wrote:

Still have my MC-10 micro color computer and my co-co2 (with prom
burner, a-dos dual 1.2 floppies, OS9 operating system and the full
load.


I had both of those Tandy computers, early on, along with a TI99-4A,
Vic 20, C64. I think I still have the Radio Shack service manual for
the MC-10.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!

Jim Stewart wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?

Hell yes. I worked as a bench tech debugging
Nova hard disk controllers and shoehorned an
Eclipse into an electron beam lithography system,
Also designed a digital interface to said Eclipse.

I had the removable cartridge hard drive, and a nine track tape drive
in the Nova system I junked.


I designed a Multibus natural voice speech playback
system used in all the LLNL secure area entry points.

Sounds like fun!


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-04-30, Ivan Vegvary wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2009-04-30, Ivan Vegvary wrote:
How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm
talking
about.

Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95,
Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar
modern day PCs and CAD programs.

Slide rules (many over the years), Best current one is a 20"
mahogany and ivory K&E, (and for fun a 36" store demo
Picket log-log.)

Always wanted a 20" or a 8" plus diameter circular rule. When I saw them in
pawn shops, I still could not afford it. it.

This one was abandoned by a retired worker where I was.

I never got a cylindrical slide rule, but I now have a pocket
watch format circular slide rule made in Russia which I got from eBay a
few years ago.

Probably the slide rule which got the most use was one from
Lafayette radio (remember them) -- a rather nice log-log duplex which
had marginal cursor life, so I adapted a replacement cursor for a K&E to
it. It had to be shimmed with some thin plastic sheet because the rule
body was a little thicker than the K&E was.

That Lafayette was the one which nearly got me arrested. I was
living in a rooming house while working for Transitron in Wakefield
Mass, and felt like a Coke at about 11:00 PM. So, I walked down the
stairs, about a block to the corner gas station, and dropped a nickel in
the machine (one of the slide the bottle through a maze to the exit
hatch style).

When I got my Coke, and turned around, I found myself facing an
expanse of blue police uniform. (They hired them *big* there. :-)

He asked me a long string of questions, which I answered, and
when I was figuring that he had run out of questions, and I might be
able to get back before the Coke got too hot, he snaps: "O.K. Let's
see that knife you have!"

"What knife?"

"Don't play cute with me -- *that* knife!" as he points to the
leather slide rule scabbard hanging from my belt.

So -- I open the case, gently draw the sliderule from it, and
present it to him supported on my palms.

His jaw dropped, he turned, and got in his patrol car and drove
off without a word. :-)

[ ... list snipped ... ]

From the above, it looks like you've done it all!!

Actually -- no. Among other things, I never had an Intel 8080
based system (nor a Zilog Z80 based system), nor one which ran CP/M.
After my homebrew minimal OS built around a digital cassette tape drive,
I moved on to the SWTP 6800 and 6809 with SSB's (Smoke Signal
Broadcasting's) DOS-68 and DOS-69, and then on to OS-9 for the 6809
system.


I have most of two SWTP 6800 systems in the garage, if they weren't
damaged aby a leak a few years ago. Somone added a pair of 5.25" floppy
drives to one of them.

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

I never got a cylindrical slide rule, but I now have a pocket
watch format circular slide rule made in Russia which I got from eBay a
few years ago.

I've got a couple of promotional circular slide rules. I suppose one of
them ought to go in the display...

David Lesher wrote:
Jim Stewart writes:


I designed a Multibus natural voice speech playback system used in all
the LLNL secure area entry points.

Was that the system with the booths that weighed you? I can't recall the
name now [some Greek god, I think] but a friend was on the design team.

That was it. I can't remember the name either.
My next door neighbor was the voice for the
system.

David Lesher wrote:
Jim Stewart writes:


I designed a Multibus natural voice speech playback system used in all
the LLNL secure area entry points.

Was that the system with the booths that weighed you? I can't recall the
name now [some Greek god, I think] but a friend was on the design team.

CAIN. Biblical.

OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...

5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of colored
wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the instructors mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my Chem
home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer club
and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted to
get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that became
C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy drive
and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro the 4004
dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that became the
console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran of
Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was genuine
Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did original
BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can remeber
the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded 8
bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".

Go here for a good picture of "history"

http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html

--.- Dave




"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...
How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm
talking about.

Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95, Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar
modern day PCs and CAD programs.

The above are approximately in order.
Just for fun, I did spend some time with a Soroban (same as Abacus minus
one bead) and could multiply and divide just about as fast as someone with
a hand-crank Monroe.

I think the slide rule should still be taught. It sure gave use the
ability to estimate the order of magnitude of the answer. Ask a kid today
what 100 times 100 is. No clue. Something that's lost today.

Just an old fart reminiscing,

Ivan Vegvary

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?



Sure, I started fooling around with PDP-8's, and worked quite a bit with
a PDP-5, a discrete transistor 12-bit machine essentially identical with
the PDP-8 (no suffix) except for physical size, the -5 was about twice
the size. I also did a bit of work with the LINC, a computer designed
at MIT and built by grad students at a summer session there. Some 50+
were built and then shipped back to the home institutions of those
students, and were used for many years. Again, 12-bit word width, but
ones-complement arithmetic, discrete transistors, XY oscilloscope
display and block-oriented 3/4" magnetic tapes. That instruction set
was later incorporated into DEC's LINC-8 and PDP-12 systems. All that
was at Washington University in St. Louis. I also did some learning on
IBM 360's there. Later I worked on PDP-11s, Vaxes and Alpha systems there.

I worked with Data General Novas at University of Missouri at Rolla.

I built a multiprocessor system with the National Semi 16032 (later
renamed the 32016). It ran up to 7 of these computers with a 2 MB
common memory and using a Vax 11/780 for I/O. About the time I got it
really running well, the faster microvaxes came along, and it was
obsolete. It is still in my basement for sentimental reasons. It used
the extended Multibus-I standard for connection to the VAX and memory
boards, as well as power.

We had a Pr1me (that's a numeral one in the middle, not a letter "i")
here but I never worked with it. I did work with an Interdata 7/32
which was used to run an insane 3rd party disk controller for our
PDP-11s. it enabled us to run Calcomp 40 MB 14" hard drives on our PDP.
The instruction set looked a lot like the IBM 360. I think Pr1me was an
offshoot of Interdata.

I worked on a MicroData microprogrammable minicomputer at Rolla. I even
worked on a Vacuuum-tube computer, the Bendix G-15 at Wash U, but we
were never able to get it running. The magnetic drum was badly scratched.

The first computer I built for myself had an 8008 CPU, but too little
memory to do anything worthwhile. I then built an S-100 system with
8080, and then moved up to a Z-80. I had all sorts of stuff interfaced
to that, including a Honeywell 14.5" drum printer that was bigger than a
chest freezer, 9-track mag tape, a 12" XY display with light pen, and a
10 MB Memorex hard drive. I built a 32-bit AMD bit slice computer on
two huge wire wrap boards, but writing the microcode for it was a huge
project. I did get it running, and had a bunch of test programs, but it
was light years from becoming a usable general-purpose computer. I made
a copy of a Nat Semi 32016 CPU and built a working Genix system, but it
was insanely slow. many things were 5 times slower than my Z-80! I did
use it for at least a year, though. This must have been around 1986,
when I got the opportunity to buy a MicroVax CPU board from a broker,
and get the rest of the needed stuff from 3rd party vendors.


Jon

Dave August wrote:
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
WOW, I only heard her speak on an NPR interview shortly before her
death, but she was a great speaker, and of course, had the MOST AMAZING
experiences!

I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy drive
and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine.
Yup, I actually visited the PerSci factory in the LA area while on a
work trip, and later bought one. I did have a lot of trouble with it,
as I never figured out how to make the single load solenoid work right
with my dual floppy drive interface board. I eventually just disabled
the head lifter mechanism and solved the problem.
Console was the ASR33 fro the 4004
dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that became the
console.
I got a thing that had an IBM selectric and paper tape reader and punch,
and figured out an interface to it. It was called a "Dura". I used
that as a printer for a while. I made my own glass TTY by laboriously
wire wrapping a clone of a commercial terminal we had at work.

Jon

On Apr 29, 10:44*pm, "Ivan Vegvary" wrote:
How many of you have taken this road? *Those that have know what I'm talking
about.

Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95, Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, *IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar * *
modern day PCs and CAD programs.

The above are approximately in order.
Just for fun, I did spend some time with a Soroban (same as Abacus minus one
bead) and could multiply and divide just about as fast as someone with a
hand-crank Monroe.

I think the slide rule should still be taught. *It sure gave use the ability
to estimate the order of magnitude of the answer. *Ask a kid today what 100
times 100 is. *No clue. *Something that's lost today.

Just an old fart reminiscing,

Ivan Vegvary

Know the feeling...

My first love...

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/digicomp_1.html

TMT

Too_Many_Tools writes:

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/digicomp_1.html

I've got mine on my bookshelf at home.

On 2009-05-01, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

Actually -- no. Among other things, I never had an Intel 8080
based system (nor a Zilog Z80 based system), nor one which ran CP/M.
After my homebrew minimal OS built around a digital cassette tape drive,
I moved on to the SWTP 6800 and 6809 with SSB's (Smoke Signal
Broadcasting's) DOS-68 and DOS-69, and then on to OS-9 for the 6809
system.


I have most of two SWTP 6800 systems in the garage, if they weren't
damaged aby a leak a few years ago. Somone added a pair of 5.25" floppy
drives to one of them.

Hmm ... I wonder which of the floppy controller boards that was?
SSB (Smoke Signal Broadcasting) was one of the makers, and they had a
neat trick to save address space. The I/O ports were eight groups of 32
addresses separated by 32 blank address spaces.

The SSB ROM was wired and programmed to fill all of those 32
byte gaps, so it did not take away anything from what the rest of the
system was using. Tricky programming -- and it *had* to be assembly
language programming to allow that much control of the address spaces.

TSC was another maker of floppy controllers in the early years.

IIRC, both started with two 5-1/4" floppies. Later ones would
handle double density and double sided, and the final ones would also
mix 8" with 5-1/4" ones.

Gimix made the best of them in the later days. 4 8" and 4
5-1/4" drives on a single controller.

The SSB ones usually had an Indian head in warbonnet as a logo
on the board. I don't know what the TSC ones looked like, because I
used SSB exclusively.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2009-05-01, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-04-30, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

[ ... ]

One of the Metrodata computers used a SMS 8" drive system that held
500K per disk.

O.K. Either SSDD, or DSSD depending.

SSDD soft sectored. I just found a few disks I saved, when we
scrapped the system.

O.K.

[ ... ]

The damn Shugart 801 drives ran 24/7 and wore out in
about two years. Every new drive had a different PC board, so we had to
make several phone calls to get the configuration data every time a
drive failed. The SMS design didn't lift the arm when it wasn't in use,

O.K. This makes it SSDD (Single Sided Double Density), since
the Double Sided drives moved one head against the other closing onto
the surface of the floppy. Those *might* have lasted longer in a clean
environment. (Of course, a bit after the Mt. St. Helens eruption, 8"
(and 5-1/4") floppies were having problems because of the airborne
abrasive dust which it spit out.


The system manager was an idiot. The door to the headend was about
three feet from the back door of the building, where the installers &
techs came and went. Then he decided to use the headend to store bulk
supplies, so you had guys covered with mud & dirt running in and out
several times a day.

Ouch!

so the felt pads would wear out. Then the arm would stick to the disk
and destroy the floppy.

Ouch! I *never* had an 8" floppy drive wear out -- but the OS
and controller lifted the heads when not actively reading or writing.


SMS built lousy equipment. I found out later it was designed as a
word processor for law offices, then they designed an interface board
for the old Motorola Exorcisor bus. that was why the drives didn't lift
the head, the typist was writing directly to the disk, on a continuous
basis.

Ouch!

I *did* have a DSDD 5-1/4" floppy drive die -- but from poor
design. The centering cpu was on a 1/4" shaft, running through two
shoulder style ball bearing assemblies, and secured by the drive pulley
slid onto the shaft, and then a central screw and washer tightened to
grip, followed by a glob of Glyptal to secure it.


Some 5.25" drives were extremely flimsy. I still have over 100 180K,
360K & 1.2 M 5.25" drives. I might even have a few 720K. I think they
made 720K drives for about two weeks, before switching to 360 RPM, and
calling them 1.2M.

I had one new Shugart 400 drive. That was their first SSSD 5.25"
design, and only had 35 tracks. I think I gave it away.

I started with two of those -- with the "phonograph" style head
positioning system. At least it made it resistant to damage by running
against the stops. :-)

Some of the early floppy envelopes only had a slot long enough
for the 35-track use, too.

[ ... ]

Somewhere I should have a pair of Teac 1/2 height 8" DSDD drives that
don't need 120 VAC.

Hmm .... there was also the one used in one of the systems which
had a voice-coil servo for head positioning, instead of a stepper motor.
I never had one, but I understand that while they were noticeably faster
on track-to-track seeks, the also needed to be re-aligned fairly often,
while the Shugarts were rock solid as far as alignment goes.

Now I remember who made the systems which used those drives. It
was a Chromemco system made for business use. Two of the drives, and
each drive would hold two floppies (but I think that the head
positioning servo moved both sets of heads together, so copying from
one area on one floppy to another area on the other floppy in the same
drive resulted in very slow operation. Better to work between drives
instead of between floppies on the same drive.

I think that the drives were made by PerSci -- yes, they were.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2009-05-01, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-04-30, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

[ ... ]

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?

Data General Nova (at work, not at home).

Tektronix 6130 based on the National Semiconductor 32016 CPU (at home).

Both my "Cosmos CMS-16/UNX" and my Sun 2/120 used the Intel
Multibus, but not Intel CPUs in either case. Instead
68000 (for the Cosmos), and 68010 (for the Sun 2/120).


I have a pair of Intel rack mount Multibus cabinets out in the shop.
I've never fired them up.

With power supplies and all?

DEC LSI-11 (in the Bridgeport BOSS-3 CNC mill. :-)


I have a box of memory boads for the lsi-aa. They were made by
national Semiconductor. I think they are all 256 KB. about 15 to 20of
them?

Hmm ... 256 KB -- that would certainly not work with the old
quad-wide LSI-11 which the BOSS-3 used. I'm not sure about whether the
double-wide M7270 which I have has the memory management hardware to
address more than the 64 KB (32 KW), but since it came in a 4-slot cage
with 1 64 KB board (M8044DC), one quad serial port board (M8043) and one
floppy controller board (M8029), I don't have high hopes. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2009-05-01, wrote:

[ ... ]

Still have my MC-10 micro color computer and my co-co2 (with prom
burner, a-dos dual 1.2 floppies, OS9 operating system and the full
load.

Aha! Another OS-9 user. Are you still using yours? I've let
my OS-9 skills get rather rusty with the migration to unix boxen.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On Apr 29, 10:44*pm, "Ivan Vegvary" wrote:
How many of you have taken this road? *Those that have know what I'm talking
about.

Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95, Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, *IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar * *
modern day PCs and CAD programs.

The above are approximately in order.
Just for fun, I did spend some time with a Soroban (same as Abacus minus one
bead) and could multiply and divide just about as fast as someone with a
hand-crank Monroe.

I think the slide rule should still be taught. *It sure gave use the ability
to estimate the order of magnitude of the answer. *Ask a kid today what 100
times 100 is. *No clue. *Something that's lost today.

Just an old fart reminiscing,

Ivan Vegvary

Thanks for starting this discussion.

Brings back LOTS of memories.

TMT

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-05-01, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-04-30, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

[ ... ]

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?

Data General Nova (at work, not at home).

Tektronix 6130 based on the National Semiconductor 32016 CPU (at home).

Both my "Cosmos CMS-16/UNX" and my Sun 2/120 used the Intel
Multibus, but not Intel CPUs in either case. Instead
68000 (for the Cosmos), and 68010 (for the Sun 2/120).


I have a pair of Intel rack mount Multibus cabinets out in the shop.
I've never fired them up.

With power supplies and all?


Yes, and some boards.



DEC LSI-11 (in the Bridgeport BOSS-3 CNC mill. :-)


I have a box of memory boads for the lsi-aa. They were made by
national Semiconductor. I think they are all 256 KB. about 15 to 20of
them?

Hmm ... 256 KB -- that would certainly not work with the old
quad-wide LSI-11 which the BOSS-3 used. I'm not sure about whether the
double-wide M7270 which I have has the memory management hardware to
address more than the 64 KB (32 KW), but since it came in a 4-slot cage
with 1 64 KB board (M8044DC), one quad serial port board (M8043) and one
floppy controller board (M8029), I don't have high hopes. :-)


I'll see if I can find them. I traded a pile of the smaller memory
cards for these.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2009-05-01, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

Actually -- no. Among other things, I never had an Intel 8080
based system (nor a Zilog Z80 based system), nor one which ran CP/M.
After my homebrew minimal OS built around a digital cassette tape drive,
I moved on to the SWTP 6800 and 6809 with SSB's (Smoke Signal
Broadcasting's) DOS-68 and DOS-69, and then on to OS-9 for the 6809
system.


I have most of two SWTP 6800 systems in the garage, if they weren't
damaged aby a leak a few years ago. Somone added a pair of 5.25" floppy
drives to one of them.

Hmm ... I wonder which of the floppy controller boards that was?
SSB (Smoke Signal Broadcasting) was one of the makers, and they had a
neat trick to save address space. The I/O ports were eight groups of 32
addresses separated by 32 blank address spaces.

The SSB ROM was wired and programmed to fill all of those 32
byte gaps, so it did not take away anything from what the rest of the
system was using. Tricky programming -- and it *had* to be assembly
language programming to allow that much control of the address spaces.

TSC was another maker of floppy controllers in the early years.

IIRC, both started with two 5-1/4" floppies. Later ones would
handle double density and double sided, and the final ones would also
mix 8" with 5-1/4" ones.

Gimix made the best of them in the later days. 4 8" and 4
5-1/4" drives on a single controller.

The SSB ones usually had an Indian head in warbonnet as a logo
on the board. I don't know what the TSC ones looked like, because I
used SSB exclusively.


They are buried out in the garage. I hope to get some of it cleared
out this summer to be ready for some new steel roofing. I wish I could
just put 4 40' shipping containers in there instead of rebuilding the
shop.

BTW, one of the volunteer drivers for the local DAV shuttle van to the
VA hospital delivers freight containers from Tampa.

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!

"Dave August" wrote in message
...
OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...

5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of
colored wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the instructors
mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my
Chem home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer club
and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted
to get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that
became C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro
the 4004 dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that
became the console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran
of Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was
genuine Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did
original BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can
remeber the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded 8
bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".

Go here for a good picture of "history"

http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html

--.- Dave

Fascinating, Dave!! Thanks so much

Ivan Vegvary

My pleasure, it's always fun to take a walk down memory lane.

And in a condensed version like this I left out a ton of stuff, these were
just the thing that popped into my mind.

As Jon Elson pointed out I also did my share of wirewraping, you can see on
that picture of my "last homebrew" that it was a wirewraped card for the
disk controller and had a WD1771 on it.

Funny wire wrap story *JUST* happend last month.. I had to make up a quick
klude of a counter and flip flop for the people I'm working for... ya gotta
picture a couple of DIPS in single level wirewrap sockets on a vector board
hotglued on to a board that's totaly surface mount 0402 size descretes with
a big assed 200 pin BGA mounted SOC... The young tech had NEVER SEEN
wirewrap, when I showed him my old OK hand tool and how to use it he was
totaly fascinated.. then said "I wondered how you wound those wires so
tight"... GAWD this industry is just full of kids...LOL..

This brings up yet another "war story".. I could tell you about driving up
to Stanford to the "home brew computer club meetings" and seeing the likes
of a scruffy Woz waving around an MoBo for an Apple 1.

As Ava Gardner said to Sutart Turner in her old age.... "God Stu, we were so
young and beautiful then"..

--.- Dave





"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...

"Dave August" wrote in message
...
OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...

5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of
colored wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the
instructors mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my
Chem home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer
club and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted
to get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that
became C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro
the 4004 dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that
became the console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran
of Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was
genuine Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did
original BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can
remeber the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded
8 bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".

Go here for a good picture of "history"

http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html

--.- Dave

Fascinating, Dave!! Thanks so much

Ivan Vegvary

Best thing Grace evenr invented was the "Hopper loop".. ya know when they
say it's impossible to make something run fast, and you DO make it run fast
and the put in a delay loop.. Grace her self called it a "Hopper loop"...
Then slowly over time you keep decressing it's time constant and make you
part of the program "magically" run faster.... That "Old Doll" knew more
about people and how to bend managment than she knew about Comp Sci and
that's a Hell of a lot!!

Yeah that PerSci was trouble from day one..

The damn servo on the voice coil would drift and about every six months I'd
hear "WHACK!.. BBBZZZ" as it finely got to far out of cal and the head
assembly just went to full extension and stayed there.. Sigh..time to drag
out the old HewPee scope and recall the damn thing... good thing I also had
the Dysan calibration disk :-).

I never had an issue with the head loader, since I had "home brewed" my disk
controller. IIRC I just put and external enable on it and managed it
myself... wasn't too much of a problem since I was writing my own BIOS...
:-)

I finely replaced it when a buddy went to work for National Semi and found
couple of Sugart 801's he could..uhhh..err...umm "Surplus" to me :-)

Ahh yet another "war story".. I took the PerSci and the I/O Selectric up to
a West Coast Computer Fair and sold them... I actually did what became known
as "Trade Show Squating"... We didn't "buy a table" we'd just hit the show
and walked around till we found an empty table.. Set out our stuff, sell it
as fast as we could and the leave...LOL...

--.- Dave


"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
Dave August wrote:
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
WOW, I only heard her speak on an NPR interview shortly before her death,
but she was a great speaker, and of course, had the MOST AMAZING
experiences!

I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine.
Yup, I actually visited the PerSci factory in the LA area while on a work
trip, and later bought one. I did have a lot of trouble with it, as I
never figured out how to make the single load solenoid work right with my
dual floppy drive interface board. I eventually just disabled the head
lifter mechanism and solved the problem.
Console was the ASR33 fro the 4004
dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that became the
console.
I got a thing that had an IBM selectric and paper tape reader and punch,
and figured out an interface to it. It was called a "Dura". I used that
as a printer for a while. I made my own glass TTY by laboriously wire
wrapping a clone of a commercial terminal we had at work.

Jon

Tanks!

I was a charter member of the North Texas group - and we had a member
that was Howard Mauch as I recall - he had a nice audio to tape
unit - using a PLL - those magic IC's at the time - then with so
many versions - He and his wife went to KC for the KC unified version.

Our fun was not only building our computers from scratch or kit - but
writing code to drive printers of all sorts and plotters as well.

Yep - started with hard sector Pertec drives - and added a TTY.
Traded that TTY a KAR model four years ago. A friend had a friend that
designed a LSI 11 in a chip - and was making small machines for tech friends.
The design used a current loop TTY. I gave him a box of Telex paper and box
of punch paper - 8 level naturally. I gave up my 5 level years before to the
deaf.

Martin

Dave August wrote:
My pleasure, it's always fun to take a walk down memory lane.

And in a condensed version like this I left out a ton of stuff, these were
just the thing that popped into my mind.

As Jon Elson pointed out I also did my share of wirewraping, you can see on
that picture of my "last homebrew" that it was a wirewraped card for the
disk controller and had a WD1771 on it.

Funny wire wrap story *JUST* happend last month.. I had to make up a quick
klude of a counter and flip flop for the people I'm working for... ya gotta
picture a couple of DIPS in single level wirewrap sockets on a vector board
hotglued on to a board that's totaly surface mount 0402 size descretes with
a big assed 200 pin BGA mounted SOC... The young tech had NEVER SEEN
wirewrap, when I showed him my old OK hand tool and how to use it he was
totaly fascinated.. then said "I wondered how you wound those wires so
tight"... GAWD this industry is just full of kids...LOL..

This brings up yet another "war story".. I could tell you about driving up
to Stanford to the "home brew computer club meetings" and seeing the likes
of a scruffy Woz waving around an MoBo for an Apple 1.

As Ava Gardner said to Sutart Turner in her old age.... "God Stu, we were so
young and beautiful then"..

--.- Dave





"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...
"Dave August" wrote in message
...
OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...

5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of
colored wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the
instructors mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my
Chem home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer
club and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted
to get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that
became C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy
drive and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro
the 4004 dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that
became the console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran
of Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was
genuine Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did
original BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can
remeber the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded
8 bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".

Go here for a good picture of "history"

http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html

--.- Dave
Fascinating, Dave!! Thanks so much

Ivan Vegvary

Jon Elson wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

No one here has ever played with any Data General computers? How
about Prime? National Semiconductor? Metrodata? Intel Multibus? How
about VME/VXI?



Sure, I started fooling around with PDP-8's, and worked quite a bit with
a PDP-5, a discrete transistor 12-bit machine essentially identical with
the PDP-8 (no suffix) except for physical size, the -5 was about twice
the size. I also did a bit of work with the LINC, a computer designed
at MIT and built by grad students at a summer session there. Some 50+
were built and then shipped back to the home institutions of those
students, and were used for many years. Again, 12-bit word width, but
ones-complement arithmetic, discrete transistors, XY oscilloscope
display and block-oriented 3/4" magnetic tapes. That instruction set
was later incorporated into DEC's LINC-8 and PDP-12 systems. All that
was at Washington University in St. Louis. I also did some learning on
IBM 360's there. Later I worked on PDP-11s, Vaxes and Alpha systems there.

I worked with Data General Novas at University of Missouri at Rolla.

I built a multiprocessor system with the National Semi 16032 (later
renamed the 32016). It ran up to 7 of these computers with a 2 MB
common memory and using a Vax 11/780 for I/O. About the time I got it
really running well, the faster microvaxes came along, and it was
obsolete. It is still in my basement for sentimental reasons. It used
the extended Multibus-I standard for connection to the VAX and memory
boards, as well as power.

We had a Pr1me (that's a numeral one in the middle, not a letter "i")
here but I never worked with it. I did work with an Interdata 7/32
which was used to run an insane 3rd party disk controller for our
PDP-11s. it enabled us to run Calcomp 40 MB 14" hard drives on our PDP.
The instruction set looked a lot like the IBM 360. I think Pr1me was an
offshoot of Interdata.


We had a Prime, with an 'I' at Microdyne. A very odd system that
handled the MRP, Accounting, sales, personnel & inventory on about 50
terminals.

The first time I heard of Prime was Wane Green, a publisher of
Amateur Radio magazine 73, and Byte magazine in its early days. he was
sold a prime to keep his subscription information, and he went into
great deal about all of the system's flaws. Like the fact that the
system couldn't reuse drive space from deleted files.


I worked on a MicroData microprogrammable minicomputer at Rolla. I even
worked on a Vacuuum-tube computer, the Bendix G-15 at Wash U, but we
were never able to get it running. The magnetic drum was badly scratched.

The first computer I built for myself had an 8008 CPU, but too little
memory to do anything worthwhile. I then built an S-100 system with
8080, and then moved up to a Z-80. I had all sorts of stuff interfaced
to that, including a Honeywell 14.5" drum printer that was bigger than a
chest freezer, 9-track mag tape, a 12" XY display with light pen, and a
10 MB Memorex hard drive. I built a 32-bit AMD bit slice computer on
two huge wire wrap boards, but writing the microcode for it was a huge
project. I did get it running, and had a bunch of test programs, but it
was light years from becoming a usable general-purpose computer. I made
a copy of a Nat Semi 32016 CPU and built a working Genix system, but it
was insanely slow. many things were 5 times slower than my Z-80! I did
use it for at least a year, though. This must have been around 1986,
when I got the opportunity to buy a MicroVax CPU board from a broker,
and get the rest of the needed stuff from 3rd party vendors.

Jon


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!