Re: Tektronix Terminal Emulation
> I'm not sure about the MicroVax II but on some other VAX and Alpha > machines, the console port may be less capable than ordinary terminal > ports in the way of buffering, flow control, 8 bit support and so on. The KA630, the MicroVAX-II CPU board (which includes the console serial port), has a relatively limited serial port. For example, it has only a byte or two of buffering in each direction, it cannot be used directly from userland even if the kernel wants to let it (it is accessed with MFPR and MTPR instructions), it has no software baudrate control, and various other limitations. These have concomitant benefits for console use, such as no software setup being required to get small numbers of characters transferred. But they do rather cripple it for voluminous data transfer. If you have an at-least-mildly-smart serial port card (eg, with substantial hardware buffering capability, and/or with DMA capability), you will probably get better performance with it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: I hate the new mail system
>> RFC 3912 doesn't specify what output the whois server is supposed to >> send. Everybody "assumes" that it should be the complete domain >> information, but that's simply not the case. >> Imposing this assumption is what Mouse does, and that is wrong. No, that is not what I'm doing, though I can certainly see how you could come to that conclusion. I'm not expecting/requiring/whatever that the relevant WHOIS server return all available information. But there is a lot of room between that and returning no contact information whatever, which latter is what DENIC does when queried in the usual way, ie, just the domain name without any DENIC-specific text. And that's well on the "unreasonable" side of the line. In my opinion, of course. It's my mailserver, so that's what matters. >> This option is completely legal [...] > Legal in what sense? I make no claim about its legality, in either the RFC sense or the off-net-law sense (except that I believe I am within applicable off-net law). I simply consider it antisocial and uncivilized, and am not interested in accepting mail from any domain within its bailiwick. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware
> I'm also a Cube owner in Toronto. Maybe we should start a local > collector's / user's group :D > Any others care to speak up? I'm in Ottawa. I've got a - very small! - collection of NeXT hardware. A slab or two, at least one megapixel display (the 2bpp greyscale kind), some small number of keyboards, a mouse or two, that's probably about it. I gave away my Cube years back. I've been tempted to get rid of them, but feel sentimental enough about having developed MouseX that I've so far avoided doing so. Also, I've been holding out the (admittedly slight) hope that hardware documentation will surface for the interesting hardware; I do not run closed-source software, so that's important to me. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: I hate the new mail system
>> And BTW, what you are doing is not clever at all: >> mo...@rodents-montreal.org >> SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: >> host MX-4.rodents-montreal.org [98.124.61.89]: >> 550-.de's whois server, whois.denic.de, is completely broken, handing >> 550-out no contact information at all when queried for .de domains in >> 550 the usual way. Such a domain has no place on a civilized network. It's not supposed to be clever. I'm just willing to call brokenness brokenness. That it's an entire country that's broken does not make it any less broken. Nor does it get them a pass on brokenness; if anything, being big makes the offence greater - they have less excuse. >> This is just wrong. Of course they hand out contact information! They didn't when I put that block in place, not without some DENIC-specific option - and still don't; see below. That's why I wrote "when queried...in the usual way". Since the whole point of WHOIS is to find data on domains you don't know things about, requiring some idiosyncratic option is, IMO, broken. Here's what I see, run while composing this mail: [Sparkle] 1> whois -h whois.denic.de uni-stuttgart.de Domain: uni-stuttgart.de Status: connect [Sparkle] 2> or [Sparkle] 3> telnet whois.denic.de whois Trying 81.91.170.6... Connected to whois.denic.de. Escape character is '^]'. uni-stuttgart.de Domain: uni-stuttgart.de Status: connect Connection closed by foreign host. [Sparkle] 4> Maybe you consider that to be contact information. I don't. > $ whois -h whois.denic.de uni-stuttgart.de > % Error: 557 Request not clearly specified I don't know what's going on here. The only way I've got that is to query for "-r uni-stuttgart.de". I know some whois clients automatically try to add the DENIC-specific option I mentioned above; perhaps yours is, but DENIC has changed and no longer accepts it? (IMO that would be, if anything, even more broken.) > $ telnet whois.denic.de 43 > Trying 81.91.170.6... > Connected to whois.denic.de. > Escape character is '^]'. > whois -r uni-stuttgart.de > % Error: 557 Request not clearly specified > Connection closed by foreign host. > $ > That's broken. In that case, it's the query that's broken. The normal way to use whois for domains is to send just the domain name upon connecting; the "whois -r " prefix you used is probably responsible. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: I hate the new mail system
> You know how to see what user agent I use (hint: alpine). And it is > fully capable of editing or changing anything I want. Good. Then what's the problem? Do you just want the list to be tuned so that you won't have to take a few seconds to edit out any addresses you don't want to send to? Basically, on the assumption that everyone shares your particular preferences? Because... > Yes, and it must not be in the Reply-To: field because in normal > cases, this field is the one used for replying, and I want to reply > to the list, and only to the list. ...that's sure what this sounds like. If so, I have little sympathy for your position. >> As I understand it, the attempt to "fix" the suspended-subscription >> "problem" has nothing to do with where the bounces are going, but >> rather with their being produced in the first place. > Yes, it is, well, funny... I haven't been able to figure out what the > problem could be. I know lots of things it could be. I don't know what it is. Nor have I seen anyone claiming to have actually looked into it enough to know what it is. (The most plausible guess I've seen is DMARC, which by design breaks mailing lists, but, based on just what I've seen said, nobody has actually dug up enough info to confirm or refute that. I don't have enough visibility into any relevant system to do so myself; all the suspensions I've personally had have been my system performing as configured, rejecting mail I want it to reject.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: I hate the new mail system
> My complaint (and I guess many more from other users will follow) is, > that if you reply to a message on the list, the author of that > message gets a private mail, too, as he is listed in the > Reply-To:-field. Only if you don't bother editing it down to whichever address you want to reply to (as I did for this message). If your user agent doesn't let you do that, well, your choice of a crippled user agent (and an inability to edit the list of recipients is a pretty serious failing for a user agent) is not reason to mangle the list even further for everyone else. > This is *wrong* and must be corrected (i.e. removed)! I disagree. For one thing, that is one of only two places the actual sender's address appears anywhere in the headers, based on the mail I'm replying to (and the other one is in a Received: comment, even less available to user agents and not present unless the sending mailsystem happens to add it). Mind you, I'd prefer the former state. But I'm not about to criticize Jay's handling of the lists when I'm in only peripheral touch with the relevant issues; even the issue of the bounces I have only the smallest experience with. I haven't personally seen a subscription suspension since I made my mailer accept-and-drop list mail it would normally reject, which makes me think that the suspensions people are seeing are probably due to the receiving mailserver rejecting the mail and should be dealt with by the subscriber in question talking with the mailserver admin in question and getting that sorted out. > No, the Envelope-From: [...] The envelope-from is not a header and in general does not have a name with a colon after it. (Your user agent, or possibly your mail store, may be (mis)presenting it that way, but that's not how it's carried on the wire and it is not handled that way in general.) > And yes, the change in the address fields don't cure the bounce > problem because the envelope from field is unchanged (and *that* > field is used for bounces, not the header fields *within* the mail). As I understand it, the attempt to "fix" the suspended-subscription "problem" has nothing to do with where the bounces are going, but rather with their being produced in the first place. As far as I have seen described on the list, nobody knows why the bounces are being generated; there have been plausible guesses involving misguided anti-spam measures, but even those I haven't seen any confirmation of as the cause of any of the suspensions. It's certainly possible I've missed something, but the continuation of the discussion as before seems to imply that's not it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Heathkit tube checker available
> Hi, all, I have a Heathkit TC-3 tube checker, including manual and > prints, available. Image here: > http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/jpg/tmp/TubeChecker.jpg Oh, man, that takes me back. As a kid, back when electronics meant vacuum tubes (because that was what I had access to), I had a (completely different) tube tester...I wonder what became of it. Not that I would have any real use for it these days. > Any interest, reply to me only, please - no need to litter the list! Might be nice to say where it is geographically. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: I hate the new mail system
>> [From: changing] > You can blame me for the change to the way the From: header is > handled. The purpose of this change is to try to solve the mass > bounce problem. Sounds as though this may be a cure worse than the disease, though. > Actually, you should really blame the folks responsible for DKIM, > SPF, ADSP, and the like. Depending on what you mean by "responsible", I might disagree. I don't blame the people who designed them. Depending on details I don't know, I blame either the people who adopted them without due consideration for their side effects or the people who chose a provider configured inappropriately for their desired use. (My guess from the outside is that the former is closer to appropriate here.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: PDF PDF Which is right and which is ... Was Re: PDP-11/24 CPU later version
> - PDF/A is [...] > Those are all good archival properties! However, it's also R/O. Maybe if you stick to Adobe's tools. As demonstrated by this thread, it's entirely possible to modify such files, even if the currently-easy ways to do that involve a trip through a completely different representation. I find it astonishing that anyone would seriously call any documented file format read-only. (If PDF/A isn't documented, then IMO it's not suitable for archival under any circumstances. But this thread makes it sound as though it's documented.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: LMI Lambda?
>> Note that I am not talking about _using_ an emulator to run >> copyrighted code. If that's what you were talking about, then I >> misunderstood, and I retract my question. > Yeah, I should have clarified - Using an emulator to run copyrighted code. I$ > However, doesnâ??t developing the emulator make you an accessory to the viol$ That would be jurisdiction-specific, probably to be settled by case law in most jurisdictions. However, there are people (and companies) with legitimate copies of the protected code; an emulator is a useful thing for them (for example, if I had a machine and it broke, I may want to continue running software written for it). I suspect (though it is a non-lawyer's guess) that any such case would hinge on how provable intent-to-infringe was. To pick an analogy, I have been working on a MicroVAX-II emulator. For it to be useful, you need the ROM image from the board. That software is copyrighted - but I own a KA-630 and thus have a legitimate copy of it. (The emulator is nevertheless useful to me, since I lack other hardware to surround the KA-630 with to make a useful system, notably disks.) Consider also MAME. As for a LispM emulator, personally, what I'd like to do (but don't have the resources to do and have other things I'd prefer to put my time into) would be to develop an emulator - with a legitimate copy of the software to test it against - then work on developing an alternative, open, system to run on it. (I've used (Symbolics) Lisp Machines, and, as much as I like them, there are numerous things I would prefer the OS did differently.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: LMI Lambda?
> Absent a license from the rightsholder, emulators are illegal. Full stop, en$ I think this is the first time I've seen this claimed. What is the basis for it? That is, what law would be violated by such a thing? Note that I am not talking about _using_ an emulator to run copyrighted code. If that's what you were talking about, then I misunderstood, and I retract my question. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: The Biggin Hill Omnibus
> Wow. Disassembling and rebuilding motors... not so crazy if it's a fan moto$ If I had to pick anyone as someone capable of it, though /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Logic Analysers
>> the propagation delay as the signal gets to each pin (remember a >> foot is about a nanosecond. [...]) Not really. A foot is about a light-nanosecond, yes, but high-frequency signals in copper travel by skin effect, moving significantly more slowly - somewhere around .6c, I think it is. It's still on the general order of c, mind you; for the purposes of this discussion, c and .5c - even .1c - are much the same. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: [cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org: confirm 38290c8a992491eda604beff5a06ff20cd7e85f5]
>>> Can someone please fix the mailing list software? This has been >>> reported every once in a while by a bunch of people for over ten >>> years. >> Bounces aren't caused by the mailing list, they're caused by the >> destination mail server. Depends on how you view `cause'. My own mailserver is one what I believe must be a very few that will reject mail for, for exmaple, being marked as containing 8859-1 text but including octets like 0x92 which do not occur in 8859-1 text. Yet such bounces are actually caused by the composing MUA's nonconformance, with every intermediate mailhost that handled the mail complicit by acquiescence; my mailserver causes the bounce only in the immediate sense of being the one that blows the whistle and throws down the red flag, the one that flags the offence for what it is. > What I've been wondering for a while is the span of time over which > the bounces are counted. I haven't read the code for that logic in any mailing list manager (or at least if I have I don't recall). But... > I can understand shutting a subscriber off for getting 10 bounces in > as many minutes. On the other hand if those 10 bounces are spread > over two months, it seems rather severe. It depends. If those 10 bounces in as many minutes were for 10 consecutive messages, perhaps. If they were for 10 messages mixed randomly among 250 others that were delivered fine, it seems somewhat excessive to me. If I were writing such code, I would pay attention to not only count and time but also to non-bounced list traffic. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: [cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org: confirm 38290c8a992491eda604beff5a06ff20cd7e85f5]
>> (Speaking of best practices, you're generating paragraph-length >> lines; you might want to read RFC 3676.) > Thatâ??s up to the receiving MUA to deal with, not the sending one. If you think that, you _really_ need to read 3676. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: [cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org: confirm 38290c8a992491eda604beff5a06ff20cd7e85f5]
> I'm on comcast.net and I get these too. Once a week or so on average. The $ (Speaking of best practices, you're generating paragraph-length lines; you might want to read RFC 3676.) You most likely wouldn't notice unless the bounce traffic got bad enough to trip some list's auto-suspend test. Perhaps the other lists are set less sensitive, or perhaps classiccmp carries more traffic that gets rejected. (The latter strikes me as more probable; I'd hazard a guess that this list holds an usually high proportion of people with unusual mail setups.) I've configured my mailer to silently drop mail that it would normally bounce, when it's mail from either of the lists I'm on that prefer that. This is one of them. Maybe you should do likewise? (If your mail is outsourced - it's not clear to me whether "I'm on comcast.net" means you outsource your mail to them or you just get connectivity through them - and they aren't willing to do that for you, I guess it's find a better mailhost to outsource to, stop outsourcing it, or give up on that idea.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Looking to read past EOT on DDS/DLT/LTO
> I find that the tar CLI in its full glory is no less arcane than the > creaky old cpio one. Ah, but what is "the tar CLI"? The POSIX one (which version?)? The GNU one (which version?)? The V7 one? The one you learnt 15 years ago and have trouble remembering anything beyond even now? :-) > tar used to be simple with few options. True - and true of a lot more than just tar. And, if you are ready to give up all the functionality correspnoding to the new options (whichever set of new options you mean), it probably wouldn't be that hard to tweak an old tar source into building today. _Also_ true of a lot more than just tar /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: tu58fs - PDP-11 file sharing with TU58 tape emulator
> Can't believe that FreeBSD has no baudrate > 38400 ! >> serial.c:443:44: error: use of undeclared identifier 'B300' >> serial.c:444:16: error: use of undeclared identifier 'B250' >> serial.c:445:16: error: use of undeclared identifier 'B200' At least some systems don't use B constants except for compatability - they simply stick the baudrate in c_ospeed and/or c_ispeed. (I don't use FreeBSD myself; I don't know whether it's one of them or not.) But there were a bunch of other undefined symbols too, many of which (eg, CRDLY, NLDLY) I don't recognize and which are not present in at least one other termio implementatino (NetBSD's). So at least part of the problem is that the code isn't all that portable. I notice you used gmake, from which I infer the Makefile is GNU-make-specific, which makes it at least somewhat likely the code was written for Linux, which makes the nonportabilities less surprising. (Code being written for Linux correlates positively, in my experience, with it assuming every system matches the developer's. Not that this is necessarily bad - I've done it myself often enough, though not often with Linux - but it does, to some extent, explain what you're seeing.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: IBM 7074 and then some: "Systems we love" conference
>> The 7074 was referred to as a "supercomputer". Can any decimal >> machine really bear that title? > I suppose it could. I would apply the term to a computer that's the fastest$ Consider Babbage's Analytical Engine. It was decimal and it was, not so much by intrinsic merit as by lack of competition, the fastest machine of its day. Admittedly, it ended up being little but vapourware until modern times. But applying "supercomputer" to vapourware machines is a longstanding tradition (though perhaps not one dating back quite to Babbage's day). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
MSCP Qbus port layer doc sought
I'm starting to pick up my KA630 emulator again. In particular, I want to give it MSCP disk. I have various MSCP documentation files, but they talk about MSCP proper. None of them describe the Q-bus - nor even Unibus - port drivers in enough detail for me to write an emulator; most of them barely mention either Q-bus or Unibus. I find I wrote a bunch of code, and I'm fairly sure it was based on a doc file, but I cannot now find that doc file. And I find the code disagrees with NetBSD's MSCP support. I tried to use the NetBSD driver as documentation but end up with the response ring doing unexpected things. So, I'm looking for the Qbus port specification. One of the text files I found on bitsavers (a DEC-internal TMSCP document) says "See UNIBUS/QBUS Storage Systems Port Specification for additional detail". I also found a message to a simh mailing list, quoting an RQDX3 document which, in its "Applicable Documents" list, has o UQSSP (Unibus/Qbus Storage Systems Port Specification) Those sound like what I want. Anyone happen to know where I might be able to find such a thing? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: SunoS 4.1.4 and Open Windows 3 on an IPX?
>> It looks like there is a mismatch between what resolution Open >> WIndows is using and how the frame buffer is configured. It does. >> My screen reports that the framebuffer is outputting 1280x1024@76Hz. If it's a "modern" flatscreen, don't necessarily trust that. I've seen flatscreens claim some very, um, "creative" things about the input signal if it doesn't use quite the sync timings the screen wants (which are, of course, invariably undocumented). For example, my usual desktop machine is a SPARCstation-20. Years ago, I figured out how to get them to generate resultions the ROMs don't account for. Recently, I tried to drive a recent flatscreen with a SS20, and, while fidding with the various timings, I had the flatscreen report wildly ludicrous resolutions when all I was changing was the sync timing. >> On the other hand, when SunOS boots it finds the cgsix0 and reports >> that the resolution is 1000x1022!? That's...odd. I can't help wondering where it got that. Out of all the framebuffers I've poked at, I've never seen that resolution. The usual resolutions close to that are 1152x900 and 1280x1024, and those are landscape, not portrait. If you can test-boot NetBSD - from a CD or from the network, for example - I'd be interested to hear what it thinks the resolution is. Also, if you can capture printenv output from the ok prompt, I'd be curious about that too. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: What's the rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?
Well, after reading what other people have, my contribution seems pretty piddly, but here it is. The rarest hardware I have is probably a Sun SPARCstation Voyager or a Tadpole 3GX - I'm not sure which is rarer (and those are just my perception of rarity, which could be wrong). It's possible one of my klunker peecees happens to be a particular rare model, but I'm not aware of any, and unless there's something notable about it, that kind of rarity is not interesting - to me, at least. :-) The rarest software I have is, of course, software that nobody else has a copy of (given how much software I've written, there's a fair bit nobody else has, because it's too new or because I haven't bothered to export it or because nobody has cared to pick up a copy). But I doubt that's what the question was really asking for. My open-source fanaticism means I don't have very much that would be of interest here, sorry. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Unknown 8085 opcodes
>>> jsr puts >>> fcc 'Hello, world!',13,0 >>> clra >> Mine can't do that automatically, but it can with a little human >> assist; the human would need to tell it that the memory after the >> jsr is a NUL-terminated string, but that's all it would need to be >> told. > Not all strings are null-terminated. Mine can also be told that it's a block of text where you tell it the length. I think the only sort of automatic length determination I implemented is NUL termination, but you can specify whatever length you want manually. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Unknown 8085 opcodes
>> Clone [my disassembler] and look at the README if you want to get an >> idea how it works from a user's point of view. > I will certainly do that. It'll be interesting how this for 8080/z80 > compares to the 30-odd-year old interactive disassembler for CP/M, > Dazzlestar. It will probably come out on the short end of that comparison. A multi-target disassembler will usually not be as good for any particular machine as one designed from the ground up for only that machine. And, of course, there will be lots of differences which are neither better nor worse, just different...though to someone used to one or the other it may feel like better or worse. :-) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Unknown 8085 opcodes
>>> Does your disassembler do flow analysis? >> I doubt it, because none of the meanings I know for the term are >> anything my disassembler does. > A disassembler that can do flow analysis is a breath of fresh air > when working with larger binaries. Essentially, it looks at the code > and makes some decisions about its content. A reasonable facility to have, though of course you need overrides in both directions. > Thus, a target of an already-disassembled jump must also be code, Well...usually. It's possible the jump isn't actually a jump instruction (just data that happens to look like one) and it's possible it doesn't actually jump to where it appears to for any of many possible reasons. Hence the overrides. My disassembler defaults to disassembling as instructions, but it has support for the user telling it that certain areas are text, or integers, or whatever. Clone it and look at the README if you want to get an idea how it works from a user's point of view. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Unknown 8085 opcodes
>> [...disassembler...] > Does your disassembler do flow analysis? I doubt it, because none of the meanings I know for the term are anything my disassembler does. > At any rate, the best reference for "undocumented" 8085 instructions > is the Tundra/Calmos datasheet: [...] That looks like a webpage, not a datasheet, but I found a link there to http://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/originals/distributors/Datasheets-8/DSA-152680.pdf, which appears to be the datasheet. Saved, thank you! /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Unknown 8085 opcodes
> Good list there, the onlinedebugger looked the most promising but it > doesn't do 8080/8085 either. I built a disassembler years ago to pick apart captured malware. By now it handles about a dozen ISAs. While 8080 and 8085 are not on the list, Z-80 is; adding 8080 would be a relatively simple thing. I've added that to my to-do list; if someone can point me to 8080/8085 machine language documentation that would save me some searching (which is something I'm not much good at in these days when frickin' *everything* is shoehorned into a Web page). In case anyone is interested, I export it via git. The thing to clone is git://git.rodents-montreal.org/Mouse/disas, though it hasn't had much testing off my systems and thus probably contains localisms. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: GMAIL accounts suspended.
> Why does this keep on happening? What is google doing to cause this > to happen? >> Your membership in the mailing list cctalk has been disabled due to >> excessive bounces "Bouncing mail", presumably. Certainly every time I've gotten that and investigated, I've found record of my rejecting list mail. But why are you asking us rather than Google (who is in a position to tell you what they're doing, including mail they reject) or our listowner (who's in a position to tell you what behaviour the list is seeing from Google)? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: More circuit help required please
>>> http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/STCExecutelSyncCircuit.jpg >> I don't believe it's correct as drawn. For one thing you have V333, >> an NPN transistor, with the collector grounded (and no -ve supplies >> on the circuit. Bipolar transistors are to some extent symmetric under interchange of collector and emitter. Simplified pictures showing a bar of semiconductor with the ends being emitter and collector and a thin base layer in the middle are, well, simplified, but there is _some_ truth lurking in them. However, the only reason I could see that being done deliberately is if the circuit is analog and the transistor's behaviour is relevantly different from the normal way around. This circuit doesn't look like that to me. Redrawing it a bit less confusingly with V333 E/C swapped makes it look as though V333 and V326 are being used in their switching regions, not their linear regions. The lack of negative supplies is hardly conclusivein itself; negative voltages could be developed in any of many ways. However, V325, R322, and V326 would make it difficult for the R335/V325/V333 junction point to get too far below 5V (admittedly this is much less true if R322's value is actually significantly higher). I also question the way R311/R310/R309 are all different. I would expect the red, green, and blue circuits to be electrically more or less identical, and different pulldown values does not fit with that. >> For another, R322 is ridiculously low. Indeed. I don't know how much you know about electronics at the relevant level, so it's possible what I'm about to say is unnecessary or has already been considered. Did these resistor values come from reading bands, or measuring in-circuit, or what? Note that R322 is in parallel with the C-B diode of V326; a simple ohmmeter put across it may end up measuring the diode drop instead. (To test this theory, switch ranges. A diode drop will usually give you approximately the same digits in each range - eg, 6.7 ohms on the 0-10 range, 67 ohms on the 0-100 one, 670 ohms for the 0-1K range, etc. Also, swapping the probe leads will give a different reading if that's what's behind this.) >> And I would expect the anodes of the 3 diodes on the RGB outputs to >> go somewhere other than a resistor to ground. At least with R312 as high as 10K. If it were much lower, the diodes could be clipping diodes; a diode drop is not too far from about the right swing for a video signal. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Cleaning RK05 packs (Was: LGP-30 Memory Drum Update)
>> In the US, "rubbing alcohol" is mostly denatured ethanol (though "isopropyl$ Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a bottle of "rubbing alcohol" that was anything but isopropanol-and-water. But I'm more Canadian than US. > I would suggest avoiding these blends of random chemicals made with no real $ Or, more precisely, with _different_ concern for purity. For rubbing alcohol you want to avoid biologically active contaminants, but dissolved solids per se don't matter. Here, you care about dissolved solids but don't much care about things that might be biologically active, as long as they evaporate without residue. Which leads me to tentatively suggest gasoline (West Pondian) / petrol (East Pondian), since it seems to me that will go to some lengths to avoid fouling engines with residues. And it's available pretty much universally, and relatively cheaply. Or am I wrong about it not leaving even trace residues? Of course, anyone with distillation equipment could distil any of these to get something with less residue. But not everyone has chem-lab glassware. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: TOPS-20 Telnet and Port Forwading issue
> Interestingly, when I telnet from _outside_ the network to my > firewall's port 2320, it works, but Telnet goes into line mode rather > than character mode! Probably, as I think someone said, telnet noticing it's not using the standard telnet port and not even trying to go character-at-a-time. I did a telnet myself, snooping the network traffic, and... me -> you SYN you -> me SYN|ACK me -> you ACK you -> me data: IAC WILL ECHO me -> you data: IAC DO ECHO you -> me data: \r\n DECTEN, PANDA TOPS-20... Nowhere, in particular, is there any attempt at LINEMODE negotiation. And, when I type ?, nothing is sent until I press RETURN, upon which my end sends ?\r\n. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]
>>> Middle-endian FTW >> That makes me wonder: was there any hardware that used an endianness >> such that conversion didn't loop with period 2? > Not quite the same thing but weren't longwords on the PDP-11 > little-endian for the bytes within the word but big-endian for words > within the longword? Yes. As I said in the very next paragraph, > Conversion between PDP11-endian (0x87654321 stored as 0x65 0x87 0x21 > 0x43) and [...] /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]
>> Or how about architectures not using a word length that's an >> integral number of bytes? > You mean like any 36-bit machine? No, they usually either ran as 6 6-bit bytes or 4 9-bit bytes, from what I understand. (The era of 36-bit machines was before "byte" had drifted to its current synonymity with "octet".) Byte sex is really an issue of conversion between numbers and their serializations. For example, it does not make sense to speak of the number 2271560481 (0x87654321) having an endianness in its own right; endianness becomes a meaningful concept only when a number is made up of smaller units with some kind of ordering among themselves. Most commonly these are memory-addressing units, with the order being increasing address order, but the terminology can also be used when, for exmaple, discussing serializing bits onto a bit-serial transmission medium, with the order being transmission order (eg, when sending characters over a serial line). To address the comment, I don't know enough about any of the 36-bit machines to know whether they had sub-36-bit-word addressing or any such, which would be necessary for concepts such as endianness to make sense. I think at least one early (by modern standards) machine supported addressing memory as if it were an array of bits, extracting an arbitrary block of those bits not longer than a machine word; if true, that addressing order would induce an endianness /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]
>> Little-endian!!! > Middle-endian FTW That makes me wonder: was there any hardware that used an endianness such that conversion didn't loop with period 2? Little- and big-endian do this; conversion between them is byteswapping, which is self-inverse. Conversion between PDP11-endian (0x87654321 stored as 0x65 0x87 0x21 0x43) and either big- or little-endian is also self-inverse. Is there any hardware for which conversion between its native storage format and any of these three is not self-inverse? To put it another way, and rather more loosely, is there one for which htonl and ntohl are actually different operations? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Digital circuits and analog devices
>> I think the original is 'Digital circuits are made from analog >> parts' >> Another of the laws is 'There is no such thing as ground' This reminds me of an incident of my own which is one of my favourite examples of why learning about things at every level possible is useful. I built a PROM reader from discrete logic, to attach to a parallel port. Basically, with 8 output and 3 input pins, you could load an address, then read back the ROM's content for that address, incremement, repeat. But every ROM showed 0xFF as the contents for the last byte, even in cases where I knew better. Well, the ROM socket was in one corner of the board. Some of the inputs were tied to specific logic levels; I tied those to the Vcc or GND pins of the ROM. The only inputs from the rest of the circuit were the address pins of the ROM. And, I tied the ROM's Vcc pin to circuit Vcc. But it turned out I'd neglected to tie the ROM's GND point to circuit ground. As soon as I noticed that it all made sense: as long as at least one address line was low, it powered the ROM through the input clamping diodes and it all worked (apparently one diode drop was not enough to put power outside the effective operating range - it may have been slower than speed spec, but the circuit was not running anywhere close to that). But, as soon as all address lines were high, there was nothing but Vcc coming into that corner of the board, so of course there couldn't be anything but Vcc coming out. Grounding that corner's ground point made it all work. But, if I understood the ROM purely at the logic-gate level, this would have been mysterious and cryptic. If I hadn't known that a low-level output could sink a fair bit of current with little-to-no voltage rise, if I hadn't known input clamping diodes existed, that would have been cryptic, incomprehensible magic. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Base 64 posts to the list
> Lately, some list posts have begun appearing in Base 64 format. I > read the list in daily digest mode, and these posts are not converted > to anything sensible, [...]. > Is there a way of dealing with this, apart from humbly requesting > posters to not post in Base 64? It may not always be the poster's choice. One of the characteristics MIME was designed with was that certain transformations may be made mechanically and are not considered to change the message (in the senses that, for example, it does not need a different Message-Id:, and should be considered the same for deduping purposes). One of these transformations is a re-encoding, such as a change from Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit to Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 (or the other way around, for that matter). I frequently get mail which was, in the words of the the header added to one example, X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Stone.Rodents-Montreal.ORG id DAA28998 (Stone being my house network's MTA host.) So it's entirely possible that the sender produced something reasonable, like 8bit or quoted-printable, but some intermediate MTA converted it to base64. The right way of handling this from a MIME perspective would be for the some part of the list software to do such conversions, so that (for example) the messages being packaged into a digest all get converted to 8bit before digest generation runs (and the digest itself may itself get converted, either right after generation or by some intermediate mailhost). But, I suspect that, in this case, the brain cycles to make anything like that happen are close to unavailable. I know _I_ certainly don't want to add to the time-and-energy cost the list is exacting from our honoured listowner. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Thinking about acquiring PDP stuff
> Argument goes both ways. Does anyone really do practical things with any ho$ Depends on how you define "practical" and "home computer". My home network includes a SPARCstation-20, which is my main head (I'm typing this message using it to handle keyboard and screen). I don't think there's any question that the SS20 is on-topic, but is it a "home computer"? I think of it and treat it that way, but it was never aimed at that market by its maker and it differs in some drastic and fundamental ways from most machines that were. As for practical, well, it's the HCI in front of almost everything I do at home, including work-from-home stuff And I have another SS20 with a qec in it, which I recently used to regain some semblance of connectivity when my house DSL decided to die on me (it took multiple days for it to get fixed, for a variety of reasons). It sat on my house network with one of the qe ports connected to a friend who had mass-market connectivity; I set up an instance of my cloud VPN on it and it did its job well, passing packets between my house network and my machines on the outside. That certainly counts as practical to me. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Magnetic media FTGH!
>> Back in October, I wrote that I had two boxes of magnetic media that >> were not worth - to me - the space they were taking up. >> This drew a note from one Rob Jarratt, [...] > That was me replying. I have the drives to read TK50 (a hazardous and > unreliable process these days), not sure about the others. The > trouble is I am in the UK, I know you are reluctant to ship, and *I* > am reluctant to pay a lot for shipping across the pond. Yes, that was what I thought the major barrier to just dropping them on you was. > However, if you don't get any takers, can we discuss the option of > sending them to me? Sure. I'll send you mail offlist; this is somewhat in the nature of a heads-up, so if you don't get the offlist mail you'll know something's wrong. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Magnetic media FTGH!
Back in October, I wrote that I had two boxes of magnetic media that were not worth - to me - the space they were taking up. This drew a note from one Rob Jarratt, saying > I think the Ultrix and FORTRAN tapes have got to be worth saving > whatever happens, and possibly the MicroVMS ones too, [...]. [...] > please don't get rid of those particular media without giving someone > the opportunity to image them. I haven't heard from anyone, and I can't really hang onto these indefinitely in the hope that a nebulous "someone" will show up to image them. As I wrote in October, I didn't have a system that could image any of them, and that hasn't changed since then. I know there are at least a few of us in/near Ottawa; if any of them read this and are willing to help out, possibly by imaging the tapes, possibly by just taking over keeping them, possibly something else, I'd love to hear about it. I too think it would be good to preserve the data...BUT not to the extent of overriding my need to pare back the space my *ahem* "collection" is occupying. I think the end of the year is about as long as I can wait without hearing anything. Given email's unreliability these days, I'd also like to leave more than just email as a way of getting hold of me. +1-613-482-0910 should either reach me or take a message. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Membership disabled due to bounces
> This is why people use Gmail, it filters spam and trash like no other Maybe for the people whose eyeballs it's selling. My view as someone who doesn't use it is that it's a bulletproof spammer drop-box hosting service crossed with a spam spewer. Their offloading the costs of their antisocial behaviour onto the rest of the net are one reason I will have nothing to do with their mail. (The other major reason is their outright spamming me.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Membership disabled due to bounces
> Gmail is only the single most reliable mail provider in the world, and bounc$ Reliable? Maybe. There _are_ a few things I count on it for. (Antisocial things, but if reliability per se is your goodness criterion) If you really feel so strongly about it that you're willing to (by implication) say Jay's system is lying about seeing bounces, maybe you'd be happier just unsubbing? I long ago configured my mailer to silently drop mail from classiccmp lists it would normally bounce (such as mail claiming to be 8859-1 but containing octets outside the 8859-1 printable range, to pick one simple example), and I can't recall ever seeing my listmembership disabled since that, certainly not "every couple of weeks". This all leads me to doubt your "bounces never happen" claim. What is your basis for it? I'm tempted to also suggest you configure your mailer the way I did mine, but I'm inclined to suspect gmail isn't civilized enough to provide that level of control. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Looking for terminals again
>> Anybody have extra DEC or IBM terminals in Toronto (Canada) ? > Is Ottawa too far away? While we're speaking of Ottawa and terminals...it's neither DEC nor IBM, but I do have a Hazeltine in Ottawa I would like to get rid of, but I do not like the idea of just chucking it. Anyone interested? I think it's a 1500, but it might be a 1420. It's certainly got the look of a 1500 in my memory. I don't know whether it still works. I'm pretty sure it worked last time I tried it, but that was at least two moves ago. It _looks_ in good shape, but I trust we all know how little that means. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NCD Explora Pro (was Re: NCD19 / Xncd19)
> I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with a USB Ethernet dongle that itâ??s plugged into,$ You can use ARP for that only after it comes up far enough to get an address and speak ARP. If the Pi 3 is anything like the one I had the misfortune to deal with at work a while back, it's running a Linux with a surprising number of tools renamed, crippled, or just plain missing. But if it's got tcpdump, that's the tool I'd normally use for this: connect the NCD to the Pi (or whatever other machine) with a crossed cable (or possibly straight, if the machine's Ethernet is auto-X, or whatever else is necessary, if it's not twisted-pair). Then start tcpdump, as in tcpdump -n -s 2000 -i wm0 (or whatever the actual interface name is intead of wm0). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DEC bus transceivers
> The trouble with chip resellers is that it's hard to know which ones are leg$ And then there are the periodic mentions of supposed chip vendors who ask you what package and what pin count when you ask them for a part that has never existed except in one version. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?
>>> What is the plural of a computer virus?). >> Viruses. >> The Latin word _virus_ [...] >> More than you ever wanted to know, I'm sure. > Actually, NO. What Fred said. Across the board. Thank you. That was informative, authoritative, and - impressive, managing to combine this with the other two - interesting. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?
> My favorite formatter was my S100 crate with CP/M, [it's] impossible > to give a single user OS without background processing a virus. I disagree. I see nothing about "a single-user OS without background processing" that would prevent a virus from infecting other programs, even including the OS, when it's run, and potentially doing something else as well. Perhaps you are using some meaning of "virus" other than "piece of software that infects other software to propagate itself"? That's the only meaning that makes any sense to me. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?
>>> [...anti-virus...] >> [...] > Just wondering are you guys not running AV SW on your old HW? I am not. But then, because of my interests, the old hardware I keep is stuff like Sun SPARCs that are powerful enough to run a real operating system. These are (a) inherently invulnerable to most of the malware (including viruses) out there because they're not x86 Windows and (b) difficult to attack with targeted malware because they are real OSes with real interprocess protection, file protection, and the like. Probably not impossible; all nontrivial software has bugs. But I have no reason to think I'm likely to be targeted by anyone with the resources (= skills, mostly) to effectively attack my OSes. And I'm familiar enough with their operation that most successful malware is likely to be noticed relatively soon. And if I am somehow targeted by the likes of letter agencies, there are much weaker links in the chains for them than the things malware attacks. And "AV SW", even if someone produced one that ran on what I run and I were willin gto run it, generally isn't going to notice custom-designed malware anyway. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Old versions of Emacs
>>> [...skull-and-crossbones with text warning...]
>> That looks identical to the comment at the head of display.c from
>> the Gosling derivative I use.
> Yes, it's the same in the copy of Gosling Emacs I got. I asked
> Gosling himself, and he referred me to Brian Reid. He got it from
> Gosling in 1983, and it was modified at DEC over the years. What
> pedigree is your copy?
I got it from a prerelase of Eunice, obtained because one of the people
behind Eunice personally knew some people at the lab I was then hanging
out at. ("Then" is mid-'80s sometime.) Once I started using a real
Unix (4.2c, then 4.3 shortly after that, then SunOS, then) I ripped
out the special-case Eunice code and have been maintaining (and slowly
evolving) it over the years since then.
Incidentally (and only partially releatedly), the comment means what it
says. I once tried to rewrite that module, to teach myself how it
worked, and succeeded in nothing but slowing it down by about a factor
of some 2 to 3 and introducing assorted bugs as well.
Someday I'm going to find the time to really figure it out.
I don't know how to usefully describe what sort of version it is; that
is, I don't know what information would be useful to you. If you can
describe a useful test, I can see what it gives
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Old versions of Emacs
> I seem to have stumbled upon a GNU Emacs 13.8. I'll post this > src/display.c snippet as evidence: > [...skull-and-crossbones with text warning...] That looks identical to the comment at the head of display.c from the Gosling derivative I use. Presumably one is derived from the other...? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Twiggys [was: Re: ka... ching!]
>> Still don't. Playing a computer game is about as entertaining to me >> as putting my money into an online slot machine. > Find better games :) Heh. Not everybody thinks the same way, and some people just don't react to games the way you (or I) do. > The theme of this list means that I should recommend some retro games > and gaming systems, but those old games generally lacked depth and > tried to cover it up by making the game insanely difficult and > relying on extremely good timing and motor skills. To a point, perhaps. But some of the old games were just _good_. My own favourite is Tempest, one of the few colour vector games. 24 _kilo_bytes for the entire game, and it's still one of the most engaging games I've ever played. > I rather enjoyed the two Portal games, Me too - well, the first one; I think I haven't played the second. But I like puzzle games. I also greatly enjoyed Swapper - the first new game mechanic I'd seen since Portal, and its author(s?) built a highly engaging puzzle game around it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Magnetic media FTGH!
T 90/04/30 89/5/1 MPAQUETT 90/05/25 (indistinct)/ 92/12/08 -- LAB B YEAR END 2/2 -- LAB J A3 MAY 7/93 -- LAB F YEAR END 1/2 -- LAB F YEAR END 1/2 -- LAB F YEAR END 1/2 -- LAB F YEAR END 1/2 -- LAB B YEAR END 1/2b -- LAB B 4 OF 4 LAB B 44 HP JAN 15 1993 n/u -- (crossed-out text omitted) ABBOTT INCR DUMP OCT-1-87 4 MAY 87 (1of2) -- NESTAR SYSTEMS INCORPORATED PLAN 1000 (tm) Print Server Version 1.1 IA BACKUP TAPE QIC- 11 P/N 160-12170-002 (C) 1981,1982,1983,1984,1985,1986,1987 NESTAR SYSTEMS, INC. Licensed Program -- SUPERSKETCH REL 6 © A. PENTLAND 1985,1986,1987 -- LAB B 34 HP JAN 15 1993 -- Fall- 8AT LAB B 1 (unclear) End of Semester backup -- Accelr8 DESCRIPTION DCL8 (2,0) EDT8 (2,0) PART NUMBER 8-812-001, 002 RELEASE #: TAPE 1 OF 1 . NUMBER OF FILES BPI SN: 000646 -- (SUN3.2 SUNBIN EXPORT 68020 logo) 1.4" Tape (boot format), 2 of 4 Part Number: 700-1256-02 Rev. A -- box:KEE 3.1 Genera 7.1 tape: 3.5 EXPORT SUNBIN 68020 1.4" Tape (boot format), 3 of 5 Part Number: 700-1600-02 Rev. A -- 13/3/89 Relax 1of2 LFRL system and saved results -- 13/3/89 Relax 2of2 -- LAB J A2MAY 7/93 -- LAB F YEAR END 2/2 -- LAB B 2/4 -- LAB J A1 MAY 7/93 -- There are also a bunch of 5¼" floppies. 34 of them are unlabeled, possibly completely unused: 9x Sony branded, DSDD 48tpi 6x Sony branded, "MD-2HD" 6x 3M branded, DS, DD, RH, MARK Q 9x BASF branded, 2S/2D 48tpi 4x Unbranded The BASF floppies from the above list are marked as being for sale to government and educational institutions only, not for resale; I don't know whether that has any bearing. Of the remaining floppies, some have labels short enough to be reasonably represented on a single line: QuickBasic 1of3 QuickBasic 2of3 QuickBasic 3of3 FW Macros d|i|g|i|t|a|l branded, unlabeled BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 28/28 85/10/28 (scratched out) BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 27/28 85/10/28 (scratched out) BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 26/28 85/10/28 (scratched out) BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 25/28 86/10/28 (scratched out) ?ACKUP OVMS 4.1M 6/28 85/10/28 (partially ripped off) BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 5/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 4/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 3/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 2/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 1/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 9/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 8/28 85/10/28 BACKUP MICROVMS 4.1M 7/28 85/10/28 MS-DOS boot AG2012 Maxell branded, label ripped off, all that's legible is "FEB85" QuickBasic 1 QuickBasic 2 QuickBasic 3 Network Boot DOS 3.1 There is also a set of original Borland Turbo C diskettes: INSTALL/HELPA2B0427471 INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT COMMAND LINE/UTILITIES LIBRARIES HEADER FILES/LIBRARIES EXAMPLES/BGI/MISC and two sets of six which appear to be working copies of the above. There are three Microsoft-branded floppies: Microsoft Mouse Setup/Mouse Menus 1 Microsoft PaintbrushProgram/Mouse Menus 2 Microsoft PaintbrushUtilities Disk and two that don't fit any of the above: -- label partially ripped off: remaining text is BL-N639C-BH P/OS HARD DIS DISPATCH VOLUME LABEL "PROD 1983 © Digital Equipmen -- BitFax for Windows V2.08A (01/25/93) BitCom Deluxe with MNP5 v5.1 (06/20/91) -- This is all in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In general, I suck at getting things shipped; local pickup, either in person or by proxy, is much preferred. I can try to find the round tuits to ship, but it's usually a losing proposition (I have at least two boxes of stuff that have been awaiting shipment for months at this point). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: late-night insane request
> Is there anyone on this list who has a VNEbus Ethernet adapter? Is that a late-night typo? Because I might have a VME Ethernet, but I've never heard of VNEbus (before). (I might not, too; I gave away most of my VME stuff relatively recently. I think I found some more after that, but the memories are fuzzy and could be wrong.) It'd be in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada), in case that matters. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)
>> To name three real uses I've made of [telnet] recently: [...] > You might find netcat useful. Not sure if/which distribution has it > by default. "Distribution"? Are you assuming I run Linux? (I don't, not on my own machines. The Pi 3 was for work.) I have a netcat, one of my own writing. It works reasonably well for such things, yes. However, it is not present everywhere; when there is a netcat present, its command line requires learning - if I can even find the documentation for it. (And assuming there isn't an nc present that is something completely different.) Until I ran into that Raspbian, though, telnet had always (a) just been there and (b) just worked with (c) the same command-line syntax. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)
>> See Also RedHat and CentOS.No telnet, netstat, etc. > csh Possibly. I find sh more usable than stock csh, though shells are almost as personal an issue as keyboards or editors. > though in the modern world I can see why clear text protocols aren't > shipped out of the box If you think of telnet, the program, as strictly an interface to telnet, the remote login protocol, then I can see how you might think it reasonable to drop it. But telnet-the-program hasn't been just that for...decades, at the very least. Every telnet I can recall, clear back to the days (circa 4.2BSD) when my wetware memory isn't reliable any longer, accepted a port number and was extremely useful for dealing with any of various possible networking issues. To name three real uses I've made of it recently: to check what a remote sshd banners as, to check what an RFB server banners as, and (in conjunction with script(1) to capture the output of a one-off server set up to transfer a text file (this being the use case I had for it on the Pi 3). netstat, that's a completely different issue. There's no "clear text protocol" issue there. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)
> What initially stunned me is how any vendor who supplied TCP/IP > networking could fail to include ftp and telnet as a standard part of > the package, [...] That was my reaction when I found Raspbian (the Debian variant a Pi 3 that $WORK bought came with) lacked telnet. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: MicroVAX II Console Garbling Characters
>> I have a MicroVAX II which has started garbling and losing >> characters output to the console. [...] > Iâ??ve seen similar with under two occasions. [...] Furthermore, "garbling" is horribly imprecise. If certain characters always get corrupted, and a given character always gets corrupted to the same thing? If it's always the same characters getting corrupted, but they get corrupted to different things on different occasions? If there's no uniformity on which characters get corrupted, but a given character, if corrupted, always gets corrupted to the same thing? If both which characters get corrupted and what they get converted into show no consistency? Each of those scenarios points towards a different constellation of plausible causes. (Furthermore "same characters" can be taken either of two ways, either "characters with the same bit pattern, regardless of where they occur" or "characters at the same place in the output, regardless of bit pattern". It could even be a cross between those.) Similar remarks apply to "losing". The post also said >> It had seemed that re-seating the processor board would fix it, but >> that no longer seems to be the case. It occurs to me that it might not have been the re-seating that was responsible, but something else incidental to that. For example, if the problem is thermal, powering it off briefly might have helped; if (to continue that theory) if the environment has been getting hotter, it may be that leaving it off briefly now doesn't cool it enough. Without more details, we can't really do much but take stabs in the dark. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
FTGH: More miscellaneous old stuff
Okay, I took a bit more time going through my storage. (a) The SparQs are indeed disks; I didn't look closely enough. (b) Some more stuff: - Three disks, which IIRC came out of a MicroVAX-II. Two are Micropolis 1325Ds and the third is a plain 1325. Also present are two sets of cables, each set suitable to connect one drive to a controller card. - One HP 9153A (an HP-IB device; it appears to be a 3.5" floppy drive). - One HP 7958A (an HP-IB device; it appears to be disk). - One HP card, likely the interface card from something like a 7958A. It has an HP-IB connector, an ID switch, two connectors for cables to the drive, and a connector apparently for power. In the etch on the component side is the number 07957-60001; on a sticker, below a barcode, is the text *57CNO14515* (or perhaps *57CN014515*, the font is ambiguous). As before, this stuff is in Ottawa, and is yours for the coming and picking it up. Functionality is unknown, and details may be incorrect because they were hand-copied. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: FTGH: miscellaneous old stuff
>> Four SparQ 1.0 tapes. Contents unknown. > Now, those would be unusual! Mostly because the Syquest SparQ wsa a > removable-media 1GB hard drive. Then perhaps that's what they are. They looked like tapes when I looked at the business edge of the cartridge, that's why I called them tapes. But if they're actually disks I'd have to check - they're in storage right now, where I was looking things over earlier today - but I _think_ they were Syquest, in which case they probably would be the disks. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
FTGH: miscellaneous old stuff
I've got a bunch of old stuff I want to get rid of. Much of it is squarely on-topic here; most of the rest is tangentially on-topic, and I hope the remainder can be forgiven. All this stuff is in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and is yours if you come pick it up. In theory, I could ship, but I suck at actually getting stuff shipped. Except as noted, these are functionality unknown. I don't _think_ any of these have been robbed for parts, but it's possible (least unlikely for the vacuum-tube devices). Details may be incorrect; at least two human-layer copies were involved in everything here and I'm tired, so miscopying is not at all out of the question. In no particular order: Two TK50 tape drives. These are just the drives, no controller cards or enclosures. One mechanical (not even electromech) typewriter. Aside from generic interest in such things, the major reason people here might care about it is that it has the C= logo prominently visible on it. (Not just a sticker; if this is an aftermarket addon, it is a very well-done one.) One arc-welding helmet. It is made of fibreglass and is somewhat cracked, but still entirely functional. Four SparQ 1.0 tapes. Contents unknown. A power supply. It is marked as a Sun 300-1047-05; it is Zytec-branded, marked as a ZYRISE 925W unit, Zytec part number 22903110. It is marked as being limited to 150A on +5V, 15A each on -5.2V and +12V, and 10A on -12V; the +12V is also marked "25A PK FOR 20 SEC". But it is marked as max total power 925W, and needing 60CFM forced air cooling. The connector is nothing I recognize; it's the kind of custom thing I'd expect for a PS that can push 150A One HP 211A, a SQUARE WAVE GENERATOR, serial #2707. This is test gear from the vacuum tube era. Two HP 202A LOW FREQUENCY FUNCTION GENERATORs. Based on the controls, these are capable of sine, triangle, and square waves from, IIRC, about .01Hz to something like 1200Hz. These also date from the vacuum tube era. An "ALLEN B DUMONT LABORATORIES" oscilliscope, model 304 H, serial 5484. An HP 400D vacuum-tube voltmeter. A Beckman/Berkeley model 5230 "UNIVERSAL EPUT® AND TIMER", whatever that is. The most visually notable feature is that it has four display columns with ten digit positions in each one, presumably with a lamp behind each position. Various magnetic media. Figuring most prominently are QIC tapes, TK50s, and 5¼" floppies. Some of the "TK50"s might actually be some other tape in the same form factor, but if I had to guess I would guess not. Most/all of the tapes are in plastic cases; the floppies have paper jackets and/or cardboard boxes around them. Contents unknown, though at least some have labels. For the labeled media, I hope to get the labels transcribed sometime over the next week or so. If/when I do that I'll post the results. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: X server for original PC (8088/8086)
>> [small pizza-box X terminal] > I had a similar unit from NCD, [...] > Back in the day I remember using monochrome NCD X terminals though, > and those things were just great - it would be nice to find one again > one day. I own two NCD X-terminals; if you can drop by Ottawa, I wouldn't mind unloading one onto someone who'll appreciate it properly. :-) > I just did some searching and can't even find a photo of one online. I may be able to take a picture at some point. > The displays were large, and I want to say the aspect ratio was > either portrait or maybe square, rather than any kind of modern > landscape nonsense :-) IIRC the ones I have are 4:3 landscape, but they could be square; it's been a while since I had much to do with them. Mine are in storage, not amenable to easy checking at the moment, but IIRC their NCD model number is 19r. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: X server for original PC (8088/8086)
> While I wouldn't want to use such a combination over, say, 1200bps dialup, i$ I decided to try this. I just set up a SLIP link between my main desktop head (a SPARCstation-20) and a handy peecee, running at 9600/8/N/1 on each end. I then sshed through the SLIP link to the peecee and started a terminal emulator, displaying on the ssh-forwarded X display. (My own terminal emulator, running with just base X fonts - in particular, with server-side font rendering.) It's no speed demon, but it is entirely usable. I've had less usable ssh sessions between cities when the inter-city links were heavily loaded. This is without even LBX, which I would expect would improve performance substantially but which has proven resistant to use. (I've been unable to get anything but connection rejections out of it; I don't know why, but don't want to hare off on chasing after that with an email pending.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: X server for original PC (8088/8086)
> (There were plenty of mouse-and-window systems for the PC/XT back then, I ex$ If the serial link runs at a relatively high data rate (eg, 115200) or LBX support is in use and the data rate is at least medium (eg, 19200), probably. If not...well, it depends on how patient you are, I suppose, but _I_ wouldn't want to have to use it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: SWTPC 6800
> If you have two serial devices on the same line and one is just > listening while you work with the other, *can* that work, or would it > just confuse things? It depends on what you mean by "the same line". For ease of language here, I'm going to assume that the devices are a computer, C, and two terminals, T1 and T2. If you connect all the pins, it will work fine for the signals that T1 and T2 are driving to the same state. Signals driven to opposite states may register as being in one of the two states or they may fall into the undefined intermediate zone (between -3V and +3V, IIRC), depending on the voltages T1 and T2 are trying to drive them to and the exact impedances of the drivers. (It shouldn't fry anything, though; one really nice feature of RS-232C is that the spec requires that any pin or combination of pins can be shorted together and/or to any voltage source within the allowed range (-25V to +25V, IIRC) indefinitely without damage. I'm not sure this applies to ground pins, though; it certainly doesn't in practice - I've seen ground loops.) However, the terminal-driven data line (the one that T1 and T2 use to send to C) is one of those signals. I would suggest using a breakout box, or two connectors wired by hand with that signal omitted, to isolate C from one of the two terminals on that pin. (I would actually go as far as to connect only two pins, signal ground and C-to-T data, to one of the two terminals.) It will mean you can't type on both T1 and T2 (or, rather, typing will be ignored on one of them); if you want that to work, you will need at least a few active components between them - two diodes and a pullup resistor strikes me as the bare minimum, and even then you may have to play with the resistor value to get the voltages within the correct ranges. Another nice feature of RS-232C is that it is electrically very simple. You can throw together serial-line stuff with alligator clip leads and discrete components like diodes and resistors. You don't have to worry about things like modulation schemes and lower-level protocols, the way you do with things like USB or Ethernet. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Are old SCSI tape drives not all created equal?
> To my surprise, not all SCSI tape drives are created equal. I was > under the mistaken assumption that all SCSI tape drives would pretty > much be abstracted the same way by the SCSI interface. That's the ideal. As you discovered, the world is far from ideal. > Question: So, even though some tape drives physically have a SCSI > interface, are they different in some other way such as to require > special software to use them? Probably. See below for a brief discussion of what "SCSI" is and how it's relevant. > Or maybe there were different SCSI standards? Or is the standard > simply imperfect? I feel reasonably sure each of those holds part of the explanation. Another issue, especially relevant on this list, is that some drives date to before the standards were in their current form; they may conform to early drafts, drafts which are incompatible with the spec we know today. Other drives don't conform to any known document, whether deliberately (customer lockin?) or not (sloppy firmware authors?). So, yes, some drives - especially older ones - may need drive-specific code. SCSI is more than just the physical interface. Traditional SCSI is a parallel interface, with a bunch of signals and grounds. But, layered atop the physical interface, there is also a command/response protocol which is, strictly, independent of the physical layer. (I have seen it said that the SCSI protocol is very similar to both ATAPI and SAS, probably because it influenced their design, though I haven't read enough of any of them to really have a good handle on it myself.) In particular, a drive may conform to the mechanical and electrical interface but still be completely off the wall when it comes to the command/resposne protocol. To pick a simple example, to read from a tape[%], current SCSI sends a 0x08 command, which consists of one byte of opcode, one byte of flag bits, three bytes of buffer length, and one byte of control bits. There is no technical reason a drive maker couldn't implement reads as a 0x72 opcode followed by two bytes of buffer length and one byte of flag bits; it's not done because customers would complain that it doesn't work with stock systems and would switch to other makers which _do_ use the standard commands. But, drives made before the spec was baked might use nonstandard commands, especially for operations whose specs were in a state of flux when the drive was designed. Look at NetBSD's st.c driver and search for its quirk table and you can find a list of drives which are known to need unusual interfacing in various ways. For example, a drive identifying itself as "ARCHIVE " and "VIPER 2525 25462" apparently needs to have a READ done in order to get good MODE SENSE data under at least some circumstances (ST_Q_SENSE_HELP). And, of course, some drives may want to support features for which there is no standardized command. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Spam [was Re: still looking for that stuff?]
> Firstly, there are many types of unwanted e-mail, and using the term > SPAM to cover them all is a dis-service. Using the term SPAM to cover any of them is a disservice - to Hormel, who has been relatively gracious about the use of "spam" for something other than their product. Of course, posting on a list like this is not something trademark law generally applies to, so it us unlikely to lead to immediate legal repurcussions. But it is good to get into appropriate habits, and it is good to try to cooperate with companies who are trying to cooperate with us. > The e-mail in question was not one of those, it was almost certainly > sent by a criminal attempting to steal and re-sell some ones > credentials. It can still be spam. It was unsolicited and it was email; the only leg of the UBE tripod that's questionable is the "bulk" one, and I have little doubt there. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: VAX file format conversion
> $@hobbyist-use-only-va.txt > %RMS-W-RTB 512 bye record to large for user buffer The little grey cells holding this info are rather dusty, but they're telling me that back when I used VMS (early '80s) CONVERT/FDL was the appropriate tool to deal with issues like this. It took some noodling around the HELP pages and some experiments, but I eventually got the file I was dealing with converted. You might want to throw ANALYZE/FDL at the file first to see how it really is set up. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Spam [was Re: still looking for that stuff?]
>> Actually, it's really simple to stop spam. Simple, not easy. >> You just need to delegate responsibility along with authority when >> handing out netblocks, registering domain names, and the like. > I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The trouble with email is that th$ That's a technical issue. The probjlem is not technical. In a civilized net, I could write to the postmaster at the host that handed me the spam, who would then either smack down their local user or chase the pointer to the next hop, as applicable. Postmasters that refused to act against abusers would find themselves without connectivity, because providers would enforce terms-of-service against them. (Providers that refused to do so would find themselves without address space and/or peering. This chases up the governance pyramid, hence the remark about needing will-to-enforce at the top.) Time was - say, back when Jon Postel, rather than the US Department of Commerce, was the top of the pyramid - back about when the MicroVAX-II was new, to put it in terms people here can relate to :-) - I could have lost my access for forging email. Today? Today I'd be surprised if anyone even noticed, much less cared. And nobody caring, and being permitted to not care all the way up the governance chain, is exactly the problem I'm talking about. I suppose that's what happens when you put the Department of Commerce in charge of something. As long as it doesn't collapse far enough to stop concentrating money in the hands of large corporations, there's nothing wrong with it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Tape imaging
>> fwiw, I made my own format when I archived all my old tapes. [...] > congratulations, you reinvented .tap format.. badly. Now, now, no need to be harsh. I daresay this format was intended for purposes somewhat different from .tap's and thus its tradeoffs were made differently. I invented a similar slightly different format myself, once (it was to represent tapes in a software-simulated tape drive; it was much like the format whose description I cut, above, except that each record had its length after as well as before it, to make backward skips easy - something not important and not worth spending storage space on if you're just trying to archive existing tapes' data). > how did you handle unreadable blocks. Quite possibly not at all, since it appears to have been intended for archiving readable tapes. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: more vintage computer stuff
>> [keyboard fora] require that I subject myself to the Web. >> I recognize that few people share this attitude. > Well, I sorta understand; the modern 'active content' mania causes me > to grind my teeth, too. Oh, it doesn't make me grind my teeth. I just ignore it. I have no interest in running software completely untrusted third parties would like me to run. > But the non-active Web has major benefits. For you, I daresay it does. It might for me too, if I could stand it. (There are a very few websites I actually find to be worth subjecting myself to - tvtropes.org and cracked.com are the only ones that come to mind offhand.) It is, of course, not entirely irrelevant that on the few occasions when I do try to something with the Web, I do it from a classic machine, usually a SPARCstation-20. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: MicroVax II
> I just got a MicroVax II in the BA123 world box chassis. I has a > TK50, RX50, RXDQ2, but no DEQNA. I'd like to get it running an OS. > The DU disks don't work, but I have a couple of Qbus SCSI controllers > that might come in handy. Ooh, those are (my impression!) substantially rarer than DEQNAs. (I know _I_'d cheerfully swap a DEQNA for Qbus SCSI.) > What OS's can I use with this hardware? NetBSD? Yes. Recent (and some not-so-recent) versions are broken, in that they can't self-host; as far as I know nobody knows exactly what's wrong. My impression (as someone who hasn't tried it, but who has seen it discussed on port-vax) is that something breaks somewhere in the compiler when running native. You may also find recent(ish) versions are too resource-hungry; the MicroVAX-II can't have more than 16M RAM, which is pretty tiny by modern NetBSD's standards (pretty much ever since they relegated most ports to second-class, er, sorry, "organic" status). Fortunately, older NetBSD is still available; I think it's even available from netbsd.org. I don't have any VAXen up at the moment (I'm more constrained than historically usual about how many computers I have live or almost-live), or I'd offer to build you a tarball; I can do that anyway, but I won't be in a position to test whether it actually works, that it may be suboptimal. > Are versions of VMS available? I imagine so, but I don't actually know, since I haven't gone looking for any. (I have fond memories of my VMS days, but as long as it remains closed-source, I'm not running it.) > How do you get an OS onto this system? Same way you would any other system. In your case, I see four options: tapes, floppies (I think the RX50 is a floppy drive?), netboot (if you can find a network for the thing), and putting the disk on another machine and plopping the install on it there. Personally, I'd be installing NetBSD, and I'd probably dig out a spare DEQNA, netboot, then install onto local disk from the netbooted system. In extremis, I might download a grappling-hook program via memory binary deposit commands, then ship stuff over the console serial line. This would work, but would be slow; I think the fastest the console serial can run is 19200, or maybe 38400. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: more vintage computer stuff
>> I also participate in at least one of the "dreaded" keyboard forums. >> Why are they so dreaded to you guys? Well, personally, the biggest reason is that they require that I subject myself to the Web. I recognize that few people share this attitude. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Why classiccmp is awesome [was Re: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard]
>> Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. >> [...] > See, now, this sort of thing is a big part of why I like this list. I just noticed this could be taken as being sarcastic. I'm not being sarcastic in the least. Humour - even humor - is a very significant thing to me; it makes you people feel human, for lack of a better word, makes me feel this is a community of people instead of a soulless marketplace or some such horror. Not that humour is the only thing that makes me feel that way. But it's a substantial part of it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Why classiccmp is awesome [was Re: QuietJet Plus (wide Carriage RS232/Centronics) (FPUIB) (Was: Found some stuff at the scrapyard]
> Bunches of money if you want it to be packed well. ... > NO color nor colour! ... > OB_Standard_Disclaimer: Guaranteed not to work. In the event of our > quality control being shoddy, if it does turn out to be working, you > may bring it back (at your expense) for a refund of half your > purchase price. See, now, this sort of thing is a big part of why I like this list. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: FTGH: DEC 54-17507 backplane; Sun type-4 keyboards
>> - One DEC 54-17507. Google makes me think this is the Qbus >>backplane from a BA123. [...] > Did you find a home for this yet? Yes, though it depends on figuring out a place/time to meet the recipient when on a trip I'm going to be making in mid-August. If that falls through (which currently looks unlikely), then it'll be looking for a home. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now))
> As far as sending video from a computer frame buffer, I think it > might be way too fast. I wouldn't be doing that. I cited the cg6 by way of contrast. How the points get into the display hardware is still open, but a framebuffer seems unlikely to be involved. (I suppose a framebuffer with something like DVI-D could be used as a way to continuously replay sequences very fast, but it has its limitations. I'd rather build a hardware ring buffer, but I tend towards hardware hackery.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now))
>> I'm wondering how practical it might be to take a laser and turn it >> into a vector display on a handy blank wall > Those have been around for decades - I recall seeing them used to > draw things on the sides of building, _many_ moons ago. Yeah, me too, but my impression is that they're only for pre-prepared displays, and only some displays (notably those that don't involve the beam turning any sharp corners, such as Lissajous figures). My impression may, of course, have been - be - incorrect, which is what I'm asking for; if you've seen such displays involving sharp-corner turns of the beam and run-time chosen displays, then obviously my impression is incorrect and the technology exists. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now))
>> Light show hobby. You'd probably know, then - what's the fastest way to deflect a laser beam? In particular, I'm wondering how practical it might be to take a laser and turn it into a vector display on a handy blank wall - but that requires some very fast acceleration of the spot, probably faster than mechanical deflection can support (though if I'm wrong I'd love to know it). For example, does piezoelectricity make a crystal distort enough to use it as an optical deflection element in such a scheme? (My guess is no, but I don't actually know.) I have SPARCstations with cg6s that I can use as vector displays, but they are vectors converted to raster. I'd like to do real vector - a parallel port driving a couple of moderately fast D->A converters might be able to do it; it might take something better, dunno. But without the deflection mechanism there's no point in even trying to design the rest of it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now)
> [...], especially since most electrical installations (even domestic) > are 3-phase. This, I believe, must be location-specific. In North America, it is usual for domestic electrical feeds to be only two-phase (that is, they are the two sides of a centre-tapped secondary - the two hot wires are 180 degrees out of phase with one another). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now)
>> [...electrical wiring...] > This very definitely is an area where, if you're not 100% comfortable with t$ Also, know your own limits. A depressing number of people think they're more competent than they are. For example, I once had a neighbour who replaced an outlet in his kitchen. Turned off the breaker, removed the old one, put in the new one, all very nice. Turned the breaker for that circuit back on and popped the service main breaker. When I investigated, it turned out the new outlet still had the bridging piece that shorts together the hots for the two outlets, and this was a kitchen outlet and thus had separate circuits for each half (and, as is often the case, they were on adjacent fingers in the breaker box and thus on different phases). So, of course, the new outlet shorted the two hot phases together. He didn't have the experience to recognize that those shorting pieces exist, to realize that having four conductors instead of three coming to the outlet - or its being a kitchen outlet - likely means the two halves are on different circuits and thus likely different phases, or the electrical understanding to put those facts together. Which wouldn't've been a problem, except that he thought he was fine - he didn't bring me in until the main service breaker blew. (He did, fortunately, have enough sense for that to tickle his "something I don't understand happened, call for help" reaction.) I've been doing electrical work since I was maybe ten or twelve, when I helped my parents wire the house they were building. (My father inspected my work first; then, this being de rigeur there-and-then, it was inspected by a suitable authority. Only then was it energized.) I don't hesitate to do routine house electrical work, maybe even installing 30A outlets (though I'd make sure I looked up the appropriate gauge of wire, and probably then used the next larger gauge). But I'd call in someone more experienced for something well outside my own experience, like (say) dealing with 600/600 service. I would say that, if you don't have a good deal of experience, find someone who does to look over your work before you energize it. Indeed, some jurisdictions require that for work done by unlicensed persons - or at least used to, and I would assume some still do. Even if yours doesn't, it strikes me as the smart thing to do. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NuTek Mac comes
>> I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so >> did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line? I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones. Here are the ones big enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the early-to-mid '80s): - No command-line editing. (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but only there.) - Verbosity. - Some degree of syntax straitjacket. Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather, significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time. Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too. The principal one I remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above. For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well enough for us to get useful stuff done. (The above discussion applies to DCL. I never used MCR enough to have anything useful to say, positive or negative, about it.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...
>> NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows >> why, because it shows up only in native builds. > Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I've only used it in the context of > other platforms and variants. I'm sure there are lots of <host,target,compiler> triples it works just fine for. I just don't know why <amd64,vax,gcc-Vwhatever> isn't one of them. As far as I know nobody else knows either. >> Nobody knows [...]. (Or at least that's what I've gathered from >> following port-vax@.) > Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly > motivated VAX gods. :-) :-) Actually, I think it probably is - just ones short on round tuits. I suspect that anyone with the necessary VAX/gcc/NetBSD chops to diagnose this problem is also kickass at a number of other things, things which (for example) pay significantly better. >> If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying >> to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native. > It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. [...] Thank you for the compliment! NetBSD apparently either disagrees or decided something else had higher priority, though. This way I have more time for doing my own thing, though, so it's not entirely without a silver lining. (Admittedly, at the moment "my own thing" is less computery, so perhaps it's not that much of a silver lining from your perspective - I don't know how much we overlap except for classiccmp.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...
> Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or > embedded systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile > binaries for completely alien systems is just awesome. But it comes at a price. NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native builds. Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the cross-compiler generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle bug in the compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what. (Or at least that's what I've gathered from following port-vax@.) If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)
> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also > proprietary, seldom used, I think it is only semi-proprietary. I've seen open documentation that at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet and for serial lines. However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of hosts it supports. I don't remember exactly what the limit is; different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large corporation. (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host number within each area? I'm sure someone here knows.) Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might have been a contender. For all I know maybe they've even done that, but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony. But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the ground-up integration into the OS. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)
> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, > I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah, probably. But there's a lot more to networking than just IP. Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NuTek Mac comes
>> [...] VMS [...] > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was > incredible. For its time, certainly. Even today, there are a few things a DECnet stack does better than an IP stack. > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the > water). I'm not sure I agree. The VMS command line I used sucked, but so did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways. As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what is _much_ better is the documentation it contains. DEC documentation of the VMS era was _awesome_. Even today I rarely see it equaled, never mind bettered, in many ways. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NuTek Mac comes
>> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly >> unstable: [...] Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as a counterexample. Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to learn from it. (Not that I think it's perfect, of course. But I do think it did some things better than most of what I see today.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
FTGH: DEC 54-17507 backplane; Sun type-4 keyboards
I've finally started digging through all my stuff in storage, at least in a small way. Two (or three) things I've found so far might be of interest here. (There will likely be more eventually, but it's anybody's guess when I'll find the round tuits to do more digging.) - One DEC 54-17507. Google makes me think this is the Qbus backplane from a BA123. It appears to be in good shape; while I am not set up to test it, it looks pretty much "too simple to break". It consists of the PCB, the Qbus connectors on one side, two 18-pin power connectors and one ten-pin connector with blue plastic shroud on the other side, and a piece of heavy sheet steel all this is bolted to. (And the bolts, of course. :-) Oh, all four resistor packs are installed. - Two Sun type-4 keyboards. (Whether the list is two or three things depends on whether you count these as one thing or two.) They are somewhat age-yellowed, and one of them has some stain spots. All the keys appear to work mechanically. I have a machine I can test these with, but I will have to first dig out a suitable cable; whether they are available now or later depends on whether you want to wait for me to find a cable to test them. These are in Ottawa (Canada's national capital, for those who don't know the name or who want disambiguation) and are anyone's for the claiming. In theory I can ship, but in practice I find I totally suck at getting stuff shipped (I have two things pending shipping right now, pending for long times), so you are much more likely to get something soon if you can pick it up or give me a local(ish) place I can drop it off, and if someone wants something shipped and someone else is prepared to pick it up, I'm taking the easy-for-me option. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: 'Bounces'
> Just re-subscribed to cc-talk. I'm wondering if anyone has an answer > on this - every now and again I get these warning emails about > 'excessive bounces'. I have to click a link and then they go away > for a while. But sometimes I get busy and forget.. and then the list > unsubscribes me. No idea what 'excessive bounces' means or what I > can do to prevent it from unsubscribing. Any thoughts? I automated that. One of my procmail recipes says # Try to auto-reenable those damn suspended subscriptions :0 cD * ^Subject: confirm [0-9a-f]*$ * ^Message-ID:
Re: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)
>>> [...] and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. >> (a) That is not my experience. > I did acknowledge (but it was snipped in your reply---it's the > missing footnote). True enough. > I've also checked the xterm use of DCS. I *still* don't understand > where you would use those particular sequences. _I_ wouldn't, since I don't use xterm. My terminal emulator has a much richer DCS command language, allowing things like requesting window resize, or opening another window (displaying elsewhere) onto the same emulator. DCS is basically the escape hatch to device-speific functionality. > I've also come across plenty of libraries and modules (for various > langauges) that use raw ANSI sequences to color things when they > "technically" should be using the Termcap Sf and Sb > capabilities---those scuflaws! Touting non-portable behavior like > that! Well, technically, there is no such thing as ANSI colour. The colour sequences are ISO-defined extension arguments to ANSI's SGR sequence. But, yes, I've seen that too, most often with Linux. It is EXTREMELY annoying to type ls and see [0m[01;34mdir[0m file [01;36mlink[0m [01;32mpgm[0m It's even more annoying when other things - eg, vi - understand the terminal type correctly set in $TERM, but things like ls insist on assuming not only without evidence but in the presence of evidence to the contrary that the display device can handle ISO-extended X3.64 SGR. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)
>> [modern "improvements" in monitor technology] > Lord have mercy, just give me the damn pixels on 1/3rd of the monitor > and give me the *option* to scale it if I want. Why is it so hard to > understand that nobody wants to run an LCD in it's "non-native" > resolution. It always looks like crap! Most people run a monitor exactly two ways: (1) in text mode during BIOS POST and early bootup and (2) in its native resolution. There is very little business case for supporting letterboxing rather than scaling. (For the mass market. There are niches, of course.) I too find it discouraging. Tyranny of the majority at its finest. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)
> The effect of bloatware: > http://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins "Wordstar on an 4.077 MHz 8088 could keep up with my typing; WinWord under Windoze on a 300 MHz PII can't." --Seth Breidbart You can tell how old the quote is: it cites a PII/300. > I see it with guitar. [...] > I've seen how people buy $80-130k sportscars but can't drive a stick > I've been to shoots [...] > I see it with woodworkers [...] I see it in monitors. I've been repeatedly annoyed by modern flatscreens that refuse to even try to do what CRTs from twenty years ago routinely did. "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski by someone on a mud I hang out on. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DL11 configuration for pdp11gui
>>> [W]hat have you been using your Dreamcast for? >> Not much, yet. > I've been resurrecting the old Dreamcast Linux. [...] Oh, I have NetBSD/dreamcast. It boots and runs. But it doesn't provide any glue to the rendering hardware, making it pretty useless (or, at best, irrelevant) for games. And, since the thing has no disk of its own, it has to run diskless, or at best out of a ramdisk (the closest thing it has to a disk is the CD). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DL11 configuration for pdp11gui
>> [...] my own Dreamcast serial-line code [...] > I have to ask, being a Sega fan, but what have you been using your > Dreamcast for? Not much, yet. Aside from assorted poking at it to learn how to use the hardware, the only thing I really feel I can be said to have used it for was when I built a program for it that let another host, on the same Ethernet segment, use the controller(s) connected to the DC. In my Copious Spare Time, I would like to build a game for it, probably meaning also building a game engine, at least a rudimentary one. But that is waiting on my finding a supply of round tuits. If you have git set up, and are curious enough to bother, clone git://git.rodents-montreal.org/Mouse/dreamcast and poke around. rem.s is (the Dreamcast end of) the aforementioned "remote controller" code. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: DL11 configuration for pdp11gui
>> Mostly PDP11GUI does not care, either 7b or 8b. > I'm kind of surprised to hear that; I assumed that PDP11GUI can > download binaries, and for that, 8-bit is kind of necessary? Depends on the protocol. While it's not a PDP-11, my own Dreamcast serial-line code sends binaries over a serial line as hex. It doubles the octet count sent (for the data - there's some other overhead too) but requiring nothing beyond plain text of the comm channel. I'm sure there are plenty of other serial-line protocols that encode more compactly; if you use the 95 printable ASCII characters (space through tilde), you can pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters with less than one bit of spare space; you can even reserve 10 characters for other purposes (eg, framing) and still pack 32 bits of binary into 5 characters. About the most compact packing I see is 32 binary octets into 39 base-95 values. In theory it's possible to do better, but not much, and even this much is not convenient to do. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?
>> No, it's not an old-fashioned simplistic Unix utility. Hey, >> newsflash, neither is GNOME, neither is KDE. And if either of those were being made as central to the system as systemd is, there would be a similar outcry against them. The problem is not that systemd is bloated, or buggy, or badly designed. The problem is that it's bloated, buggy, badly designed - _and_ is being made very, very central to even rudimentary operation of the OS. Well, that, and that a whole lot of users perceive it as being rammed down their metaphorical throats, something that raises hackles at the best of times. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?
> Its obvious that the systemd thing is a very controversial one, but I > see the move as just one of the "trying to keep up with the other > players in the field, i.e. launchd in OS X or svc services in > Solaris/Solaris distro's. Just because other people make a mistake is no excuse for another person making it. (The argument, of course, is over whether systemd _is_ a mistake. My current opinion is that it is; while this is based on second-hand information only, unless the second-hand information turns out to be outright lies I am unlikely to change my mind.) As for everyone who disliked systemd already having bailed, see Devuan. > I find it funny people are fighting for the Sys V rc scripts. I > remember how much they were hated when Sun rolled out Solaris 2.x and > everyone wanted the BSD rc/rc.local/rc.x scripts back, because > the Sys V system was too complicated. Just because X is better than Y doesn't mean that Z isn't worse yet. (Here, X is BSD /etc/rc, Y is SysV-style rc scripts, and Z is systemd. All in suitable people's opinions, of course.) >>> and BSD is better on servers. >> *Ridiculously* contentious. [...] Linux [is] the dominant server >> platform of the WWW. "servers" != "the WWW". Not by a long shot. >>> That's one thing I liked about IRIX. It's still a true UNIX >>> variant, not "based on UNIX". So are Linux and BSD, right up until you start caring about the _legal_ definition of UNIX, which is why they call themselves as "based on UNIX" or "UNIX-like" or the like. But (IMO, of course) the legal sense is the only one in which they aren't UNIX. > I'm a big *BSD fan myself. There is a lot of great work that get > accomplished under the *BSD umbrella, that never seems to get proper > attention. The BSDs just sit there and work, for the most part. The major thing I see them lacking is a PR department. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: NEC ProSpeed 386
> It might be interesting to poll the list to see who's still using an > IBM Model M keyboard on their x86 box. I am. Not me. My x86 boxen get whatever peecee keyboard is handiest when I want a keyboard on them. I don't have a Model M as far as I know; my impression from seeing others' is that they are not Mouse-friendly. (I know of no Mouse-friendly keyboards suitable for direct use on x86 boxen.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: ASM, Clancy & Harvey, and Agile (Re: vintage computers in active use)
> I've worked under Agile and XP regimes and I hate both with a > passion. They were both a *huge* productivity drag (ever actually > tried "pair programming"?) Yes. I've done agile and XP and even a little pair programming. And...I agree and I disagree. If you have a small project, something one person can do and you are content with the result being in only one person's head, agile and XP and the like are exactly what you say: a significant productivity lose. But if you need the result to be in more than one person's head, or if the project is such that one person can't handle it (too big, needs to be done too fast, whatever), pair programming is - well, can be - a substantial win overall. It impairs _individual_ productivity for the sake of _overall_ productivity. Agile and XP are less about programming productivity in isolation and more about customer interfacing - and therefore productivity in terms of producing happy customers (where "customer" should be interpreted liberally, not necessarily as "arm's-length entity that pays money"). If you're building something for yourself, if you're doing a well-defined and highly predictable "here's the task, go away and come back when it's done" job, they are of little to no use. But if you're building something where there's a nontrivial chance of the requirements changing mid-job, and the coders and the consumer are different, I find them to be of significant value - and that's a larger fraction of the coding jobs than one might wish. > It also seems to me that all the "greats" (incredible coders) No, if you're idolzing lone-wolf coders producing one-person projects on their own (or even very small teams, if they already know one another well), agile will be somewhere between irrelevant and obstructionist. > and software projects or companies I loved or respected weren't > "Agile". Possibly. I'd have to know which ones you have in mind to have any chance of saying anything of value - and probably not even then, as it's unlikely that whatever you have in mind is something I know anything about the internals of. I will hazard a guess that the projects/companies you're talking about were not producing code for a customer, but were producing something for themselves which, once produced, turned out to be appreciated. (Perhaps they did so expecting that result, perhaps not - the critical point is that there was no customer before/during coding.) There, too, because there is no customer during coding and thus no changing requirements during coding, and no customer to be kept happy during coding, agile and XP are irrelevant. If that's the only kind of coding you care about, or what to do, or whatever, yes, you should ignore them. A nontrivial fraction of the code I write falls into such categories. But there is also a nontrivial fraction of the code I write that _does_ have a separate customer, with changing requirements. While I don't formally do agile, what I do do is in line with many of the principles behind agile - things like "release early, release often", short iterations, and constant customer involvement. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: vintage computers in active use
> I have used the following operating systems: [...] > Now will somebody explain to me why windows is considered not good. There are, of course, almost as many answers to that as there are people holding that opinion. My own answers? It's closed source. It appears to put usefulness to users second to separating them from their money. It appears to be designed for users who know nothing about computers - and designed to keep them in that state. It appears to be designed around the model of large companies producing content which individual consumers consume (as opposed to peers providing things to one another). It is a monoculture. It drives the Intel ISA monoculture. By requiring ridiculously over-specced machines, it encourages the sloppy coder tendency to hide sins with hardware. It's full of gaping security holes - some by culture, some by design, some by chance. (Yes, I know some of these are easily explainable.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Re: Front panel switches - what did they do?
>>> The PDP-5 I did a fair bit of work on needed a bootstrap program >>> loaded in from switches, it had no internal ROM for that. >> How long did it usually take to do it? > We had contests, I think some people got under 15 seconds. > All from memory, of course! I don't think I ever used a PDP-5, but I did, back in the late '70s, use some HP rackmount machine with lighted buttons for front-panel switches and a manually-entered bootstrap. I got good at entering its bootstrap, to the point where the limiting factor was speed of moving my fingers between switches; once the code was memorized, dexterity was the limiting factor for speed. (I don't remember how long the bootstrap was; I think it was something like six or eight instructions. Probably something like "set DMA address and source sector in disk controller, tell disk controller to read, wait for completion, jump to loaded code". Probably only some five or ten seconds to enter.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
