Random question about a Byte Magazine Cover

OK so this has been bugging me for a while. During a stint working at Morgan-Smith Electronics in Hatfield UK (they made diverse electronic systems including industrial PCs and radio alarms) I went through the boss's discarded vintage computer magazine collection and one particular issue I

RE: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU

Thanks Mark, I probably don't have space for another one really, and yours is the one in the big enclosure anyway (like this: http://www.trailingedge.com/comphave.html?theKey=deccmicrovax2=0), if I remember right, which has a different PSU. Mine is one of these:

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

Hello, I have some unibus machines that always need some way to interface to modern disks. I always dream to make an universal board that could act as disk and/or tape interface to a modern medium (scsi or cf/sd card), but also ram, network, I/O, whatever... It would be very nice to design a

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> From: Phil Budne > Any plans to allow USB "target" (as opposed to "host" -- I dunno if > those are the correct terms) 'host' and 'device' are the two modes for USB, IIRC. > to allow the board to be connected to a modern computer as a > peripheral? Not sure I see the

Re: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU

I haven't looked into this at all and I suspect it's probably quite tricky indeed. I did look around a while back drew a blank. If you need another dead MV2 let me know, the one I collected is still sat in the garage. Regards, Mark. On 20 November 2015 at 00:00, Robert Jarratt

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 11/24/15 18:21, Phil Budne wrote: > I suppose "host" ports can used to support physical USB dongles of > various sorts (serial, ethernet), but I guess my orientation is "why > connect extra hardware that can be simulated?" We talked about this and put it in the category of "the hardware can

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 5:08 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: > > >> On Nov 24, 2015, at 14:04, shad wrote: >> It would be very nice to design a system based on fpga + cpu (arm), so you >> can load linux on it and avoid the hassle of handling file systems for the

Re: Open FPGAs? - was Re: Project Oberon and OberonStation (resend)

On 11/24/2015 2:42 PM, Mouse wrote: What I was really interested in was whether the FPGA itself was open. If so, I definitely would have wanted to pick up the hardware, because I would love to experiment with an FPGA - but I am _not_ going to put up with running a vendor binary blob (which

Re: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU

On 11/24/2015 05:52 PM, Mark Wickens wrote: I haven't looked into this at all and I suspect it's probably quite tricky indeed. I did look around a while back drew a blank. I built up a Micro-VAX II system out of boards, backplanes and assorted junk. I made my own power supply. The power

Re: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU

On 11/24/2015 05:52 PM, Mark Wickens wrote: 4. The most difficult bit, I suspect, would be the PSU LTC signal , which I believe is some kind of clock. I don't know what the spec of the signal is, but I will get a scope on a working one to see (NB don't want to risk a working PSU on this

Re: Oberon and the OberonStation (retro-style FPGA computing)

On 11/23/2015 7:28 PM, William Maddox wrote: The revived 2013 re-issue of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system is a joy to behold. If you've never heard of Oberon before, it is a minimalistic education-oriented language and operating system designed after Wirth had taken a (second) sabattical at PARC

Re: Oberon and the OberonStation (retro-style FPGA computing)

On 11/24/2015 07:34 PM, Paul Koning wrote: Judging a language without even looking at it seems rather odd. Pascal is largely obsolete now, but I still appreciate it -- of the 40 or so languages I know, there are only two where I could go from no knowledge at all to having a working program of

Re: Oberon and the OberonStation (retro-style FPGA computing)

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 8:30 PM, ben wrote: > > On 11/23/2015 7:28 PM, William Maddox wrote: >> >> The revived 2013 re-issue of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system is a joy >> to behold. If you've never heard of Oberon before, it is a >> minimalistic education-oriented

[cctalk] - Flash (or ide) storage for HP-2000?

Jay an idea who's time has come? Has anyone looked into this~? Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org)

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

Hmm, now this is interesting. It occurred to me to try tacking a bit of aluminum foil tape onto the interruptor blade to make it cover the optical sensor earlier before hitting the hard stop. That made the drive seek differently, and then report either "Track Zero sensor misadjusted" or "Seek

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

On 11/24/2015 08:45 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: The hard drive is blinking an error code on its LED, reporting that it cannot cover the track 0 sensor. Measuring the sensor pins with a DMM while the drive is powered makes me believe that the optical sensor itself is working correctly. Its output

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 21:37, Chuck Guzis wrote: > Maybe it's trying to tell you that it's really a brick? :) > > (For those who recall the Miniscribe debacle). LOL! After my experience with that 20M SCSI drive on my Amiga, I'm tempted to say that they're all bricks. Some

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: > > Anyway, I have it happily spinning up now after moving the interruptor vane > on the outer stepper motor shaft a bit. It seems that the drive expects to > see the track zero sensor trip some distance before the hard stop,

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 22:11, Glen Slick wrote: > > I did some support work for a product that used a 3.5-inch 20MB > Miniscribe drive back in the mid-80's which had a failure mode where > the track zero flag would rotate slightly out of position on the > shaft. [...]

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

By the way, I found a stamp marking on the inside of the drive's front bezel which I think represents the expected attitude of a Miniscribe drive. :-p https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/669368721094238211 -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X http://www.nf6x.net/

Re: Oberon and the OberonStation (retro-style FPGA computing)

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 5:30 PM, ben wrote: > > I say WORTH LESS, with out even looking at it, as I am NOT a Pascal > FAN > > ​I'm guessing you're more of a FORTRAN devotee, based on the ALL CAPS? ​

Re: Oberon and the OberonStation (retro-style FPGA computing)

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 17:58, Earl Evans wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 5:30 PM, ben wrote: > >> >> I say WORTH LESS, with out even looking at it, as I am NOT a Pascal >> FAN >> >> > ​I'm guessing you're more of a FORTRAN devotee, based on the

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 11/24/15 5:04 PM, shad wrote: Hello, I have some unibus machines that always need some way to interface to modern disks. I always dream to make an universal board that could act as disk and/or tape interface to a modern medium (scsi or cf/sd card), but also ram, network, I/O, whatever...

Re: IBM 4341 and 3880 floppy disks

They look like diagnostics (IPL disks are serialized). Anyway, definitely worth saving and imaging. Of course, I can only see the top two, but I bet there are other fun things in the stack. -- Will On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote: > I recently acquired a

Open FPGAs? - was Re: Project Oberon and OberonStation (resend)

On 2015-11-24 2:37 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote: Just in case anyone wonders, the Oberonstation uses a Xilinx XC3S700AN aka Spartan-3 FPGA. So far, I haven't found anything that says that the code for the FPGA is open source / documented. I think mouse was referring to the toolchain, structure

IBM 4341 and 3880 floppy disks

I recently acquired a small pile of 8" floppy disks which appear to be for IBM 4341 and 3880 hardware: https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/669240958492372992 They're on my "to be imaged" pile. I don't have any hardware to go with them, and would be happy to trade them away after imaging them. They

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 2015-11-24 16:35, Al Kossow wrote: On 11/23/15 11:46 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: Your native interface have the additional problem that in addition to requiring people to write their own device driver for any OS usage, it will be rather difficult to get booting from it, since that require

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 11/23/15 11:46 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: Your native interface have the additional problem that in addition to requiring people to write their own device driver for any OS usage, it will be rather difficult to get booting from it, since that require special support. There is no reason

Re: WTB Miniscribe 3425 (working or parts donor)

No luck with the hard drive system on my CoCo 2 or 3, but I don't know if I have it set up right. There's one cartridge with the SASI interface (presumably...), and another with an Owl Ware Hard Disk BASIC 3 ROM and floppy controller. I can make the hard disk LED blink with commands like DRIVE

RE: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU

> -Original Message- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jon Elson > Sent: 25 November 2015 02:05 > To: gene...@classiccmp.org; discuss...@classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off- > Topic Posts > Subject: Re: Replacing MicroVAX II PSU With a Modern PSU > > On

Re: HTTPS and man-in-the-middle - was Re: new message

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Adrian Stoness wrote: > Man this has turned in a hackerspace discussion on security > On Nov 22, 2015 10:18 PM, "Dave Wade" wrote: > And here's today's installment: Dell has been found to be including an easily

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 2015-11-24 16:55, Mouse wrote: 3. The Q-bus comes in 2 (or 3?) flavors, the original with 18 bit addresses,$ I wouldn't go that far. I would say the MicroVAX-II counts as "in the Qbus world", and it has hardware to map Qbus memory space accesses to memory accesses, rather like the Unibus

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 10:55 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: > > On 2015-11-24 16:43, Paul Koning wrote: >> >> ... >> To elaborate, since this seems to be an area where people get confused: > > Thanks. Yes, people do seem to be confused. > >> 1. Unibus has 18 bit addresses,

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

On 2015-11-24 17:14, Noel Chiappa wrote: {Catching up, after being on the road all day yesterday... Replies to quite a few people in this, sorry you'll have to read through it to find yours, didn't want to inundate the list with 17 replies.} [snip] > However, if you want to write a

Re: IBM System/32 available

I just emailed the seller of this system to see if it has been purchased yet. They say it's still available, and they're thinking of putting it on eBay. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X http://www.nf6x.net/

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

{Catching up, after being on the road all day yesterday... Replies to quite a few people in this, sorry you'll have to read through it to find yours, didn't want to inundate the list with 17 replies.} > From: Jacob Ritort > Are you on keeping bits and/or status for these projects on

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

Noel, Any plans to allow USB "target" (as opposed to "host" -- I dunno if those are the correct terms) to allow the board to be connected to a modern computer as a peripheral? phil

Re: Project Oberon and OberonStation (resend)

Just in case anyone wonders, the Oberonstation uses a Xilinx XC3S700AN aka Spartan-3 FPGA. So far, I haven't found anything that says that the code for the FPGA is open source / documented. Ok, scratch that, I was looking at the http://oberonstation.x10.mx/ site. Over at

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 14:04, shad wrote: > It would be very nice to design a system based on fpga + cpu (arm), so you > can load linux on it and avoid the hassle of handling file systems for the > sd card, management and configuration, etc. [...] > But: there's always the

Re: IBM 4341 and 3880 floppy disks

The images are now available here: https://github.com/NF6X/ibm4341disks The original disks are now available for trade if anybody is interested in them. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X http://www.nf6x.net/

Re: Emulation

On 21 November 2015 at 16:55, Ray Arachelian wrote: > What you really want is the MESS project, http://www.mess.org/ - which > is part of MAME and has retro computer emulators. Not any more, no. As Al K said, MESS has now been merged into MAME. -- Liam Proven • Profile:

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> On Nov 24, 2015, at 2:46 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: > > On 2015-11-23 20:30, David Bridgham wrote: >>> For a classic/straightforward programming interface, the Massbus disks >>> (RP04 and successors) are a good choice. That will take you just over 500 >>> MB, if you

Re: flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

> 3. The Q-bus comes in 2 (or 3?) flavors, the original with 18 bit addresses,$ I wouldn't go that far. I would say the MicroVAX-II counts as "in the Qbus world", and it has hardware to map Qbus memory space accesses to memory accesses, rather like the Unibus Map you sketch. DMA is "always to