Re: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[Alexandre Souza]

And hpmuseum seems to be offline right now :(


2016-04-28 3:52 GMT-03:00 Pontus Pihlgren :

> That is sad news :(
>
> I've had good use of his work.
>
> /Pontus.
>
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 11:48:46AM +0200, Rik Bos wrote:
> > This morning I got the sad message of the passing of Jon Johnston the
> > curator of the HP Museum website www.hpmusem.net.
> >
> > More info at :
> > <
> http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/father-of-three-jon-johnston-died
> >
> -in-tibet-during-a-trek-in-the-himalayas/news-story/501c804577a833b0964016ba
> > e87fd318>
> >
> http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/father-of-three-jon-johnston-died-
> >
> in-tibet-during-a-trek-in-the-himalayas/news-story/501c804577a833b0964016bae
> > 87fd318
> >
> >
> >
> > Jon, was a fellow collector and HP enthusiast and will be missed.
> >
> > Jon himself and his site were a help and source of knowledge for everyone
> > who was interested in HP computing history.
> >
> >
> >
> > -Rik
> >
>

Re: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[Tor Arntsen]

On 28 April 2016 at 09:16, Alexandre Souza  wrote:
> And hpmuseum seems to be offline right now :(

It's online, but you may have tried the link in Rik's post, which has a typo.

Re: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[Alexandre Souza]

Ops...Sorry :(

2016-04-28 4:24 GMT-03:00 Tor Arntsen :

> On 28 April 2016 at 09:16, Alexandre Souza 
> wrote:
> > And hpmuseum seems to be offline right now :(
>
> It's online, but you may have tried the link in Rik's post, which has a
> typo.
>

Re: Digital VAX, Alpha (Was RE: Mac "Workgroup Server" ...

[emu]

Zitat von Paul Koning :



On Apr 27, 2016, at 9:07 AM, e...@e-bbes.com wrote:



If "accurate" means to run VMS or Unix, it shouldn't be to difficult.


You might be surprised.


Probably not. I have both working here as Software emulations ;-)

Getting a PDP-11 FPGA to be accurate enough  to run standard  
operating systems is hard enough (as I found out  helping Sytze's  
"pdp2011" project).  And that's a much simpler CPU  than VAX.  In  
particular, the privileged architecture tends to be  critical for  
getting an OS to boot, and that part tends to be poorly  documented  
(as well as variable from one CPU model to the next).


Funny as it Sound, the VAX was easier, but all the Floating Point  
formats took a while to implement ...



I don't know.  Fun is certainly a good reason for many of us.


Yup, that's how it started ;-)

I don't know if there are any unexpired patents; if not, then   
implementing a machine from the published documentation seems fine,   
though running the software might require answering some licensing   
questions.


That's the real pain in the neck, to Transfer licenses from one  
machine to the next ...


Cheers

Re: Digital VAX, Alpha (Was RE: Mac "Workgroup Server" ...

[emu]

Zitat von Swift Griggs :


3. I know for a fact the US government and a few other folks are pretty
   well stuck with using Alphas for "certain" things. If the vendor was
   OK'd by the gubment, there might be some money to be made there, too.


But they don't Need an FPGA, for them Software Emulation of an Alpha  
is sufficient ...



4. If some guy in Poland (Lotharek) was able to make an FPGA box that
   emulates more than 9 different platforms (albeit probably simpler ones)
   for under $200, ...


just for clarification, Lotharek is a reseller not the developer of  
it. About the development of it, ("MIST") you can read at  
https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki


cheers

Unknown transistor repairing a TI990/5 power supply

[Alberto Rubinelli - Fondazione Museo del Computer]

I'm working at the power supply of a 990/5 minicomputer.
The chassis is a 6 slot version, with 20A power supply.
After a few minutes of working, the fuse blow and I found a transistor on
the main power supply board with collector in short circuit with emitter.
The transistor has TRW logo and is market with Texas part number 996070-003,
in addiction with the date code.
Pictures of the transistor here :
http://www.museodelcomputer.org/parts/texas/990_5/IMG_6442_transistor.JPG
http://www.museodelcomputer.org/parts/texas/990_5/IMG_6445_sotto.JPG
Google give me only a link, were it seem to be an Optek SVT6747 ... another
unknown transistor :(
Someone has experience with this power supply ?
http://www.museodelcomputer.org/parts/texas/990_5/IMG_6423.JPG
Texas part number is 944970-0001

Thanks for any help !

Alberto
--
Alberto Rubinelli
A2 SISTEMI   ELETTRONICA, INFORMATICA, NETWORKING
Via per Occhieppo, 29  Tel 015 8853203
13891 CAMBURZANO (BI) - ITALY  Fax 015 8853202
   Mobile +39 335 6026632
Mail : albe...@a2sistemi.it
Web  : www.a2sistemi.it
FONDAZIONE MUSEO DEL COMPUTER ONLUS
http://www.museodelcomputer.org 
Mail:info.museodelcomputer.org
Tel 015 8853201  Fax 015 8853202
--
Le telefonate con numero nascosto sono filtrate
Calls with no caller identifier are filtered
--

Re: It has been quiet.

[Noel Chiappa]

> From: Dwight Kelvey

> Has the list gone down or just dropped me again?

Consulting the list archive via the Web:

  http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/  

is a good way to see if things are moving.

Noel

Calling all typographers

[Rod Smallwood]

Hi Guys

 DEC did some interesting things when it came to fonts on 
front panels.


Take an 8/e front panel  for example.  the address is kind of a chalet font.

But they built it out of circles and straight lines and that's what I do.

Then they bunch up the characters until they touch or nearly touch. 
(kerning?)


I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at several font 
creator/editors.


Frankly they are dung.  Every fancy curve there is but not a straight 
forward line and circle method of  creating lower case characters


as DEC did it.  I do need the ability to enter (or import)  the lower 
case characters using just circles and lines.


I then need to do the usual font type things like different font sizes, 
bold, and character spacing from zero (touching) to miles apart.


Suggestions please

Rod (Panelman) Smallwood

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 27 April 2016 at 19:44, Brian L. Stuart  wrote:
> On Wed, 4/27/16, Liam Proven  wrote:
>> ... with a few weirdos saying that 6809 was better than
>> ... and a few weirdos maintained that Forth was better.
>> ... while the weirdoes use FreeBSD.
>
> I've never been more proud to be classified as a weirdo :)

Oh, well, good! I am glad to hear that, because it suggests that my
deliberate theme -- of people choosing obscure systems, not even the
2nd or 3rd choice but the ones out past that -- got benefits from
their choices and they were happy with them. The idea of the 'weirdo'
label is that that's what the mainstream types see them as, because
the mainstream types don't understand the benefits or can't believe
that they're even there.

>> The efforts to fix and improve Unix -- Plan 9, Inferno -- forgotten.
>
> Plan 9 and Inferno are still around.  There are quite a few of
> us who still use them on a regular basis.  In fact, the Plan 9
> updates for the new Pi 3 should be out very soon, and I have
> a student currently working on a port of Plan 9 to the Allwinner
> A20 found in the Banana Pi and several of the low-end tablets.

Oh, yes, indeed! I have a Plan 9 VM, and I intend to try it on my Pi.
But it's had relatively little impact on mainstream Unix.

The peak development period of actual UNIX™ seems to have ended in the
late 1980s, i.e. decades ago -- up to System V, then SVR 3, SVR 4,
then it seemed to sort of peter out. SVR4.2 was the last
widely-adopted version, AFAIK. SVR5 didn't go anywhere much; I don't
think it even made it into AIX. Wikipedia suggests that SVR6 was never
even released.

I blame SCO for that.

>> That makes me despair.
>
> I feel much the same way, but it leads me to a little different place.
> While I'll probably never be there entirely, I am now at a point where
> I am giving serious thought to only running software I write myself.
> For example, the file system I run on my home file server (a Plan 9
> box) is something I wrote myself.  The version of Scheme I use on
> Inferno is one I wrote, etc.  The truth is if you're willing to be one
> of the weirdos, there are still some pretty interesting places to be
> in the computing world.  There are still interesting languages both
> old and new to learn.  (I had a blast last summer working with MCPL,
> an experimental offshoot of BCPL, and the ENIAC simulator I'm
> developing is written in Go.)  I find life to be much more enjoyable
> and my blood pressure to be much lower as long as I steer away
> from anything that's mainstream or popular.

That's great to hear. Sadly, I fear I'm not hardcore enough. I can
barely code and haven't really done so since the late 1980s.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

RE: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[Jay West]

Al wrote...

This is horrible news.
The last project we worked on was my recovery of a bunch of HP3000 tapes
from him a few years ago.


Yep. The last email I got from him ended with:

I will be out of communication from Apr 5 to June 3 (on climbing expedition
in Tibet).

I got an update from them this morning with the detail that "[the] ground
gave way beneath them". So sad.

I know that there was a large shipment being gathered from many folks to
Teresa in LA which was then going to be shipped to AU around June. Some
contact will need to be made regarding that but will wait a bit first.

Best,

J

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 27 April 2016 at 20:15, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> I wish to apologise for this. It was unjustified and unfair, and
>> unjustly ad-hom as well.
>
> Well, that's mighty big of you Liam.

You're welcome, Swift. I'll try to learn from this.

> You are clearly a brilliant guy with
> a storied career and bristling with skills I only wish I had.

I don't know about that! I'm "only" 48 and my career was always more
in the sense of a verb than a noun. ;-)

I just have dabbled in a lot more systems and platforms than most. I
never specialised.

That came back to bite me in the fundament by my 40s. :-(

> As I read
> through your post here, I also got a lot more grit and understanding of
> why folks get as irritated as they do when I associate my bumbling college
> profs with something like LISP. It's silly of me to associate a language
> with a group of people. It's human, but still not very bright of me. LISP
> certainly has a lot of smart people advocating for it. It seems to
> represent a lost ideal or paradigm to them and it's I can see it's nasty
> of me to step on that, even if that's not my direct design to hurt them.

I guess I have picked up some of the esteem it's held in by contact.

This essay made the argument originally, I think:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

If you go and survey people with broad comparative knowledge, everyone
looks down on some languages and up to others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VxkltwS9g0

But whereas you can find fans of all sorts of languages who look up to
Lisp, Lispers don't look up to anyone. It seems to be the peak.

I don't program in anything modern and haven't coded for 25y or so. I
don't do Lisp or any FP language. But I've read a lot /about/ Lisp and
it seems to be something special and unique.

>> My contention is that a large part of the reason that we have the crappy
>> computers that we do today [...] is not technical, nor even primarily
>> commercial or due to business pressures, but rather, it's cultural.
>
> I share your lament.
>
>> the culture was that Real Men programmed in assembler and the main
>> battle was Z80 versus 6502, with a few weirdos saying that 6809 was
>> better than either.
>
> One thing that also keeps jumping out at me over and over is how I meet
> people with the same kind of experiences you describe and they are often
> much more skilled and better critical thinkers than folks I know from my
> generation or younger. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of young
> shining stars, but they just don't seem to occur with the same frequency.
> I have surmised that I am standing on the shoulders of giants going all
> the way back to folks like Grace Hopper, and that it's more and more
> difficult to grow in this field in the same way as the "old timers" (which
> for me is anyone who worked in the industry before 1989, I realize it's
> all relative).

There seems to be part of that. As ESR said, if one learns Lisp, /even
if one never uses it/ it makes one a better programmer. I cannot
verify this myself but the excitement of the Java folk getting into
Clojure now seems to bear it out to some degree.

> All "you guys" seemed to start out with math or EE
> background and filling in the CS parts seems to be trivial for you. I look
> up to your generation, believe it or not.

I was an undergrad biologist. :-) I've never studied CS.

But I think you have a point.

I've long felt that universities should teach /methods/ not skills.
They aren't for vocational training -- that's for polytechnics,
colleges and trainee jobs. But that's another thing we've screwed up
in recent decades: education.


>> The labs had Acorn BBC Micros in -- solid machines, *the* best 8-bit
>> BASIC ever,
>
> I'm a bit sad those never caught on in the states. They are neat machines.

NIH syndrome?

>> But a new wave was coming. MS-DOS was already huge and the Mac was
>> growing strongly. Windows was on v2 and was a toy, but Unix was coming
>
> For me, as a teen in the 1990s. I associated Unix with scientists,
> engineers, and "thinkers" in general. I'd walk into somewhere to fix a
> monitor or printer (I was a bench tech for a while) and the Unix guys
> wouldn't want me near their stuff. They could fix it themselves and they
> didn't want some punk kid who knew MSDOS to touch them. Meanwhile all the
> people I didn't respect (PHBs and other business-aligned folks) used beige
> boxes running DOS. I knew I was in the wrong place.

Yep, me too. I only learned it because it was the best choice for
multiuser accountancy systems in the late '80s. That is the one
function we sold it for. Some of the boxes replaced Concurrent CP/\M
systems with much more primitive DOS-based accountancy apps.

>> A new belief started to spread: that if you used C, you could get
>> near-assembler performance without the pain, and the code could be
>> ported between machines. DOS and Mac apps started to be written (or
>> rewritten) in C, and some were

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 27 April 2016 at 20:50, Noel Chiappa  wrote:
> > From: Liam Proven
>
> > There's the not-remotely-safe kinda-sorta C in a web browser,
> > Javascript.
>
> Love the rant, which I mostly agree with (_especially_ that one).

Thank you!

The JS line is the one that's attracting particularly harsh criticism
on FB, incidentally.

>  A couple of
> comments:
>
> > So they still have C like holes and there are frequent patches and
> > updates to try to make them able to retain some water for a short time,
> > while the "cyber criminals" make hundreds of millions.
>
> It's not clear to me that a 'better language' is going to get rid of that,
> because there will always be bugs (and the bigger the application, and the
> more it gets changed, the more there will be). The vibe I get from my
> knowledge of security is that it takes a secure OS, running on hardware that
> enforces security, to really fix the problem. (Google "Roger Schell".)

I have and will read up on this before I comment.

> > The Lisp Machines and Smalltalk boxes lost the workstation war. Unix
> > won, and as history is written by the victors
>
> Custom hardware for running LISP lost (not sure about Smalltalk, don't know
> much about it), I am quite sure, mostly because 'mainstream' CPUs got so much
> faster/cheaper, because of the volume. I saw this happening in the AI Lab at
> MIT: when you could run LISP on a workstation with a vanilla CPU much faster
> than a specialized LISP processor, that's all she wrote. (That effect killed
> all sorts of things, not just LISP machines, of course.)

Yes, so I've heard.

But the thing, the big thing, is that computers aren't organisms.

We can study dinosaurs and work out what they were good and bad at,
but Jurassic Park will never happen. Absent time machines, we cannot
bring them back.

But we could build new computers using the lessons of the past.

But nobody much is doing it.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 27 April 2016 at 22:13, Sean Conner  wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
>> On 26 April 2016 at 16:41, Liam Proven  wrote:
>>
>> When I was playing with home micros (mainly Sinclair and Amstrad; the
>> American stuff was just too expensive for Brits in the early-to-mid
>> 1980s), the culture was that Real Men programmed in assembler and the
>> main battle was Z80 versus 6502, with a few weirdos saying that 6809
>> was better than either. BASIC was the language for beginners, and a
>> few weirdos maintained that Forth was better.
>
>   The 6908 *is* better than either the Z80 or the 6502 (yes, I'm one of
> *those* 8-)

Hurrah! :-D

>> So now, it's Unix except for the single remaining mainstream
>> proprietary system: Windows. Unix today means Linux, while the
>> weirdoes use FreeBSD. Everything else seems to be more or less a
>> rounding error.
>
>   There are still VxWorks and QNX in embedded systems (I think both are now
> flying through space on various probes) so it's not quite a monoculture.
> But yes, the desktop does have severe moncultures.

True. I own a Blackberry Passport, a lovely QNX device.

But it's for sale. I have a new cheap Chinese Android phone that does
much much more. :-(

It's all about the apps...

>> C always was like carrying water in a sieve, so now, we have multiple
>> C derivatives, trying to patch the holes.
>
>   Citation needed.  C derivatives?  The only one I'm aware of is C++ and
> that's a far way from C nowadays (and no, using curly braces does not make
> something a C derivative).

Directly? Objective C, D.

Indirectly? Well, almost anything written in it. Your curly-braces
point is true, but the influence is, I feel, quite pervasive.

>> C++ has grown up but it's
>> like Ada now: so huge that nobody understands it all, but actually, a
>> fairly usable tool.
>>
>> There's the kinda-sorta FOSS "safe C++ in a VM", Java. The proprietary
>> kinda-sorta "safe C++ in a VM", C#. There's the not-remotely-safe
>> kinda-sorta C in a web browser, Javascript.
>
>   They may be implemented in C, but they're all a far cry from C (unless
> youmean they're imperative languages, then yes, they're "like" C in that
> reguard).

This point is getting made to me on FB as well. I think there is a
clear /influence/ and some C-isms -- direct memory allocation, pointer
manipulation and so on -- are widespread /because/ of the C family
influence. And I have a deep suspicion that these are harmful things.

>> And dozens of others, of course.
>
>   Rust is now written in Rust.  Go is now written in Go.  Same with D.
> There are modern alternatives to C.  And if the community is anything to go
> by, there is a slowly growing contigent of programmers that would outlaw the
> use of C (punishable by death).

Do you really think it's growing? I'd like very much to believe that.
I see little sign of it. I do hope you're right.


>> So they still have C like holes and there are frequent patches and
>> updates to try to make them able to retain some water for a short
>> time, while the "cyber criminals" make hundreds of millions.
>
>   I seriously think outlawing C will not fix the problems, but I think I'm
> in the minority on that feeling.

We would, of course, merely get different problems instead. ;-)

>> Anything else is "uncommercial" or "not viable for real world use".
>>
>> Borland totally dropped the ball and lost a nice little earner in
>> Delphi, but it continues as Free Pascal and so on.
>>
>> Apple goes its own way, but has forgotten the truly innovative
>> projects it had pre-NeXT, such as Dylan.
>>
>> There were real projects that were actually used for real work, like
>> Oberon the OS, written in Oberon the language. Real pioneering work in
>> UIs, such as Jef Raskin's machines, the original Mac and Canon Cat --
>> forgotten. People rhapsodise over the Amiga and forget that the
>> planned OS, CAOS, to be as radical as the hardware, never made it out
>> of the lab. Same, on a smaller scale, with the Acorn Archimedes.
>
>   While the Canon Cat was innovative, perhaps it was too early.  We were
> still in the era of general purpose computers and the idea of an
> "information appliance" was still in its infancy and perhaps, not an idea
> people were willing to deal with at the time.  Also, how easy was it to get
> data *out* of the Canon Cat?  (now that I think about it---it came with a
> disk drive, so in theory, possible)  You could word process, do some
> calculations, simple programming ... but no Solitare.

True.

>   As for CAOS, I haven't heard of it (and yes, I did the Amiga thing in the
> early 90s).  What was unique about it?  And as much as I loved the Amiga,
> the GUI API (at least 1.x version) was very tied to the hardware and the OS
> was very much uniprocessor in design.

There's not a lot about it out there, but there's some.

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=35526&forum=32&14

>> Despite that, of course, Lisp never went

Re: History [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[Mouse]

>> Well, I think "Sun god" is a significant overstatement, and I'm
>> pretty sure I never capitalized the "der", but yes, that was me.
> It's not an overstatement to me, sir.

Thank you.  I'm glad to hear I helped; I've received so very much from
the net - as cynical and bitter as I tend to wax about its current
state in general - that it's nice to know I've given a little back.

> Heh, that reminds me of living in Norway and learning to speak Norsk

Which reminds me of my own time i Norge (Tromsø, to be specific).  I
never did learn to speak any significant amount of Norwegian, neither
bokmål nor nynorsk, but I did manage some minor proficiency in the
written language.  (Unfortunately I haven't kept it up, and it's been
over thirteen years now, so I've probably lost much of it.  I should
get out my copy of Drømmen om Narnia and see if I can still read as
much as I used to be able to.)

To drag my reminiscences at least a little bit back on topic, I also
remember the house netlink I had.  I was working for Universitetet i
Tromsø, and they set me up with a microwave link to the borettslag I
was living in on the mainland...but it was IPv6-only.  'Twas a sharp
lesson in how v6-unready my tools were at the time.  My desktop was a
SPARCstation, and it was the first time I'd really tried to use Seagate
Barracudas anywhere near my desktop; those things were _noisy_!

/~\ 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: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Mouse]

>> But the marketing men got to it and ruined its security and
>> elegance, to produce the lipstick-and-high-heels Windows XP.  That
>> version, insecure and flakey with its terrible bodged-in browser,
>> that, of course, was the one that sold.
>   â??Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much
>   more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how
>   efficient it might be.â??

Indeed.  Ask any junk-food chain.

The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for
decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that
contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in
the computer operating system ecosystem.

>> Linux got nowhere until it copied the XP model.

Only for corporate values of "nowhere".  Considering it to be a failure
because it wasn't grabbing "market" share, or because there weren't
large companies involved, is to buy into the problem, defining success
in monetary (or near-monetary) terms.

I don't know what Linus's original vision for Linux was, so I don't
know when (if ever) it was his idea of a success.  But I would have
called it a success much earlier, and, indeed, I would be tempted to
say it failed _when_ it "copied the XP model" and "got somewhere",
because that's when it lost the benefits early versions brought.

I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source"
but have never once even tried to build anything from source.
Personally, it doesn't run on my machines unless I personally built it
from source; my only use for a binary distribution is the first install
on a new architecture, and even that not always - sometimes I can
cross-build or some such.

Yours in curmudgeonicity,

/~\ 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: Calling all typographers

[schoedel]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:19:43 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote
> But they built it out of circles and straight lines and that's what I do.

That's superficially, but not exactly, true. Even the 'o' is not a perfect 
circle, and you can't get close to replicating the 's' or the digits that way.

I took a stab at replicating the 'classic dec' font about a decade ago, 
following 
scanned DEC manuals wherever possible. I built up most of the basic ASCII set 
in 
the outline form before suspending the project. (I suspect the solid form can 
mostly be derived from paths through the middle of the outline strokes.) It did 
get used a few years ago by our Jason T for some VCF Midwest graphics - 
https://picasaweb.google.com/102190732096693814506/VCFMW50OfficialGraphics#551251
2730455260610

I'm unlikely to continue the project any time soon, since I no longer own any 
DEC 
gear of that era, so I will gather up my work in progress and make it available 
under a suitably liberal license (probably Apache, which is one of the 
'standards' in the font world) for anyone to continue.

-- 
Kevin Schoedel  VA3TCS

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 28 April 2016 at 16:35, Mouse  wrote:
>>> But the marketing men got to it and ruined its security and
>>> elegance, to produce the lipstick-and-high-heels Windows XP.  That
>>> version, insecure and flakey with its terrible bodged-in browser,
>>> that, of course, was the one that sold.
>>   ā??Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much
>>   more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how
>>   efficient it might be.ā??
>
> Indeed.  Ask any junk-food chain.
>
> The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for
> decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that
> contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in
> the computer operating system ecosystem.

Absolutely! This is *the* key question, really.

>>> Linux got nowhere until it copied the XP model.
>
> Only for corporate values of "nowhere".  Considering it to be a failure
> because it wasn't grabbing "market" share, or because there weren't
> large companies involved, is to buy into the problem, defining success
> in monetary (or near-monetary) terms.
>
> I don't know what Linus's original vision for Linux was, so I don't
> know when (if ever) it was his idea of a success.  But I would have
> called it a success much earlier, and, indeed, I would be tempted to
> say it failed _when_ it "copied the XP model" and "got somewhere",
> because that's when it lost the benefits early versions brought.

OK, a very fair point. Linux was indeed popular and widely-used in the
FOSS world, and among Unix types.

But it still took many years for Canonical's Bug #0 to be closed.

I'd argue 2 things helped achieve that.

First, Ubuntu made Debian usable by mortals. I ran SuSE before Warty
Warthog, but I wasn't that happy with it. It was merely the
least-worst option since Caldera self-immolated.

Ubuntu achieved its goal, which, reading between the lines, was
basically "a Linux distro simple enough that the average Windows power
user will be able to install it and get useful work done using it,
without extras or tweaking".

AIUI Ubuntu today is a bit over half of Linux desktop usage, as best
as anyone can estimate this. I suspect that means that actually,
Ubuntu has (probably quite a lot more than) doubled desktop Linux
usage, and it's forced all the other distros to up their game.
(Actually it's forced a lot of them out of the game, which is sad, but
probably inevitable.)

I also gather that it is now strongly dominant in cloud/VM deployments.

Secondly, Android. Android is probably something like 99% of
non-server/embedded Linux usage. In terms of Linuxes that ordinary
people actually directly interact with -- excluding washing machines,
ATMs, whatever -- Android is, I strongly suspect, *it* and everything
else is a rounding error.

> I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source"
> but have never once even tried to build anything from source.

Some, certainly.

> Personally, it doesn't run on my machines unless I personally built it
> from source; my only use for a binary distribution is the first install
> on a new architecture, and even that not always - sometimes I can
> cross-build or some such.
>
> Yours in curmudgeonicity,

I confess that I have never been that hardcore, or determined, or --
probably -- skilled.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 27, 2016, at 11:28 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.  wrote:
> ...
> Objective-C was the only other C derivative to have a significant
> impact. 

Did it really?  It is used in the Mac, much as Bliss was in VMS, but apart from 
that, would anyone use it?

paul

Re: Calling all typographers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 28, 2016, at 10:37 AM, schoe...@kw.igs.net wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:19:43 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote
>> But they built it out of circles and straight lines and that's what I do.
> 
> That's superficially, but not exactly, true. Even the 'o' is not a perfect 
> circle, and you can't get close to replicating the 's' or the digits that way.
> 
> I took a stab at replicating the 'classic dec' font about a decade ago, 
> following 
> scanned DEC manuals wherever possible. I built up most of the basic ASCII set 
> in 
> the outline form before suspending the project. (I suspect the solid form can 
> mostly be derived from paths through the middle of the outline strokes.) It 
> did 
> get used a few years ago by our Jason T for some VCF Midwest graphics - 
> https://picasaweb.google.com/102190732096693814506/VCFMW50OfficialGraphics#551251
> 2730455260610

Neat.  I did the same many years ago, using CorelDraw as a very poor man's font 
maker, but it was just good enough to create the basic outlines.  I call the 
font "Handbook" and I've sent out TTF files of it at times.  I can do so again 
if anyone wants it.  It has no kerning in it (no support for that in 
CorelDraw).  I could probably add those with a better font editor.

The samples you pointed to don't take into account that there are two versions 
of f and t and r -- one for end of word that has the long curl in your design, 
and one for mid-word that has a shorter curl.

paul

Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Norman Jaffe]

It is also the basis for iOS - you know, the system that runs on iPhones. 
I'd say that would be considered a significant impact - over 1.5 million 
applications. 
- Original Message -

From: "Paul Koning"  
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"  
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2016 7:58:43 AM 
Subject: Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from) 


> On Apr 27, 2016, at 11:28 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.  
> wrote: 
> ... 
> Objective-C was the only other C derivative to have a significant 
> impact. 

Did it really? It is used in the Mac, much as Bliss was in VMS, but apart from 
that, would anyone use it? 

paul 

Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Paul Koning wrote:
> Did it really?  It is used in the Mac, much as Bliss was in VMS, but 
> apart from that, would anyone use it?

It's had at least a mediocre run. I mean, they used it for NeXTStep apps 
too. It's been around for quite a while with a pretty solid core of 
adherents. A C++ god that I used to work with called it "C++ without the 
suck". I don't particularly think C++ sucks, though (or I guess I got used 
to it). I never could read Obj-C, due to lack of practice in the lang, and 
too much at-colon-dash-at going on. However, again it was probably just 
lack of familiarity, on paper at least, it has some nice features.

-Swift

PS: If you folks who care about C are interested and haven't done any 
coding a while, check out the features in C11. I'm loving things like 
quick_exit() and the static assertions. I also am hoping for a cogent 
Annex K bound checking interface once it hits gcc, though I have my own 
cheesy cheap-az solutions for that kind of stuff (a little thing I call a 
reflective reference counter).

Re: Calling all typographers

[Jon Elson]

On 04/28/2016 07:19 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote:


I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at 
several font creator/editors.


Frankly they are dung.  Every fancy curve there is but not 
a straight forward line and circle method of  creating 
lower case characters


as DEC did it.  I do need the ability to enter (or 
import)  the lower case characters using just circles and 
lines.



Suggestions please

Have you tried MetaFont?  I've never actually created a font 
with it, just used it automatically within the TeX 
environment.  But, there is a human-readable language that 
defines the characters.


Jon

Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Ben Sinclair]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Swift Griggs 
wrote:

>
> It's had at least a mediocre run. I mean, they used it for NeXTStep apps
> too. It's been around for quite a while with a pretty solid core of
> adherents. A C++ god that I used to work with called it "C++ without the
> suck". I don't particularly think C++ sucks, though (or I guess I got used
> to it). I never could read Obj-C, due to lack of practice in the lang, and
> too much at-colon-dash-at going on. However, again it was probably just
> lack of familiarity, on paper at least, it has some nice features.
>

I do a lot of iOS development and it took me years to get used to, or at
least feel comfortable with, Objective-C. At first I hated how verbose it
and Apple's SDKs felt, but appreciate a lot of that now. I'm doing some
embedded C++ work right now too, and often wish I could use Objective-C
there. I haven't done any C++ in years though, and have found C++11 added
some nice things.

I'll try whatever is new and fun though, and I've been enjoying Swift (the
language!) quite a bit. Apple is pushing it pretty hard, so I'll probably
use it for my next big iOS project.

--
Ben Sinclair
b...@bensinclair.com

Re: Calling all typographers

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 16:07, Paul Koning wrote:

On Apr 28, 2016, at 10:37 AM, schoe...@kw.igs.net wrote:

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:19:43 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote

But they built it out of circles and straight lines and that's what I do.

That's superficially, but not exactly, true. Even the 'o' is not a perfect
circle, and you can't get close to replicating the 's' or the digits that way.

I took a stab at replicating the 'classic dec' font about a decade ago, 
following
scanned DEC manuals wherever possible. I built up most of the basic ASCII set in
the outline form before suspending the project. (I suspect the solid form can
mostly be derived from paths through the middle of the outline strokes.) It did
get used a few years ago by our Jason T for some VCF Midwest graphics -
https://picasaweb.google.com/102190732096693814506/VCFMW50OfficialGraphics#551251
2730455260610

Neat.  I did the same many years ago, using CorelDraw as a very poor man's font maker, 
but it was just good enough to create the basic outlines.  I call the font 
"Handbook" and I've sent out TTF files of it at times.  I can do so again if 
anyone wants it.  It has no kerning in it (no support for that in CorelDraw).  I could 
probably add those with a better font editor.

The samples you pointed to don't take into account that there are two versions 
of f and t and r -- one for end of word that has the long curl in your design, 
and one for mid-word that has a shorter curl.

paul

OK I have grabbed the VCF stuff.  Anything that takes the  Panel 
Project  forward  really helps.
I have shipped a number of panels already and now I'm on version 3 of 
the PDP-8 panels.


Rod (Panelman) Smallwood

Re: Calling all typographers

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 16:32, Jon Elson wrote:

On 04/28/2016 07:19 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote:


I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at several font 
creator/editors.


Frankly they are dung.  Every fancy curve there is but not a straight 
forward line and circle method of  creating lower case characters


as DEC did it.  I do need the ability to enter (or import)  the lower 
case characters using just circles and lines.



Suggestions please

Have you tried MetaFont?  I've never actually created a font with it, 
just used it automatically within the TeX environment.  But, there is 
a human-readable language that defines the characters.


Jon

I haven't where would I find it?

Rod

Re: Calling all typographers

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:

> Every fancy curve there is but not a straight 
> forward line and circle method of  creating lower case
> characters

I'm not sure if you count it as straightforward, but I'd
suggest METAFONT.  Straight lines are certainly straightforward.
Circles are a little more fun, but once you get the hang
of the math, most any curve is pretty easy to create.

BLS

Re: Calling all typographers

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 16:42, Brian L. Stuart wrote:

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:


Every fancy curve there is but not a straight
forward line and circle method of  creating lower case
characters

I'm not sure if you count it as straightforward, but I'd
suggest METAFONT.  Straight lines are certainly straightforward.
Circles are a little more fun, but once you get the hang
of the math, most any curve is pretty easy to create.

BLS

Well that's  two votes for metafont so far.

Rod

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Thu, 4/28/16, Liam Proven  wrote:
> Oh, yes, indeed! I have a Plan 9 VM, and I intend to try it on my Pi.
> But it's had relatively little impact on mainstream Unix.

I would agree, given the qualification "relatively."  There are several
things that have made their way from the late research UNIX editions
and Plan 9 to the mainstream UNIX world.  The unfortunate part is that
they're little bits and pieces and as a result miss the major advantages
by not bringing in the big picture.  For example, the proc file system
that most UNIXs have today was originally in either 9th or 10th edition
and is a central part of the design of Plan 9.  The _clone() system call
that now underlies good old fork() in Linux is basically the Plan 9
rfork() call.  Several UNIXs are starting to graft in per-process name
spaces.  There are also a number of research systems that are bringing
in a lot of Plan 9 influence.  The only one whose name comes to
mind at the moment, though, is Akaros.

BLS

Re: Calling all typographers

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:
> On 28/04/2016 16:32, Jon Elson wrote:
>> Have you tried MetaFont?  I've never actually created a font with it, 
>> just used it automatically within the TeX environment.  But, there is 
>> a human-readable language that defines the characters.
>
> I haven't where would I find it?

It should be part of pretty much any TeX installation.  I don't know if anyone
has packaged it up independently of TeX though.  If you don't already
have TeX installed, I'll warn you that the mainstream TeX distributions
are pretty huge.  There's a build-from-source distribution called kerTeX
that I use.  It's much closer to Knuth's original packaging and I find to be
quite a bit more managable.  If all you need is METAFONT, then that
might be a nice way to go.

BLS

Re: Calling all typographers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 28, 2016, at 11:42 AM, Brian L. Stuart  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:
> 
>> Every fancy curve there is but not a straight 
>> forward line and circle method of  creating lower case
>> characters
> 
> I'm not sure if you count it as straightforward, but I'd
> suggest METAFONT.  Straight lines are certainly straightforward.
> Circles are a little more fun, but once you get the hang
> of the math, most any curve is pretty easy to create.

Metafont has a fatal defect: it only generates bitmap fonts.  Those have been 
obsolete for decades (except, occasionally, on display devices).

paul

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 16:54, Brian L. Stuart wrote:

On Thu, 4/28/16, Liam Proven  wrote:

Oh, yes, indeed! I have a Plan 9 VM, and I intend to try it on my Pi.
But it's had relatively little impact on mainstream Unix.

I would agree, given the qualification "relatively."  There are several
things that have made their way from the late research UNIX editions
and Plan 9 to the mainstream UNIX world.  The unfortunate part is that
they're little bits and pieces and as a result miss the major advantages
by not bringing in the big picture.  For example, the proc file system
that most UNIXs have today was originally in either 9th or 10th edition
and is a central part of the design of Plan 9.  The _clone() system call
that now underlies good old fork() in Linux is basically the Plan 9
rfork() call.  Several UNIXs are starting to graft in per-process name
spaces.  There are also a number of research systems that are bringing
in a lot of Plan 9 influence.  The only one whose name comes to
mind at the moment, though, is Akaros.

BLS
How about morse by a key made in 1898 . Then cw to ascii serial 
converter and  normal program input after that.

Rod

Re: Calling all typographers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 28, 2016, at 8:19 AM, Rod Smallwood  
> wrote:
> 
> ...
> I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at several font 
> creator/editors.
> 
> Frankly they are dung.  Every fancy curve there is but not a straight forward 
> line and circle method of  creating lower case characters
> as DEC did it.  I do need the ability to enter (or import)  the lower case 
> characters using just circles and lines.

I just found FontForge, which is open source.  A few minutes experimentation 
shows that it is quite happy to draw straight lines, including doing obvious 
stuff like line segments forced to be horizontal or vertical, or circles or 
ellipses.  Bezier curves too, of course.

paul

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:
> How about morse by a key made in 1898 . Then cw to ascii serial 
> converter and  normal program input after that.

I've often thought of doing that!  Though my key dates from more like
the '40s or '50s.  I see a weekend Raspberry Pi hack in my future...

BLS

Re: Calling all typographers

[Jon Elson]

On 04/28/2016 10:46 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote:



On 28/04/2016 16:32, Jon Elson wrote:
Have you tried MetaFont?  I've never actually created a 
font with it, just used it automatically within the TeX 
environment.  But, there is a human-readable language 
that defines the characters.


Jon

I haven't where would I find it?

It is a part of the TeX package, although only the font 
creator is there, as "mf".  The TeX-Live package seems to 
include a bunch of font creation tools.  That should be 
available for most Linux distros.  You should also be able 
to get it on Windows, but might be a bit harder to find.


Jon

Re: Calling all typographers

[Jon Elson]

On 04/28/2016 11:05 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

On Apr 28, 2016, at 11:42 AM, Brian L. Stuart  wrote:

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood  wrote:


Every fancy curve there is but not a straight
forward line and circle method of  creating lower case
characters

I'm not sure if you count it as straightforward, but I'd
suggest METAFONT.  Straight lines are certainly straightforward.
Circles are a little more fun, but once you get the hang
of the math, most any curve is pretty easy to create.

Metafont has a fatal defect: it only generates bitmap fonts.  Those have been 
obsolete for decades (except, occasionally, on display devices).



Well, Metafont itself, is designed for this purpose.  But, there are some other 
programs that can convert the font definition to vector form, for use with 
scalable PostScript and PDF formats, for example.  One of them is Metapost, 
which is a derivative of Metafont.


Google pulls up a vast number of articles on metafont to 
vector, for instance.


Jon

Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jay West]

Several years ago, Lyle Bickley began negotiations with S&H Computer Systems
to release TSX-Plus (a 3rd party Multiuser Operating System for PDP-11's) as
free software for personal use. As is often the case, this process can take
a lot longer than one would expect.

Once Lyle obtained an initial agreement from the owner of TSX-Plus, he then
had to await the approval from S&H's Board of Directors. Initially, S&H
chose to only release the source code listings for TSX-Plus (which are now
on Bitsavers.org). Unfortunately, the machine readable source code itself
had been accidentally lost when S&H changed PDP-11 computer systems
in-house.

Eventually, Lyle was able to obtain the original SMD hard drive from S&H
containing the latest versions of TSX-Plus, and the layered products
COBOL-Plus and RTSORT (and other software that remains private to S&H
Computer Systems). He transferred the TSX-Plus, COBOL-Plus, and RTSORT files
to an RL02 disk - and using S&H's proprietary licensing software created a
"personal use, serialized version" of TSX-Plus. This version has ALL the
capabilities and features of the commercially licensed version of TSX-Plus.

Subsequently, Lyle was authorized to release this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus
distribution only to individuals that he could vouch for as being
non-commercial users.

After another year or so, he was able to obtain the current agreement and
license to make this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus distribution generally
available for non-commercial use.

Please note that TSX-Plus is NOT public domain software; S&H retains all
rights including ownership. They have provided a free personal use license
available through Bickley Consulting West. There is still a paid commercial
use license available directly from S&H.

We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems and his
Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of TSX-Plus
and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.

The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org

Best,

J

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Evan Koblentz]

We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems and his
Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of TSX-Plus
and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.


Great work Lyle!!

Re: Unknown transistor repairing a TI990/5 power supply

[Chuck Guzis]

On 04/28/2016 02:45 AM, Alberto Rubinelli - Fondazione Museo del
Computer wrote:
> I'm working at the power supply of a 990/5 minicomputer. The chassis
> is a 6 slot version, with 20A power supply. After a few minutes of
> working, the fuse blow and I found a transistor on the main power
> supply board with collector in short circuit with emitter. The
> transistor has TRW logo and is market with Texas part number
> 996070-003, in addiction with the date code.

I don't have a magic key to translate the house part number to something
real, but if I were to guess, based on the location of the transistor, I
suspect it's an NPN high frequency device.  A good guess would be that a
"universal" TV horizontal output transistor might be a good candidate.
I've done that myself to old PSUs and it's worked well.

Try, say, an NTE238 or 2SC1308K or similar.

--Chuck

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Lyle Bickley]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:22:11 -0500
"Jay West"  wrote:

--snip--

> We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems
> and his Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all
> vintage computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle
> Bickley for tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a
> huge fan of TSX-Plus and I'm thrilled there's now a personal
> (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.
> 
> The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org

And a big "THANKS!" to Jay for creating the website and hosting the
TSX-Plus distribution on classiccmp.org!!!

Cheers,
Lyle

-- 
73  AF6WS
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

Re: Calling all typographers

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 17:18, Paul Koning wrote:

On Apr 28, 2016, at 8:19 AM, Rod Smallwood  
wrote:

...
I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at several font 
creator/editors.

Frankly they are dung.  Every fancy curve there is but not a straight forward 
line and circle method of  creating lower case characters
as DEC did it.  I do need the ability to enter (or import)  the lower case 
characters using just circles and lines.

I just found FontForge, which is open source.  A few minutes experimentation 
shows that it is quite happy to draw straight lines, including doing obvious 
stuff like line segments forced to be horizontal or vertical, or circles or 
ellipses.  Bezier curves too, of course.

paul

Oh I tried that one. Very powerful  I'm sure but I could not get it to 
do anything.

Got as far as loading an empty font and picked a letter o
goes to some kind of blank edit screen,
click along top menu nothing about lines or circles get to help and drop 
down menu.

Click on help and it comes up with something about glyphs
I don't want Egyptian writing so I give up

R

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 18:25, Evan Koblentz wrote:
We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems 
and his

Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of 
TSX-Plus
and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to 
Lyle.


Great work Lyle!!

Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.
Rod

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Lyle Bickley]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:51:03 +0100
Rod Smallwood  wrote:

> On 28/04/2016 18:25, Evan Koblentz wrote:
> >> We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer
> >> Systems and his
> >> Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all
> >> vintage computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle
> >> Bickley for tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been
> >> a huge fan of TSX-Plus
> >> and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks
> >> to Lyle.  
> >
> > Great work Lyle!!  
> Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.

See note #2 in the download page...

Lyle

-- 
73  AF6WS
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

Re: Calling all typographers

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-04-28 1:43 PM, Rod Smallwood wrote:



On 28/04/2016 17:18, Paul Koning wrote:

On Apr 28, 2016, at 8:19 AM, Rod
Smallwood  wrote:

...
I'd like to recover the DEC fonts and have looked at several font
creator/editors. ...


paul


Oh I tried that one. Very powerful  I'm sure but I could not get it to
do anything.
Got as far as loading an empty font and picked a letter o
goes to some kind of blank edit screen,
click along top menu nothing about lines or circles get to help and drop
down menu.
Click on help and it comes up with something about glyphs
I don't want Egyptian writing so I give up


A glyph is just a drawing of a specific character - applies to members 
of any font.


Font editors do tend to have a learning curve.

Here's another option found by googling: https://birdfont.org/
or https://glyphsapp.com/ which is commercial but has a 30 day trial...

--Toby




R

RE: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jay West]

Rod wrote...
-
Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.
-

That is correct, and that is stated in the "Notes" on the distribution web
page before you download it.

For those not familiar with TSX-Plus, from a user standpoint - it's a
multi-user version of RT-11. You start TSX+ running after RT11SJ boots, and
then it basically replaces RT11 in memory but still uses a lot of the RT11
userland binaries for commands and such.

J

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[alexmcwhirter]

On 2016-04-28 10:44, Liam Proven wrote:

On 28 April 2016 at 16:35, Mouse  wrote:

But the marketing men got to it and ruined its security and
elegance, to produce the lipstick-and-high-heels Windows XP.  That
version, insecure and flakey with its terrible bodged-in browser,
that, of course, was the one that sold.

  ā??Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much
  more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how
  efficient it might be.ā??


Indeed.  Ask any junk-food chain.

The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for
decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that
contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in
the computer operating system ecosystem.


Absolutely! This is *the* key question, really.



We get closer to that analog as time passes. The more Linux becomes the 
next Windows, the more people jump ship (mostly to FreeBSD). Gentoo 
Linux is my distro of choice simply because i can pick, choose, and 
compile everything i want for just about any arch. However, if i could 
choose any OS i would probably go with illumos. Unfortunately The man 
power needed to maintain the software repo is the biggest challenge when 
wanting to go you're own direction. I would say that it's the primary 
reason it seems like we're dining in a world of McDonald's and Steak 
Houses, but nothing in-between.



Linux got nowhere until it copied the XP model.


Only for corporate values of "nowhere".  Considering it to be a 
failure

because it wasn't grabbing "market" share, or because there weren't
large companies involved, is to buy into the problem, defining success
in monetary (or near-monetary) terms.

I don't know what Linus's original vision for Linux was, so I don't
know when (if ever) it was his idea of a success.  But I would have
called it a success much earlier, and, indeed, I would be tempted to
say it failed _when_ it "copied the XP model" and "got somewhere",
because that's when it lost the benefits early versions brought.


OK, a very fair point. Linux was indeed popular and widely-used in the
FOSS world, and among Unix types.

But it still took many years for Canonical's Bug #0 to be closed.

I'd argue 2 things helped achieve that.

First, Ubuntu made Debian usable by mortals. I ran SuSE before Warty
Warthog, but I wasn't that happy with it. It was merely the
least-worst option since Caldera self-immolated.

Ubuntu achieved its goal, which, reading between the lines, was
basically "a Linux distro simple enough that the average Windows power
user will be able to install it and get useful work done using it,
without extras or tweaking".

AIUI Ubuntu today is a bit over half of Linux desktop usage, as best
as anyone can estimate this. I suspect that means that actually,
Ubuntu has (probably quite a lot more than) doubled desktop Linux
usage, and it's forced all the other distros to up their game.
(Actually it's forced a lot of them out of the game, which is sad, but
probably inevitable.)

I also gather that it is now strongly dominant in cloud/VM deployments.

Secondly, Android. Android is probably something like 99% of
non-server/embedded Linux usage. In terms of Linuxes that ordinary
people actually directly interact with -- excluding washing machines,
ATMs, whatever -- Android is, I strongly suspect, *it* and everything
else is a rounding error.


I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source"
but have never once even tried to build anything from source.


Some, certainly.



Indeed, but more end users help drive demand for better software. 
Eventually someone will get frustrated a build a better tool or improve 
and existing one.

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Rod Smallwood]

On 28/04/2016 18:57, Jay West wrote:

Rod wrote...
-
Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.
-

That is correct, and that is stated in the "Notes" on the distribution web
page before you download it.

For those not familiar with TSX-Plus, from a user standpoint - it's a
multi-user version of RT-11. You start TSX+ running after RT11SJ boots, and
then it basically replaces RT11 in memory but still uses a lot of the RT11
userland binaries for commands and such.

J



So we need a license and distribution of RT11 is that right?
R

Re: Calling all typographers

[schoedel]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:43:30 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote
> On 28/04/2016 17:18, Paul Koning wrote:
> > I just found FontForge, which is open source.  A few minutes 
> > experimentation 
shows that it is quite happy to draw straight lines, including doing obvious 
stuff like line segments forced to be horizontal or vertical, or circles or 
ellipses.  Bezier curves too, of course.
>   
> Oh I tried that one. Very powerful  I'm sure but I could not get it to
> do anything.

Fontforge went through a period after the original author retired when it was 
constantly broken. The version obtainable via http://fontforge.github.io/ 
should 
be better now (but I haven't used it lately).

-- 
Kevin Schoedel  VA3TCS

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Liam Proven  writes:
> the last iterations of Genera ran on Tru64 on Alphas, but under an
> emulator.

The emulator has been ported to Linux and x86-64.

http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux

RE: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Rich Alderson]

From: Liam Proven
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2016 6:39 AM

BTW, an expansion for someone who missed a humorous point very early on:

"FTHI" means "For the humour-impaired", and was followed by numerous
smilicons.

> On 27 April 2016 at 20:15, Swift Griggs > wrote:

>> All "you guys" seemed to start out with math or EE background and filling
>> in the CS parts seems to be trivial for you. I look up to your generation,
>> believe it or not.

> I was an undergrad biologist. :-) I've never studied CS.
> But I think you have a point.

I received undergraduate and graduate degrees in historical linguistics; all
my computer science background is due to my own self-directed study--and I do
mean study.  I've read any number of primary papers and books in the field,
since that study made me better at using computers for what I really wanted to
do.  I've implemented compilers, and even my own Lisp interpreter, just for
the fun of it.

I am not one of the Lisp gods.  The closest I came was interviewing for a
systems programming job at the MIT AI Lab (dinner with Pat Winston at O'Hare
one late fall evening when he had a layover).  I went to work at Stanford the
next year.

I studied Lisp from the ground up:  Read the Weisman LISP 1.5 book, read the
LISP 1.5 Primer by McCarthy et al., read the sources to Portable Standard Lisp
and MDL (and the MDL books from MIT), read Abelson&Sussman and the Common Lisp
book (1st ed.).

At the same time, I read many papers in artificial intelligence of the 1970s
and early 1980s, most interested in natural language processing and knowledge
representation.

I've never done anything for money with either my degrees or my AI studies.
I've supported myself and my wife as a systems programmer on IBM and DEC big
iron, the latter eventually leading directly to working at the museum.

As you might imagine, I'm a good bit older than either of you; I started at
university (since you both want to equate "college" with "trade school"; in
the US, we usually say "go to college" even if the institution grants higher
degrees as well) before Liam was born.  I was married and in grad school by
the time Swift came along.

I'm sorry that Swift took amiss my intended humor, but it's sparked an
interesting long thread.

Rich



Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Paul Anderson]

Fantastic!!

Many thanks to Lyle, Jay, and S H!!!

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 12:22 PM, Jay West  wrote:

> Several years ago, Lyle Bickley began negotiations with S&H Computer
> Systems
> to release TSX-Plus (a 3rd party Multiuser Operating System for PDP-11's)
> as
> free software for personal use. As is often the case, this process can take
> a lot longer than one would expect.
>
> Once Lyle obtained an initial agreement from the owner of TSX-Plus, he then
> had to await the approval from S&H's Board of Directors. Initially, S&H
> chose to only release the source code listings for TSX-Plus (which are now
> on Bitsavers.org). Unfortunately, the machine readable source code itself
> had been accidentally lost when S&H changed PDP-11 computer systems
> in-house.
>
> Eventually, Lyle was able to obtain the original SMD hard drive from S&H
> containing the latest versions of TSX-Plus, and the layered products
> COBOL-Plus and RTSORT (and other software that remains private to S&H
> Computer Systems). He transferred the TSX-Plus, COBOL-Plus, and RTSORT
> files
> to an RL02 disk - and using S&H's proprietary licensing software created a
> "personal use, serialized version" of TSX-Plus. This version has ALL the
> capabilities and features of the commercially licensed version of TSX-Plus.
>
> Subsequently, Lyle was authorized to release this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus
> distribution only to individuals that he could vouch for as being
> non-commercial users.
>
> After another year or so, he was able to obtain the current agreement and
> license to make this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus distribution generally
> available for non-commercial use.
>
> Please note that TSX-Plus is NOT public domain software; S&H retains all
> rights including ownership. They have provided a free personal use license
> available through Bickley Consulting West. There is still a paid commercial
> use license available directly from S&H.
>
> We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems and his
> Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
> computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
> tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of
> TSX-Plus
> and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.
>
> The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org
>
> Best,
>
> J
>
>
>

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Zane Healy]

This is officially the best news I’ve had this week.  Thanks Lyle and Jay both!

Yay!  Software and documentation upgrade for my PDP-11/73!  :-)  When I have 
time. :-(

Zane

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Seth Morabito]

* On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 06:48:21PM +, Rich Alderson 
 wrote:
> I received undergraduate and graduate degrees in historical linguistics;

(!!!)

It's good to see Linguist here. While I never did receive my degree,
linguistics was my major, and historical linguistics was my focus of
study.

All of my understanding of computers was, likewise, self-study. I took
precisely two CS courses in college, and flunked out of one of them.

I got better.

-Seth
-- 
Seth Morabito
s...@loomcom.com

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[william degnan]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 3:11 PM, Zane Healy  wrote:

> This is officially the best news I’ve had this week.  Thanks Lyle and Jay
> both!
>
> Yay!  Software and documentation upgrade for my PDP-11/73!  :-)  When I
> have time. :-(
>
> Zane
>
>
>
>
Wonder if this will work on 11/40 with 96K


-- 
@ BillDeg:
Web: vintagecomputer.net
Twitter: @billdeg 
Youtube: @billdeg 
Unauthorized Bio 

Re: High performance coprocessor boards of the 80s and 90s - was Re: SGI ONYX

[Guy Dawson]

It was many many hundreds of pounds. £499 comes to mind but that might be
wishful thinking!

There was various bits of publicity on the thing and Acorn had a shop in
Covent Garden and about once a month I'd go down and ask them. I think they
must have said yes one day!


On 27 April 2016 at 23:18, Jules Richardson 
wrote:

> On 04/26/2016 01:33 PM, Guy Dawson wrote:
>
>> I bought a 32016 Cambridge Coprocessor back in the day. It's in my loft.
>>
>
> Oh, so it was you! ;-)   I'll try and file that away in my brain so I
> remember it in future... do you happen to remember how much it cost? (And
> were they advertized for sale somewhere, or did you have to call up Acorn
> and ask?)
>
> cheers
>
> Jules
>
>


-- 
4.4 > 5.4

RE: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jay West]

Bill wrote...

Wonder if this will work on 11/40 with 96K

ISTR it requires 96kW minimum and 128kW recommended.

Installation guide, section 2.3, page 5&6 (pdf file pages 9-10) will tell...

J

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Pete Turnbull]

On 28/04/2016 18:22, Jay West wrote:

Several years ago, Lyle Bickley began negotiations with S&H Computer Systems
to release TSX-Plus



The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org


Well done, Lyle.  Thank you for your effort, and thanks too to the 
people at S&H.  This is great news.  And thank you, Jay, for hosting it.


--
Pete

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jerry Weiss]

> On Apr 28, 2016, at 12:25 PM, Evan Koblentz  wrote:
> 
>> We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems and his
>> Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
>> computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
>> tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of TSX-Plus
>> and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.


Thank you Lyle and S&H for making this possible.  Terrific news!

Re: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[Glen Slick]

It addition to all of the resources that were directly available
through http://www.hpmuseum.net/ there were also resources available
if you asked.

I wanted a copy of some HP-UX installation CD images for my 9000/382
and Jon was happy to provide those to me after sending him an email.

His loss is a significant blow to the community. I hope all of the
dedicated effort he put into this is maintained somehow and isn't also
lost.

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[William Donzelli]

Excellent news. Thank you for making this happen.

--
Will

On Apr 28, 2016 1:22 PM, "Jay West"  wrote:
>
> Several years ago, Lyle Bickley began negotiations with S&H Computer
Systems
> to release TSX-Plus (a 3rd party Multiuser Operating System for PDP-11's)
as
> free software for personal use. As is often the case, this process can
take
> a lot longer than one would expect.
>
> Once Lyle obtained an initial agreement from the owner of TSX-Plus, he
then
> had to await the approval from S&H's Board of Directors. Initially, S&H
> chose to only release the source code listings for TSX-Plus (which are now
> on Bitsavers.org). Unfortunately, the machine readable source code itself
> had been accidentally lost when S&H changed PDP-11 computer systems
> in-house.
>
> Eventually, Lyle was able to obtain the original SMD hard drive from S&H
> containing the latest versions of TSX-Plus, and the layered products
> COBOL-Plus and RTSORT (and other software that remains private to S&H
> Computer Systems). He transferred the TSX-Plus, COBOL-Plus, and RTSORT
files
> to an RL02 disk - and using S&H's proprietary licensing software created a
> "personal use, serialized version" of TSX-Plus. This version has ALL the
> capabilities and features of the commercially licensed version of
TSX-Plus.
>
> Subsequently, Lyle was authorized to release this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus
> distribution only to individuals that he could vouch for as being
> non-commercial users.
>
> After another year or so, he was able to obtain the current agreement and
> license to make this "Personal Use" TSX-Plus distribution generally
> available for non-commercial use.
>
> Please note that TSX-Plus is NOT public domain software; S&H retains all
> rights including ownership. They have provided a free personal use license
> available through Bickley Consulting West. There is still a paid
commercial
> use license available directly from S&H.
>
> We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems and
his
> Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
> computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
> tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of
TSX-Plus
> and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.
>
> The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org
>
> Best,
>
> J
>
>

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Liam Proven]

On 28 April 2016 at 16:52,   wrote:
> On 2016-04-28 10:44, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 28 April 2016 at 16:35, Mouse  wrote:

>>> The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for
>>> decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that
>>> contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in
>>> the computer operating system ecosystem.
>>
>> Absolutely! This is *the* key question, really.
>
> We get closer to that analog as time passes. The more Linux becomes the next
> Windows, the more people jump ship (mostly to FreeBSD).

That's true, and I am choosing to interpret it as an encouraging sign.
I have nothing against systemd -- I have looked into it and I think I
more or less grasp both the pros and the antis. I have no horse in the
race; whereas I used to play around with init scripts and whatnot,
mostly, that was decades ago now and these days, for my own use, I
favour anything which "just works".

Which is why I'm tying on a (cheap, used) Mac, on which I mostly run
FOSS and freeware.

> Gentoo Linux is my
> distro of choice simply because i can pick, choose, and compile everything i
> want for just about any arch.

I tried it years ago. I found it a very unpleasant experience, and
went to some communities, both online and real-world, to ask for
guidance. One of my questions was "how can I choose a simpler init? I
don't like SysV init, I prefer the BSD one. How do I switch?"

At first they didn't understand the question at all. When I got it
across, the reaction was incredulity: "why on Earth would you want to
do that?!"

I could tweak the compile flags and optimisation of KDE, but not
change the init. That's not customisation in my book: that's
yak-shaving, painting the bike shed a new colour. Basically pointless;
I wanted more profound change, and Gentoo didn't offer it and the
Gentoo community couldn't grasp /why/ I'd want to change something so
profound that it was a given, an axiom, a fundamental.

So I gave up on it before I even had a fully-working system.

> However, if i could choose any OS i would
> probably go with illumos.

Last time I tried, probably one of the last versions of OpenSolaris,
it couldn't understand either my chipset-integrated Ethernet port /or/
the on-motherboard 3rd party Ethernet. So I didn't get very far; it
worked, but I couldn't get online.

>  Unfortunately The man power needed to maintain the
> software repo is the biggest challenge when wanting to go you're own
> direction. I would say that it's the primary reason it seems like we're
> dining in a world of McDonald's and Steak Houses, but nothing in-between.

Well, perhaps. But I'm interested in something *way* more different
than just a different Unix. I like to play with things like Haiku,
AROS, Syllable, Morphos. Interesting, but none are complete enough for
me to work in them, sadly.

I'm intrigued by projects like Movitz, Interim, TempleOS -- the
/really/ different stuff. But all are prototypes, demos, so
dramatically limited they can't be /used/ yet.

I lack the skills to make Plan 9 or Minix 3 do anything useful.

And I read about now-dead historical OSes such as Taos (later Intent),
which I played with all-too-briefly at an Acorn World show about 20y
ago, or Parhelion's HeliOS for Transputer machines. Nothing even
_remotely_ like them exists any more.

>>> I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source"
>>> but have never once even tried to build anything from source.
>>
>> Some, certainly.
>
> Indeed, but more end users help drive demand for better software. Eventually
> someone will get frustrated a build a better tool or improve and existing
> one.

Here's hoping. ISTM that what it's actually leading to is polishing
the same turds. (OK, "turd" is grossly unfair, I actually hugely
admire Linux, but I hope my general meaning is clear.)

We are continuing to refine and tweak a 1970s-style OS -- a
technologically conservative monolithic Unix. FOSS Unix hasn't even
caught up with 1990s style Unix design yet, the early microkernel ones
like NeXTstep or OSF/1, AKA Digital UNIX. It's roughly 2 decades
behind the times.

That's what Minix 3 is trying to fix, of course.

And commercial Unix in general has totally failed to pick up the ideas
of even Plan 9 -- which I think of as Unix Version 2.0: "even more
things are files now, and the kernel is networking aware".

Inferno -- Plan 9 Version 2.0, or perhaps Unix Version 3.0: "Like Plan
9, But Now We Have A Friendlier GUI And Everything's
Processor-Independent", AKA "it's time, let's move on from C" -- is
languishing, AFAICS.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: Abstraction levels and tool evolution, versus bugs - Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[ben]

On 4/27/2016 4:50 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:

On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Toby Thain wrote:



I stick with C because I don't want (much) more abstraction than it offers
for the applications I write or maintain.

How ever hardware design is still knowledge needed, with all the strange 
Caches and logic flow in the new cpu's to have decent optimization in 
the source language.

Ben.

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[ben]

On 4/28/2016 7:59 AM, Liam Proven wrote:

On 27 April 2016 at 22:13, Sean Conner  wrote:

It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:

On 26 April 2016 at 16:41, Liam Proven  wrote:

When I was playing with home micros (mainly Sinclair and Amstrad; the
American stuff was just too expensive for Brits in the early-to-mid
1980s), the culture was that Real Men programmed in assembler and the
main battle was Z80 versus 6502, with a few weirdos saying that 6809
was better than either. BASIC was the language for beginners, and a
few weirdos maintained that Forth was better.


  The 6908 *is* better than either the Z80 or the 6502 (yes, I'm one of
*those* 8-)


Hurrah! :-D



But alas still only 16 bit addressing. OS/9 was nice once you got to 
level 2 and a nice Hard-drive. Most of use minons never even heard about 
the 68000 versions sadly.

Ben.

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Lyle Bickley]

Hi All,

Hopefully you all read in the "Notes" (and Jay's and my comments) that
TSX-Plus requires RT-11 as a prerequisite.

RT-11 is readily available all over the Internet.

It is also available at on the classiccmp server at
http://www.classiccmp.org/PDP-11/

Cheers,
Lyle
-- 
73  AF6WS
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

Re: Rolm Computers: 1602, 1602A, 1602B, 1666, MSExx (was Data General Nova Star Trek)

[Sean Caron]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Erik Baigar wrote:



On Wed, 27 Apr 2016, Sean Caron wrote:

I don't have any ROLM computers (not that I wouldn't love one) but I am 
proud to say that I have a complete ROLM SCBX 8000. I've tried to take some 
pictures and compile some information on my personal site:


http://wildflower.diablonet.net/~scaron/rolmfieldguide/index.html


Wow, that is a lot of PCBs to handle the telephone stuff!
Thanks for sharing the pictures - also interesting to see,
that they used a Z80 in there but never used microprocessors
in their MIL computers (even the later ones!)...

As a project you could design a VoIP PCB for the SCBX  ;-)

  Erik.



You're welcome! Mine is actually a relatively small example. It has 84 
PCBs in total across six shelves and two conjoined racks with a little 
disk and control panel between them.


If you've seen a picture of a lowboy PDP 11/60 ... I always use that as 
something to relate the general dimensions. The ROLM is maybe a little 
taller. I need to post some pictures of the complete system and rack.


I would love to get the ROLM running someday and get it hooked up to a 
VoIP network... Another hobby of mine is collecting PBX systems and 
telephones and I've already done this for a Definity as well as a Nortel 
M1 and I have no doubt that the same could be done for the CBX [1].


The CBX (eventually) supported DS1 interfaces ... which would IMO be the 
coolest way to connect the CBX to a media gateway ... but one day once I 
get the PBX running, I should be able to get it routing calls again with 
something like a Cisco box acting as an external media gateway ... while 
designing a media gateway to sit on the ROLMbus would be a heck of a 
project ;)


I find the design of the CBX really interesting. IMO, their appearance 
belies that ROLM was a computer vendor first a a phone equipment maker 
second. Not in a perjorative sense, just stylistically. Comparing them 
against boards from WECo/ATT/Lucent/Avaya, Nortel and Harris.


Best,

Sean

[1] http://www.ckts.info

RE: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jay West]

Thanks are also due to Dennis Boone, who wrote the CGI code for the tsxplus 
download site.

THANKS DENNIS!

J

RE: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Rich Alderson wrote:
> I received undergraduate and graduate degrees in historical linguistics; 

That is an interesting field of study. I don't really understand a lick of 
it (talk about jargon! nobody beats linguists) but it's neat. As academic 
fields go, I'd do operations research if I ever went back. Those guys seem 
to be the brusin' bad dudes of math when it comes to getting things done.

> all my computer science background is due to my own self-directed 
> study--and I do mean study.  I've read any number of primary papers and 
> books in the field, since that study made me better at using computers 
> for what I really wanted to do.

I've read some Dijkstra, Knuth, Jacob Ziv, and some stuff by David 
Wheeler, Martin Hellman, and a few others. The math for the last three is 
pretty well over my head but I got about 80%. What I read is mostly for 
implementation and "applied" reasons, but it's still interesting.

> I've implemented compilers, and even my own Lisp interpreter, just for 
> the fun of it.

Making compilers is fun. I've done it a couple of times using Jack 
Crenshaw's old papers (and he quotes Chomsky!). The lexical scanning tools 
are a lot better, now though. It's actually not too bad of an exercise if 
you don't have to extend or maintain the language afterwards. :-)

> As you might imagine, I'm a good bit older than either of you; I started 
> at university (since you both want to equate "college" with "trade 
> school"; in the US, we usually say "go to college" even if the 
> institution grants higher degrees as well)

It just seems like using the world "college" irritated fewer people when I 
implied that training & education were not mutually exclusive. It feels 
like some folks really recoil at that idea for universities. I just wonder 
how they apply that same principle to law school, nursing, metallurgy, 
etc... All (at least) 4 year degrees from universities where you'd darn 
well better come out with some training, or you are going to be in 
something of a pickle (failing the bar, losing your license, burning your 
face off, etc..).  Maybe it's only for CS, since that's all we've mostly 
been talking about, and that's fair.

> before Liam was born.  I was married and in grad school by the time 
> Swift came along.

I was born in 75, graduated (high school) in 1993, and dropped out of 
college in 1998.

> I'm sorry that Swift took amiss my intended humor, but it's sparked an 
> interesting long thread.

Ah, did I? Sorry about that. I'm always game for a good joke. 

-Swift

basic switch lubricant

[Charles Dickman]

I have been cleaning a PDP-8/e front panel and some of the switches
are not as free as others. The switches are simple slider basic
switches. I have taken similar switches apart and noticed that there
is a brown/red grease on the contacts.

Any suggestions on the proper grease for a low voltage contact.

Chuck

Re: smalltalk and lisp (was: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Ben Sinclair wrote:
> it and Apple's SDKs felt, but appreciate a lot of that now.

I've heard they have a lot of boilerplate code, but it sounds like there 
is some reason to it, if you got cozy with it.

> I'm doing some embedded C++ work right now too, and often wish I could 
> use Objective-C there. I haven't done any C++ in years though, and have 
> found C++11 added some nice things.

Both C++11 and C11 really have me excited. It's a kick in the butt to the 
compiler makers. Gimme that sugar! I'm bucking for some polymorphism for 
C, next. IMHO, that'd be the icing on the cake for C. I don't want to bolt 
on anything else, just let me define the same function twice with two 
different parameter lists and I'll be one happy dude.

> I'll try whatever is new and fun though,

Same here. I'll do a tutorial or read a book for anything even if I dont' 
do much with it. Hehe, this might make you laugh, but my last two were 
AREXX (using AROS) and FORTRAN. I'm pissed at myself for not learning 
AREXX back when the Amiga was kickin'. FORTRAN was a mind trip. I felt it 
had some kind of relation to Pascal (just certain things). It made me want 
to go out and do some X-Ray crystallography just so I could write me some 
applicable FORTRAN code, hehe.

> and I've been enjoying Swift (the language!) quite a bit.

har har! Well, this is a not the first time my name has got me into 
trouble. You should hear when I went to a local meetup where folks were 
talking about the object store in openstack (called "Swift" also). Someone 
was cussin' it and saying that they made one mistake and blew up their 
object store. I was confused and I heard my name all around me. It was 
like an episode of the Twilight Zone. 

FYI, since everyone asks, Swift is my real name. My grandfather, Swift 
Lindley was born during the 30's when my great grandparents were so poor 
they couldn't pay attention. They had some sick scrawny cattle to sell and 
nobody would buy them. My great grandfather took them to a rail station 
near Pampa, Texas where they'd load up cattle to send on to Colorado and 
Wyoming to butcher and so forth. Still, nobody wanted to buy his sub-par 
stock. Meanwhile, unknown to him, my great grandmother had gone into labor 
and was giving birth about two weeks early. So, my great gramps runs into 
this cat named "Theodore Swift" and his crew (he was rich). He said he'd 
buy the cows since another deal had fallen threw and he wanted the train 
completely full. So, after this stroke of luck, my forefather came home 
victorious to find my great grandmother had given birth to a son. The 
first thing she asked him when he came home was "What will you name your 
son?" The story goes that he stood for a minute, smiled, and said "Swift" 

 then of course I just got it as a hand-me-down from my moms' side. 
:-)

-Swift

Re: Calling all typographers

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

On 28 April 2016 at 13:05, Jon Elson  wrote:
> That should be available for most Linux distros.  You should also be able to
> get it on Windows, but might be a bit harder to find.
>
I believe the current easiest to get up and running TeX/LaTeX solution
for Windows is MikTeX. 

I don't know if it comes with the METAFONT utilities for creating a
font though. Then again I haven't looked too hard since it has xeLaTeX
which means "balls to it, I'm using OpenType!" (And there was much
rejoicing, as Computer Modern was replaced by Adobe Garamond Premier
Pro.)

But I digress.
Christian
-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.

Re: basic switch lubricant

[Chuck Guzis]

On 04/28/2016 06:50 PM, Charles Dickman wrote:
> I have been cleaning a PDP-8/e front panel and some of the switches 
> are not as free as others. The switches are simple slider basic 
> switches. I have taken similar switches apart and noticed that there 
> is a brown/red grease on the contacts.
> 
> Any suggestions on the proper grease for a low voltage contact.

Chuck:

I'd use the same thing that I use on automotive contacts--what's
referred to as "dielectric grease".  Available in the auto section of
almost any big-box store.  Comes in a tube, is colorless and a bit
translucent.

--other Chuck

Re: Rolm Computers: 1602, 1602A, 1602B, 1666, MSExx (was Data General Nova Star Trek)

[Christian Kennedy]

On 4/28/16 17:45, Sean Caron wrote:

[big snip]

> I find the design of the CBX really interesting. IMO, their appearance
> belies that ROLM was a computer vendor first a a phone equipment maker
> second. Not in a perjorative sense, just stylistically. Comparing them
> against boards from WECo/ATT/Lucent/Avaya, Nortel and Harris.

I was a staff engineer at ROLM MSC between '82 - '86.  By that time by
any reasonable measure MSC and telecomm were two utterly different
companies that happened to have common parentage; technology cross-over
between the divisions was for all practical purposes nonexistent
(although we did have the occasional employee move between divisions,
particularly after the IBM debacle) -- but it certainly seems that
experience building stuff on the MSC side informed *some* of the early
design decisions on the telcom side.

IIRC the most interesting thing about the CBX was that it could do so
much with so little hardware (relative to other switches of the time)
thanks to TDM of the 12-bit bus through the "connection table", which
was a 384 slot recirculating command buffer that drove the codecs, dial
tone generators, tone decoders, ring generators and the like.  Basically
the CPU would schedule the sender and receiver for the bus by dropping
commands into two parallel queues (one for transmit, one for receive),
so there was no need for bus request or arbitration logic and yet the
CPU could be slow, as the sequencer would just advance through the
buffer every 83usec processing the commands that it found.  It was a
pretty clever way of substituting DRAM for bus control logic while
reducing processor requirements.

MSC was effectively the alpha site for new builds and new hardware, and
we saw failures that at times left us without reliable phones for a day
or two.  One of the more interesting was when the switch refused to
honor extension status changes and instead entertained itself by ringing
each extension *once* in ascending order, then repeating.

-- 
Christian Kennedy, Ph.D.
ch...@mainecoon.com AF6AP | DB0692 | PG00029419
http://www.mainecoon.comPGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration…"

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jerome H. Fine]

>Lyle Bickley wrote:


On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:22:11 -0500 "Jay West"  wrote:


--snip--


We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems
and his Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all
vintage computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle
Bickley for tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a
huge fan of TSX-Plus and I'm thrilled there's now a personal
(hobbyist) license thanks to Lyle.

The distribution is at http://tsxplus.classiccmp.org
   



And a big "THANKS!" to Jay for creating the website and hosting the
TSX-Plus distribution on classiccmp.org!!!

Cheers,
Lyle
 


I am extremely pleased to see that hobby users may now use
TSX-Plus without charge.  The PDP-11 hobby community
has been waiting a long time.  It is very gratifying that the
situation for the hobby community has finally been resolved.

Many thanks to both Jay and Lyle and appreciation to Harry Sanders
and the Board of Directors at S&H.

Jerome Fine

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Chris Hanson]

On Apr 25, 2016, at 7:38 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> 
> And you do know what Apple MacOS was originally written in, don't you?

The original Macintosh System Software was almost entirely M68000 assembly 
language.

There were a couple parts of the original System Software that were written in 
Pascal, but by and large the space constraints of the 64KB ROMs and the 400KB 
floppy and the desire to eke every last cycle of performance out of the 8MHz 
CPU led to pervasive use of assembly.

The APIs were defined in terms of both Pascal and assembly, which is what leads 
people to think that it was written in Pascal.

Of course as time went on, there were pieces added and rewritten that were in 
Pascal, C, C++, etc. But if you worked on the classic Mac OS chances were you’d 
need to work in 68K assembly at some point.

Fortunately the 68K had a great instruction set so its assembly wound up being 
effectively a high-level language. While I generally preferred to install 
Jasik’s “The Debugger” to do source-level debugging at any level, a huge number 
of people just used MacsBug for everything, because looking at a disassembly 
was pretty much equivalent to looking at sources.

  -- Chris

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Jerome H. Fine]

>Rod Smallwood wrote:


>On 28/04/2016 18:25, Evan Koblentz wrote:

We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems 
and his

Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of 
TSX-Plus
and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks to 
Lyle. 


Great work Lyle!!


Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.


At the present time, RT-11 is used in running TSX-Plus in three ways:

(a)  To boot TSX-Plus, either it is usual to initiate TSX.SAV via one of the
 UnMapped RT-11 monitors such as RT11SJ or RT11FB since most,
 probably all, Mapped RT-11 monitors are too large.

(b)  Certain RT-11 utilities such as DIR.SAV and PIP.SAV are often used in
  addition to other RT-11 programs such as MACRO.SAV to accomplish
  goals under TSX-Plus which S&H did not write.

(c)  Many of the TSX-Plus device drivers were originally RT-11 device 
drivers

 modified to conform to TSX-Plus requirements.

It is probably (c) that is actually the reason that RT-11 is needed to run
TSX-Plus since S&H could have managed to write the boot code in
addition to the RT-11 programs that are used.  But as long as an RT-11
license was a pre-requisite to run TSX-Plus, there really was no need to
also write all of the device drivers from scratch as well.  For the actual
situation, as long as RT-11 was already present, the straight forward
solution was the one used.

If my comments are incorrect, it would be appreciated if someone could
provide the actual information.

Jerome Fine

Re: Lyle scores a WIN for our hobby!

[Rod Smallwood]

On 29/04/2016 04:58, Jerome H. Fine wrote:

>Rod Smallwood wrote:


>On 28/04/2016 18:25, Evan Koblentz wrote:

We all owe a big "Thanks!" to Harry Sanders at S&H Computer Systems 
and his

Board of Directors for making this release a reality for all vintage
computer folks! Also, the hobby owes huge thanks to Lyle Bickley for
tirelessly pursuing this for us all! I've always been a huge fan of 
TSX-Plus
and I'm thrilled there's now a personal (hobbyist) license thanks 
to Lyle. 


Great work Lyle!!


Excellent  --  One minor point you need RT11 to run it I think.


At the present time, RT-11 is used in running TSX-Plus in three ways:

(a)  To boot TSX-Plus, either it is usual to initiate TSX.SAV via one 
of the

 UnMapped RT-11 monitors such as RT11SJ or RT11FB since most,
 probably all, Mapped RT-11 monitors are too large.

(b)  Certain RT-11 utilities such as DIR.SAV and PIP.SAV are often 
used in

  addition to other RT-11 programs such as MACRO.SAV to accomplish
  goals under TSX-Plus which S&H did not write.

(c)  Many of the TSX-Plus device drivers were originally RT-11 device 
drivers

 modified to conform to TSX-Plus requirements.

It is probably (c) that is actually the reason that RT-11 is needed to 
run

TSX-Plus since S&H could have managed to write the boot code in
addition to the RT-11 programs that are used.  But as long as an RT-11
license was a pre-requisite to run TSX-Plus, there really was no need to
also write all of the device drivers from scratch as well.  For the 
actual

situation, as long as RT-11 was already present, the straight forward
solution was the one used.

If my comments are incorrect, it would be appreciated if someone could
provide the actual information.

Jerome Fine
I can remember sitting in the training room at digital in Parker Street 
(HQ had moved out of the mill by then)
in November 1973 and doing the RT11 course. It was included in my new 
hire training (six weeks in the US)
I was a bit distracted as one of girls running the course came in and 
sought out non-US hires and gave us a 50 dollar bill each.
I asked what that was about.  Cost of living allowance because the US 
was considered to be higher.
She did that every day for the rest of the course, except Fridays when 
you got 150 dollars.


We had already had a big expense advance before leaving the UK.
When I got back I duly worked out all my US expenses including  the 
50dollars and presented them to my new boss.

There was a big surplus and I was all ready to return it.
He laughed and said full marks for honesty but we are are a cost center 
and cant take money back in.
Keep it. He then endorsed my copy of the expense sheet  "return of 
excess declined - employee to retain"

Happy days!!

Rod (Panelman) Smallwood

Re: Rolm Computers: 1602, 1602A, 1602B, 1666, MSExx (was Data General Nova Star Trek)

[Sean Caron]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Christian Kennedy wrote:




On 4/28/16 17:45, Sean Caron wrote:

[big snip]


I find the design of the CBX really interesting. IMO, their appearance
belies that ROLM was a computer vendor first a a phone equipment maker
second. Not in a perjorative sense, just stylistically. Comparing them
against boards from WECo/ATT/Lucent/Avaya, Nortel and Harris.


I was a staff engineer at ROLM MSC between '82 - '86.  By that time by
any reasonable measure MSC and telecomm were two utterly different
companies that happened to have common parentage; technology cross-over
between the divisions was for all practical purposes nonexistent
(although we did have the occasional employee move between divisions,
particularly after the IBM debacle) -- but it certainly seems that
experience building stuff on the MSC side informed *some* of the early
design decisions on the telcom side.



Very cool, thanks for the perspective. My understanding was that the 
profits on the mil-spec computers side bankrolled the entry into the PBX 
market but I was never clear on how much overlap there was between the two 
divisions. Any awareness if the common control of the CBX is in any way 
architecturally related to the DG Nova?


It seems like it would be advantageous to leverage the experience building 
mil-spec Nova processors on the other side of the business, and looking at 
the hardware, it is clear the CBX is a 16-bit machine. But never been able 
to confirm.


One thing that would be a huge score for postierity and might help to 
answer some of these questions is a copy of the first half of the System 
Service Manual for the CBX. I have Part II which contains a command 
reference and some discussion of peripheral cards, but everything relating 
to system architecture and the design of the common control seems to be in 
Part I. Do you know of anyone who may have preserved this? I've spoken 
with a few old hands who were CBX switchmen in the past but all I've been 
able to get is Part II.





IIRC the most interesting thing about the CBX was that it could do so
much with so little hardware (relative to other switches of the time)
thanks to TDM of the 12-bit bus through the "connection table", which
was a 384 slot recirculating command buffer that drove the codecs, dial
tone generators, tone decoders, ring generators and the like.  Basically
the CPU would schedule the sender and receiver for the bus by dropping
commands into two parallel queues (one for transmit, one for receive),
so there was no need for bus request or arbitration logic and yet the
CPU could be slow, as the sequencer would just advance through the
buffer every 83usec processing the commands that it found.  It was a
pretty clever way of substituting DRAM for bus control logic while
reducing processor requirements.


I had watched a Youtube video which discussed a little bit about the 
design:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8J6CGI6HA0

However what you write is much more detailed. I believe there is an 
apocryphal story behind that particular part and sampling rate although 
the specifics elude me at the moment ... I understand it caused trouble 
trying to interface the CBX to DS1 circuits.




MSC was effectively the alpha site for new builds and new hardware, and
we saw failures that at times left us without reliable phones for a day
or two.  One of the more interesting was when the switch refused to
honor extension status changes and instead entertained itself by ringing
each extension *once* in ascending order, then repeating.



Sometimes my Definity gets confused and does that. Surprises the heck out 
of my partner and me. Good thing it hasn't happened in the middle of the 
night :O


Thanks,

Sean

RE: Calling all typographers

[Paul Birkel]

-Original Message-
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Christian 
Gauger-Cosgrove
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2016 10:07 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Calling all typographers

On 28 April 2016 at 13:05, Jon Elson  wrote:
> That should be available for most Linux distros.  You should also be 
> able to get it on Windows, but might be a bit harder to find.
>
I believe the current easiest to get up and running TeX/LaTeX solution for 
Windows is MikTeX. 

I don't know if it comes with the METAFONT utilities for creating a font 
though. Then again I haven't looked too hard since it has xeLaTeX which means 
"balls to it, I'm using OpenType!" (And there was much rejoicing, as Computer 
Modern was replaced by Adobe Garamond Premier
Pro.)

But I digress.
Christian
--
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.

-
http://miktex.org/pkg/az

Wow, is that some list.  In my era it was a *lot* shorter, by orders of 
magnitude.  The list does include these:

miktex-metafont-baseMETAFONT base
miktex-metafont-bin-2.9 METAFFONT binaries
miktex-metafont-miscMETAFONT misc

(and: logic A font for electronic logic design)

(and what's not to like about: comicsansUse Microsoft Comic Sans font)

-

Re: Very sad message: the passing of Jon Johnston

[curiousmarc3]

You can see him in the YouTube video he posted at the beginning of the month 
about his HP 2116 restoration. Very sad indeed.
https://youtu.be/Kko526UpHsM
Marc