[cctalk] Re: Revocable Living Trust for Computer Collectors
On 26/06/2024 15:01, geneb via cctalk wrote: On Wed, 26 Jun 2024, Paul Koning wrote: 1. Truth is an affirmative defence against "libel". That depends on the country. What you say is correct in the USA; I have the impression it isn't in the UK. Absolutely. The UK enjoys heavily weaponized butthurt. ;) I've never been in legal proceedings on either side of the courtroom, so take this with a pinch of salt, but the very first reasonable link that Google threw out would seem to suggest that, at least in this case, the weapon is both blunt and crumbly: https://www.carruthers-law.co.uk/our-services/defamation/defamation-defences/ I think that where it differs from (some) other systems is that if you are the defendant then it is up to you to prove the truth of the statement rather than up to the plaintiff to prove that it is not true. Then again, if you win, you generally get your legal expenses paid by the other side. So swings and roundabouts. None of this is legal advice and if things were this easy then lawyers would be starving. Ones man's truth ... Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
On 09/05/2024 14:28, Alexander Schreiber via cctalk wrote: German snake oil wizards to the rescue! The "Atomstromfilter" (nuclear power filter) joke product has been making the rounds in Germany for at _least_ 20+y now:https://traumshop.net/produkt/atomstromfilter/ It claims to filter power generated by nuclear power plants out of your power flow at the wall socket ;-) Sorry, but that's clearly rubbish: it's way, way too cheap. Mind you, there are none on eBay UK, so maybe I could put some up at a bargain price ... £3500 too much? (I was going to add a tin foil hat too, to save on postage, but those are already on eBay :-() Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnetization [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
On 09/05/2024 03:41, D. Resor via cctalk wrote: Next they'll want silver oxygen free plated plumbing and sewage pipes in their homes. Silver plated toilet seats? Walls insulated with Palladium coated corn silk threads? Seems the subject has really gone astray? Lions, Tigers and Bears oh my! ) Don Resor -Original Message- From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2024 7:01 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: Sellam Abraham Subject: [cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks] Why stop there? A truly dedicated audiophile would run new pure silver electrical wire through the walls directly to the breaker box. Then you gotta upgrade to the breaker box that was disinfected from transient spirits through an exorcism, and then special 24K solid gold-contact breakers in inert nylon housings. Surely you have to get the cables upgraded all the way back to the original generator? Then you have secondary effects, for example, with hydro power, the purity of the water makes a *huge* difference. I also think it's just as important to have your ears, and the gap between them syringed too. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: WAS: Amoeba OS, Now: VAX/VMS Licensing?
On 01/04/2024 00:45, W2HX wrote: Hi all, I am completely ignorant when it comes to VMS licensing and how it works (or worked). I purchased a MicroVAX that is running VMS V5.3. Do I need to worry about it ceasing to work at some point? I don’t have any paperwork for the license, just a running machine. What should I know about this? You should know how to take a standalone backup and make sure you have done that. I'd suggest restoring it on a SIMH instance to check that it is bootable and works as expected. You could use the LMF commands to dump the PAKs with checksums but that (iirc) disables them so you have to re-enable them afterwards. That would allow you to rebuild your system, assuming you have install media for VMS and all the layered products. A standalone backup would be better though. Your VMS installation will certainly keep running for as long as you are likely to want to run it, but the hardware may fail at any time. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Amoeba OS
On 28/03/2024 23:29, Alexander Schreiber via cctalk wrote: The only legal[0] workaround for VMS on VAX is to go back all the way before LMF was introduced which IIRC means running VMS 4.4 and nothing newer. It's no more legal than running VMS V6.1 without a valid PAK (that was legally transferred to you). The only difference is that you didn't have to subvert the LMF. Sad and mildly irritating, but nothing we can do about it. This bit is true. -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Cleanup time again
On 23/03/2024 15:56, Henry Bent via cctalk wrote You have to look at sold listings to get an idea of what they are actually selling for. There are many, shall we say, overly ambitious sellers when it comes to vintage hardware. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?kw=210ts+transciever=20004_Sold=1_Complete=1 Looks like $20 is about the going rate. -Henry The first hit on ebay.co.uk is £399, so I sense an arbitrage opportunity :-) It may take a while to sell, but I'm patient ! Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: VAX 4000 console SLU in need of some TLC
On 21/03/2024 21:51, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: Assuming you find a solution for the console port issue, can't you just try netbooting it and see what mac address the load requests have? You could either use some ethernet monitoring software such as tcpdump, ethermon, wireshark or whatever or your MOP server may even report load requests it sees on the network to OPCOM. I have a W7 system running SIMH that I was going to configure as the cluster master ... I completely forgot that I could just turn on the OPER console replies and look for a message. I can even boot the VS400-60 over the ethernet to prove that I have SIMH configured properly. Of course, I don't know that the console ethernet works, but this would tell me pretty clearly one way or the other. Thanks for that: I blame the 5 hours of driving for me missing the obvious, but it might be the 20+ years of not fiddling with OpenVMS on a daily basis :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: VAX 4000 console SLU in need of some TLC
On 21/03/2024 22:03, Jonathan Stone wrote: What kind of VAX 4000? One with DSSI connectors on the "S:U", or the /VAX 4000-200/KA660, which has serial and Ethernet? IIRC you can klludge up the latter using a KA630 SLU, and either re-using the AUI/10base-2 part of the SLU, or kludging one from a DEQNA/DELQA to act like the AUI-select switch setting and AUI of the original Those come off the KA660 in a single IDC connector, 50 pin if memory serves. I have no idea about substituting for DSSI. It's a VAX 4000-300 (KA670) in a BA440, so it has two DSSI, ethernet, the usual switches and LED display. I can switch ethernet between AUI and BNC (the green LEDs change) and I have known working DETPM AUI<->RJ45 interfaces, so ethernet may be OK. I have found one panel for a KA650 (uV 3500/3600) that has an OK connector but is otherwise a bit toasty, so I'll try carefully removing that tomorrow. If that goes OK, then I'll remove the MMJ socket from the VAX 4000 console SLU: it's dead so there's not really much risk here as long as I'm careful with the PCB. At least I could then tack on 6 wires and find a way of interfacing. I do have at least one H8584-AC, which is an MMJ socket and an RJ45 plug. So with a bit of measuring I could probably find an RJ45 socket and rig up some temporary franken-console. Or, if the KA650 donor is really too far gone, and its socket survives half a dozen cable insertion-removals with no harm, then I could just fit that in place. If the console ethernet doesn't work, I think I can drop in the DELQA with appropriate handles from the KA650 system ... I think that the BA440 Q-bus metalwork and the BA213 metalwork are compatible. If not I have one Q-bus DELQA panel and I'm sure that neither the VAX nor anything else in there with it care too much about RF interference these days! I can find new MMJ plugs all over the place (admittedly I'm assuming that Mouser and Farnell could actually supply them!!) but the corresponding sockets seem to be lost to time. Or at least they remain beyond my goolge-fu. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] VAX 4000 console SLU in need of some TLC
I have a VAX 4000 with a console SLU that has been host to a battery for far too long. I removed the battery some time ago and cleaned things up with vinegar and IPA. Then I had PSU issues, which I've resolved by swapping for a NOS one (thanks Witchy!). Last Wednesday (13-MAR-2024) it booted to the dead sergeant prompt for the first time in a decade or two (I would guess). It was set to 19200 baud and the console 7-segment LED was a bit the worse for wear, but it responded to the VT420 quite happily. But tonight, although it seemed to power up OK, the console was unresponsive. Shining a light into the MMJ socket showed pin 2 is missing (2nd from the left looking into the socket (https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/serial/dec-mmj-serial/). The rest show patches of the sort of green you would expect from something that has been near a leaky battery for some time. Now I have some console SLUs for the KA650 (uVAX 3600) which have also generously hosted batteries for longer than they should, but I suppose if one of those has an OK looking socket I can try a swap. Otherwise, does anyone have any ideas for a source? I know I could solder to the six pins at the back and make an adapter, but that is I think would be a stop gap 9or a last resort if no parts are available. Pin 2 is TXD+ so I suppose that the RX side still works. I have no suitable storage for this system (well, I have some RF71 drives but not the carriers that would be needed to connect to the backplane properly), so I was planning to netboot from a SIMH instance on a PC. However, to configure that I would need the ethernet MAC address, and I can't think of a simple way to get that. unless someone knows whether the ethernet ID prom is readable in something like a TL866II Plus? Anyway, thanks in advance for any suggestions or ideas. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 03/12/2023 16:27, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug I've never used any of these boards but if you leaf through "digital diggings" back catalogue on Youtube (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKBDY9lluRo) you can find that he's been working on getting BlueSCSI working with a VAXstation 3100. I thought he'd also done the same for DEC Alpha systems but I can't find that video, so I may have imagined it! But the BlueSCSI compatibility page does list a few Alpha systems: https://bluescsi.com/docs/Compatibility. There are reports of ZuluSCSI working with some Alpha systems too. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004
On 21/11/2023 23:14, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote: More information is here: https://firstmicroprocessor.com/?doing_wp_cron=1700608229.8666059970855712890625 I think that is the designers (Rod Holt?) website. Apparently he won a legal battle to use the term "first microprocessor" for whatever that is worth. Details were published in 1998 and the chip was available approximately never (I presume, unless you were building a Tomcat) so I'm not sure you should count it. Perhaps "first microprocessor, until someone else claims another secret design that was even earlier" would be a more accurate claim? Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Any RSX-11 fans able to identify file types?
On 27/06/2023 21:17, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: > Different thing, I believe. Gotcha. I'd find it funny and perfectly fitting if DEC had two departments working on the same concept and coming up with completely different, but equally oddball solution Like the VAX 6000 and the VAX 9000 :-) Having competing teams wasn't unusual in DEC, at least for a portion of its history. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Gb Ethernet and 10Mb links
On 29/05/2023 00:30, Jonathan Chapman via cctalk wrote Along those lines, 10gig copper interfaces often don't want to talk to 100mbit ports! Found that out when we had a switch fail and stuck an older 10/100 switch in just to get back up and running. I believe the 10Gb standard specifically prohibits autonegotiation, so 10G should not drop down to 1G or 100Mb/s. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Getting floppy images to/from real floppy disks.
On 25/05/2023 19:47, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: Not only that, but all correctly implemented GigE devices will fall back not just to 100 but also to 10 Mb/s. That's part of standards conformance, and from what I can tell even low cost devices like D-Link or Netgear do this. Yes, including half duplex mode. In ~1997 my ISP provided a Terajet 410 and that was very fussy about what it would talk to; I couldn't get it to talk to my PC or laptop at the time at 100MB/s ... in the end I just connected to it via a small DEChub at 10MB/s and it worked perfectly. Right now my motherboard has a 2.5GB/s ethernet port and it needed poking with ethtool to autonegotiate at 1Gbps with a TP-LINK TL-SG116. No idea why yet and I probably won't know until I have a chance to power both off and prod. So your statement about "correctly implemented GigE devices" is technically correct (the best kind of 'correct'!) but I have yet to be convinced that it's not describing the null set :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer Club (GCCC)
On 18/05/2023 05:16, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: Now what are the options. Greaseweazle or ? What are the advantages and disadvantates of each? For the Greaseweazle it looks like I can get one and it seems to be open source with schematics of the hardware. I'd prefer more buffering of the disk drive signals, but anyway. Will it do what I want? Both Greaseweazle and FluxEngine are open source software and based on (different) standard hardware. A ready built Greaseweazle is less than £25 and the PSoC? dev board the FluxEngine uses was about £20 but you get to solder on a connector. I picked the FluxEngine because I could get hold of the parts at the time, and I still think that's probably your main consideration. Software wise they seem to have similar capabilities. If you have a specific list of formats you care about you could check: Geaseweazel formats: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Supported-Image-Types FluxEngine formats: http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html There are other flux readers out there but they either don't seem to have much momentum behind them (so you might be stuck if you need a new format added) or they're closed like KyroFlux. At ~£25 you're unlikely to lose much with either of the two front runners :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: ST-251 Data Recovery for Glenside Color Computer Club (GCCC)
On 17/05/2023 04:56, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: EXACTLY! I was told that was the best solution for this sort of thing. Are there any downsides to doing it that way? If I do go that route, what are the options? I have no knowledge of them and thus no preference for one over another As I said at the start I am clueless about this. I really need somebody to talk me through it, what to get, what to build, what to download etc. As I suspect that you have IBM PC compatible systems with 5.25" (high and normal density) and 3.5" (ditto) then I would think the easiest solution for you is to run DOS on such a machine and use Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk: http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/index.htm. This assumes you have some way to get files (specifically IMD files) onto and off that system ... perhaps through a network connection? My preferred solution is to boot to DOS using a CF adapter and then - when finished imaging - to connect that CF card to a USB card reader that supports CF and is connected to a more modern machine for archiving, storage of the image or whatever. This all depends on the FDC on whatever motherboard you have being capable of reading/writing all the modes that you myriad collection requires (or at least the subset you want to use in this manner). TESTFDC (part of the ImageDisk package) will tell you exactly which modes work and don't work with your hardware. I do also have a FluxEngine that I want to get around to using - see http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html for a list of formats it supports natively. The advantage would be that you are not limited by the PC FDC as the FluxEngine will read flux transitions directly from the connected floppy disk. FluxEngine connects via USB to whatever modern system you choose to use. However, getting the Cypress PSoC5LP dev board might be a challenge right now given the continuing global supply shortage. FluxEngine supports IMD. If you want to put a random file on a floppy for something obscure then you need to find software (or a chain of software) that will build an IMD file. DOS will be easy, CP/M is probably simple enough, but after that I expect that you'll potentially need to do some digging for each new format. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: mainframe vs mini
On 17/03/2023 16:34, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: This goes by way of what RT11 originally called a "fork queue" but was told to rename to "fork list" :-) The story was that Dave Cutler had a T-shirt made with "fork queue" on it, but I don't know if that's actually true. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Computer of Thesus (was: Re: Re: Computer Museum uses GreaseWeazle to help exonerate Maryland Man)
On 23/01/2023 20:38, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: Are you referring to Jeri Ellsworth? As far as I know she only fabricated an IC with simple logic gates on them, but it's possible she may have gone on to do more complex stuff, like a CPU. I think the reference was to Sam Zeloof: https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof/videos. I don't think he's done a CPU but he was up to ~100 transistors on a chip when last I looked. Maybe one day he'll be able to fabricate working Qbus transceiver chips ... Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: AI applied to vintage interests
On 19/01/2023 20:25, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: At least the machines care ;) Sellam That's possibly the best epitaph any of us will ever get :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: AI applied to vintage interests
On 19/01/2023 15:25, Chris via cctalk wrote: Never been in an accident that wasn't TOTALLY AND ENTIRELY the fault of the other driver. And in both instances they hit me. So after 38 years of driving, I need a computer to do it for me. Sorry I'll pass. Maybe 10(+?) years from now, assuming L5 driving is a thing (rather than marketing hype), the other drivers will stop hitting you. Always assuming they don't pass too :-) If ChatGPT gets good enough to help me diagnose my non-functioning L400X motherboards, then I'll be happy. Until then, I'm not too interested. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Identifying a Failed Diode in a Rainbow H7842 Power Supply
On 21/11/2022 21:45, Antonio Carlini wrote: I have two more I can open up and look at, but I cannot get to them tonight and I'm probably out tomorrow too. But I think I can get to those other two supplies on Wednesday. Hopefully at least one of them will be readable! Otherwise I can desolder the diode from one of the other two and hopefully find a useful marking. Turns out I have three more PSUs ... and the diode markings are unfortunately invisible on all but one. That one is this one: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TeGTcBBv7KecMJ2CmNcR0O-tb3jZigy6/view?usp=share_link It's not really visible there either but with the PSU out and one end desoldered I can see that it is marked H9501. I can also see that it doesn't conduct either way, which might mean that this PSU is the non-working one I know I have. Obviously the capacitor (820uF 250V electrolytic) is going to need replacing (might as well do both). But first I need to remove them and see what (if anything has happened) underneath. This now goes back into my queue (behind the MicroVAXes and the H7868B PSU modules) so if you fix yours before I get to mine, please let me know what you did :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Identifying a Failed Diode in a Rainbow H7842 Power Supply
On 20/11/2022 21:03, Rob Jarratt wrote: Thanks Antonio, The location of the diode is arrowed on this picture: https://rjarratt.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/img_20221120_205802-arrowed.jpg You can also see the heatsink where the transistor used to be. This is mine: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1igM9AqrICX93t-KHH3N4gRCr1Z8H6tAY/view?usp=share_link, so as you can see, the pick-and-place machine decided to rotate the diode for almost maximum inconvenience! I have two more I can open up and look at, but I cannot get to them tonight and I'm probably out tomorrow too. But I think I can get to those other two supplies on Wednesday. Hopefully at least one of them will be readable! Otherwise I can desolder the diode from one of the other two and hopefully find a useful marking. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Identifying a Failed Diode in a Rainbow H7842 Power Supply
On 20/11/2022 17:40, Rob Jarratt via cctalk wrote: The H7842 PSU in my Rainbow failed yesterday. At first the machine just powered down and there was a slight burning smell, I wasn't next to the machine when this happened, so I didn't see or hear anything to tell me where the problem might be. Not being sure if there was a short in the machine or a problem in the PSU, I disconnected the fans, FDD and HDD and, probably foolishly, I applied power again to see if the machine would work. At this point there was a bang and a flash in the PSU. I blogged this here (it repeats most of that I have said above): https://robs-old-computers.com/2022/11/20/dec-rainbow-h7842-power-supply-fai lure/ I have Rainbow PSUs H7842A, H78420 (which I suspect I may have misread! ...) and H7842D available. I can look tomorrow; if you can supply an overview picture and maybe circle the location of the offending parts that might help me identify them more quickly (always assuming that they are marked at all, of course). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
On 15/11/2022 23:22, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: My experience with a H7822 is that when all the diagnostic LEDs stay lit, DC OK is probably not getting asserted so the power supply might still not be working 100% correctly. In the H7822, DC OK seems to be the purple lead and high (something around 4V-5V) means asserted. Thanks, but sadly in this case it's not such a simple diagnosis. I had a spare 15 mins tonight so I powered it up and checked (DC OK is indeed the purple lead). DC OK is sitting at 5.13V so the problem lies elsewhere. I do have another H7822 in a MicroVAX 3100-80 (iirc, could be -40) and that one doesn't start either. I've done nothing with that one at all since it has a Dallas chip and so didn't need any remedial work. At some point I'll get back to these and spend some time trying to get them going. But I need to do some work on a Rainbow and some uV3600 PSUs first before I get back to working through uVAX/VS 3100 PSUs (I also have 5 H7821 PSUs there, so I expect that I'll be back ...). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
On 24/10/2022 21:07, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote: the bitsbox one may be a teensy bit to large but the ebay one should fit nicely. Neither is too expensive even with postage so I'll buy a few, given that I do have a fair few PSUs knocking around. Just a quick follow-up in case it helps someone else down the line. I've put the system back together and the H7822 PSU seems to work: with the mainboard connected the green LED lights (and the fans spin). So that's good. The mainboard stays in the reset state (all diagnostic LEDs lit) so that might still be an issue with the PSU DC OK signal or the mainboard itself. However, at this stage the PSU is behaving as expected. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Inline Serial Device?
On 12/11/2022 10:28, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: I thought it was well-known that nothing can be designed without at least one microcontroller. The other day I saw a product with a flashing LED, the flash rate was set with a knob. Yes, a microcontroller with a pot connected to an analogue input and LED hung off an output port. This is the sort of thing I'd do with a couple of transistors or an NE555 depending on which turned up in the junk box first. $deity I hate modern electronics. Surely a microcontroller is just a 555 with a few extra transistors? Another tool in the box, just that it happens to be very cheap. You should check out Usagi Electric on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nakazoto/videos, he's putting together a valve-based recreation of 1-bit processor (the MC14500B). He makes his own PCBs too :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
On 01/11/2022 23:10, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: I've taken the boards out of a whole bunch of H7821 and H7822 PSUs to replace the electrolytics without removing the fans. It was difficult at first but the more I did, the easier it got. I did come across one seized fan along the way but I haven't a replacement yet so I haven't got around to removing the bad one. I should look into it. I think I have a second H7822 and a pair of H7821 supplies to look at, so I may well end up getting some practice in! Did you have to replace the power LED at all? I've just bench-tested the PSU I've swapped the X2 cap in (luckily it powers up without a load, so all I did was hook up a DVM and check out the voltages), and I noticed that the LED didn't light. I'm pretty sure I connected it back (and it is keyed!) so I think I may be looking for a replacement. Something in the back of my mind says that there is something that makes the replacement slightly non-trivial (funny LED, odd housing it fits in, some trick to getting it out ... I can't remember unfortunately). BTW was it just the 1800uF 25V 105degC caps (mine are brown) that you had to replace? Mine look fine but there are some other large electrolytics in there (two large brown 470uF voltage unclear, and one large black cap by the mains input on which I cannot see any of the markings). Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
On 24/10/2022 21:07, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote: the bitsbox one may be a teensy bit to large but the ebay one should fit nicely. Neither is too expensive even with postage so I'll buy a few, given that I do have a fair few PSUs knocking around. Turns out both sets of X2 caps I bought were identical and they fit perfectly. As I was putting the PSU back together I thought I could hear something loose rattling inside. So I decided to dismantle it completely. I managed to get the bottom board out, with some fiddling, but it would be much easier if I could get the fans off. However, they seem to be held on with some fasteners that I've not seen before. On the inside they are some sort of trilobe fastener that seems to yield under any sort of pressure (so I stopped) and on the outside they have a small hole with three thin slots, but my tri-wing bits only seem to turn them in the "tighten" direction, almost as though the whole thing is supposed to be "fit and forget". I suppose if I had to get the fans out of the way I could destroy those fittings and replace with some suitable M bolts. I'm just wondering now whether I'm missing a trick for removing the fans? As I write this I realise that a photo or two wouldn't go amiss, so I'll try to take a few close ups tomorrow in daylight. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
On 23/10/2022 20:19, John H. Reinhardt via cctalk wrote: It looks like the RIFA caps I've removed from my DEC H7864 P/S. Though mine were colored more toward the amber you find dead flies fossilized in and had visible cracks in the case. The RIFA logo/name was on one side with other markings on the other side, on the top was only the X2 and the value. You might have to remove it just to be certain that it is a RIFA, but the top lettering and the overall look point in that direction. On 23/10/2022 22:18, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: It does look rather like the troublesome RIFA capacitors that come in transparent / slightly yellow cases. However, it seems to be lacking the usual tell tale cracks. You are both right: I desoldered it tonight and it is indeed a RIFA: https://photos.app.goo.gl/smYWrNeuFeo6Ragw7. I measured it as: 28mm W x 16mm D x 13mm H. There are a couple of matches so I'll probably buy a few from each of these: https://www.bitsboxuk.com/index.php?main_page=product_info=65_81_id=409 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/124149363651 the bitsbox one may be a teensy bit to large but the ebay one should fit nicely. Neither is too expensive even with postage so I'll buy a few, given that I do have a fair few PSUs knocking around. This is not a big deal compared to the six/ten 1800uF 25V electrolytics in H7821/H7822 power supplies. If these are not already leaking (look for a ring of brown goo around the base, sometimes only visible after unsoldering them), they are very likely to start leaking soon, even more likely if the power supply has not been stored in it's natural orientation. These can do a lot of damage to the power supply and anything else the goo gets on. I have four H7868-B modules (two per BA213) that don't work and two of them have leaking caps, and I mean *seriously* leaking!. This PSU though (the H7822-00) is currently OK: None of the caps show any sign of leaking or bulging. Given how easily the RIFA popped out, I might speculatively try removing one of the 1800uF ones just to see what it looks like underneath, and maybe measure its value too. Mouser wants £1.10 each (for 10+) and also charges £12 minimum shipping, digikey seems similar; eBay does have a UK seller doing 10 for £6, which might be a better option if I need to go that way. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Is this a RIFA (uV3100-10 PSU)?
I'm working on cleaning up a bit of battery leakage in a MicroVAX 3100 Model 10 and while it's apart I decided to look inside the PSU (an H7822-00). It's nice and clean inside with no bulging caps. What it does have is an X2 capacitor, as shown here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/dpdqJ3tuGfsRDR3Y6. It doesn't appear to be damaged and I can't see the word "RIFA" on it anywhere but I can't see two of the sides because of other components that get in the way. So does anyone know for sure whether it is a RIFA brand or not, or do I have to desolder it to be sure? Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: Soviet PDP clones
On 18/10/2022 14:18, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: I assume the story about the message is accurate (I heard it from a senior guy at DEC who should know) but that doesn't mean it was actually cloned. It seems to be an engineer reaction to hearing about their earlier work being stolen. paul Unless someone has gone to a good deal of trouble, then the story is true: https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html Given what has been done for the Z80 and 6502, it should be possible to recreate an exact clone of a CVAX with just a little effort (:-)). I wonder if anyone has considered a MiSTer core for it? Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
[cctalk] Re: DEC H7868 Power Supplies
On 29/08/2022 21:40, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: While cleaning up I found a box with 3 H7868 power supplies. Once upon a time I had a BA213 and BA215 Vax. One of them has a cable coming out the top of it and probably went to the BA213 box which had only one power supply. The other two are plain and likely are from a BA215 box. I assume they are not working and if you want one or all I will ship if you pay postage. I am located in Zip 20640, shipping out of the US seems not worth the trouble. It's worth noting that I think that the H7868-*A* is 115/120V and the H7868-*B* is 220/240V and they are not auto-ranging. So shipping outside the US (at least to the UK, but probably other places too) is not worth the trouble for another reason too. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: IBM PC Connecting to DECNET
On 03/06/2022 03:09, Rick Murphy via cctalk wrote: On 6/1/2022 12:49 AM, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote: No one ever called it a "Digital Ethernet Personal Computer Bus Adapter", just a DEPCA. I never previously knew that there was any meaning behind the DEPCA name. Yes, that's what it meant. "DELNI" - Digital Ethernet Local Network Interface. "DESTA" - Digital Ethernet Station Termination Adapter. DELQA - Digital Ethernet Local Q-Bus Adapter (this one probably means something else. Working?). DEMPR - Multi Port Repeater. DEREP - Repeater. And so forth. Yeah, nobody spelled it out, but those DExxx names usually meant what the device was. DEBNT, DEUNA, DEQNA. Same naming convention. I'm probably missing several. -Rick The DEPCA manual (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/ethernet/depca/EK-DEPCA-PR-001_Apr89.pdf) says "DIGITAL Ethernet Personal Computer Adapter", without "Bus". DELQA was "DIGITAL Ethernet Local-Area-Network to Q-bus Adapter" according to its user guide. It's predecessor, the DEQNA, was "Digital ETHERNET Q-Bus Network Adapter", according to its user guide, or "broken", according to most people :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: HP9825 internal ROM?
On 04/05/2022 21:40, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Question for the group: I'm working on a HP9825B here. First thing I did was take it apart, clean it, unplug all the power connections to the board and test the power supply. Supply is good (values below) so after checking the boards I put it together and powered it on. Note: I can see the lack of a crowbar circuit on the +5 line and would be happy to install a crowbar circuit. Does anyone have a spare PCB board as otherwise I'd need to order at least three of them to build one. Voltages are still good, however I get nothing on the display. The CAPS LOCK does light up the caps lock light and it's cleared by pressing Shift but that's about it. Question: Is there supposed to be a ROM board or cartridge inside the unit by default? This one does not have one (the space between the front of the CPU board and the 4 card edges on the front). Perhaps that's the problem. If so is it possible to build a board that can contain a more modern ROM with the system code on it? CuriousMarc did a crowbar on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIfJ30fPAOw. The circuit is available on his website: https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-9825-scientific-computer#h.xrov16yr03br The whole series was fun to watch (even though I don't have an HP9825) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Advice on Desoldering an IC
On 15/04/2022 18:49, Rob Jarratt via cctalk wrote: I am using a fairly cheap desoldering station (this one https://cpc.farnell.com/duratool/d00672/desoldering-station-uk-eu-plug/dp/SD 01384?st=duratool%20desoldering). Its spec in terms of vacuum pressure is equivalent to that of the professional Hakko ones though. I am also trying a hand desoldering pump. None of these are able to clear many of the holes of solder, although some are doing better than others. Nevertheless, the IC remains stubbornly unmoving. I have that one too and I've found it to be reasonably good (compared to a manual pump - I've never had access to an expensive desoldering station.). I've not tried it on anything Qbus related, only relatively modern motherboards and the like, but it has been quite good at getting the solder out. Sometimes I need to wiggle the end of the pins to break contact with the via. Removing a 20-pin IC can take a good 15 minutes but when the IC legs don't stick then it can be very quick. I have sometimes resorted to using a hot air gun with the fine nozzle to warm things up first and then use the Duratool. When I first got the desolder gun I played around with scrap motherboards to get the hang of it. There are a fair few YT videos about that Duratool (it seems to be a variant of the ZD-915) and there are various modifications that people have made. Those videos often have examples of it in action along with hints and tips that people have found useful. As usual, take with a hefty grain of salt. (The ones that modify the tool to try and increase the vacuum pressure seem particularly sketchy ... YMMV). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: AlphaServer 2100s available
On 14/04/2022 22:36, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote: (OFFLIST, I think) I will learn to get this right eventually :-) -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: AlphaServer 2100s available
On 12/04/2022 16:34, Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk wrote: Folks, Does no one fancy a go at this. Had zero interest... Dave (OFFLIST, I think) I'm assuming the machine is safe, at least for the moment? I've actually got less room now than when I had to let it go, so hopefully it can just sit in a corner and be a useful table end or something for a while? I'm currently struggling with a uVAX 3600 PSu and a VAX 4000 PSU, so if I ever fix those, maybe I can help with the AS2100 ... Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Quantum ATL-7100 DLT Changer in SLC
On 09/04/2022 16:58, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: You wouldn’t be able to put TK-70 drives in this, wrong interface. I don’t know if DEC DLT drives capable of reading TK50’s and TK70’s will work in one. I have two TZ877 units, each of which contains a TZ87, and those will read TK50 and TK70 tapes. Whether a TZ87 will work in this drive or not, I don't know. The internal interface board in the TZ877 presents a SCSI interface to the outside world. I realise no-one is going to put a TZ-anything inside a Quantum tape library, but just in case ... Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: PDP 11/24 - A Step Backwards
On 28/03/2022 04:57, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: Very little of the stuff I've bought new has had such seals (with some things, like my audio equipment, you are _expected_ to remove the covers, the user manuals tell you how. They also include the full schematics). Ditto test gear (if there is a seal it voids the calibration only), computer stuff, etc. I don't think DEC ever put such seals on their machines when new. Certainly not on things like power supplies,] -tony The RZ28 I have right here has the usual "Warranty Void If Broken" seal on the side. In this case the PSU was recently sent off for repair: I'm not surprised it came back with a similar sticker. They're not trying to stop you looking inside, they're trying not to have to fix it again for free after you've fiddled. What surprises me (a little) is that there is a commercial outfit willing to work on something so old. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Installing an operating system on an 11/83
On 22/02/2022 14:19, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: That didn't stop me being massively nervy installing a VMS v5.0 upgrade from RX50s to a customer's VAX 11/50... I think it was the first one that I'd done so no pressure. I remember doing the V5 upgrade on a VAX-11/750 but via tape. You still needed to boot from TU58, which seemed to take roughly forever. I imagine it was possible to hook up RX50s to a VAX-11/750 but I never saw one configured that way. Why not use tape :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Installing an operating system on an 11/83
On 22/02/2022 03:27, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Are RX50 drives less robust than what was used to install Windoze 95? I never installed it this way myself, but MicroVMS on the MicroVAX II was distributed on RX50 floppies: lost of them. Of course, that was then and the floppy drives were younger and less temperamental (and perhaps the same could be said about the people feeding the drives floppies ...) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX9000 unearthed
On 18/02/2022 17:16, Lee Courtney via cctalk wrote: Paul, What was the timeframe for the MPP? Lee The earliest DECmpp reference I can find is from 1991: https://eisner.decus.org/anon/htnotes/note?f1=INDUSTRY_NEWS=551.1 You can peruse the service manual here: http://manx-docs.org/collections/mds-199909/cd2/decmpp/decacsmc.pdf There are other docs that you can most easily find by searching for "DECmpp" on manx. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX9000 unearthed
On 18/02/2022 20:35, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: There also was an effort at one point to adopt FutureBus in DEC systems. We did a pile of design in the network architecture group to figure out how to handle interrupts and bus cycles efficiently; I don't remember if anything actually shipped with that stuff. paul The DEC 4000 systems (COBRA and the follow-on upgrade, FANG) use FB as an I/O bus. DECnis also used FB as its backplane. They couldn't share cards though. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Origin of "partition" in storage devices
On 01/02/2022 16:17, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote: Covering more distance in the same time means increased speed to me! Not if you stretch the bits, as older drives did. You are still covering more linear distance per unit time but the magnetic data is smeared out just enough to counteract this. This is the disk equivalent of the Lorentz contraction. :-) So the relative speed of your head over the platter is faster but the observable effect (data transfer rate) is the same as it is on the inner tracks. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Women of Computing
On Sat, Dec 4, 2021 at 10:20 AM Chris Long via cctalk wrote: Great.not. Why do we need woke Lego? Excellent use of compression on the list: a question that contains its own answer :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation
On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: Is there an archive.org mirror? How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I know that 10 years from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it would be hard. That's 8 years of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that none of us has an archive.org mirror. What about Wikipedia? There's Infogalactic, but that's a fork, not a mirror. You can download a copy of Wikipedia and set up a local copy - it's probably bigger now but when I tried it, it was about 3GB. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 8:34 PM Steve Malikoff via cctalk Michael asked What are we, as a community, to do to fix this and make sure that our history stays peserved and isn't one bad day away from vanishing. Whenever some new vintage computing page appears I go to archive.org and submit the URL to them for the wayback machine. Often they've crawled it already, but not always so I think it does help. One of the DtCyber pages was archived, but when you drill down to the sources, those pages are not there. So you have to watch out for missing bits when you archive a website. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: DEQNA cab kit wiring
On 03/11/2021 16:15, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote: Thanks for the outstandingly-quick response! I had already buttoned up the cab and put it aside for another day. Thanks also for the link to a site I did not know about, I'll bookmark it for later browsing. Soldering iron on! The DEQNA cable details are (I think) here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/qbus/MP01811_CKDEQNA_Qbus_Ethernet_Cable.pdf The DELQA may well be subtly different. I think I have a DELQA cab kit left and maybe I can take a photo tomorrow. I'll look for a DEQNA one too, but they may all be long gone now. (I also looked at the DEQNA UG but I couldn't find wiring details in there ... but it was a very quick look). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Sun-2 and Sun-3 mice (eBay)
On 26/10/2021 07:43, r.stricklin via cctech wrote Hadn't realized before that there were Sun-2 mice which weren't black (were white/beige). I know some folks are looking. "Unable to test. Some yellowing" That needs some serious cleaning ... although that would then expose even more yellowing :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: MD5 list of bitsavers files
On 01/10/2021 08:36, Paul Flo Williams wrote: https://vt100.net/manx/assets/2021-10-01-bitsavers-dec.md5 Paul Thanks for that. It turns out that some of the bitsavers files have changed since I picked them up (perhaps to add OCR of similar). (I also got further data from Richard via email, which showed the same issue). So I've had to do some other surgery to hone down the list of files. The total number of files that seem to be unique and unpublished is just under 2000. About 950 of those are original PDFs of manuals/specs/whatever (not scans) that I picked up while working at DEC. The rest either I've scanned, or I've found lying around on the internet somewhere. That's rather a large amount to dump on Al without providing some metadata. I think for most of them I can dig up a title. So I could provide an index file to link the filepath and title, something like: 0002/MANUALS/EK/XMIADHB.PDF: "XMI Adapters Handbook" Would that help, or is there more that I might be able to provide? Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
MD5 list of bitsavers files
I'm trying to list out the document scans I have and work out which are already on bitsavers and which are not (and, indeed, a fair few of these are originally from bitsavers anyway). This is probably several thousand files total, so searching manx by hand is not an option! I see that manx lists the MD5 checksum for many files, at least it does for those from bitsavers. Is there a publicly available list of URL and MD5 checksum? This would make it relatively easy for me to cross check my files against the list and whittle down to a subset that I should make available. Alternatively, is the current manx database available anywhere? I know the code is on github, but I didn't see the data there. (I do have an SQL dump from 2010 when manx changed hands, but that's not recent enough to save much). I could try to do some parsing of bitsavers-filename => DEC-part-number and eliminate files that way, but that seems inexact at best. Or I could just download the DEC subset of files (spread across the mirrors) but that seems a bit antisocial. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Setting up a VMS system
On 22/09/2021 17:05, Zane Healy wrote: Interesting, I have 3 34GB drives in my cluster, and haven’t had any issue. I think I was running OpenVMS VAX V7.2 on SIMH. IIRC it was fixed in V7.3 (someone sent me the DECUS Hobbyist V7.3 release and that was OK). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Setting up a VMS system
On 22/09/2021 13:21, Philip Pemberton via cctalk wrote: Hopefully a few of the DEC/VMS fans here might be able to help! I'm on a bit of a quest. I've been given some old VAX/VMS software -- a cross compiler and some source code -- that I'd like to get running. My goal is to get the source code building and experiment with the compiler a bit. Problem is that I've never used VMS before, and don't have a clue how to install or use it. One of the other replies supplies a "how to install from scratch in SIMH" link, so that would be a good starting point. Might be faster to install on a speedy machine though (I've never tried on any Pi but I doubt that any of them will match a Ryzen ...) Can any point me to an idiot's guide to VMS, how to set it up and make it possible to send files to it from my Linux box? The easiest way to transfer that I can think of would be to set up TCP/IP on OpenVMS and then just FTP (or NFS if you you set that up). There is (or at least, was) a version of SAMBA for OpenVMS, so that's another way if you like Windows. I'm thinking of using SIMH, unless there's a better emulator available. SIMH works really well. Well enough that if you give OpenVMS (VAX) a sufficiently large disk (30GB should do), it will crash when trying to mount it :-) I'm still waiting on a reply from HP with a hobbyist licence PAK (I've filled out the form), but I figure I can get started on the learning while I wait. You'll be a wizard before you stop waiting. Hobbyist PAKs are no longer available. I forget whether the existing PAKs run out at the end of 2021 or 2022. VSI are not allowed to issue PAKs for VAX (I'm not sure whether they simply cannot do it or are not allowed to do it, but either way, they won't). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Burnable, patched Microvax-2000 SCSI-boot EPROM images?
On 21/09/2021 18:38, Jonathan Stone via cctalk wrote: (At least for Qbus. At eBay prices, even RQDX3 plus distribution panel plus emulator, is cheaper than bootable SCSI controller plus SCSI emulator). SCSI performance will still be better. My recollection is that the MicroVAX 2000 SCSI isn't complete and was only intended for the tape unit. Whether its performance beats an RD54 will be interesting to see. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Anyone Have the H9642 Enclosure Maintenance Manual EK-187AA-MG
On 04/09/2021 14:26, Rob Jarratt via cctalk wrote: I have looked on Manx and on Bitsavers and I don't see it there. Do you need the H9642 specifically or is it just the embedded MicroVAX 3600 that you want to know about? If so then EK-189AA-MG-001 will possibly do. It's really for the BA213 but does mention the H9644. Except that's not quite what you want, I misremembered the number. The appendix does list the manual you want, so I presume it must be mentioned somewhere, just I didn't see it. There are a bunch of enclosure manuals on Tim Shoppa's site: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/scandocs.trailing-edge.com/ (they've presumably moved at some point as Manx currently points to the wrong place). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX4000 VLC diagnostics/console
On 04/09/2021 02:42, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote: On 7/14/2021 12:32 PM, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: VT100 to the rescue, the VLC is fine talking to it so now I'm wondering why my old faithful hardware UART in this PC I'm typing on now has let me down. The BlueSCSI appears as 7 devices though, which is usually a termination or ID problem so I now need to dig out an external terminator for the box since it's never had one. The hard drive in there has been good at providing its own TERMPWR which the BlueSCSI should too but I'll play by the rules to test things properly. Cheers, I think BlueSCSI will only appear as the devices you have image files named for on its SD card. JRJ "Digital Diggings" couldn't get BlueSCSI to work on either VAX or Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFEh7owqHxU=36s. That's a pity as it's much cheaper than SCSI2SD. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
On 02/09/2021 20:51, Paul Flo Williams via cctalk wrote: With apologies for breaking the threading, as I've just rejoined and I'm responding to something I've just spotted in the archive ... Welcome back! I haven't finished writing this up, but my workflow tends to be to produce a Group4 TIFF from the colour scan by simple thresholding (or first dropping the other colours to white, if they are quite dark), and then produce all the other separations by dropping black out, converting your spot colour to black and then thresholding. This way you get two or more images: 1) PNG(s) containing pixels that are all either white or your spot colour, 2) a G4 TIFF for the black and white layer. As I'm in the process of scanning manuals right now, and I'd like to preserve the colour, I'm looking forward to the write up. The ones I'm working on right now are mostly RSX-11 or VMS V4 and earlier, so they tend to highlight typed input by presenting that text in red. They also have blocks of grey as background on which text is printed (this looks OK even with a bilevel TIFF) and also blocks of red/pink as background for black text (and maybe red text too). I'm sure there's at least one manual that has blue text thrown into the mix too. I've just scanned another document with some blue diagrams and table backgrounds, if you'd like to see an example: https://vt100.net/dec/ek-0la75-ug-002.pdf That looks really good. It copes very well with black text on blue background, so I imagine it would work well for the black text on red/pink shading case. What's the input to the process? G4 bilevel TIFF @ 600 dpi from the looks of your example, but how do you scan the colour pages? 600dpi to PNG? Or something else? Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
On 28/08/2021 12:44, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote: I always fail to understand this ... With prices for hard drives like they are, and comparing to the amount of work, it really is to scan a manual, I would recommend to scan with the best resolution you have, and have those files as you "original scans" Than, you apply whatever tricks you have in your bin, to "publish" those scans. Well the scanner claims 4800 dpi optical, so that's 1.6GiB per page. (Actually the scanner claims 4800 x 9600 dpi optical but I can't see how to ask it to do that). So there's a question of what's practical. I only have about 4Tib of free space, so that's 2500 colour pages at most. It's also incredibly inefficient: that same information, if it had been born digital, would take 100kB per page or so. I've not tried opening a 100GiB document lately but I assume that any PDF reader will some issues. Probably, one day there will be a nice tool, to do whatever you expected, and you have the scan already on your drive, and the original manual is digitized and preserved already. Neatly solved in the document's future (but our past and present) by having documents that are born digital. That just leaves a few hundred years of printed matter to deal with. Luckily noteshrink seems to do a good job. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
On 28/08/2021 09:21, æstrid smith via cctalk wrote: i've achieved satisfactory results paletteizing scans of low-color-depth material using a tool called 'noteshrink': https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html Well as a guide the 66 page AA-CJ39A-TE (VAX-11 RSX Installation Guide and Release Notes) is 8.8MB. That's with the front and rear cover scanned as 300 dpi JPG and also 12 colour pages as 300 dpi JPG. Each of the 600dpi PNG pages comes out at 26MB. I tried optipng first. Even "-o 7" (which I ran overnight but I forgot to time ...) only dropped a page down to 19MB. So completely impractical for even this small number of pages. Noteshrink (which I've seen before but never bothered to try!) knocked a 26MB PNG down to 700kB. The only issue is that the red looks quite a bit more brown than it should. I'll look into it a bit more as it looks good. Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
On 27/08/2021 22:10, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: On 8/27/21 2:05 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: For material such as the RSX manuals you mentioned, the tool needed is a compression algorithm that handles color with hard edges faithfully. Basically that means a lossless compression scheme. That should be fine, since pages like that should compress very well, at least if the scan has been touched up just a bit to make the page background reasonably pure white. Ethan worked on a filter a long time ago for DEC manuals. J David Bryan's work was mentioned recently. I did see it, but it didn't look like a cookie-cutter recipe. I'd be happy to be proved wrong though. What I don't want to have to do is manually process each page (beyond having to decide which to scan in colour). I would be looking for an algorithm or process that I can just point at scanner data for a page and have it spit out the optimised PDF page. I'm sure that will appear at some stage, but I don't think it exists yet. The RSX-11M/M-PLUS Error Logging Manual, for example, has somewhere between 20 and 50 pages with colour present. I can pick those out and re-scan them and I can relatively easily merge those pages with the original B scan, but if I have to manually examine each page, I'll never make it to whatever manual is in my list after that one :-) It is trivial to add page bookmarks with Eric Smith's tumble with the -b %F option Thanks, I'll look into tumble. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
On 27/08/2021 22:05, Paul Koning wrote: JPG is the wrong tool for pages with color text or color line art. As I've mentioned before, JPG is fit ONLY for photos, not for any image with hard edges. Text compressed with JPG will suffer badly. Yes, true. I thought that for colour, all I could get was JPEG. It certainly seems to be the case that the HP PhotoSmart I have scans everything as JPEG 300 dpi when you use the front panel to scan to a memory stick. Post processing wouldn't make that any better, which is why I thought I was stuck with JPEG. It turns out though that if you drive it with a computer then you also get the choice of TIFF or PNG as additional choices. TIFF is likely to be quite a bit too big. I'll try PNG and see how big the files it generates are. I've no idea what the default compression is straight out of the software but as long as it's lossless I can hopefully post-process to squeeze things down if possible. If this turns out to work without ballooning file sizes, then I can just not bother preserving the B pages, as lossless colour PNG should OCR as well as B (I would think). I have a few pages in the scanner now at 600dpi PNG so I'll soon know how that compares to JPG or B Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Scanning Suggestions (Bookmarks & Colour)
I have a few manuals to scan and I'm looking for suggestions, about how to add bookmarks and how to handle colour. Bookmarks should be easier, so lets start with that. I want to add bookmarks (or whatever they are called) so that it is easy to navigate to page "2-48" or "C-17" in a document. Many of the PDFs on bitsavers have that and I've found it very useful so I'd like to do that for my future scans. I've tried with pdftk (the Java port as the original is no longer available on my distro) but that failed. So I tried GhostScript and that also failed, while also rewriting the PDF to be considerably larger. Is there simple way to achieve this (ideally from the CLI)? Now for the scanning itself. For manuals that are simple monochrome, I plan to scan at 600dpi bilevel G4 encoded, wrapped in PDF. For photographs or shaded areas that don't necessarily come out well under those settings, I plan to use 8-bit greyscale. I'd prefer to use 600dpi but I may have to fall back to 300dpi if the per-page fiile size shoots up too much. The real issue is colour. I know that various people have looked at the issue of how to efficiently scan pages that are mostly black and white but have some coloured text (RSX-11 manuals and early VMS manuals did this to highlight terminal input, for example). I don't think this is a solved problem and I'm not expecting a solution, what I'm really looking for is to check that what I'm about to produce will have all the information that a future efficient algorithm is likely to need. I'm going to start by scanning the whole manual as though it had no colour (so 600 dpi bilevel G4 encoded, except for pages with photos and shading and so on). Then I'm going to go back and rescan the pages that have colour and scan those at 600 dpi and save as a JPG. Then I'll produce a final PDF with the colour pages inserted. I'll also produce a PDF with the B pages that were replaced by colour pages (I assume OCR will be better served by non-jaggy scans). So the final outputs will be: manual.pdf - the whole manual, including whole pages scanned as colour if any colour is present on them manual_BW.pdf - the G4-encoded bilevel pages that were replaced by colour pages Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Extremely CISC instructions
On 26/08/2021 04:41, Tony Duell via cctalk wrote: And yes there were CRTs set up at the factory for the northern and southern hemispheres. I remember Bang and Olufsen made a TV where the CRT was effectively mounted upside-down (so that the EHT connector was far enough from the cabinet to meet safety requirements) and the CRT had to be the one for the 'wrong' hemisphere as a result. DEC too had different part numbers for various monitors for different hemispheres. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Ultrix-11
On 17/08/2021 19:39, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: I thought V7M and Ultrix were entirely diferent and unrelated things. At least on the Pro, DEC released a betal version of the one (which I tried when it came out) and then canceled it and replaced it by a release of the other. I forgot which came first, other than that the beta was really clunky. As in, a "vi" that didn't do real screen updates... paul http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/ultrix-11/2.0/AA-X342B-TC_ULTRIX-11_SoftwTechDescr_1984.pdf says on p1-1 that "ULTRIX-11 V2.0 software is the second version of DIGITAL's 16-bit UNIX product. The first version was V7M-11 V1.0 software." Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
H7868 Power Supply Schematics
I have a non-functioning H7868 PSU. This is one of the two PSUs used in a BA214 chassis (and probably elsewhere). This one seems to be dead: the green LED doesn't come on at all, there is no sign of life and no +5V appears on the BA214 Qbus. (I did use a load board when testing, so that's not the issue). Does anyone have a set of schematics? I did try poking around in the various MicroVAX 3600/3800 schematics that I could find on bitsavers but nothing obvious leapt out at me. Of course, I could easily have missed something. Alternatively, does anyone have any experience of working on these PSUs? Any pointers for common failure modes would be helpful. Thanks Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX4000 VLC diagnostics/console
On 14/07/2021 18:32, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: VT100 to the rescue, the VLC is fine talking to it so now I'm wondering why my old faithful hardware UART in this PC I'm typing on now has let me down. Given the possible issues (dead VLC line drivers, iffy cable, iffy PC UART) you've probably bee lucky (although maybe DECconnect cables aren't too tricky to make up these days). Funnily enough I have a very similar issue on my MicroVAX 3600: the CPU bulkhead LED cycles through the right stuff but nothing appears on the VT420. Take the lead out of the uV3600 and plug it in to the VS400-60 and it's fine. The leaky battery on the console bulkhead probably didn't help :-( At least you don't have *that* issue on the VLC! It would be nice to know if Bluepill works on the VS4000 range: I wonder if my VS4000-90 would then become silent enough to run more often! Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX4000 VLC diagnostics/console
On 13/07/2021 22:34, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: On 7/13/2021 3:30 PM, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: Hi folks, Powering up with nothing attached apart from an MMJ/H8571 cable I get nothing on the console, I'm using PuTTY via a genuine COM1 port on a PC which is one level above what I used last time I powered the machine up (FTDI USB adapter to a laptop). Diagnostic LEDs cycle through the tests and end up at ' 0011' which according to the manual is 'entering the console program'. There are 2 ways to have a console on the VAX4000/VLC. A switch on the back selects either; (1) graphics console mode, or (2) terminal attached to the serial port. It sounds like you have the switch set to graphics console mode, in that case you get nothing from the serial port. I can't remember where the switch is on the back, bitsavers or someone who remembers can help. Doug If you look from the front it's on the right hand side and marked "S3", between the grey reset switch and the keyboard connector. I think that S3 needs to be UP otherwise it would expect a monitor and keyboard to be attached. The MMJ connector is on the back (but obviously Adrian has found that ... or he's pushed really, really hard into either the keyboard connector or the phone connector :-)) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAX4000 VLC diagnostics/console
On 13/07/2021 20:30, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: Clearly the DALLAS has passed the TOY tests, but if it's not happy would that stop the console displaying? It doesn't matter how I set S3, next step I guess is to hook it up to a 'proper' VT. My VS4000-60 has a DALLAS chip that is either dead or not working very well: it will not remember settings at all. It boots fine using a VT420 and it also boots fine with a monitor/keyboard connected. Do you get *any* output on the console at all? The easiest thing to try would be a known good VT terminal, then you don't have to worry about the H8571-? being the correct "-?" for your config (ISTR that there are a number of variants, each subtly different). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: First new vax in ...30 years? :-)
On 05/07/2021 21:48, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: On 7/4/21 1:52 PM, David Brownlee via cctalk wrote: In case anyone was interested in an FPGA VAX implementation http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2021/07/03/msg003899.html And/or thoughts on 64bit/FP & multiprocessor enhancements :-p http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2021/07/03/msg003903.html WOW,very impressive! Indeed. If only someone could get him a copy of DEC's AXE suite so he can test it properly. Anyone have that available? Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VT100 colors
On 22/06/2021 08:16, Matt Burke via cctalk wrote: The VT640 had a green phosphor. This was a 3rd party upgrade for the VT100 from Digital Engineering which gives the VT100 graphical capabilities. Part of the upgrade involved changing the picture tube. I suspect this was to reduce flicker as the phosphor has a high persistence. Here is an original advert for the upgrade: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rO0QAcSJpQUC=PA27 Matt The ones I used had a VT640 (although the only used for the graphics side that I remember was a labyrinth game and some ALGOL code I wrote to plot some coursework). I would never have guessed that the tube got changed as part of the process, but it looks like you probably bought the modified VT100 from Digital Engineering rather than installing a kit yourself. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VT100 colors
On 21/06/2021 17:10, Antonio Carlini wrote: On 21/06/2021 15:39, Paul Koning wrote: You're thinking of the VT200, which came in three colors, although at DEC fortunately they never inflicted green on us :-). But all the earlier DEC video terminals (VT05, VT50/52/61t/62, VT20, VT71) were white. The only exception I can think of is the GT40, probably because that one benefits from having fairly long persistence which was available in green phosphor but not in white. The User Guide doesn't say and I don't have an IPB I can find. I do remember the VT100s in the computer room at Uni being green and the VT52 clones (Dataram?) being white. But that's a while ago so maybe my wetware is wrong. If and when I can get to where I think my VT100 is I can look at powering it up. Powering it up may take much longer than getting to it though :-) My VT220 is (or was, it's been a while ...) green phosphor and my VT420 is amber ... I like both. I found the IPB on bitsavers and that lists the P4 phosphor and a later CRT with the P40 phosphor. I think both of those are white. I did find one seemingly untouched image of a VT100 with green text: https://vistapointe.net/cliparts/getsecond. That does appear to be a VT100 (not a VT102/VT103 etc) and is green. I did find many more white phosphor pictures than green (and no amber at all). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VT100 colors
On 21/06/2021 15:39, Paul Koning wrote: You're thinking of the VT200, which came in three colors, although at DEC fortunately they never inflicted green on us :-). But all the earlier DEC video terminals (VT05, VT50/52/61t/62, VT20, VT71) were white. The only exception I can think of is the GT40, probably because that one benefits from having fairly long persistence which was available in green phosphor but not in white. The User Guide doesn't say and I don't have an IPB I can find. I do remember the VT100s in the computer room at Uni being green and the VT52 clones (Dataram?) being white. But that's a while ago so maybe my wetware is wrong. If and when I can get to where I think my VT100 is I can look at powering it up. Powering it up may take much longer than getting to it though :-) My VT220 is (or was, it's been a while ...) green phosphor and my VT420 is amber ... I like both. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VT100 colors
On 21/06/2021 07:51, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: I want to say that it’s white. Though I can’t get to mine right now. Zane Sent from my iPod On Jun 20, 2021, at 10:50 PM, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk wrote: Hello, Does anyone know what colors a VT100 is? Most photos online has it looking yellowish, but I expect that's from aging. Some people I have asked claim it was a light cream color. This bitsavers picture has it looking neutral grey: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/vt100/vt100_wps-8.jpg And the black parts are claimed to be dark brown. I haven't found any color codes in the manuals. I can't get t mine either but I think they were originally light cream, but not bright white. I suspect that most photos have it as yellowish because that's what they are now :-) The black bits I remember as black. I remember the tube colour being green, I think I remember seeing amber and I believe that white was an available option. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAXstation 4000/vlc mouse issue
On 01/06/2021 17:41, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: It would be interesting to attach a UART to the comm link (4800 bps, RS-232 signal levels) and capture what happens. It's quite strange to see a system failure caused by pressing a button. I suppose it could be a bug in the system software mishandling a protocol error on the mouse to system link. Or perhaps the mouse embedded controller has failed so that pressing the button in question crashes the controller and makes it stop talking to the host. In that case you'd think that unplugging and replugging the mouse would cure the issue, though. Years ago I had a VSXXX-AA mouse that stopped a VS3100-76 from powering up. Removed the mouse and it was fine. Tried another mouse and it was fine. I recently re-tested my DEC mice and none exhibited that behaviour, so I've no idea where that one has ended up. I couldn't remember whether you could hot-swap mice or keyboards (I *think* you could, but I wasn't *sure*) so I tested the slow way, with reboots and power-cycles (and a long gap to give the VS4000-60 a breather in between!) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Writings on AI from 17 years ago....
On 31/05/2021 23:55, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Sure, Library of Alexadria, lots of examples through history. Oddly enough people like to find this stuff, centralize it somewhere, then burn it to the ground. Go figure. And make sure all of your stuff is backed up all over the place, it's amazing how it can all wind up on one guy's FTP server that vanishes True. I was looking for a document [1] from www.miim.com just the other day. I know it used to be available because I had previously saved a few other docs from there, just not this one. But it's gone and archive.org won't serve it up (I did find the site owner's account of his battle with archive.org to sto pserving copies of his stuff ... ironically on another archive site!) [1] The RSX FAQ, in case anyone else was more diligent than I was! Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: RSTS/E version numbers
On 31/05/2021 15:04, Paul Koning wrote: The earlier rule was that the first number is the major version, the letter is the minor version. As of V7 it changed to major number dot minor number. In either case, the dash number suffix is the baselevel number (development build cycle number). Those typically restart at 0 or 1 for each release, so V5C-01 indicates only one baselevel was done for that minor release. That may not be true in all cases; I doubt that V4B had 17 baselevels so that number probably wasn't reset between V4A and V4B. Looking at them I guess RT-11 does something similar: V2, V02B, V02C. I can (just about :-)) cope with the seemingly optional leading 0, but would there have been a V2A? There was for IAS. Actually IAS had V3, V3.1, V3.2, V3.2A, V3.2B and V3.2C. So IAS went major.minor in a sort of half-hearted way :-) Sometimes version numbers seem to be missing. I don't know if anyone ever saw V1, and I also never saw V3B though I have seen V3A and V3C. The "80th Birthday Memo" (http://www.silverware.co.uk/rsts_80th_birthday.htm) says that V1 never made it out of the door. V2A-19 was the first to ship. The "DEC 1957 to he Present" book (http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/digital/dec%201957%20to%20present%201978.pdf) confirms the FY in which RSTS-11 shipped but not the version number. The earliest manuals online seem to be the V4.x ones available on bitsavers. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
RSTS/E version numbers
Can someone explain RSTS/E version numbers to me? They seem to be all over the place: V2A-19, V4A-12, V4B-17, V5A-21, V5B-24, V5C-01, V6A-02, V6B-02, V6C-03. Then it seems to have switched scheme but the "-number" suffix reappears: V7.0, V7.2, V8.0-06. Any clarification would be helpful. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: MicroVAX 3300/3400
On 25/05/2021 18:53, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: I’m still not 100% sure if this is a 3300 or a 3400. It’s in a BA400X chassis, and after looking at the manuals last night, it seems like it’s closer to the 3400. My familarity with Q-Bus MicroVAXen is limited to MicroVAX/VAXstation II’s, and a MicroVAX 3. After getting a power cable (the only one at PCH Cables was a 3’ one, and I didn’t want to wait for more to come in), it powered right up, but is failing 4 tests. I quickly learned last night that “TEST 9E” prints all the tests out to screen. This effort is making me wish I had a DEC LA50 plugged into the terminal. :-) It starts counting down diagnostics at “41”. 27.. ?57 2 17 FF 00 22.. ?C2 2 01 FF 00 0001 07.. ?5C 2 01 FF 00 0002 06.. ?5D 2 0B FF 00 0003 57 = SI_memory incr test_matter * C2 = SSC RAM ALL* 5C = SII_initiator ** 5D = SII target *** I think this is indicating issues with the DSSI interface. The system has two RF73 DSSI drives, which sound like they spin up. It also has a TK70 tape drive. It says it has 4MB and 16MB RAM, all good. One odd thing is that the KA640-A seems to plug into another board, before the DSSI drives. I’m getting ready to dig into that, and find out what that board is. Zane SII is the built-in DSSI interface. Is it terminated properly? SSC is (iirc) the System Support Chip ... that may be more serious. FWIW I think the distinction between the 3300/3400 is the size of the box: the innards are the same. (So same as the 3500/3600 and 3800/3900 and the uV3100-30/40 etc.). Both the uV3300 and the uV3400 use the KA640 board. If you plug KA640 into manx you'll find two useful manuals online. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Mounting ULTRIX CDROMs on Linux
On 20/05/2021 21:11, John-Paul Stewart via cctalk wrote: Setting ufstype=sun will indeed work for loopback mounting Ultrix CD images. With physical CDs, the Linux CD-ROM driver expects the filesystem to use 2048 byte blocks but the UFS CDs have 512 byte blocks. So you'll also have to add "loop" to the options: sudo mount -t ufs -o ro,ufstype=sun,loop /dev/sr1 /tmp/mount That will mount the physical CD using a loopback device so you can access the 512 byte per block filesystem. (FWIW, I learned that trick with IRIX EFS CDs, which have the same problem.) We have a winner: $ ls /tmp/mount/decw_book/ bookbrowser d3b0aa70.decw_book d3knaa23.decw_book d3s1aa97.decw_book d5e5aaa8.decw_book dh87zaa1.decw_bookshelf dt59aaa8.decw_book BRM410 d3b0aa71.decw_book d3knaa24.decw_book d3s1aaa1.decw_book d5e5aaa9.decw_book dhqdaa11.decw_book dt59aaa9.decw_book BRV410 d3b0aa72.decw_book d3knaa25.decw_book d3s1aaa2.decw_book d5e5zaa2.decw_bookshelf dhu3aaa3.decw_book dt59zaa1.decw_bookshelf d296aaa1.decw_book d3b0aa73.decw_book d3knaa26.decw_book d3s1aaa3.decw_book d8dlaaa1.decw_book dhu3aaa4.decw_book dt59zaa2.decw_bookshelf d296aaa2.decw_book d3b0aaa1.decw_book d3knaa27.decw_book d3s1aaa4.decw_book d8dlaaa6.decw_book dhu3zaa2.decw_bookshelf dt59zaa3.decw_bookshelf ... Great, thanks for that. I would probably have never guessed that I needed loop. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Mounting ULTRIX CDROMs on Linux
I'm running Linux Mint (an ubuntu derivative) and I want to mount ULTRIX CDROM discs to see what I can see. (I'm eventually going to image these, but I presume that will "just work" with dd or ddrescue). They are supposed to be UFS format (according to the net) and that usually means you have to tell mount exactly which option to use (as not all UFS implementations are compatible). I've tried (all the options I can find) and failed: $ sudo mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/sr1 /tmp/mount mount: /tmp/mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. The CDROM would appear to be readable 9and I've tried a few anyway): $ sudo file -s /dev/sr1 /dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on /UPS_MOUNT_TAR_SOURCE, last written at Wed Sep 28 16:27:45 1994, clean flag 30, number of blocks 243648, number of data blocks 233295, number of cylinder groups 38, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum percentage of free blocks 10, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational speed 60rps, TIME optimization A later Digital Unix CDROM behaves the same way with mount and reports this with file: $ sudo file -s /dev/sr1 /dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on /kits/tmp/gendisk17665/mnt, last written at Wed Nov 20 13:38:02 1996, clean flag 3, number of blocks 151168, number of data blocks 150383, number of cylinder groups 24, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum percentage of free blocks 0, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational speed 60rps, SPACE optimization I also have a few OSF/1 CDROMs, which I assume are also the same format. Any ideas? I can't be the first person to try to do this ... Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: DEC DUP
On 20/05/2021 20:28, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: posting this over here, if anyone has any clues for this guy i could dig in the DEC archive but it won't be any fun to find https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/genres/dec/1209678-documentation-for-dec-dup-protocol-as-used-by-dec-diagnostics-such-as-xxdp-on-rqdx3#post1209697 The OpenVMS driver is FYDRIVER. I can look for the listings if nobody finds any better docs. Those listings might be censored/incomplete/missing so I wouldn't hold out too much hope. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: VAXstation 4000 Mice?
On 20/05/2021 18:22, Jonathan Stone via cctalk wrote: It does indeed need a VSXXX-AA mouse (the round puck) or a VSXXX-AB tablet (or compatible). \ I recently checked both installation guide and service guide, whilst looking at eBay offerings. I recently went through my DEC mice to test them (so I can create eBay offerings for the spares!) and all the -AA, -GA (and one other that escapes me right now) tested OK on a VS4000-60. At least one of those was originally used on my VAXstation 3100-M76. If it looks like "that" sort of connector and it is a VSXXX-xx then I do suspect that it will work in any VAXstation up to and including the VAXstation 4000-96. In fact I recently sold one (privately) for use on a VAXstation II. I think those mice will also work on the DECstation 2100/3100/5000 range , except for the Personal versions. You may need an adapter though. They (I think) even work in the early Alpha workstations (the DEC 3000 stuff); I don't think DEC switched to PS/2 mice until the AlphaStation name came out. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 18/05/2021 10:17, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: The content of your posting which I was replying to and the error message you quoted suggested to me that your concern was that the bookreader files you are attempting to read are "corrupt". I think Zane was reading the files from an ISO image I made of a 1989 CONOLD CDROM. That CDROM had previously been used as a toboggan by one or more members the DEC Reading Engineering Team and so was somewhat heavily scuffed when I got it. I eventually recovered it through a process of manual polishing involving sandpaper and elbow grease. I think ddrescue reported 2048 bad bytes in the end (one sector). It is entirely possible that one or more of the files is corrupt, although the text files (the BOOKSHEFLF files, for example) seem OK. The filesystem structures do seem OK, so maybe I was lucky. My suggestion was intended to help you discover whether the bookreader files are "corrupt" or the tools you are using to read them are mishandling them. (In my experience "corrupt" files on VMS are usually due to file attributes being lost when the files were transferred via some other system. On early version of VMS, this can usually be fixed using Joe Meadows' "FILE" utility.) In this case any corruption will be down to over-enthusiastic handling 20+ years ago. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 16/05/2021 21:53, Zane Healy wrote: What exactly is VAX/VMS V5.5-2H4? I’ve never been too clear on that. It’s just V5.5-2 with added hardware support, isn’t it? Yes, that would seem to be the case: |---|-|--||9| |---| | |V5.5-2HW |Limited HW Release||3|2| OpenVMS VAX V5.5-2HW was a special hardware release that | | | | | FRS=9/4/92 | | | supported the following new VAX systems and peripherals: | | | | || | | VAX 7000 Model 600 & VAX 1 Model 600 (Neon) | | | | || | | VAX 4000 Model 400 (Omega-slow)/ VAX 4000 Model 100 | | | | || | | (Cheetah-Q) MicroVAX 3100 Model 90 (Cheetah-W) / VAXstation | | | | || | | 4000 Model 90 (Cougar) / RZ26 / TZ86 / ESE50 | |---|-|--|| | |---| https://web.archive.org/web/20170824234825/http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/os/openvms-release-history.txt (and also http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/openvms-release-history.txt). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 16/05/2021 21:00, Zane Healy wrote: Does anyone know if a 5.5-2 era CONOLD is available? These that have just been made available are beyond awesome, as I gave my paper set of 5.x doc’s to Paul Allen’s computer museum, only keeping the basic 6 paperbacks, since I have a complete 6.x set, and the base 7.2 set I’m going to see about putting them on PDXVAX (which is on HECnet), and making them available for viewing with VTBOOK. I need to hunt up copies of that and a couple other things. I should have them in my archives. I want to say that there is a WASD package that will handle bookreader format doc’s. V5.5-2 would be 1991-NOV or so. There's a CONDIST 1991-MAY on https://vaxstuff.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/. and I have a CONDIST 1991-NOV. The next CONOLD I have is 1992-JUL (3 discs) (I can image that one next if it will help). There's a V5.5-2H4 OS CD on VaxHaven at http://vaxhaven.com/cd-image/AG-PXL1A-RE.iso.zip. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 16/05/2021 13:51, Malte Dehling wrote: I have now generated a contents listing for the CONOLD CDs: https://archive.org/details/vms-conold-1989-03 https://archive.org/details/vms-conold-1989-07 That looks interesting: the fundamental VMS documentation is there, but very little of the layered product info is present. The MAR-1989 CONOLD has FORTRAN and DBMS and the JUL-1989 CONOLD has C, FORTRAN, PASCAL, GKS, DBMS, VDE and DECforms. So I would speculate that these would be amongst the earliest CONOLD distributions. I read elsewhere (comp.os.vms) that the first CONDIST went out in the VMS V5.0 timeframe and the 1989-05 CONDIST contains both VMS V5.0 and V5.1. VMS V5.0 was announced in APR-1998 (https://eisner.decus.org/anon/htnotes/note?f1=INDUSTRY_NEWS=64.0), so it is possible that some earlier CONDIST may yet appear. I've put the CD_CONTENTS.DAT that I have up on github: https://github.com/AntonioCarlini/dec-cdrom-distros. (I just realised that I've mis-named the 1989-05 release as 1989-03 ... I'll fix that rsn). I guess that I should do something similar for the CONOLD CDROMs. Did you find DECW$SHELF to be enough to build up an accurate list of contents? Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 14/05/2021 13:45, John Foust via cctalk wrote: In the USA, it is not uncommon that a public library would have such a CD/DVD rescue machine, too. Ask a librarian. It's moot now (until I come across the next one, I guess). But given the cost and the fact that I have a 100% hit rate right now, I have to say IBM (It's Better Manually) :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 14/05/2021 13:40, Zane Healy wrote: Much to my surprise, I think I’m actually more interested in the Online Doc Library from ‘89 than in the CONDIST’s. It immediately made me think of VTBOOK. As of tomorrow, I’ll be on an 8-week Sabbatical, and I’m going to have to see about putting that Doc Library on PDXVAX, when taking a break from other projects. Zane I don't know how to programmatically check that the data blocks in that ISO are valid (by which I mean "match the original"). For backup savesets then BACKUP/ANALYZE is at least a starting point and the default is to write savesets with /CRC and to check the CRC on read. For DECW$BOOK stuff, I have no idea how you can be confident that it is 100% correct. Then again, it's just text you're going to read (line the [.LINE_DOCS] stuff) so I guess it's not hugely critical. Plus all the stuff I've recovered so far has at most 4096 missing bytes I think, which is 8 blocks at most. So the odds that you'd hit something bad are quite small. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 14/05/2021 10:47, Malte Dehling wrote: Perfect! Thanks so much :-) The first two are now also on archive, the InfoServer CD will follow soon: Excellent. I plan on updating the description for the CONOLD CDs with a list of the books included. That probably means writing a script to extract that information from the DECW$BOOKSHELF files. I did look at the CONOLD and there didn't seem to be anything that would help (other than the bookshelf files). There was the VTBOOK software on a DECUS release many years ago. It got stomped on for a while and then DEC gave up the fight against PDF and (I think) VTBOOK made it to the Freeware CD. That might help in working out the format. Wow, thanks a lot! You are putting in some serious effort here! I'm glad this worked so well :-) I rather suspect that if I'd stopped the initial ddrescue when it was at 99% and just gone straight to the 1500 grit sandpaper, then I could have saved my DVD-RW a few days of work. I've just catalogued the VAX CONDIST/CONOLD sets I have and it comes in at 14 or so. I'm hoping that someone tells me that they're already archived before I start on those :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 14/05/2021 00:19, Matt Burke via cctalk wrote: You might want to have a look at http://de.openvms.org/spl.php Thanks, that looks really useful. I'll have to work out which updates to send him. Some time ago I made a copy of this data in an SQLite database which I've added some more entries to. You can download it here: http://www.9track.net/bits/dec/vms/spl.db.bz2 Thanks. You can see the entries I've added with SELECT * FROM spl WHERE rowid > 41236; Now I just need to read up on SQLite :) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 12/05/2021 13:58, Malte Dehling wrote: Here are the links to the relevant archive.org uploads: https://archive.org/details/vms-conold-1989-07 https://archive.org/details/vms-ad-condist-1989-07 https://archive.org/details/vms-condist-1989-07 https://archive.org/details/vms-condist-1989-11 https://archive.org/details/digital-standards-1993-03 Let me know what you think! Thanks. Nice work, particularly grouping them together, pulling out the JPEGs and seemingly mounting them to suck out the CD_CONTENTS.DAT! As a reward for your hard work here are a few more for you :-) I've now uploaded ag-nc67a-re.tar.xz, ag-mn36d-re.tar.xz and ag-pcy4c-xe.tar.xz. These are: AG-NC67A-RE - VMS Online Documentation Library 1989-03 Disc 1 of 1 AG-MN36D-RE - VMS Consolidated Software Distribution 1989-05 Disc 1 of 1 AG-PCY4C-XE - InfoServer V2.0 Software Base Level 10 1991-11 Disc 1 of 1 AG-MN36D-RE in particular took over 5 days to rescue. In the end it managed 99.41% and couldn't get any more data off the CDROM when run with -R. So, despite the internet saying use 2000 and 3000 grit sandpaper, I went against all the advice and recklessly tried a seven minute does of 1500 frit sandpaper, followed by the usual vigorous polishing. I've included a "before" image of the rear (non-label) side of the CDROM and a triangular "blemish" is clearly visible near the centre and extending out into the data region. 2000 grit didn't touch it, I could still feel it afterwards with my fingernail. 1500 grit wiped it away completely and ddrescue got to work immediately and took just 10 minutes or so to recover the missing data (apart from 4096 bytes). I had previously tried the image out using SIMH back when it was at a mere 99% and it mounted happily (although it complained that it could not find the alternate home block). I copied all the files to NLA0: and there were no errors. I don't think that means that all the data blocks were good (since VMS would have no way to tell) but there were no errors noted in the filesystem structures, so that's at least some comfort. I haven't tried BACKUP/ANALYZE on all the savesets but that might be one way to test the integrity of those files. The InfoServer CDROM I included because it has some nice cover art with (I presume) the faces of five of the develpment team. Anyone know who they are? I suspect that if you really want to use an Infoserver you might be better off with the most up to date version on the most recent OpenVMS Freeware release. Incidentally, I'm currently working through my OpenVMS VAX (and a few Alpha) CONDIST CDROMs and pulling out all the CD_CONTENTS.DAT so I can put together a script to build a list of which sets hold any given version of a product. So if anyone has any missing sets, and wants to supply some, please do. This will all end up on github eventually. To save you some time, for versions sometime before MAR-1992, you need the CD_CONTENTS.DAT from every disc in the set as they each contain details of only the products on that disc. Beyond that data the format changed and the contents are identical on each disc. The old style looks like this: LABEL CD_BIN_92932 %TYPE CONDIST ! ! NOVEMBER CONDIST: DISC 2 OF 2 ! !PRODUCT NAME UPI INST VERSION KIT CH DIS ROOT SAVESET(S) and the new style looks like this: %DISC_PRODUCT_NAME1 VMS Consolidated %DISC_PRODUCT_NAME2 Software Distribution %KIT_PART_NUMBER QA-VWJ8A-A8. U01 %SPINE_PART_NUMBER AV-MN37Y-RE ! %DISC_PART_NUMBER AG-MN36Y-RE,AG-PASMS-RE,AG-PCXXM-RE,AG-PFXCJ-RE,AG-PJ4YD-RE,AG-PNTPA-RE %DFARS Y I already have 1989-05/07/11, 1992-03/05/07/09/11, 1994-11, 1995-01, 1996-03/06/09/12, 1997-03/06/09/12 and 1998-03, so anything else (or anything from any Alpha CONDIST release) would be cool. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: LK201 emulator for PS-2 keyboard
On 12/05/2021 17:53, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: I remember those. I thought Jonathan was talking about the round ones, but I suppose the protocol is identical. There was also a tablet, same interface I believe. I used one of those to trace some topo maps. Does anyone know of protocol documentation for these devices? paul The normal mouse specs are in VCB02 Video Subsystem Technical Manual, EK-104AA-TM-001 (appendix C). The LK201 is in there too. I think I have one of those mice with the non-round connector, but I also have a MIPS DECstation that I now suspect needs it :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 10/05/2021 10:05, Malte Dehling wrote: Thanks a lot, Antonio, these are very valuable to have! I've only checked a couple of them under SIMH, so it would be helpful to know if I need to check my workflow or not. I think uploading them to archive.org would be a good long-term solution. I can take care of it if you don't have an account. Please do. Thanks. In other news, I polished the MAR-1989 CONOLD, which looked very bad, to start with. Amazingly it buffed up quite nicely and then read surprisingly well: [ $ ddrescue -r5 -v /dev/sr1 CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.iso CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.map GNU ddrescue 1.23 About to copy 205199 kBytes from '/dev/sr1' to 'CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.iso' Starting positions: infile = 0 B, outfile = 0 B Copy block size: 128 sectors Initial skip size: 128 sectors Sector size: 512 Bytes Press Ctrl-C to interrupt ipos: 205198 kB, non-trimmed: 0 B, current rate: 0 B/s opos: 205198 kB, non-scraped: 0 B, average rate: 637 kB/s non-tried: 0 B, bad-sector: 2048 B, error rate: 170 B/s rescued: 205197 kB, bad areas: 1, run time: 5m 22s pct rescued: 99.99%, read errors: 25, remaining time: n/a time since last successful read: 2m 1s Finished ] So I went ahead and tried the CONDIST from MAY-1989. That too now can be read, although it is proving a somewhat tougher nut to crack: [ $ ddrescue -r5 -v /dev/sr1 CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.iso CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.map GNU ddrescue 1.23 About to copy 623247 kBytes from '/dev/sr1' to 'CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.iso' Starting positions: infile = 0 B, outfile = 0 B Copy block size: 128 sectors Initial skip size: 128 sectors Sector size: 512 Bytes Press Ctrl-C to interrupt ipos: 5919 kB, non-trimmed: 0 B, current rate: 0 B/s opos: 5919 kB, non-scraped: 11127 kB, average rate: 14694 B/s non-tried: 0 B, bad-sector: 2843 kB, error rate: 85 B/s rescued: 609276 kB, bad areas: 445, run time: 11h 31m 2s pct rescued: 97.75%, read errors: 5884, remaining time: 5d 23h 43m time since last successful read: 2m 45s Scraping failed blocks... (forwards) ] On the plus side, that's 97.75% more data than I had before :-) but the "remaining time" looks like it could be the rest of the week (it varies quite a bit). I think, from reading the manual, that I can use CTRL-C and restart this again later and it will pick up where it left off using the map file. Is this right? Are there any other options I should consider trying? Another thought is that perhaps a shade more polishing might help. If I polish the CDROM a little more and then resume the ddrescue, I think I won't be any worse off than I am now, i.e. all existing data will still be there and all I'll be risking is data that maybe would have eventually read before but now may not read at all. Is that right? Successful reads are now ~20m apart, so I suspect that the remaining data will be quite difficult to recover. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
I've now uploaded: ag-mn36e-re.tar.xz, ag-nh37b-re.tar.xz and el-cdrom-01-rev-L.tar.xz. The full set now available are: AG-MN36E-RE - VMS Consolidated Software Distribution 1989-07 Disc 1 of 1 AG-NC67C-RE - VMS Online Documentation Library 1989-07 Disc 1 of 1 AG-NH36B-RE - VMS AD Software Consolidation 1989-07 Disc 1 of 2 AG-NH37B-RE - VMS AD Software Consolidation 1989-07 Disc 2 of 2 AG-MN36G-RE - VMS Consolidated Software Distribution 1989-11 Disc 1 of 2 AG-PASMA-RE - VMS Consolidated Software Distribution 1989-11 Disc 2 of 2 EL-CDROM-01 - Digital Standards and Related Documents 1993-03-19 Rev L I think that a fair bit (if not even all) of the Standards CDROM is actually already available on bitsavers, but just in case, I've uploaded it anyway. If anyone wants to offer them a permanent home, that's fine by my (I don't need the space on the google drive just yet, but I will have to remove some images if I start to image a lot more (and I do seem to have a fair few more). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Terminals wiki
On 09/05/2021 16:05, Dave via cctalk wrote: Does anyone have a mirror of the terminals wiki at https://terminals-wiki.org? It seems to have gone dark over a year ago, and it would be a shame to lose the resource. If there is no mirror, does anyone know of a way to contact the owner/maintainer? I'd like to see if there's anything I can do to help get it back online. Thanks, Dave https://web.archive.org/web/20181103180649/http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/User:Legalize I think Richard also handles manx too (which is still around, luckily!). Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 18/04/2021 18:00, Antonio Carlini wrote: I'm using a seven year old DVD-RW drive and a similarly aged DVD-ROM drive. The results are the same in either case. Life got in the way, as usual, but here are a few CDROMs to start with: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c1ttR83wt5Y4z4O9DsFWtJgV-PdpHarS?usp=sharing. Hopefully those will be accessible to whoever wants them. AG-MN36G-RE and AG-PASMA-RE are discs 1 and 2 of NOV-1989 CONDIST. AG-NC67C-RE is the JUL-1987 CONOLD. AG-NH36B-RE is Disc 1 of 2 of the JUL-1989 "VMS AD Software Consolidation", which I think was some sort of experiment. Two of them may well be completely unrecoverable. The others that I've tried with 1989 date codes are 99+% recoverable so I'm hoping that the missing sector or so doesn't upset ODS-2 too much. If I get the time, I'll try them out tonight. The May 1989 CONDIST (and the Mar 1989 CONOLD) are both currently completely unreadable. I'll try one of them in the GAME polishing machine, assuming they actually have a polishing machine nearby. If there is no such machine nearby then I'll try the 3000 grit sandpaper as there's not really much to lose. I've no idea whether the nearby GAME store has a polisher, as they've not replied to my queries and I've given up waiting. I'm going to try 2000/3000 grit sandpaper on the MAR-1989 CONOLD soon, so we'll see how that goes (I picked up some rubbing compound today, which is needed for the final stage). I do have a few more early ones imaged, I just haven't scanned the CDROM themselves, so as soon as I get that done (hopefully less than a month this time!) I'll upload those and make a note here. These are tar images compressed with xz. "-J" should expand them. There is a sha256sum.txt file inside and a readme with details of the extraction and the results of the ddrescue command. I think AG-PASMA-RE read without error using dd. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: That VAXStation4000vlc 3W3 video connector
On 04/05/2021 02:29, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk wrote: Failing either solution you can make your own adapter cable: <https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/products/0484903/> <https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/products/3115694/> (you'll also need a case for the connector, the other connector and a length of suitable cable of course). They have a US site too. Wow: £2.47 for the housing but £5.02 for each of the coaxial inserts ... not cheap at all! Mind you, I suspect that an original cable won't be much cheaper either. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 21/04/2021 22:13, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote: I've just tried ANALYZE/DISK on VAXBINMAY931 which is the oldest I can put a hand on right now and it gives exactly the same output as you got. Thanks ... that's reassuring. Individual savesets can be tested with BACKUP/LIST or (more extensively) by extracting each BACKUP - that would show up any errors. ZIP is probably most commonly used for compressed archives on VMS. The version of ZIP that runs on VMS can save VMS file attributes when told to so that it doesn't lose important attributes for the installation kits like tar would. (I only came across xz anywhere for the first time about a week ago...) It's true that ZIP is probably the most common archiver on VMS (and I'm sure it's on the various OpenVMS FREEWARE disks). That said, I expect that most people making such images available for distribution (e.g. bitsavers) are not running VMS. I'm planning to distribute an ISO plus some extra bits, not the individual backup savesets, so attributes shouldn't be a problem. I'd expect that anyone who wants to use this stuff will run up SIMH and mount an ISO or possibly burn a CD-R and use it that way. I might try zip (under Unix, so gzip) for fun, but I expect that xz will beat it hands down for space. I guess an ISO could also be accessed using LDDRIVER, although my main constraint back in the day was always disk space. I'm not going to try zip on OpenVMS because ... much as I love VMS, SIMH on my laptop just isn't as fast as Linux on a Ryzen! Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
2051 VMSU2051 "VAX/VMS OPERATING SYSTEM" 001 N V5.1-B SUB A Y VMSU1051 VMSU1051,VMSSB_CD051 "VAXCLUSTER CONSOLE SYSTEM" V01 Y V1.2 SUB A Y VCS012 VCS012 "VAXCLUSTER SOFTWARE" N V5.1 SUB A Y VAXCLU051 NO_BINARIES "VAXIMAGE APPLICATION SERVICES FOR VMS" 892A Y V1.0 SUB A Y VIS010 VIS010 "VAXIMAGE SCANNING APPLICATION" VPFA Y V1.0 SUB A Y PSCAN010 PSCAN010 "VAXLAB SOFTWARE LIBRARY" Y V1.3A SUB A Y VSL013 VSL013 "VAXPC FOR VMS" Y V1.0 SUB N Y VAXPC010 VAXPC010 "VAXSET" N V8.0 SUB N Y VAXSET080 NO_BINARIES "VMS WORKSTATION SOFTWARE" N V4.0 SUB A Y VWS040 VWS040,SIGHT040,VWSDEMO040,HCUIS040 "VMS WORKSTATION SOFTWARE" N V4.0A PTC A Y VWS040 VWSA040 "VMS WORKSTATION SOFTWARE/JAPANESE" A96J N V4.0 SUB A Y JVWS040 JVWS040 "VMS WORKSTATION SOFTWARE/JAPANESE" A96J N V4.0A PTC1 U Y JVWS040 JVWSA040 "VMS/JAPANESE" N V5.1 SUB1 U Y JVMS051 NO_BINARIES "VMS/SNA" 362 Y V2.0 SUB U Y SNAVMS020 SNAVMS020 "VMS/ULTRIX CONNECTION (TM)" VHR Y V1.0 SUB1 A Y UCX010 UCX010 "X25ROUTER 2000" S02 Y V1.0 SUB2 A Y X25ROU010 X25ROU010 ] -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
Re: Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x
On 17/04/2021 23:37, Jon Elson wrote: On 04/17/2021 11:24 AM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote: If anyone has any suggestions for how to clean CDs to recover data, I'm all ears. If by the "data side" you mean the clear side the CD is read from, those can be polished with toothpaste or plastic polish. Modern CD/DVD drives are much better at reading poor quality disks. I'm using a seven year old DVD-RW drive and a similarly aged DVD-ROM drive. The results are the same in either case. If the data layer is scratched, they are likely unrecoverable. That is the side with the label on it, and the data layer is only a few thousandths below the label. Two of them may well be completely unrecoverable. The others that I've tried with 1989 date codes are 99+% recoverable so I'm hoping that the missing sector or so doesn't upset ODS-2 too much. If I get the time, I'll try them out tonight. The May 1989 CONDIST (and the Mar 1989 CONOLD) are both currently completely unreadable. I'll try one of them in the GAME polishing machine, assuming they actually have a polishing machine nearby. If there is no such machine nearby then I'll try the 3000 grit sandpaper as there's not really much to lose. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com