I used to work at UBC in Pharmacology in the
1980's and had a few talks with Bill Webb about
Unix but, unfortunately, for the data acquisition
we were doing Unix was far too slow and I did
everything in optimized PDP-11 assembler. Of
course, we didn't have a PDP-11/45 like Bill had
and had t
That was a very interesting read! The type of
thing I could see myself doing over 40 years ago
when once I'd come up with a neat idea and either
did preliminary coding or hardware design
suggesting it would work I'd jump right into it
and find optimistic 1 month project timelines
stretching
Thanks for that link Charles and also thanks to Mark Kahrs for
obituary on Roger Abbott. I started out on PDP-8 in 1968 which was
the first time I had hands on access to a computer at
UofCalgary. Would have loved to have had access to one when I did my
MSc in neurophysiology in 1975 but obvio
A mere 579 miles from Kamloops. Unfortunately have to talk to my
wife who thinks I have too many computers even though I've given away
bulk of my DEC stuff. Never got a chance to play around on Alpha as
it came out during my Mac days.
I have access to 3 ES45s, a DS15, and an RA8000 in a tall
well. My wife is after me to get rid of "old
stuff" but it's the most fun to use and easiest
to repair. May have to placate her by getting
rid of my collection of 80x86 PC's which can now
be easily replaced by Propeller systems for data acquisition applications.
On 8/5/20
Thanks for putting it up. First time I've logged
onto old Unix in decades (should try getting my copy of V6 up on simh).
Have a couple of RasberryPi's kicking around that
just fired up once to play with. Only part that
simulation doesn't let you do is to connect up
all sorts of lab hardware t
Unfortunately, I have to use Windoze as most medical software is M$
centric. Also, started using VB in about 1991 which allowed me to
create windows easily rather than using Hypercard on Mac. As with
most M$ programs, they decided to replace a perfectly functional VB6
which allowed one to inc
Downloaded files for previous PDP-11 emulator but couldn't get it to
run. Link to German site at bottom of your post works fine and Unix
runs about same speed that it ran on my 11/34 in 1983. Scary that
coding a PDP-11 emulator in an incredibly inefficient scripting
language such as Javascrip
At 14:15 31-12-19, you wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2019, at 13:32, Ali via cctalk wrote:
>
> I hate having to order 50 capacitors from
China every time I need one
>
I ordered two from Mouser this week.
alan
One of the things I miss most is no longer having
any local electronic suppliers.
At 16:12 05-04-20, you wrote:
On 4/5/20 6:28 PM, geneb via cctalk wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
translate a real world "thing
At 18:25 05-04-20, you wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin via cctalk once stated:
> >>Edsger Dijksta said, "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
> >>should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
>
> On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
> >I'm pretty sure he said th
Seeing that video makes me want to play around with game of life again.
Once it came out in October 1970 Sci Am, we were all coding it but
not nearly as much fun doing it as a batch FORTRAN job and having to
enter cells on punched cards (at least we could run that initial game
configuration car
Nice how machines from that era were well made enough to still work.
Remember that Lunar Lander game from about 1970. Version I played
was written in FOCAL and run on a TSS-8. Should try it out on some
kids who think they're great gamers and see how fast they catch on -
once we were able to l
Thanks for posting the timeline of various Basic interpreters. I
wasn't aware that Gates/Allen also wrote Basic for C64. Did download
the 8080 Basic source code out of interest, but in early 1980's had
very little to do with IBM PC.
As was working with PDP-11's at that time, really disliked
Thanks for that really detailed review of microprocessor history! A
post to save. Will have to doublecheck about the C64 as the first
source I found was Wikipedia and usually look for another source to
confirm that. Have a book on disassembly of C64 ROMS which came in
very helpfull when I was
Chuck, your post just reminded me of how I used
FORTRAN to interface with my PDP-11 ASM routines
when I was doing data acquisition as fast as
possible on a MINC system. Perused my FORTRAN
code about 6 months ago and had common blocks and
a routine which took "arrays" which were
essential chu
Had to fire up BasiliskII to find out what kind of Fortran I used on
Mac in 1988. Turned out it was Absoft Fortran 2.4 and seemed a bit
strange as I recall M$ was written on floppies that I got for
it. Did a bit of digging on internet today and, surprisingly, Absoft
still exists and continues
Will, thanks for that link to Mac books. My Inside MacIntosh books
suffered water damage when had a flood in room they were stored and
nice to have information as a pdf files. Prefer actual books with my
annotations, but now just use virtual Mac running under
BasiliskII. Judge how fast compu
Just had a look at file in hex editor and first &HDF bytes are 0
and then appears to be some type of image format after that.
Suggests that parts recoverable.
Boris Gimbarzevsky
When I try, it says error, failed to download document.
-Original Message-
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk
Funny how wetware memory works. I have that issue of Popular
Electronics somewhere in my collection and would have seen the
article as I would read it cover to cover after it arrived in mail.
While looking at the issue again, remembered reading next article on
PLL's so probably read the Cyclop
Remember buying boards like that at electronics surplus places in
late 60's but never knew where they came from. Just used them as a
cheap source of parts. Also suspect the black boxes are pulse
transformers although all of the pulse transformers I pulled off
boards were circular. Never thou
Agree that current mailing list format is best as simple, low
bandwidth and can always post links to images or other large
files. I still use Eudora as my email client and have text only
emails. Seems to perplex a lot of people I deal with when I can't
read their emails, but it seems somewhat
Have been going through my shop and storage room trying to see what
can get rid of and wasn't aware of how much old electronics and
computers have accumulated over last 50 years. Should note that this
process has been at insistance of my wife as a lot of these boxes
just got moved whenever I m
ille and Osoyoos,
and you can throw them across the border.
-mike
-----Original Message-
From: cctalk On
Behalf Of Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:36 PM
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
Subject: Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?
Have been going th
TAhanks for that link which fits with my
measurements (nowhere as detailed) of ones actual
ability to do things with "modern" hardware. In
the 1980's I was used to being able to measure
events with 0.2 microsecond precision using a
PDP-11 and my expectation was that the accuracy
was only goi
Thanks for doing this. I still use Eudora as my primary mail program
and have been doing so since about 1991, first on Mac and then on
Windoze. Have started using Thunderbird as easier to configure for
new email formats and should probably get up to speed on developments
since popmail format
This may be unrelated, but seems that a Tektronix disk controller
board I found when going through my shop might be related to the
graphics terminal. Hadn't found Tektronix section on bitsavers prior
to this post and drew a blank searching internet.
Manufacturing dates on chips are 1980 and i
Thanks for putting this out. Not a system I'm familiar with but did
play around briefly with APL in 1969 on an IBM 360.
Very nice emulator and managed to get it up and running once found an
emulated HP graphics terminal. Pleasantly surprised that emulator
CPU useage was very small (unlike Ba
Thanks for that Al. Never thought about humidity and mag tapes as
only time I used to backup data to 9 track tapes was in Vancouver
where humidity always high. Also used Time Shoppa's and Kevin
McGuigan's drives to extract data from those tapes in
Vancouver. Doubt I'll be copying any more of
If it's a windoze system, modified a bare-bones keylogger about 10
years ago which records all keystrokes (can get time of key_press,
key_release) and also monitors all mouse clicks as well as title of
window clicked on. Can also record every mouse event which takes up
a LOT of disk space. J
Probably read about this machine in Byte back
then but was programming PDP-11's. Was very
disappointed in IBM PC as IMO was far inferior to
PDP-11 which was was easier to interface to data
acquisition hardware and had a much nicer
instruction set. Ran into 68000 processor for
first time in 1
Thanks for the link. Coincidentally, recently while going through my
ancient Calgary printouts, found a few small APL programs I wrote in
1968 or 1969. There was an APL system being trialed at UofCalgary
and a group of us had a chance to play around with it for a few
hours. It was very novel
Counting in binary on ones fingers was something I first ran into at
age 11 when found a book on Military Electronics in a surplus
store. Everything simplified, but in computer section found binary
system explained with using fingers to represent bits. That was
something that I used immediate
Have been told by my wife that PDP-11 stuff not coming along with us
when we're moving and so time to get it off to a good home. All of
it is QBus and material in first batch is what I've got at home and
will try to get pictures of another 2 systems in storage locker this
week. Locker contain
Jim, that's the board whose picture is 20210223_173156.jpg
Not sure what it is - just remember grabbing any
QBus boards at UBC SERF with plans to use them sometime.
Boris
On 2/23/2021 9:44 PM, Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk wrote:
Boris Gimbarzevsky
Boris, it looks like a hex high boa
Glen Slick picked up my MINC and RLO2's. Have to
admit that my PDP-11 days are in the past so can let someone else have the fun.
Boris
On 2/23/2021 10:05 PM, Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk wrote:
Jim, that's the board whose picture is 20210223_173156.jpg
Not sure what it is - jus
That appears to be an earlier model of a similar system we had at UBC
which could crunch arrays of FP numbers at 10 Mflops. Had it
connected to an 11/44 and just recall doing some frantic programming
mainly involving using minimal code as had to use memory management
to allocate memory pages to
Recovering data from disks was a lot easier 30 years ago when most
filesystems had contiguous files and it was just a matter of finding
file boundaries. Was very glad of this when accidentally wiped first
200 blocks of an RT-11 RK05 and just had to write a FORTRAN program
to copy blocks of dat
Have a bunch of modems as well but first have to get PDP-11 stuff
shipped off to those people who want it. Will see if Value Village
in Kamloops will still take them. For a while they were a great
place to get old electronics like the DAT SCSI drive I picked up for
$5 8 years ago. "high spee
Thanks Mattis - watching an AR11 making that
oscilloscope display brings back a lot of
memories from my PDP-11 programming days. Had
heard of spacewar in 1980, but was more
interested in playing around displaying data on
screen of a scope. One of my jobs was to clean
up electrophysiology da
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