Re: personal history of personal computers
I believe Jack Rubin has taken pictures of his repair. He frequents this message board. Dwight From: cctalk on behalf of dwight via cctalk Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2021 5:16 PM To: Chris Hanson ; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers I believe I describe this. There is a nylon clip that holds the guide rail for the head assembly. This nylon was over stressed. Every machine that I've seen, the nylon had hardened and cracked. It allows the rail to float. What happens is that the rail lifts up. When ejecting the floppy the plastic cover catches on the head. One that is removing the disk is likely to assume that it is just the eject hanging a little and they pull the disk out. This rips the head from the mount, destroying the drive. I saw a Cat on ebay and asked the seller to pass on my email to the buyer, to tell him to not force the disk from the drive, because it would damage the head. I did not get to him soon enough. He had already damaged the head. He said he'd wish he'd read my message earlier. This is such a common failure that I continue to warn people about it as often as I can. I also did some repair for a fellow that used Cats in his business. I was only able to fix 2 of 5 drives. Luckily these had a head mount was just bent and not ripped off. The desired fix is to open the disk drive and replace the nylon piece with something to hold it in place. I used a piece of plastic but several use a small dab of JB Weld. There is little reason to ever remove the rail. The drive use is driven through a soldered on ribbon cable, unlike most such HD drives. Because of software, it requires the DriveReady signal. Most drives no longer have this. It can be created with the retriggerable oneshot, on an adapter cable. I hope that covers it. Disassembly of the drive is a little trick to get at the rail but anyone with some mechanical ability can do it. Do look at how the eject works before disassembling. Dwight From: Chris Hanson Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2021 3:13 PM To: dwight ; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: Fred Cisin Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers On Jan 4, 2021, at 1:31 PM, dwight via cctalk wrote: > > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was > generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several > applications were developed. > It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It > had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and > other things once one understood how to access the Forth. > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. > It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the > drive. What happens if it's not possible to talk to you? Can you write up just what the deal is with the drive, so that everyone can learn? -- Chris
Re: personal history of personal computers
I believe I describe this. There is a nylon clip that holds the guide rail for the head assembly. This nylon was over stressed. Every machine that I've seen, the nylon had hardened and cracked. It allows the rail to float. What happens is that the rail lifts up. When ejecting the floppy the plastic cover catches on the head. One that is removing the disk is likely to assume that it is just the eject hanging a little and they pull the disk out. This rips the head from the mount, destroying the drive. I saw a Cat on ebay and asked the seller to pass on my email to the buyer, to tell him to not force the disk from the drive, because it would damage the head. I did not get to him soon enough. He had already damaged the head. He said he'd wish he'd read my message earlier. This is such a common failure that I continue to warn people about it as often as I can. I also did some repair for a fellow that used Cats in his business. I was only able to fix 2 of 5 drives. Luckily these had a head mount was just bent and not ripped off. The desired fix is to open the disk drive and replace the nylon piece with something to hold it in place. I used a piece of plastic but several use a small dab of JB Weld. There is little reason to ever remove the rail. The drive use is driven through a soldered on ribbon cable, unlike most such HD drives. Because of software, it requires the DriveReady signal. Most drives no longer have this. It can be created with the retriggerable oneshot, on an adapter cable. I hope that covers it. Disassembly of the drive is a little trick to get at the rail but anyone with some mechanical ability can do it. Do look at how the eject works before disassembling. Dwight From: Chris Hanson Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2021 3:13 PM To: dwight ; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: Fred Cisin Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers On Jan 4, 2021, at 1:31 PM, dwight via cctalk wrote: > > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was > generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several > applications were developed. > It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It > had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and > other things once one understood how to access the Forth. > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. > It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the > drive. What happens if it's not possible to talk to you? Can you write up just what the deal is with the drive, so that everyone can learn? -- Chris
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Jan 24, 2021, at 3:13 PM, Chris Hanson via cctalk wrote: > What happens if it's not possible to talk to you? Can you write up just what > the deal is with the drive, so that everyone can learn? And now I see that you've done so—thank you! -- Chris
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Jan 4, 2021, at 1:31 PM, dwight via cctalk wrote: > > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was > generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several > applications were developed. > It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It > had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and > other things once one understood how to access the Forth. > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. > It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the > drive. What happens if it's not possible to talk to you? Can you write up just what the deal is with the drive, so that everyone can learn? -- Chris
Re: personal history of personal computers = joke
On 1/4/2021 5:53 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: Need to grease/lube it periodically That is your problem there! You grease pigs not cats. Ben.
Re: personal history of personal computers
there is a sing rail that guide the head. At the back of the rail is a small nylon tab that holds it in place. The way they mad it, it is over stressed and will have failed. This means the rail is not held down securely. Eventually the rail will pop up, not being held down securely any more. You will find the first indication is that the disk will not eject properly. the temptation is to pull it out, thinking it is just a sticky eject, but that isn't the problem. It is catching on the head. Eventually it will catch really well and you'll rip the head of the mount. At this point the disk can not be repaired. It is an unusual drive, being single sided and requiring the DriveReady signal. It also has a build in cable instead of the standard edge connector and power connector. Most of the new drive no longer have the DriveReady signal, even as an option. One can make changes to the software if you know how to use the data or sector pulse as a DriveReady. This usually requires a one shot to hold the pulse for the software to recognize the pulse. There are several things on can do with it. With a few simple modifications, one can increase the RAM ( mostly just installing ) but for text you can't have more than 100K. It is possible to use a newer version of the software that includes the assembler. One of the more frustrating things is that it normally only has drivers for Cannon printers, with the excepting that it will also do the FX80 compatible printers. It is not too hard to write one's own printer drive and substitute it for one of the printer drivers. This is normally done such that it will use a portion of the disk and overlay in RAM for one of the drivers. I've done this to use a HP pcl5 type printer. ( I don't support all of the funny characters though ). You can write your code in the editor and compile it into RAM. As an extension, it can be saved on onto the disk such that it is available the next time you use that disk. As I recall, the official software is 1.73. The new code with the assembler is 2.40 ( never released ). I have a copy of that version. Anyway, the RAM can be expanded by putting chips into the sockets and adding socket to the last row. I've expanded the RAM even more by adding a large CMOS RAM to an unused address decoded area. One does have to make a minor hack and add a gate to deal with the high/low byte 68000. I just mount a IC dead bug but one does have to lift a couple leads of the 68000. I use the extra RAM to recompile the Forth and editor software, to blow as an EPROM. I can compile it to run in the RAM space or the EPROM area. This allows me to test it first before changing the constant for the offset. Dwight From: cctalk on behalf of Cameron Kaiser via cctalk Sent: Monday, January 4, 2021 3:19 PM To: cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. I love the form factor of my Cat. Wish it was easier to "do things" with it though. > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. Don't leave us in suspense! However, mine seems to be fine. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com<http://www.floodgap.com> * ckai...@floodgap.com -- Why is it you can only trust short, dumpy spies? -- Hogan, "Hogan's Heroes"
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Mon, 2021-01-04 at 19:53 -0500, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: > Need to grease/lube it periodically Is it English? I understand the English stopped building computers because they couldn't figure out how to make them leak oil. > On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, 6:20 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. > > > > I love the form factor of my Cat. Wish it was easier to "do things" > > with itthough. > > > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you > > > talk to > > me. > > Don't leave us in suspense! However, mine seems to be fine. > > -- personal: > > http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems > > * www.floodgap.com *ckai...@floodgap.com > > -- Why is it you can only trust short, dumpy spies? -- Hogan, > > "Hogan'sHeroes"
Re: personal history of personal computers
Need to grease/lube it periodically On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, 6:20 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. > > I love the form factor of my Cat. Wish it was easier to "do things" with it > though. > > > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to > me. > > Don't leave us in suspense! However, mine seems to be fine. > > -- > personal: > http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- > Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * > ckai...@floodgap.com > -- Why is it you can only trust short, dumpy spies? -- Hogan, "Hogan's > Heroes" >
Re: personal history of personal computers
> There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. I love the form factor of my Cat. Wish it was easier to "do things" with it though. > If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. Don't leave us in suspense! However, mine seems to be fine. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- Why is it you can only trust short, dumpy spies? -- Hogan, "Hogan's Heroes"
Re: personal history of personal computers
On the issue of the Cat re-formatting disks that it couldn't read, my suggestion was that they should add enough circuitry that it could recognize the existence of FM, MFM, and GCR formats. Then, it could say, "This disk appears to already be formatted for a different kind of machine. Would you like to erase it and reformat for this machine?" I offered to provide data, so that if it could also identify recording format, number of sides formatted, and maybe even bytes per sector and sectors per track, it could expand the massge to include "The following machines are some of the possibilities of what it is formatted for:" . . . and, of course, the ultimate would be to implement some other file systems, so that it could access what was on the disk. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, 1:38 PM Mike Loewen via cctalk wrote: > > Andy Molloy had a Canon Cat at VCF East in 2006. Unfortunately, it > smoked. > > http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/VCF-East2006/dscn4151-f.jpg Someone could buy one from Jack and fix it up eBay 324441040706.
Re: personal history of personal computers
On 2021-01-04 4:38 p.m., Mike Loewen via cctalk wrote: > > Andy Molloy had a Canon Cat at VCF East in 2006. Unfortunately, it > smoked. > > http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/VCF-East2006/dscn4151-f.jpg > ... there's one on ebay now FWIW. --Toby
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, dwight wrote: There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several applications were developed. It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and other things once one understood how to access the Forth. If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the drive. Dwight That was an amazing machine. Raskin was an amazing character. He was responsible for many innovations and design decisions throughout the industry. (and, I almost ended up getting his electric minivan) I had a running argument with Jef. If you have a room full of a variety of disks, including multiple MFM formats AND GCR, the default when it couldn't read a disk should NOT be to FORMAT it. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: personal history of personal computers
Andy Molloy had a Canon Cat at VCF East in 2006. Unfortunately, it smoked. http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/VCF-East2006/dscn4151-f.jpg On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, dwight via cctalk wrote: There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several applications were developed. It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and other things once one understood how to access the Forth. If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the drive. Dwight From: cctalk on behalf of Fred Cisin via cctalk Sent: Monday, January 4, 2021 11:35 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the USA. And yet, . . . I remember an Apple Lisa ad that showed a toddler playing with it on the living room rug. (Probably rolling the mouse around and making "VROOM! VROOM!" noises, pretending that it was a car) Similar ads for Macintosh and IBM PC. The marketing people TRIED to portray them as home computers. You can place an infant on a Cray Couch; that still doesn't make that a home computer. YES, a fully loaded IBM PC, complete with buying a full suite of software from IBM WAS comparable in price to a complete Macintosh. However, the ENTRY point was lower. You could buy a minimal machine and expand it yourself. My first TRS-80 was $400, because I used my own monitor and cassette. And then later, my own disk drives. My first 5150 was less than $1500, because I used my own monitor, memory, disk drives, and printer. Segmented memory was a kludge, and not the only kludge. Remember that a DMA transfer could not straddle a 64K boundary! Many programs, even MS-DOS, failed to take that into account adequately! It was not hard to handle that particular one - just test for it, and rearrange your larger data structures accordingly. BUT, by building through a series of kludges, it was truly trivial to port software as the machines progressed. At time of release, IBM had pre-planned to have VisiCalc and Easy-Writer. Porting Wordstar to the PC was fast and easy; it took them longer to edit the documentation (using a word processor?). Porting SuperCalc (a major VisiClone) was very quick. The opposite approach, of NO KLUDGES, resulted in much better product. But, it took longer, AND, it meant a serious delay for software, since any low-level software would then also need to be rewritten from scratch. To avoid the PR nightmare of a machine with no software, Apple decided that when the Macintosh would be released, it would come with four significant software packages. It ended up being scaled back to the four being Mac-Write, Mac-Paint, Mac-Write, and Mac-Paint. But, it came with some usable software. It took a long time before after-market software, even spreadsheets, were available for the Macintosh. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com Mike Loewen mloe...@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
Re: personal history of personal computers
There was a little known 68K machine. It was the Canon Cat. Although, it was generally not intended as a development machine, in its short life, several applications were developed. It was primarily sold as a word processor ( quite powerful one at that ). It had Forth running under the word processor. One could do both assembly and other things once one understood how to access the Forth. If you should ever get one, don't use the disk drive until you talk to me. It has a common problem that if you don't understand it will destroy the drive. Dwight From: cctalk on behalf of Fred Cisin via cctalk Sent: Monday, January 4, 2021 11:35 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: personal history of personal computers On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market > after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was > around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the > USA. And yet, . . . I remember an Apple Lisa ad that showed a toddler playing with it on the living room rug. (Probably rolling the mouse around and making "VROOM! VROOM!" noises, pretending that it was a car) Similar ads for Macintosh and IBM PC. The marketing people TRIED to portray them as home computers. You can place an infant on a Cray Couch; that still doesn't make that a home computer. YES, a fully loaded IBM PC, complete with buying a full suite of software from IBM WAS comparable in price to a complete Macintosh. However, the ENTRY point was lower. You could buy a minimal machine and expand it yourself. My first TRS-80 was $400, because I used my own monitor and cassette. And then later, my own disk drives. My first 5150 was less than $1500, because I used my own monitor, memory, disk drives, and printer. Segmented memory was a kludge, and not the only kludge. Remember that a DMA transfer could not straddle a 64K boundary! Many programs, even MS-DOS, failed to take that into account adequately! It was not hard to handle that particular one - just test for it, and rearrange your larger data structures accordingly. BUT, by building through a series of kludges, it was truly trivial to port software as the machines progressed. At time of release, IBM had pre-planned to have VisiCalc and Easy-Writer. Porting Wordstar to the PC was fast and easy; it took them longer to edit the documentation (using a word processor?). Porting SuperCalc (a major VisiClone) was very quick. The opposite approach, of NO KLUDGES, resulted in much better product. But, it took longer, AND, it meant a serious delay for software, since any low-level software would then also need to be rewritten from scratch. To avoid the PR nightmare of a machine with no software, Apple decided that when the Macintosh would be released, it would come with four significant software packages. It ended up being scaled back to the four being Mac-Write, Mac-Paint, Mac-Write, and Mac-Paint. But, it came with some usable software. It took a long time before after-market software, even spreadsheets, were available for the Macintosh. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: personal history of personal computers
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the USA. And yet, . . . I remember an Apple Lisa ad that showed a toddler playing with it on the living room rug. (Probably rolling the mouse around and making "VROOM! VROOM!" noises, pretending that it was a car) Similar ads for Macintosh and IBM PC. The marketing people TRIED to portray them as home computers. You can place an infant on a Cray Couch; that still doesn't make that a home computer. YES, a fully loaded IBM PC, complete with buying a full suite of software from IBM WAS comparable in price to a complete Macintosh. However, the ENTRY point was lower. You could buy a minimal machine and expand it yourself. My first TRS-80 was $400, because I used my own monitor and cassette. And then later, my own disk drives. My first 5150 was less than $1500, because I used my own monitor, memory, disk drives, and printer. Segmented memory was a kludge, and not the only kludge. Remember that a DMA transfer could not straddle a 64K boundary! Many programs, even MS-DOS, failed to take that into account adequately! It was not hard to handle that particular one - just test for it, and rearrange your larger data structures accordingly. BUT, by building through a series of kludges, it was truly trivial to port software as the machines progressed. At time of release, IBM had pre-planned to have VisiCalc and Easy-Writer. Porting Wordstar to the PC was fast and easy; it took them longer to edit the documentation (using a word processor?). Porting SuperCalc (a major VisiClone) was very quick. The opposite approach, of NO KLUDGES, resulted in much better product. But, it took longer, AND, it meant a serious delay for software, since any low-level software would then also need to be rewritten from scratch. To avoid the PR nightmare of a machine with no software, Apple decided that when the Macintosh would be released, it would come with four significant software packages. It ended up being scaled back to the four being Mac-Write, Mac-Paint, Mac-Write, and Mac-Paint. But, it came with some usable software. It took a long time before after-market software, even spreadsheets, were available for the Macintosh. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
