Re: PDP11/03 BA-11M Front panel switch replacement
On 02/26/2018 04:18 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: On 2/25/2018 10:40 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 7:50 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: I have a BA11-M box with the usual front panel control, however it was damaged and all three switches have been sheared off. The LED's and the circuit card that connects to the power supply appear to be OK. I would like to repair it and put it back into service. Is there a replacement for those switches? In general, many old switch patterns are still made. Often, they have a manufacturer's name and part # on the body of the switch. Some common makes from back then were C&K and Alco. Jon Good advice, I went and looked at another box I had and the switches are indeed C&K models 7101 and 7108. Looking on ebay since they are obsolete, finding the model with the paddle actuator will be the trick. You should really get on Digi-Key or other distributor who has a good web site and see if you can find a new model that fits the same mounting hole and PC board pattern. Even if C&K obsoleted the exact model, they very likely still make a compatible part. Digi-Key shows 408 items when I search on "C&K 7101". Some of those REALLY look like stuff I remember in DEC equipment. Jon
Re: PDP11/03 BA-11M Front panel switch replacement
On 2/25/2018 10:40 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 7:50 PM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: I have a BA11-M box with the usual front panel control, however it was damaged and all three switches have been sheared off. The LED's and the circuit card that connects to the power supply appear to be OK. I would like to repair it and put it back into service. Is there a replacement for those switches? In general, many old switch patterns are still made. Often, they have a manufacturer's name and part # on the body of the switch. Some common makes from back then were C&K and Alco. Jon Good advice, I went and looked at another box I had and the switches are indeed C&K models 7101 and 7108. Looking on ebay since they are obsolete, finding the model with the paddle actuator will be the trick. Doug
RE: What is vintage
On Mon, 26 Feb 2018, Jay West via cctalk wrote: The OP was being sarcastic. Please not this thread again. . . . and a sarcastic response just further exacerbates the situation. Sorry.
Writing emulators (Was: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]
The purpose of an emulator is to accurately pretend to be the original hardware. It doesn't matter that the original OS runs on a particular emulator. If a program can be written that runs on the original hardware but fails on the emulator then there is a flaw in that emulator. On Mon, 26 Feb 2018, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: That's true. But it is unfortunately also true that creating a bug for bug accurate model of an existing machine is extremely hard. There is always a decision to be made, whether to mimic the behavior, or mimic how it is supposed to behave. If you are aware of a bug in the original, do you emulate that bug?There was once a New Yorker cartoon, where a mechanic told a customer, "For $300 we can get it to run like new. For $600 we can get it to run like it should." Emulation of the bugs can not simply be ignored. Surely, you could get away with not emulating the truncated mantissa FDIV bug? Not necessarily. Sometimes timing can be important. Using a do-nothing loop for a time delay was never a good idea (and optimizers would remove it), but it did happen, ranging from crude amateur programs, to crude copy protection. I remember when it was sometimes necessary for MS-DOS code to determine what processor it was running on. Since not all processors provided an "Identify yourself" command, it was done through checking for bugs, obscure differences, etc. Such as checking the size of the pre-fetch buffer, or whether a double prefix was maintained after an interrupt (REP ES:MOVSW). There was no offical method for identification. I remember an article in Microcornucopia that mentioned an Intel sanctioned set of methods; the author couldn't remember where he got it; I called Intel, and after many transfers reached somebody who understood the question; he had no idea, but asked me to forward him a copy if I did ever find it. So, it becomes necessary to have massive configuration settings, to be able to emulate as spec'ed, or as which set of the variant bugs. It's hard enough just getting it to work! When the first software based PC emulator for the Amiga came out, it worked [well enough to run XenoCopy on some formats]. But, people griped because it wasn't faster than their current PC. Geez! They got an elephant to fly, and people gripe about the speed and payload capacity! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: DEC Pro 350
Yeah, the fact that the issue is intermittent (mostly not booting) is weird. Just to be clear, You mentioned a 25 pin connector. My understanding is that the console port is the printer port which is a 9 pin connector. Thanks for the info. I have ordered the stuff to make a cable so should be able to test console port this weekend. Kurt On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 9:23 AM, Paul Koning wrote: > > > > On Feb 25, 2018, at 5:39 PM, Kurt Hamm via cctalk > wrote: > > > > Thanks for the suggestions. Interestingly, upon first boot I was able to > > get the hard disk controller error with the picture of the computer. > Then, > > sure subsequent reboots failed to display anything. > > > > I removed all the cards and booted with no luck. > > That would be the expected result if the status lights indicate a > motherboard failure -- it means you're not reaching the point where it > looks at the I/O cards. > > > It looks like I will need to build a cable to try terminal mode. I did > > hook a vt220 with a 9to25 cablw, but didn't get anything. > > You need a cable specifically wired as console cable. Check the technical > manual for the details. The DB25 connector is used to connect either a > (serial) printer or a console, and the two are distinguished by a jumper > between two of the pins. So a console cable has that jumper in its > connector, a printer cable does not. If you don't have the jumper, the > speed will be set differently (4800 rather than 9600) and the UART will not > appear at the console UART address. > > paul > >
Re: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]
On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 12:19 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > > Another example is the work pdp2011 had to do in order to make RSTS boot on > that FPGA based PDP-11 emulation, because RSTS was doing some CPU-specific > hackery to test for an obscure CPU (or FPU?) bug that had been corrected in > some ECO that it wanted to require. The only way to figure out how to do > that is to reverse engineer that particular bit of code, which isn't normally > available in source form. > I have one M8190 KDJ11-B that caused an RSTS/E 10.1 installation failure. I forget what the error message was. Looking at an installation tape message maybe it was one of these strings. Unfortunately I could not contact field service to correct the problem. ECOs are missing from this FPJ11. This DCJ11 cannot be used in conjunction with an FPJ11 accelerator. Contact Field Service for FCO kit EQ-01440-02 to correct the problem. The floating exception ECO is missing from this FPJ11.
Re: Why don't you respect the mail threads?!
- Original Message - From: "Tomasz Rola via cctalk" To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 3:18 PM Subject: Re: Why don't you respect the mail threads?! > ... I do not feel the need to have very strong opinion > about what other people should do. > > -- > Regards, > Tomasz Rola Get with the program! That's what the internet/social media is all about! m
Re: DEC Pro 350
> On Feb 26, 2018, at 2:56 PM, Kurt Hamm wrote: > > Yeah, the fact that the issue is intermittent (mostly not booting) is weird. > > Just to be clear, You mentioned a 25 pin connector. My understanding is > that the console port is the printer port which is a 9 pin connector. Sorry, you're right, my bad memory. The DB25 is at the other end of the standard DEC cables, of course. The relevant documentation is table 5-26, page 181 (5-131) of the PRO technical manual, volume 1. "Terminal L" (pin 9) is the signal that says "this is a console terminal" -- jumper that to signal ground (pin 7). That is also stated explicitly on page 177 (5-127), third paragraph. paul
Re: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]
> On Feb 26, 2018, at 12:06 PM, Doug Ingraham via cctalk > wrote: > > The purpose of an emulator is to accurately pretend to be the original > hardware. It doesn't matter that the original OS runs on a particular > emulator. If a program can be written that runs on the original hardware > but fails on the emulator then there is a flaw in that emulator. That's true. But it is unfortunately also true that creating a bug for bug accurate model of an existing machine is extremely hard. Building an OS-compatible version is not nearly as hard, but still hard enough. Passing diagnostics is yet another hurdle; in some cases that isn't feasible without an entirely different design. For example, in the CDC 6600 there is the "exchange jump" test, which at some point depends on the execution time of a divide instruction and the timing of exchange instructions. It is very hard for an emulator to mimic that (and an utter waste of effort for every other bit of software available for that machine). Another example is the work pdp2011 had to do in order to make RSTS boot on that FPGA based PDP-11 emulation, because RSTS was doing some CPU-specific hackery to test for an obscure CPU (or FPU?) bug that had been corrected in some ECO that it wanted to require. The only way to figure out how to do that is to reverse engineer that particular bit of code, which isn't normally available in source form. paul
Re: Why don't you respect the mail threads?!
On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 03:36:08PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote: > It's gone meta: people threadjacking a thread about threadjacking. > Now it's some posters trying to show others who is smartest about > arcane details of obsolete email software. Hey, I hope you do not mean that I am showing others who is smartest or even attacking them. My language might happen to be (perceived by others as) harsh, because I have barbaric worldview and eat raw meat, but I am very far from attacking or showing that I am oh so smart. Well, you will have to take my word on it, because I am not going to let you open my head :-) . Otherwise, yes, meta-thread-jacking is interesting - it shows that people really like to jack everything and there is no escape from it. This is why I have given up on regulating aspects of the net (say, breaking threads), at least as long as it depends on other people's behaviour (of course, they/some will misbehave, no escape) - but, as soon as the mails come to my hard drive, I can regulate however I please. So, provided I can program my way around my small bubble, the problem of threads is a small one (but quite interesting from algorithm side). Thus I usually do not make much fuss about the issue (anymore), with exception of breaking threads - they break my own reading experience _and_ they stay broken in the archive (AFAIK). Searching the archive, public or personal, which seems to be partly the motivation behind starting this very subthread - I think it needs to be done by whole body lookup anyway, so even if some offtopic discussion starts under "Pictures", the damage is (probably) minimal, because Subject lines are, to me at least, merely a kind of fuzzy tags, loosely connected to message bodies. And I think it is ok to change the Subject of subthread if the message body is too far from original thread, but keeping it as part of original thread has some merits, because it shows logical flow of discussion. But, again, this flow can be recreated with some (yet nonexistent but possible) tools, so I do not feel the need to have very strong opinion about what other people should do. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
Re: DEC Pro 350
> From: Kurt Hamm > If anyone has any thoughts, I would appreciate it. You probably already know this, but... My sense is that a collector of classic computers has to be able to diagnose and repair at the component level - get in there with an oscilloscope and a set of prints (creating the latter, if need be), and find the busted chip/transistor. It's like collecting old cars - if you collect old cars, you have to be able to work on them (or like Jay Leno, be rich and hire someone else who can - although given that Jay worked at an auto dealer 'back in the day', he apparently does know a fair amount). Which isn't going to help much with this particular problem, maybe some of the other replies will help. Noel
Re: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]
On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 2:49 PM, Rick Murphy via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On 2/21/2018 5:14 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > >> Ok, then it could be for VMS, which also does this (via Andy's >> unsupported driver). I don't know of PDP-11 or other minicomputer systems >> that do DECtape overlapped seek. I suppose it could be for artistic >> verisimilitude... >> > > TSS/8. It was a wonderful thing to witness. Start the drive spinning, > deselect it, go start up another, then reselect the first one as it > approached the right part of the tape. > -Rick > The purpose of an emulator is to accurately pretend to be the original hardware. It doesn't matter that the original OS runs on a particular emulator. If a program can be written that runs on the original hardware but fails on the emulator then there is a flaw in that emulator. I've been slowly working on a PDP-8 emulator since the mid 1980's. It was able to run code a couple of days after I started working on it. FOCAL in about a week. The Teletype emulation timing was added early on so a program could not tell it was running on the emulator by timing the TTY instructions. About 10 years ago I added acceleration curves to the high speed paper tape reader timing. Within the last year I have added DF-32 support and am working towards fixing the timing so a program could not be written to tell. I need to add a randomness factor to the inter platter timing. At the moment it looks like all the drives are in optimum lockstep which makes transfers run a little faster but isn't reality. Probably add a 50 hz option for those in 50 hz countries since the drive motors run slower there and thus transfers were slower. I have delayed adding DECTape support for years because of the difficulty of doing this correctly. You need to support so much stuff to do this right from a timing standpoint. At least on the TC01 controller you can read in the reverse direction as well as the normal forward direction. Do you need to support reverse reads? Almost no software took advantage of this. Every drive runs a little different and the emulator could (should) reflect this. If you can't have a real machine the least you can have is a correct as possible emulator. It is a lot easier to be lazy and think you are done when the OS boots or an interpreter appears to run or it passes diagnostics. In reality you have barely begun. -- Doug Ingraham PDP-8 SN 1175
RE: What is vintage
The OP was being sarcastic. Please not this thread again. J
Re: What is vintage
I SUCK at basic arithmetic. But i'm stupidly fast with a slide rule. I'm in between useless and obtuse! On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 11:56 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On Sun, 25 Feb 2018, Zane Healy wrote: > >> I’ve started seeing toys (mainly action figures) from the 80’s and early >> 90’s in Antique Shops. :-( >> > > When Erector sets switched from their mains powered motor with gears to a > plastic batter powerd, I wondered about the future of engineering in the > USA. > > With it discontinued, I no longer wonder. > > With the advent of digital watches, kids need to stop and think for a > while to figure out which way is "clockwise". > > With calculators, kids can no longer do simple arithmetic. > > > Just keep them off of my lawn. > > > -- Gary G. Sparkes Jr. KB3HAG
Re: DEC Pro 350
> On Feb 25, 2018, at 5:39 PM, Kurt Hamm via cctalk > wrote: > > Thanks for the suggestions. Interestingly, upon first boot I was able to > get the hard disk controller error with the picture of the computer. Then, > sure subsequent reboots failed to display anything. > > I removed all the cards and booted with no luck. That would be the expected result if the status lights indicate a motherboard failure -- it means you're not reaching the point where it looks at the I/O cards. > It looks like I will need to build a cable to try terminal mode. I did > hook a vt220 with a 9to25 cablw, but didn't get anything. You need a cable specifically wired as console cable. Check the technical manual for the details. The DB25 connector is used to connect either a (serial) printer or a console, and the two are distinguished by a jumper between two of the pins. So a console cable has that jumper in its connector, a printer cable does not. If you don't have the jumper, the speed will be set differently (4800 rather than 9600) and the UART will not appear at the console UART address. paul
Re: Why don't you respect the mail threads?!
On 22 February 2018 at 21:57, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Liam, I wanted to say this few months ago already (back in Nov, the > "Editor" thread - BTW, thanks for the links to editors wiki and other > interesting pointers). Glad it was appreciated. > So, what I wanted to say is, this posture is > going to backfire, I am afraid. The new crowd is coming, who newer had > any chance to use anything resembling a terminal (including > terminal-like experience as wobbly as given by MS Windows). I used to think this myself, but of late, I've had 2 jobs with FOSS companies (Red Hat and SUSE) and they're both full of 20-somethings who use and love Vim & other shell-only tools. People working in tiling or ultra-minimal window managers, with a bunch of terminals and nothing else. Unix isn't just an OS. It's a whole culture now, and newcomers earn credit by embracing the tools and the old ways and demonstrate their worthiness by their skill with (to them) ancient languages, editors and so on. Alas, now, it's _the_ culture. Everything else is ancient history, mostly unknown. Today, there are 2 OSes, broadly: Windows, and its fans see no interest in anything else; and Unix, which increasingly means macOS and Linux. [Aside: Greybeards are into "ancient" platforms from the 1980s like Amiga OS, Atari TOS/GEM, Acorn RISC OS, and a few into BeOS/Haiku. The stuff from before that is mostly forgotten about now. MS-DOS and the most popular 8-bit home micros are now solely the domain of retro gamers. ] But they're still millennials, so email is a slightly clunky old tool for notifications and account verification, stuff like that. They use chat systems more -- IRC, and an increasing presence of things like Slack, RocketChat, Telegram, Signal and the like. There are work-only web-based social networks where they can interact in broadly familiar ways, such as Yammer or Red Hat's Mojo. So at RH, for instance, there were people who primarily used Mojo and others who primarily used the internal mailing lists. > They > (crowd) too will be saying things like GTFO - for now, they just top > post awfully long replies (perhaps because their phone/web-based MUAs > cannot offer them easy way to cut the crap?) and refuse to see any > wrong in it. They also happen to break threads like they were paid to > do it and since I am subscribed to way too many lists where this > occurs, I have already gave up manual linking of threads with mutt - > righting wrongs of the crowd is a job for a program, not for single > human. I only have to devise it during free time, when I have some. Yes, true. There's a ton of received wisdom on how to use email effectively, but it's not disseminated. This means key providers of email tools -- notably Microsoft -- didn't incorporate these. So now there are 2 cultures of email: the old-style, text-only, 4-line sig, bottom-posting way, and "business style": rich formatting, top posting, epic sigs with graphics, legal notices etc. Given a tool focused on that, it's hard to even do the other way at all. We allowed it to fragment and in the long term that might be its downfall. > Given that they are soon (if not already) going to be a "dictatoring" > majority, I am not so sure the "GTFO" is the right kind of message to > send out. Even though I have no idea what a constructive message could > look like. Good question. An idea I threw out on a panel discussion a few years ago is that we might end up with 2 "internets". One will be the old-fashioned one, standards-based, old-fashioned practices and tools, wild and unregulated and chaotic, with a layer of disconnected web-based islands on top. Part of this will extend into the "darknet", the encrypted, tunnelled, anonymised quarter for semi-illicit stuff. And another layer, a corporate-run tool, with signing, verified IDs, some degree of crypto so that its users feel they are safe, but it's all backdoored and snooped and logged. That's the layer you'll be forced to use if you want to do public trade, where there will be federated reputation tracking and so on. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Honeywell DDP-516 console on Ebay - PLEASE don't bid!
Hello again, On 24.02.2018 04:42, Adrian Stoness via cctalk wrote: so did u get it? Yes, I won the auction at a badly high price. :-) :-) :-) :-) Kind regards Philipp
RE: What is vintage
> -Original Message- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck > Guzis via cctalk > Sent: 26 February 2018 03:42 > To: allison via cctalk > Subject: Re: What is vintage > > I thought vintage had to do with wine--and not necessarily old. > > e.g. 2006 cabernet sauvignon. I think in collecting terms it first got used for cars where, certainly in the uk, its strictly 1919-1930 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_car later is post vintage, or classic, or scrap... > > "Vintage computing" occurs when you figure out how many bottles you've > drunk. > And why afterwards you bought something on E-Bay that you can't get upstairs to the collection room.. > --Chuck Dave
