Re: Viking SCSI controller RS232 adapter
On 6/28/2022 12:58 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: I have a couple of these boards but have never got into the on-board monitor which requires an adapter board that allows a terminal to talk to the controller board and do various things. Looking at the manual on bitsavers there is almost enough info to construct my own adapter board. Has anyone ever built there own adapter to the controller? Doug I wasn't clear about this. The Viking board I have is a dual width q-bus board that connects SCSI disk or tape devices VAXes or PDP11s using MSCP protocol. In the bitsavers manual on figure 8 is a drawing of the 'Serial Port Cable Adapter'. Table 2 lists the pin-out of the 50 pin IDC connector and which lines are used for what signal. In that list are these RS232 connections: IDC pin 20 -> CON TX (RS232) IDC pin 22 -> CON Rx (RS232) IDC pin 28 -> FP TX (RS232) IDC pin 30 -> FP TX (RS232) I was able to trace these IDC connections back to an ICL232 chip on the Viking board which is an RS232 driver chip. My question is which of these RS232 lines are brought out to the 'Serial Port Cable Adapter'? Which ground do I use? What do CON and FP stand for? I am trying to de-bug one of the boards and would like to get into the on-board monitor and see what it tells me about the board configuration. Doug
Re: RT11 Freeware Collection
Ken; This worked perfectly! I was able to mount the partitions (as shown below) and actually extract the entire 65K partition to a *.dsk file that SIMH was able to mount and read. This is what I was trying to do. Get files from the RT11freewarev2 cd into SIMH. From there I can get them to my real PDP11 hardware. Some of the files are binary so this process is necessary. One comment - when you execute a mount command it takes a minute or 2 to decompress the file, so be patient! One question - How did you know how much to skip? Thanks for the effort you put into creating FSX. Doug On 4/29/2022 4:11 PM, Kenneth Gober wrote: On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 10:55 AM Douglas Taylor via cctech wrote: I wanted to extract some parts of the RT11 Freeware iso file that is available on the internet. The note Tom Shoppa wrote indicates that the CD has 2 partitions. When I burned the CD on a windows machine I only see one partition. How to I extract the 2nd partition off the iso? The second "partition" is just a second copy of all the files on the first partition, except in RT-11 volume format so that it can be mounted directly on an RT-11 system with a CD-ROM drive attached. Since RT-11 volumes are limited to 32MB, larger disks are broken up into 32MB 'logical disks'. The files are on logical disks 13 through 19 (i.e. 32MB chunk numbers 13 through 19). Since it's all the same files, there's little reason to bother looking at the second partition if you are able to mount the first. However, if you want to do it anyway I have a Windows command-line tool that can be used to access the RT-11 portions of the iso: GitHub - kgober/FSX: File System Exchange, a utility to access data stored in disk images <https://github.com/kgober/FSX> Here are the FSX commands you would use to mount each of the chunks: FSX> mount r13: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r14: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r15: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r16: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r17: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r18: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX> mount r19: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz FSX knows about .gz files and will treat the 'skip' option as the offset to use *after* uncompressing the file. You can then browse and extract files from each volume: FSX> dir r19: 29-Apr-2022 System ID: DECVMSEXCHNG V41 Volume ID: VMS Exchange Owner : SHOPPA README.TXT 23P 15-Oct-1999 TORS84.DSK 24535P 15-Oct-1999 UCLPLS.DSK 907P 15-Oct-1999 VMSBCK.DSK 1663P 15-Oct-1999 XASSMB.DSK 2036P 15-Oct-1999 DUSTAT.DSK 100P 15-Oct-1999 RT11 .LIS 13P 15-Oct-1999 < UNUSED > 36190 7 Files, 29277 Blocks 36190 Free blocks FSX>type r19:readme.txt Welcome, RT-11 User, to V2.0 of the RT-11 Freeware CD! [... remainder removed ...] FSX>save r19:readme.txt c:readme.txt R19:README.TXT => c:readme.txt -ken
Re: RT11 Freeware Collection
Here is the link I used: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/trailing-edge_cd/rt11freewarev2.iso.gz Doug On 4/28/2022 5:35 PM, s shumaker via cctalk wrote: Can you post the download link for the ISO? Steve On 4/27/2022 7:46 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: All; I wanted to extract some parts of the RT11 Freeware iso file that is available on the internet. The note Tom Shoppa wrote indicates that the CD has 2 partitions. When I burned the CD on a windows machine I only see one partition. How to I extract the 2nd partition off the iso? Doug
Using tu58fs with RT11 5.7
I wanted to try using tu58fs with a RT11 system running version 5.7 to transfer files in/out. To my surprise RT11 5.7 retired the DD: device, a DD.MAC file is there, but it is unsupported. (1) How do you compile a device driver file? How do you link and install it? (2) Has anyone done this? (3) Is anyone using tu58fs with a RT11 5.7 system? Doug
RT11 Freeware Collection
All; I wanted to extract some parts of the RT11 Freeware iso file that is available on the internet. The note Tom Shoppa wrote indicates that the CD has 2 partitions. When I burned the CD on a windows machine I only see one partition. How to I extract the 2nd partition off the iso? Doug
[cctalk] Odd Unix computer Bio-Rad SRC 3200
I have a Bio-Rad SRC 3200, which is a workstation that operated a Bio-Rad FTS-40 FTIR spectrometer. A few years ago I got it to power on and it runs Unix variant, their product name was Idris. I have 16 floppies (dated 1992) that came with the system, but the hard disk has died. It is based on a 68030 CPU and has a floppy and SCSI disk and QIC tape drive. Is it possible to run some flavor of BSD on this hardware? What are the minimum requirements for BSD? Doug
[cctalk] Re: Odd Unix computer Bio-Rad SRC 3200
On 7/30/2022 8:01 PM, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk wrote: Doug, A few years ago I got it to power on and it runs Unix variant, their product name was Idris. I have 16 floppies (dated 1992) that came with the system, but the hard disk has died. Interesting! I have a Multibus system that runs Idris, very little information seems to be around on it. Mine's a straight 68K. What are the minimum requirements for BSD? With an '030 you should be able to run NetBSD-CURRENT, slowly :P You would of course have to write drivers for any unsupported hardware you need. Thanks, Jonathan What an odd OS. Glad to see that someone else recognized it. Looked it up on the internet and found a Wiki page giving a brief history. Now I know more than before. In my case I have something where the hardware is unique, the OS is unique. A real honest to goodness dinosaur. Bio-Rad built and labeled the CPU board, not cheaply either! Looks like it used standard components for scsi control, floppy i/f. No graphics, simple line drawing. Doug
[cctalk] DEC H7868 Power Supplies
While cleaning up I found a box with 3 H7868 power supplies. Once upon a time I had a BA213 and BA215 Vax. One of them has a cable coming out the top of it and probably went to the BA213 box which had only one power supply. The other two are plain and likely are from a BA215 box. I assume they are not working and if you want one or all I will ship if you pay postage. I am located in Zip 20640, shipping out of the US seems not worth the trouble. Doug
[cctalk] Re: DEC H7868 Power Supplies
On 8/29/2022 5:11 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote: On 29/08/2022 21:40, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: While cleaning up I found a box with 3 H7868 power supplies. Once upon a time I had a BA213 and BA215 Vax. One of them has a cable coming out the top of it and probably went to the BA213 box which had only one power supply. The other two are plain and likely are from a BA215 box. I assume they are not working and if you want one or all I will ship if you pay postage. I am located in Zip 20640, shipping out of the US seems not worth the trouble. It's worth noting that I think that the H7868-*A* is 115/120V and the H7868-*B* is 220/240V and they are not auto-ranging. So shipping outside the US (at least to the UK, but probably other places too) is not worth the trouble for another reason too. Antonio The details are : H7868-A Rev E03 - this one has the power leads for disk drives coming out of it. Those DEC 5 pin types, 3 in all. Plus one 8 pin connector. H7868-A Rev D01 H7868-A Rev F04 All are listed as 120V
[cctalk] Re: Bubble Memory
On 10/19/2022 5:49 PM, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote: On eBay, 10pcs for $75: https://www.ebay.com/itm/394216367144 =] -- Anders Nelson This reminded me that I have a qbus Bubble Tek (or something) board in my collection. It emulates an RX01 device, however it uses the Intel 7110 bubble memory and contains 1M bit of data. That is 128 KB! Formatted you get a 128KB RX01, and you thought the 256KB RX01 was a small space to work in. Doug
[cctalk] Re: Soviet PDP clones
On 10/17/2022 2:57 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: On 10/17/22 14:47, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote: Hi all, After some discussion on reddit about russian PDP-11 clones, i made the (perhaps erronous) claim that the PDP series in general was cloned by the Soviets. I’m aware that there was a lot of QBUS/LSI PDP-11 clones, and depite poor documentation, there is significant evidence of PDP-8 clones. Also, depite not strictly a “PDP”, the VAX series was also cloned. I am not aware of any VAX clones but during the height of the cold war real VAX were frequently illegally moved to the USSR via India who had no problems with violating their agreements with their allies. Just like someone in the US bought a copy of BSD Unix for the VAX and it was known to have been smuggled out of the country in a diplomatic pouch via the Russian Embassy in DC. bill In the mid 1980's I went to inspect a complete VAX 780 that had been confiscated by the US Gov't and was to be auctioned off. This was in the Wash DC area and the computer was configured for 50Hz power and was destined for South Africa. Its true destination was somewhere else, probably Russia. It didn't make sense that the auction was open to the public, but the equipment was export restricted.
[cctalk] Re: Odd Unix computer Bio-Rad SRC 3200
On 7/30/2022 10:04 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: On 7/30/2022 8:01 PM, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk wrote: Doug, A few years ago I got it to power on and it runs Unix variant, their product name was Idris. I have 16 floppies (dated 1992) that came with the system, but the hard disk has died. Interesting! I have a Multibus system that runs Idris, very little information seems to be around on it. Mine's a straight 68K. What are the minimum requirements for BSD? With an '030 you should be able to run NetBSD-CURRENT, slowly :P You would of course have to write drivers for any unsupported hardware you need. Thanks, Jonathan What an odd OS. Glad to see that someone else recognized it. Looked it up on the internet and found a Wiki page giving a brief history. Now I know more than before. In my case I have something where the hardware is unique, the OS is unique. A real honest to goodness dinosaur. Bio-Rad built and labeled the CPU board, not cheaply either! Looks like it used standard components for scsi control, floppy i/f. No graphics, simple line drawing. Doug Decided to sell it, can't keep it any longer. See pictures on ebay item 325288272428. There were manuals for Idris. Doug
[cctalk] Re: Connecting a physical terminal via LAN to Serial Port
On 7/31/2022 1:23 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote: I am looking for some advice and recommendations on how to best go about accomplishing the following: I have recently come into possession of an actual physical terminal that can be connected to a device via a standard RS232 (serial) port, so far so good. I have a number of devices that can be connected to for maintenance (e.g. FW updates, configuration, etc.) via a serial port. Currently I have been using an old laptop with a terminal program (Procomm Plus) whenever I want to connected to one of these devices. This involves crawling around connecting the serial cable, doing what needs to be done, crawling back disconnecting, rinse and repeat. I can connect the physical terminal to one device at a time and have a permanent connection to that one device, great for one device but not so useful. So I was thinking if it would be possible to do this over the LAN. I know about console servers where I could connect multiple serial devices to the server and then access each device over LAN via a telnet client on a modern system using an IP:port schema. This works great except I don't get to play with my shiny, new to me, authentic experience terminal device. So I am wondering if there is a box that provides a telnet CLIENT to a serial port device? I.E. a box smart enough that handles the telnet client, LAN functions, and terminal emulations internally and then provides a text based interface through a serial port that is compatible with my physical terminal? That way my physical terminal would be connected to the RS232/LAN bridge all the time and I could connected to not only the serial ports connected to the console server but other telnet accessible services as all the heavy lifting would be done on the bridge. I am ideally looking for a ready to go, low power device, I can hide away as opposed to setting up a PC of my own running some *nix flavor that I know can do this but is way over kill. Oh yeah and if it is super cheap even better. Thanks! -Ali I got a Lantroix SCS 400 off of ebay for cheap. 4 Serial DB-9 ports, one RJ45 LAN port. Has built in Telnet , SSH. I think you can go back the other way, i.e. Computer -> LAN -> into one of the RS232 ports. Never used it that way. Used it to connect actual terminals to Vax computers, very easy. Connecting to Linux was hard, Linux doesn't like old style TELNET by default. Doug
[cctalk] Re: Saturn-Calc
On 12/30/2022 7:23 AM, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote: Hi all, My 11/73 restoration has got to the point that I am loading stuff from RT11 backups, and I have a lot of Saturn-calc and wp data that I would like to see again. My licensed copy and the manual are long gone! I downloaded some RX02 images posted by Mark Matlock, but the disks appear to be all zeroes where I expect the directory to be. Does anybody know of a source? cheers, Nigel I have some DEC format 8 inch floppies from the mid 1980's that may have Saturn WP on it. It rings a bell, I think I had a copy at one time. Long, long time ago. I can't read the floppies (got no drive), anyone in the Wash DC area that can read them would help. Doug
[cctalk] Re: Manual for MDB MLSI-LP11
On 12/29/2022 9:33 AM, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote: My re-build of a BA23 11/73 system continues. I have one of these MDB printer controllers but cannot make it do anything more that home page on the laser using RT-11 Does anybody have a manual or know where I can download one. An extensive search using google just brings up a data sheet. Happy New Year to all, Nigel I remember having a 11/03 system at work back in 1984 that had an attached printer with what looked like an ordinary parallel printer connector. However, the signal protocols for the printer interface were different than the standard parallel interface everyone was using on their PC's. I think they were close but you needed a printer that understood the DEC protocols. Shouldn't be surprising to anyone from that era. Doug
[cctalk] Re: Computer Museum uses GreaseWeazle to help exonerate Maryland Man
This would make a great talk at one of the Vintage Computer Festivals. At VCF East I see many parents bringing children (teenagers especially) that would get an important lesson from this showing how adults from vastly different walks of life interact and produce positive results. Museum Staff Helps Exonerate David Veney The System Source Computer Museum: Bob Roswell https://museum.syssrc.com/
[cctalk] DEC Prom MRV11-C and MXV11-B2 ROMS
Is it possible to use the MXV11-B2 Roms in an 18 bit MRV11-C Prom board? Clearly they work in the 22 bit version, MRV11-D, but I don't have one of those. The intention is to put together a small PDP-11 in an H9281-AB backplane (18 bit) with an 11/23 or 11/73 CPU, Ram, disk controller, etc.
[cctalk] Re: Talking PDP11
The DACs on the AAV11-C board are not marked in any revealing way. I think they are Burr Brown DAC80, 24 pin, but I'm not sure. I wasn't sure if they were working and was looking for a replacement. Looking at the spec sheets DAC's seem to come in Voltage or Current versions. Life got more complicated. This started out as a simple exercise into verifying the AAV11-C operation using PDP11GUI to program up a basic program to run all the codes thru the DAC. It worked, got a ramp out. Now, I'm starting to look at the KWV11-C and how to use that to send values to the DAC at a controllable rate. Doug -- On 7/11/2023 11:41 AM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: I originally used R-2R DACs but I was lucky enough to be able to buy a couple of DAC08 chips at Radio Shack and built a circuit using 74LS244 latching buffers so that I could drive both channels of a single 8-bit parallel port and 2 extra control lines (Select and Strobe). On 7/11/2023 6:43 AM, ste...@malikoff.com steven--- via cctalk wrote: On 07/10/2023 11:31 PM AEST Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: Way back in the 80's I was able to do stereo 4 part harmony on a 2 MHZ 6809 using two 8-bit D/A converters. Much the same here. I recounted this on VCFed a few months ago about building a simple 2-chip 8-bit ladder DAC with one-transistor amplifier for my Applied Technology DG680 S100 machine back in the early 80s from this absolutely excellent BYTE article on how to do polyphonic synthesis on a microcomputer (KIM-1): https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-09/page/n63/mode/2up A schoolfriend who had an Apple ][ and had not done any Z80 machine code before asked for me to hand him my Zaks book, upon which he wrote out one attempt in Z80, crossed it out and wrote a second version. Which worked perfectly. For the music piece I got it to play four-voice polyphony after painstakingly encoding Bach's Praeludium in C Major from my mothers' collection of piano music scores. A few years ago I had thoughts about porting the 6502 code to the PDP-11 and use the same sort of ladder DAC. Not sure if the slimline 11/05 would be fast enough for anything too high frequency, but if it was, the slimline 05's power supply could then temporarily come out and be perhaps be powered off some beefy batteries in that space, along with a small 1970s transistor amp and 1970s headphones topped off with a leather shoulder strap to lug it around like a giant Walkman.
[cctalk] Re: Talking PDP11
Funny you mention that, I've got a Data Translation DT2766 and it is identical to the AAV11-C. I mean identical! In the day DT must have sold them based on 2 selling points: (1) Cheaper than DEC and (2) Exact drop in replacement for the DEC AAV11-C. Doug On 7/11/2023 12:33 PM, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: You might try looking for Data Translation products. I know some of the later ad and da modules were made by them for DEC On July 11, 2023 12:28:43 p.m. EDT, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: The DACs on the AAV11-C board are not marked in any revealing way. I think they are Burr Brown DAC80, 24 pin, but I'm not sure. I wasn't sure if they were working and was looking for a replacement. Looking at the spec sheets DAC's seem to come in Voltage or Current versions. Life got more complicated. This started out as a simple exercise into verifying the AAV11-C operation using PDP11GUI to program up a basic program to run all the codes thru the DAC. It worked, got a ramp out. Now, I'm starting to look at the KWV11-C and how to use that to send values to the DAC at a controllable rate. Doug -- On 7/11/2023 11:41 AM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: I originally used R-2R DACs but I was lucky enough to be able to buy a couple of DAC08 chips at Radio Shack and built a circuit using 74LS244 latching buffers so that I could drive both channels of a single 8-bit parallel port and 2 extra control lines (Select and Strobe). On 7/11/2023 6:43 AM, ste...@malikoff.com steven--- via cctalk wrote: On 07/10/2023 11:31 PM AEST Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: Way back in the 80's I was able to do stereo 4 part harmony on a 2 MHZ 6809 using two 8-bit D/A converters. Much the same here. I recounted this on VCFed a few months ago about building a simple 2-chip 8-bit ladder DAC with one-transistor amplifier for my Applied Technology DG680 S100 machine back in the early 80s from this absolutely excellent BYTE article on how to do polyphonic synthesis on a microcomputer (KIM-1): https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-09/page/n63/mode/2up A schoolfriend who had an Apple ][ and had not done any Z80 machine code before asked for me to hand him my Zaks book, upon which he wrote out one attempt in Z80, crossed it out and wrote a second version. Which worked perfectly. For the music piece I got it to play four-voice polyphony after painstakingly encoding Bach's Praeludium in C Major from my mothers' collection of piano music scores. A few years ago I had thoughts about porting the 6502 code to the PDP-11 and use the same sort of ladder DAC. Not sure if the slimline 11/05 would be fast enough for anything too high frequency, but if it was, the slimline 05's power supply could then temporarily come out and be perhaps be powered off some beefy batteries in that space, along with a small 1970s transistor amp and 1970s headphones topped off with a leather shoulder strap to lug it around like a giant Walkman.
[cctalk] Talking PDP11
I have a PDP-11/53 and have just started playing with an AAV11-C D/A board. It is a 4 channel D/A convertor with 12 bit resolution. Can it be used to play an audio bit stream? Here is simple code used to see if the thing was actually working: .title AAV11 D/A test ; .asect dbr0 = 170440 .=1000 start: mov #,r0 4096 value to R0 mov #dbr0,r1 first D/A buffer out loop: mov r0,(r1) transfer value in r0 to D/A out dec r0 subtract 1 from D/A value bne loop br start loop back to start I was surprised to see that it took ~34 ms to run through all the numbers from 0-, that is about 34 Hz. The manual says the 'settling time' is 6 microseconds. Is this fast enough for audio? How would you convert a modern audio file into 12 bit integers? Doug
[cctalk] Re: Talking PDP11
Wow! Actual engineers responding... It looks like I could only do the most rudimentary audio. 1. Sample Rate: You got maybe 20K samples to store in lower memory. At 7KHz sample rate that would allow 3 seconds of audio. Voice only. 2. Samples: They must be 12 bits. Converting a modern audio clip requires, band filtering, resampling and mapping to 12 bit integers. Could be done in python, they have libraries. 3. Clocking output: I have a KMV11, but never programmed around it. 4. Amplify output: AAV11-C produces -10 to +10 volts, have to divide this down for input to an audio amp. In the end I will have undone all the advances made in digital audio in the last 30 to 40 years. Doug On 7/9/2023 4:09 PM, Martin Bishop via cctalk wrote: You just did use it to play "audio" :<) The 6 us settling time corresponds to a sampling rate of ~167 kHz, not that you will ever get there or would wish to. The theoretical (real) sampling rate required for a given bandwith is Fs = 2 Bw. That requires brick wall filters and it is a lot of work to get close without significant distortion. These old DACs are all but certain to use ladder circuits [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor_ladder] the settlng time will mostly come from the output buffer [see e.g. https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/ltc1668-dac-lt1807-opamp-achieve-90ns-settling-to-16bits-83db-sfdr-small-footprint.html for bleeding edge examples]. To see something other than ringing on a scope you want at least 10 samples per cycle, e.g. for 3 kHz bandwidth (i.e. 0 - 3 kHz frequency coverage) output at 30 kHz or greater. A low pass (reconstruction in the argot) filter will round off the corners - set the corner just above the passband DMA, a local FIFO or at least double buffering are the minimum to avoid sample jitter. On basic hardware you will probably have to do what you can with a sampling clock derived from the RTC card, from 10 MHz you could get an interupt at 40 kHz or 25 kHz but maybe not 30 kHz. The interupt then controls the play out from a table or disk ;<) For testing you can do quite a lot with a single cycle sine wave table in memory. Say you are playing out at Fs = 30 kHz, and you have a 30 k sample table. By varying the step through the table from 15k to 1 you can alter the output frequency from 15 kHz to 1 Hz in 1 Hz increments; i.e. output frequency = Fs * stride / table length. From a VQ look at the AAV11 docs it uses the bottom 12 bits, doubtless <11> is ms, hopefully it will like 2's complement numbers and the analog offset voltage will be trimmed for bipolar signals. Have fun and good luck Martin -Original Message- From: Douglas Taylor via cctalk [mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org] Sent: 09 July 2023 19:46 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: Douglas Taylor Subject: [cctalk] Talking PDP11 I have a PDP-11/53 and have just started playing with an AAV11-C D/A board. It is a 4 channel D/A convertor with 12 bit resolution. Can it be used to play an audio bit stream? Here is simple code used to see if the thing was actually working: .title AAV11 D/A test ; .asect dbr0 = 170440 .=1000 start: mov #,r0 4096 value to R0 mov #dbr0,r1 first D/A buffer out loop: mov r0,(r1) transfer value in r0 to D/A out dec r0 subtract 1 from D/A value bne loop br start loop back to start I was surprised to see that it took ~34 ms to run through all the numbers from 0-, that is about 34 Hz. The manual says the 'settling time' is 6 microseconds. Is this fast enough for audio? How would you convert a modern audio file into 12 bit integers? Doug
[cctalk] Re: VCF and System Source Computer Museum swap meet this weekend
I plan on being there, for me it is a lot closer that the Swap Meet in Wall NJ on the same day. Doug On 7/18/2023 7:56 PM, Mark G Thomas via cctalk wrote: Hi, I am curious if anyone here might be planning on attending. https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/events/3000/ The Vintage Computer Federation and the System Source Computer Museum are hosting a vintage computer repair workshop on Saturday July 22nd and Sunday July 23rd 2023 ... Mark
[cctalk] Re: VCF and System Source Computer Museum swap meet this weekend
On 7/19/2023 12:33 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: On 7/19/2023 11:23 AM, Ethan O'Toole via cctalk wrote: Hi, I am curious if anyone here might be planning on attending. https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/events/3000/ I am heading up there with friends Friday night so we can get there early Saturday. Bringing some stuff to sell, nothing too crazy just odds and ends. PICMG Pentium rackmount machine and odds and ends for micros. Only system on my "to get" list is Acorn Archemedies. Looking forward to it, and I think System Source might be the #1 collection in the world. Very cool place. Say hi if you see me and are on this list. All this chatter has made me interested in maybe making the drive (a bit over 3 hours). What time does it start on Saturday? How would we know each other? :-) bill Starts at 8AM, I think name tags would be a good idea so we can match a name we know only from the list to a face. Doug
[cctalk] Re: 1974 No Name Terminal
At first glance it reminded me of the Hazeltine 1000, I owned one in the early 1980's. Brutally simple terminals, I remember getting a ROM from Jameco which allowed the terminal to display lowercase letters. Pure luxury. Doug On 7/4/2023 6:57 PM, Brad H via cctalk wrote: Hi there - not sure how much overlap there is with vcfed's forum, but thought I would reach out here in case. I have a terminal from 1974 (based on date codes I've found on the motherboard). I'm unable to determine manufacturer and that would be handy for diagnostic purposes. The terminal casing is made out of foam, and although there are some serial numbers stamped around, nothing really lines up. The fans inside have zero dust or dirt, so I'm thinking this may not have seen much use, or may be a prototype or pilot for something. It does have RS232 capability. Interestingly the screen is set down below the keyboard so that only half of it is visible. My main issue right now is the PSU - I am trying to determine if I'm safe to attempt powering up the board (the PSU so far seems to be ok, although some voltages on a couple of pins are mysterious). Anyway, on the extremely off chance anyone has ever seen one of these or something like it.. any tips would be appreciated. If I can find a manual I'll feel a lot safer about turning it on. Some pics here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-2uEFbi3OKBYr06y6yHnygDiLMtw2Qkj?usp =sharing Brad b...@techtimetraveller.com
[cctalk] Re: Talking PDP11
I'm looking to see if it possible to do something similar. Just blasting raw 12bit samples from memory out the D/A board. A fine point would be to use the KWV11-C realtime clock board for the sample rate control. No interrupts, just polling. Harder is taking an existing MPG or WAV audio clip and converting it into raw 12bit integers. I wouldn't try this on the PDP11, I would do this in Linux, offline, using python or octave to take a wide band audio file convert it into a narrowband audio file, then resample down to the rate I would use on the PDP11 and finally convert the numbers into 12bit integers. Then just deposit those 12bit numbers into the PDP11 memory and blast away! Will it work? I don't know. Anyway, it's July and too hot to go outside. This is an inside project, with air conditioning. Doug On 7/10/2023 9:41 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: On Jul 9, 2023, at 9:19 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: Wow! Actual engineers responding... It looks like I could only do the most rudimentary audio. 1. Sample Rate: You got maybe 20K samples to store in lower memory. At 7KHz sample rate that would allow 3 seconds of audio. Voice only. 2. Samples: They must be 12 bits. Converting a modern audio clip requires, band filtering, resampling and mapping to 12 bit integers. Could be done in python, they have libraries. 3. Clocking output: I have a KMV11, but never programmed around it. 4. Amplify output: AAV11-C produces -10 to +10 volts, have to divide this down for input to an audio amp. In the end I will have undone all the advances made in digital audio in the last 30 to 40 years. I'm reminded of a project I did in college in 1974, when I made a primitive graphics display using an X/Y oscilloscope driven by an AA-11. Since the machine was a PDP-11/20 with 8 kW of memory, I decided to use the RC-11 disk as the refresh memory, doing DMA directly from disk to the D/A data CSR. So on the scenario here: the sample rate is clearly more than adequate. 12 bits is not CD grade audio but not bad; for ears used to the distorions of compressed audio files it's probably good enough. The PDP-11 certainly won't be able to decompress modern lossy compression files. It should be fine with raw or nearly-raw files, which means you can convert externally and feed the resulting files to the PDP-11. You could convert to 16 bit raw mono with standard tools and then drop the bottom 4 bits. Band filtering? Resampling? I don't know why you would want to do that, unless there isn't a reasonable way to drive the device at the source file's data rate. For example, if you have a KW-11/P that's clearly doable. (Come to think of it, that 11/20 had a KW-11/P and I created BASIC extensions for it that would allow sampling to be driven by that clock, at a rate of your choosing.) You can't fit a whole lot of data in 64 kW of memory, but that isn't needed. That rate isn't all that high; it isn't hard to write a program that does double buffering from a disk file to memory to the D/A. That makes a really nice real time programming exercise. paul
[cctalk] Re: Need AUI cable
I have a real DEC AUI cable and live in MD. I think it is 10 feet long. Doug On 6/27/2023 9:16 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Anyone in MD got an AUI cable (few feet long) I can steal so I don't have to remove the bolts from the Pro/380's Ethernet socket or the pins on my 10bt ethernet MAU? Friendly note: If you try to boot a Pro/380 running POS 3.2 with Decnet installed and don't have the loopback plug the system will crash hard with a numeric error on the display. Noted. CZ
[cctalk] Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 12/3/2023 2:19 PM, John H. Reinhardt via cctalk wrote: On 12/3/2023 10:27 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug State of the Art SCSI replacement is the ZuluSCSI RP2040 which is from the same people as SCSI2HD (I think - at least the same US Store). In any case the SCSI2HD is generally out of stock unless there is some NOS left. The ZuluSCSI is what is in production now. It's under continual development with fixes and new features are being added (for better or worse). I have two in a MicroVAX3100-95. One is the main file systems - I have a 256GB SD card where there are 4 drives allocated. There are two 50GB main drives and 2 9GB system drives. I have them mirrored under VMS Volume Shadowing. I aim to use about 50% of the capacity of the SD card to allow plenty of space for the card's firmware to do wear leveling. They are SAMSUNG PRO Endurance cards with an estimated endurance of 140k hours. The other ZuluSCSI RP2040 card is mounted for external access and is the backup device. This gets rotated regularly. All that said, in the MV3100 they are still slower by a touch than rotating disks. But after having several Ebay SCSI disks have controller issues (shorting and burnt out controllers) I am hoping these are more trouble free. I also have 2 older SCSI2HD in my AlphaServer DS10 systems for removable storage. When I get a chance I am swapping them out for the ZuluSCSI RP2040 models because they are slightly faster and much easier to manage. The ZuluSCSI is a hybrid of the SCSI2HD hardware and SCSI firmware and the BlueSCSI management firmware. With the SCSI2HD you needed a utility (mostly) to mange the settings of the SCSI2HD card. COpying the data to the card usually meant using a utility like dd or something that could write to specific places on the card. With the ZuluSCI you format the SD card in FAT or EX-FAT (if your disks are bigger than 4GB) and put them on the card with a specific name format. The documentation explains it all pretty clearly. www.zuluscsi.com - US Store and some documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/wiki/ZuluSCSI-Manual - Documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware - firmware https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WB3D5GQ - Samsung PRO Endurance https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/memory-card/micro-sd-pro-endurance/ - marketing info Thanks, now I know what to ask for for Christmas! The only conflict I ever ran into was a Viking QDO would work in a MicroVax II, but not in a PDP-11. The other problem I ran into was when I removed the SCSI bus termination resistor pack from a V5 SCSI2SD and forgot the orientation on how to re-install it.
[cctalk] Re: Drum memory on pdp11's? Wikipedia thinks so....
At the VFC East just a few days ago a young man came up to me, I had a PDP11/53 on display, and showed me pictures of his 11/45 and PDP-8 that he had just acquired and needed to learn about. It was impressive, he said the 11/45 was missing the memory boards. If he shows up here on the list please help him. To me, it look like he had stumbled into a Unicorn. Doug On 4/13/2024 5:26 PM, Christopher Zach via cctalk wrote: Was reading the Wikipedia article on Drum memories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory#External_links And came across this tidbit. As late as 1980, PDP-11/45 machines using magnetic core main memory and drums for swapping were still in use at many of the original UNIX sites. Any thoughts on what they are talking about? I could see running the RS03/RS04 on a 11/45 with the dual Unibus configured so the RS03's talk to memory directly instead of the Unibus, but that's not quite the same as true drum memory. Closest thing I remember was the DF32 on a pdp8 which could be addressed by word as opposed to track/sector. Thoughts? C
[cctalk] Re: What to take to a vintage computer show
I learned at VCF East this year that I should have brought an UPS to make sure that my vintage equipment had good, clean AC power. My PDP11 kept on resetting during the show. Doug On 5/1/2024 9:53 PM, Brad H via cctalk wrote: Just reaching out to anyone who has exhibited at a vintage computing festival before. After years of only being able to watch others attend the ones that happen in the US, we are finally getting one in BC here. Super excited. I was invited both to speak and to exhibit, and they even got me two tables which is awesome. Like, how do you prepare for these things? What things that you didn't think of going into your first show do you wish you had? I have a pretty eclectic collection, and some really rare stuff (like my Mark-8s) that I'd love to bring but am hesitant about due to the risks of transportation damage and theft (from the car mostly, not the convention itself). Just trying to decide what to bring and how focused to be in terms of theme. Brad
[cctalk] Re: 5,34 Petaflop System Cheyenne
In the 1980's I attended a US Gov't auction for a Vax 780. It was being exported to South Africa and the State Dept stopped the transfer because it was ultimately going to a banned country. Don't know which one, but I do remember the system was configured for 50Hz power. 50Hz power, disks, cpu, everything. Wow. Doug On 5/3/2024 8:41 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: I wonder if some intermediary is buying it for a country that cannot legally purchase something like that from the USA. I'm not normally a conspiracy guy but why would any normal company pay half a million dollars for something that could be produced with today's technology for considerably less? On 5/3/2024 6:57 PM, Gavin Scott via cctalk wrote: Sold at $480,085.00. On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 6:22 PM Gavin Scott wrote: On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 5:14 PM Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Bad news... But does he have 8,000 of them haha. Auction is at $435K now (past the end time) with multiple active bidders extending it.
[cctalk] Re: Keyboard Blockers?
I took a second look and here are the keys that were 'locked': Set Up Break Del Line INS Char Line DEL Char Scrn CLR Line INS Repl Escape Home All the Arrow keys, up, down, right, left It's a standard ASCII Wyse Keyboard Doug On 3/10/2024 6:10 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote: > I thought, at first, some dirt or debris had gotten stuck there, but > on closer look I saw something black below the keys that seemed to be > stuck. I pulled a key cap off and found a U shaped piece of black > plastic that was put there on purpose to prevent you from depressing > the key. > The question came to mind; "What sort of application would be so > crude that you would have to prevent the user from depressing certain > keys?" I saw this in at least two applications: 1. The Service Merchandise chain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise) used serial terminals for their in-showroom catalog ordering. Some keys were blocked somehow, though I never peeled up key caps to see how. :) I want to say that backspace was one of the blocked keys, the aggravation of which is probably why I remember this. 2. CLSI library systems (LIBS100 on PDP-11). Ours here had ADM-3A (iirc) terminals with the break key blocked, iirc, though there were plenty of other ways to discombobulate the thing inadvertently. It was also available via dialup from keyboards that were not so modified. I once heated up a paper clip to read hot and shoved it through the stem of a TVI-925's SEND key, which was used for block mode functions, and caused the terminal to vomit screen contents back to the host. Unwanted presses of course produced a heck of a mess. (Older versions of our application ran in block mode, but you could always hit ESC-S to send the screen, and it was unfortunately easy, at least for me, to thwack SEND by mistake.) De
[cctalk] Keyboard Blockers?
I picked up a keyboard for a Wyse terminal at a flea market the other day. When I tried some of the keys, they couldn't be depressed. I thought, at first, some dirt or debris had gotten stuck there, but on closer look I saw something black below the keys that seemed to be stuck. I pulled a key cap off and found a U shaped piece of black plastic that was put there on purpose to prevent you from depressing the key. The question came to mind; "What sort of application would be so crude that you would have to prevent the user from depressing certain keys?" One of the keys was a Break key, which sort of made sense to me, because it would halt a PDP-11 if that was the host machine. This was the first time I had ever seen this kind of thing, was this common long ago?
[cctalk] Re: DEC Processor Books
That matches what a DEC FE told me, at least about the VAX version: the people were just DEC employees that caught somebody's eye when they were planning the shots. Don't think they got extra modeling fees.. I wouldn't expect modeling fees, given the wording of the standard employee agreement. paul I can't imagine a company using staff for photo ops. Young people now a days have tattoos, piercings and wear tee-shirts and flip-flops to work.
[cctalk] DEC VT340/330 ROM Cartridge
The DEC VT340 has a slot in the back of the terminal to insert a ROM cartridge. I can't find any description of what this DEC labeled ROM cartridge would do for you. I've seen them with V1.1 and V2.1 markings, does anyone remember what additional capabilities these ROM cartridge provide? Doug
[cctalk] Re: DEC VT340/330 ROM Cartridge
On 4/6/2024 11:14 AM, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: On Sat, Apr 6, 2024 at 3:54 PM Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: The DEC VT340 has a slot in the back of the terminal to insert a ROM cartridge. I can't find any description of what this DEC labeled ROM cartridge would do for you. I've seen them with V1.1 and V2.1 markings, does anyone remember what additional capabilities these ROM cartridge provide? Will the terminal work at all without that cartridge fitted?. I've had a quick look at the VT330 and VT340 printsets and I can't obviously spot any firmware ROMs on the main board schematics. So my first guess is that said cartridge is the terminal firmware. -tony Hmm, I have a VT340 that seems to pass POST but no video. It does have a cartridge inserted into the slot, you may be exactly correct. Doug
