game of life, > keeping track of my vinyl records, etc. It's like John Conway's "game of life," but more prone to cause uncontrollable fits of laughter.
Re: Retire cctech
I'm fine with that myself, but will list memberships from cctech be ported over, or will we have to re-register? I don't think I'm currently on cctalk.
[no subject]
> Back in the bad old days of the 5160 PC, some DTC controllers allowed for > partitioning a drive (using witch settings) I think "witch settings" is my new preferred term for this. They're certainly mysterious and arcane enough.
Re: The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation
> On 2021-11-21 9:45 a.m., Adam Thornton via cctalk wrote: >> On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: >> >> And what happens when you wake up one morning to find archive.org is >> gone, too? >> >> > Fundamentally, eventually we're all going to be indistinguishable > mass-components inside the supermassive black hole that used to be the > Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies anyway. > > Smoke 'em while you got 'em. Yeah, I had a long, hard think about this while the Caldor Fire was looking like it was about to come knocking on my doorstep this fall and I was trying to prep myself for a short-notice evacuation and decide what I could and couldn't take (read: leave stowed in the trunk of the car for the next couple weeks.) Ultimately, while I'd *like* what I have and enjoy to pass on to someone else once I get busy decomposing, in the long run it's all dust, so I'm not gonna worry myself too much over it.
Re: cctech Digest, Vol 84, Issue 14
Per https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2.9BSD/usr/doc/2.9_kernel.ms 2.9BSD had a driver for it. On 9/20/21, cctech-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote: > Send cctech mailing list submissions to > cct...@classiccmp.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctech > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > cctech-requ...@classiccmp.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > cctech-ow...@classiccmp.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of cctech digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > >1. DEC ML11 (Mark Kahrs) > > > -- > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2021 10:47:46 -0400 > From: Mark Kahrs > To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" > Subject: DEC ML11 > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > I've been working on a newly donated PDP 11/70 at the LSSM. I just > discovered it has a ML11 --- an early Solid State Disk. Does anyone know > of any schematics, user guides, etc? > > Thanks! > > > End of cctech Digest, Vol 84, Issue 14 > ** >
Re: 3d modelling software
The quick-'n-easy solution I found when I needed to model some parts for a keyboard was https://www.tinkercad.com/ - needs a modern-ish web browser and a modestly beefy system tho.
Re: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation
Hah, wow. On 3/25/21, Warner Losh wrote: > On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:01 AM John Ames via cctech > > wrote: > >> Huh - wacky. Still pretty curious how it works just on a basic "how >> the hey does the framebuffer even function" level, but that's >> certainly interesting. Does make me feel less guilty about planning to >> cannibalize it for a homebrew project later, though! >> > > It's a text mode, which generates the screen image using rasterized fonts > from the text + attributes stored in video memory. > > There is no frame buffer. With that little RAM it can support the text > modes easily enough, but none of the graphics modes. > > Warner > > >> On 3/24/21, Camiel Vanderhoeven >> wrote: >> > It's neither X nor ethernet. These worked with a special controller >> > card >> > that had 4 RJ45 connectors. That allowed four users to share a single >> > Windows NT system. >> > >> > From: cctech on behalf of John Ames via >> > cctech >> > Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:41 AM >> > To: cctalk ; cctech >> > Subject: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation >> > >> > So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked >> > up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA >> > connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" >> > port. I got it bare, without the external PSU that would've gone with >> > it, and I've since been unable to determine just what the heck I'm >> > supposed to feed this thing. It's a standard barrel jack, but there's >> > no markings on the case or the PCB to give any clue as to what >> > voltage/amperage or polarity it expects, and Google has been no help >> > at all. Does anyone have any recollection of these things? Any idea >> > what they want for juice? >> > >> > To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the >> > case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, >> > and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a >> > W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, >> > not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on >> > how these things operated? Given this, my only guess would be some >> > kind of insane networked-framebuffer scheme where the host would blast >> > video data in on the fly, but there's no way this was even 100Mbps >> > Ethernet, and 10Mbps isn't nearly fast enough to transfer 150KB at >> > 60FPS, and there's no memory to buffer it for a slower refresh. What >> > in the heck is going on here? >> > >> > This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain privileged, >> > confidential, proprietary, private, copyrighted, or other legally >> protected >> > information. The information is intended to be for the use of the >> individual >> > or entity designated above. If you are not the intended recipient (even >> if >> > the e-mail address above is yours), please notify us by return e-mail >> > immediately, and delete the message and any attachments. Any >> > disclosure, >> > reproduction, distribution or other use of this message or any >> attachments >> > by an individual or entity other than the intended recipient is >> prohibited. >> > >> >
Re: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation
Huh - wacky. Still pretty curious how it works just on a basic "how the hey does the framebuffer even function" level, but that's certainly interesting. Does make me feel less guilty about planning to cannibalize it for a homebrew project later, though! On 3/24/21, Camiel Vanderhoeven wrote: > It's neither X nor ethernet. These worked with a special controller card > that had 4 RJ45 connectors. That allowed four users to share a single > Windows NT system. > > From: cctech on behalf of John Ames via > cctech > Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:41 AM > To: cctalk ; cctech > Subject: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation > > So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked > up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA > connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" > port. I got it bare, without the external PSU that would've gone with > it, and I've since been unable to determine just what the heck I'm > supposed to feed this thing. It's a standard barrel jack, but there's > no markings on the case or the PCB to give any clue as to what > voltage/amperage or polarity it expects, and Google has been no help > at all. Does anyone have any recollection of these things? Any idea > what they want for juice? > > To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the > case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, > and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a > W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, > not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on > how these things operated? Given this, my only guess would be some > kind of insane networked-framebuffer scheme where the host would blast > video data in on the fly, but there's no way this was even 100Mbps > Ethernet, and 10Mbps isn't nearly fast enough to transfer 150KB at > 60FPS, and there's no memory to buffer it for a slower refresh. What > in the heck is going on here? > > This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain privileged, > confidential, proprietary, private, copyrighted, or other legally protected > information. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual > or entity designated above. If you are not the intended recipient (even if > the e-mail address above is yours), please notify us by return e-mail > immediately, and delete the message and any attachments. Any disclosure, > reproduction, distribution or other use of this message or any attachments > by an individual or entity other than the intended recipient is prohibited. >
MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation
So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" port. I got it bare, without the external PSU that would've gone with it, and I've since been unable to determine just what the heck I'm supposed to feed this thing. It's a standard barrel jack, but there's no markings on the case or the PCB to give any clue as to what voltage/amperage or polarity it expects, and Google has been no help at all. Does anyone have any recollection of these things? Any idea what they want for juice? To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on how these things operated? Given this, my only guess would be some kind of insane networked-framebuffer scheme where the host would blast video data in on the fly, but there's no way this was even 100Mbps Ethernet, and 10Mbps isn't nearly fast enough to transfer 150KB at 60FPS, and there's no memory to buffer it for a slower refresh. What in the heck is going on here?
Re: APL\360
> From: Chuck Guzis > Numbering of bits in a word is also interesting. Is the high order bit > in a 64 bit word, bit 0 or bit 63? Both conventions have been employed. This one has always boggled me, because it's the one aspect of the Endian Wars where there's a simple, straightforward answer grounded in basic mathematics - base ^ digit-number only gives the correct place-value when the lowest-order bit is numbered zero. It's beyond my ken how anybody thought the reverse was *valid,* let alone a good idea.
Re: Herbert Schildt C code from books
I don't know how well-known they were in their day; I only discovered them around a decade ago, while digging into lesser-known progressive-rock groups. Definitely a nice little treat, though - people who gave them crap for sounding a lot like Yes weren't wrong, but they had enough going on to be worth listening to nonetheless. On 8/27/20, jw...@classiccmp.org wrote: > I thought starcastle was mostly a Saint Louis area thing. Lady of the Lake > is on my playlist. > > -Original Message- >>He shoulda stuck to being the keyboardist for Starcastle; he was actually >> good at that! > > >
Re: Herbert Schildt C code from books
He shoulda stuck to being the keyboardist for Starcastle; he was actually good at that!
Re: Microsoft open sources GWBASIC
Liam Proven wrote: > I don't know. There is a huge amount of tradition and culture in > computing now, and as a result, few people seem to have informed, > relatively unbiased opinions. There hasn't been much real diversity in > decades. > > 25 or 30y ago, people discussed the merits of Smalltalk or Prolog or > Forth; now most people have never seen or heard of them, and it's just > which curly-bracket language you favour, or does your preferred > language run in a VM or is it compiled to a native binary. Agreed. While I'm much more favorably disposed towards C than you are, the increasing homogeneity of almost all modern languages is discouraging and, I think, detrimental to the field as a whole. Forth and Smalltalk alike were eye-openers when I discovered them (and Smalltalk in particular was a breath of fresh air, after I'd spent years failing to ever really grok OOP with the likes of C++ and Java,) because both presented genuinely *different* and beautifully consistent ways to think about structuring and specifying a computer program. These days, though, outside of deliberately jokey ultra-esoteric languages, it's pretty much just a bunch of domain-specific Java/Javascript knockoffs from horizon to horizon. > I am just surprised that this (to me) rather inelegant design survived > and got to market, given what you've said about the same company's > ruthless drive for cost-cutting removed one PCB trace even though it > killed floppy-disk performance, or wouldn't use an extra ROM chip > because it was too expensive. > > It seems inconsistent. It's marketing - consistency there is a non-consideration, if not actively striven against. The whole saga with CP/M on CBM was a boondoggle - the CP/M cart existed because business customers wanted a CP/M add-in to run their spreadsheets and their whatnot, but it didn't end up being a good fit for reasons already stated (slow CPU, slow disk, 40-column only.) The 128 improved on those points, but not nearly enough to become competitive with the advancements CP/M machines had made in that time, and in the process wasted precious man-hours and drove up the cost and complexity of the unit - and all the while CP/M had been losing ground to MS-DOS in the business market for years! But marketing promised it, so it had to happen... :/
Re: State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers
> From: Neil Thompson > > I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar > comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to > translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of > programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their > own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends > the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm. There's definitely truth to this. The main thing that makes a good programmer isn't memorization of language features or syntax, it's good mental organization and thinking habits; the ability and practice of really *thinking through* the steps involved in solving a problem, building a solid mental model of the relevant data structures and algorithms, and then breaking those down into component steps until one arrives at a suitable representation in native-language operations. If someone has a good understanding of that, they can apply it (with varying amounts of blood, sweat, and tears) in any language; if they don't, there's no language in the world that can impart it to them (no matter *what* the flavor-of-the-decade Savior Of All Programming Forever is - "Try Swift! It's the new Pascal!") *That said,* there are definitely some languages that are more conducive to building these habits than others (and, within each group, many that emphasize different aspects more or less strongly.) I can't speak to COBOL as I've never had cause to get any experience with it, but I would say that BASIC (as in, the old-school, unstructured BASICs of the Bad Old Days) really does teach you a bunch of habits that you end up needing to un-learn as soon as you start working with better languages (not even *newer* languages - ALGOL and Lisp both predate it.) Line-#-and-GOTO programming imposes the same burden of bookkeeping and space-management on the programmer as direct machine-code monitor hacking and the most primitive assemblers, but without any rational explanation as to why, so that any novice attempting to create a program of any real complexity ends up being instilled with a superstitious dread over the ludicrous non-question of where to put things - do I space statements N numbers apart? What if I need to add more than N-1 intervening statements later!? Should I place my subroutines on even 1000s for easy reference? Will the line numbers even go high enough!? - the lack of scoped/local variables or any parameter-passing mechanism for GOSUB makes any non-trivial modularization nearly impossible, and the READ/DATA structure is just flat-out demented. And all that mental exhaustion *before* the newbie even gets to the *real* challenges of learning to program! Now, Dijkstra was a self-important ponce given to wild all-or-nothing proclamations and manifestos (manifestes? Manifesti?) and even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his statements quoted here were meant tongue-in-cheek they're still pretty ridiculous. And God knows the Appointed Language Messiah in that great holy war, Pascal, was its own special breed of Hell for novices and experts alike (array size as type qualifier? Just kill me now...) And it's definitely true that plenty of people can and did learn to program in BASIC and still went on to learn better and do Good Things down the line. But there absolutely are such things as bad programming languages.
VAX/Smalltalk-80?
Just in the middle of getting a fresh OpenVMS install set up on my VAXStation (the original having been done years ago when I barely had any idea what I was doing,) and looking through various repositories for interesting software to put on there, and I got to thinking about something I recalled reading about a few years back. I know from the book "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice" - http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOfHistory.pdf - that, back when, there were two implementations of Smalltalk-80 for VAXen - the first was Unix-based, done by an independent research group, while the second ran under VMS and was actually developed within DEC. This version - VAX/Smalltalk-80 - was headed up by Stoney Ballard and Stephen Shirron; anybody know if there's a surviving copy out there, if it was ever available outside DEC to begin with?
Re: NetBSD on a VAX 3100
I have it running on a MicroVAX 3100/90, but I can't for the life of me remember what version it is (current was 7-ish when I set it up, but I may have had to drop back to an earlier version.) I'll have to check when I have a chance. It's definitely not a speed demon, but it works reasonably well. OpenBSD on the other hand was utterly unusable; it took minutes just to respond to input over the serial port.
Re: cctech Digest, Vol 60, Issue 2
> How about some pictures of what was inside. A picture that is atleast good > enough to see what is there. > Dwight I did also take a photo of the interior, though nothing you'd be able to read the chip designations on: http://www.commodorejohn.com/whatsit-interior.jpg My rough guesstimate is that the boards in the backplane are memory and I/O options (two of them have cables going to the back panel, the rest are apparently identical,) while the core functionality is on the large board on the left and the second large board below it (which is where the cable from the front panel go.)
Re: So what the heck did I just pick up?
On 8/31/19, Gregory Beat wrote: > Beautiful front panel (1970s design). > It would make a nice front panel for a DIY Computer. Yeah, that's definitely a thought that's crossed my mind (I've been meaning to get around to a TMS-99105 project for ages...) Though I'd like to find out more about this before I go cannibalizing what appears to be a working piece of equipment (fires up with no smoke, front-panel controls respond as one might expect - but without documentation, it's rather hard to hack up a test program!)
So what the heck did I just pick up?
Ran into this at the electronics-surplus store just down the way from my workplace and grabbed it on the cheap. I don't actually know what it *is,* but the labels on the switches make it look a *hell* of a lot like a 16-bit general-purpose computer of some kind. Despite the claims of being "microprocessor-controlled," I looked at every board inside the thing and couldn't spot anything that looked like a 16-bit or even 8-bit CPU. Genuinely curious what this is, but I can't find much on it online - the name pops up in a few archived documents, but Bitsavers doesn't have anything for the company. Though the design is attributed to Stanley Kubota and Edward Corby - looks like Mr. Kubota still has an online presence at https://www.exsellsales.com/about-us/ so I'll have to drop them a line... Anybody heard of or encountered one of these before? http://www.commodorejohn.com/whatsit-front.jpg http://www.commodorejohn.com/whatsit-back.jpg
Re: Latest Additions to the Virtual Warehouse of Computing Wonders Sale Inventory
I'll also vouch for Sellam. His prices are a bit higher than I might prefer, but he's a straight dealer as far as I've ever seen; I bought an Apple IIc from him and he gave me no trouble at all about exchanging it when the board turned out to be cracked.
Re: Looking for: 68000 C compilers
I know there's an old (I think) official Sega Genesis devkit that's, erm, "around" on various console homebrew sites. No idea which exact C compiler is included, but it's not too difficult to find.
Re: Origin of 'Straight 8' name
I'd definitely be interested to hear if the DECheads on this list know the specifics, but I'd gathered that it came about once other models were introduced and the need arose to differentiate between, say, a PDP-8/e and a "straight" (i.e. vanilla) PDP-8. The car connection probably made the particular phrasing happen (of course, they originally photographed it in a Volkswagen, but they couldn't very well have started calling it a "flat-4!")
Re: "Object Oriented GUI"
> Message: 28 > Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2018 13:16:44 -0400 > From: "Jeffrey S. Worley" > To: cctalk@classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: "Object Oriented GUI" > Message-ID: <01e83dac0a96469e425a0632bd07319351c9362d.ca...@gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > I used OS/2 from 1993 to 2003 almost exclusively. It has the most > beautiful GUI on the planet, is object-oriented to a fault, and is the > target of all the claims Microsoft was making with regard to the > Object-orientedness of their new windows 95. > > Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell mentions some > important attributes of a truely object-oriented gui. > > Someone mentioned inheritance and polymorphism. These are two products > of true object oriented gui design. Applications inherit the ability > to manipulate and use whatever objects exist in the system. A word > processor is not limited to just text files, for example, or to only > the files the programmer originally set out for it. The system allows > the applications to grow in functionality as new object types are > developed/assembled by other applications or the user. All these years later, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the purpose of that in an OS/desktop environment/file-manager context is. I guess that, say, you could have new file types implement their own methods for things like printing, so the OS doesn't have to know the details of the document structure or require a particular application installed to be able to print it, but this seems like an awfully limited use case to me - sure, it would be nice to have things like audio and video codecs be universal and pluggable or things like that, but I have a hard time seeing how it's all that revolutionary, and I can easily see it being just as limiting as other non-OOP format standards (after all, it's not going to magically add functionality that the file format itself doesn't support, is it? And doesn't it ultimately just come down to diking out a chunk of the application code for the OS to use? What if two different programs both offer their own handlers for the same file type?)
Re: Desktop Metaphor
> Liam Proven wrote: > On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 18:59, Paul Berger via cctalk > wrote: >> >> This is my issue with a lot of Linux distros they seem to try to hard to >> look and work like mac or like windows while I would rather have them >> look and work like the xwindows I knew and loved. One of my biggest >> aggravations is cut and paste I would very much rather it worked more >> like it used to on X. > > If you want it old-style, build it old-style. > > Install the minimal or server version of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, > whatever you want, then install X.org and your window manager of > choice. > > This is how I have been experimentally assembling GNUstep desktops for > years now. Have to concur with this. Even the "minimalist" (i.e. non-GNOME/KDE) *nix "desktop environment" projects these days are getting so bloated that I've given up bothering with them and set up an X environment one component at a time. Currently running Window Maker with SpaceFM and ROXTerm; getting it all properly set up and tweaked to my liking took some doing, but the payoff was well worth it. Now if I could only excise the GTK3 blight entirely, I'd really be set.
Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen
> Grant Taylor wrote: >> *Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95. > > Nope. That's simply not true. > > The following three vast families of window managers / desktops prove > (to my satisfaction) that your statement is wrong. > > ? Common Desktop Environment (a.k.a. CDE) and it's ilk. > ? The various *Box window managers / desktop environments. > ? Motif window manager and it's ilk. > > They are all significantly different from each other and from Windows's > Explorer interface, first publicly debuting with Windows 95. There's also the Afterstep/Window Maker crowd, open-source reimplementations of the NEXTSTEP desktop environment, which predates even Windows 3.x. Win95 was certainly very influential in the design and refinement of many other desktop environments going forward, but it's not the be-all and end-all of anything. >> Liam Proven wrote: > > How many graphical Unix desktops are sold or distributed in the world > today that are not Linux? Excluding Mac OS X as I specifically address > that point, I think. > > Now, I can point to 3 living (FSVO "living") descendants of those OSes: > > * CDE is now FOSS > (It had a conceptual re-implementation, the XForms Common Environment, > XFCE. Here's a screenshot: > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Xfce3.jpg > Note, it has now moved to a Windows-like model) > > AFAIK no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux > offers CDE as a desktop choice. > > * NeXTstep inspired GNUstep > http://www.gnustep.org/ > (and LiteStep but that's now dead) > > No current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux offers > GNUstep as a desktop choice. > > * Risc OS inspired the ROX Desktop: > http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ > > Again, no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux > offers ROX as a desktop choice. But this is kind of a questionable standard to begin with, because the whole point in the Freenix world is choice. No distributions offer those as default options during the install process, but all of them (aside from CDE, which only just went open-source a couple years ago and is still in the process of being cleaned up and forward-ported to modern *nixen) are available in the repositories for most major distributions, and all of them are still actively updated. > BeOS used the Windows model. Kinda-sorta-not-really. BeOS (like just about everything post-1995) takes cues from Win95, but its roots are in classic Mac OS and it definitely hews closer to that in most respects, despite the absence of a global menu bar. > Outside of Apple, I think it is fair to say that no new OS or desktop > environment since 1995 has used anything other than the Win95 model. Haiku says hi. Or would, if they could spare the time from trying to awkwardly kludge Linux development models into a BeOS world. > The fact that there are a small handful of clones of the Apple Mac OS > X GUI doesn't really invalidate this point. This "aside from the things that don't match up with my argument, my argument is flawless!" line of reasoning is novel.
Re: cctech Digest, Vol 44, Issue 10
> Looking at modern hard disks, I'm unconvinced we could even mass-produce > something like that today. > > A 40mm radius is comparable to a 3.5" disk, which are generally 5,400-7,200 > RPM. 15,000 RPM is the fastest available, but those tend to be low-capacity > and > expensive, and are often 2.5" drives with a huge heatsink. We could perhaps > rotate a very narrow smaller cylinder faster still but then the capacity > suffers further, and the seek time would start to dominate. I Am Not An Engineer(tm) but it seems to me that a taller cylinder should be less prone to wobbling on its axis than a flat disk, particularly if it's built at the scale of the drums I've seen at the CHM where there's room enough to really bolt that sucker down. Bit different than a 3.5" box with a stack of thin metal platters in it, I'd think.
Re: Instruction video on laserdisk
I don't know where you're located, but I'm in the US and have an NTSC Laserdisc player. If someone can hook me up with a video capture card, I'd be happy to copy the video for you.
Re: Wanted: small composite CRT monitor
I don't like LCDs much, particularly for low-resolution applications where the fundamental badness of upscaling from a non-native resolution is truly jarring.
Wanted: small composite CRT monitor
I picked up an Apple IIc this past weekend and I want to set it up with a small monitor on my desk at work. Unfortunately, I seem to have gotten rid of the small composite monitor that I know I had at one point, so I don't have a good spare monitor that isn't a bit too large for my workspace. I've been poking around looking at some options, but I'm still waiting to find a decent one in my area, and if I'm going to order online, I'd rather do it with people I can trust to actually test the dang thing before selling it and pack it properly. In short, I'm looking for a small NTSC CRT monitor or portable TV in the 7-12" range. I'm not stuck on aesthetics, but it would be nice to have something that would sit nicely atop the IIc. I wouldn't mind an actual Apple monitor, but I don't want to pay APPLE MAC IPHONE STEVE JOBS L@@K prices; otherwise, I'd be happy with any suitable composite video monitor, color or monochrome. If you happen to be within reasonable driving distance of Folsom, CA, I'd be glad to pick it up and save the trouble of shipping. Anybody got one to spare?
