Richard AShton - time for UK voting to expel him?

> I was I admit a self confessed bigot

Thank you {F}uckwit, for confirming the accuracy of my statement.

> about the OS/2,

A bigot nonetheless.

I agree though, OS/2 was afar better OS than any offering by Microsoft at
the time. The came BeOS... :-)

--
Paul Cummins - Always a Nethead, Wasting bandwidth since 1981

Tel: 07021 117179 Fax: 07092 105150 Email paul (at) cummins.ie.eu.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Ashton the Fuckwit* Check out MID<9sglup$2hsd$1...@pc-news.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>

OS/2 was a good OS. Better in most respects than the competition
(Windows 95), but let down by a poor setup and a limited HCL. AnD lousy
marketing. IBM have this habit of having great products that are badly
marketed then die a death....

Thomas
--
Thomas Lee
(t...@psp.co.uk)

Given the state of the PC market at the time, it was a good product, and
so was the XT and, to a lesser extent the AT.

The PC had 3rd party content, and the manuals even had the assembler
listing of the BIOS, pin outs, etc.

Sadly, Don Estridge died...

Quite so. If a priest abuses a member of his flock, it's entirely his
individual responsibility. The church will turn a blind eye: judge not, lest
ye be judged and anyway children are dirty little beasts.

.. but it was built around a (cack) Intel chip - even though the
68000 existed (and was already used by IBM in other products) and
worthwhile processors were available from other vendors (e.g. the
NS16032).

Cheers,
Daniel.

The NS16032 (and its successors) was my favourite at that time, but
hardly any manufacturers picked it up. At the time the IBM PC was
designed, though, both the Motorola and the NS chips were more expensive
and less tested.

The two things which made the IBM PC the industry standard were:

The IBM name. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was the mantra
at most companies at the time (it later changed).

The 'open' circuits and BIOS listings, which made it trivial for
clones to be produced (and to start with they were total clones,
component and byte identical, until Big Blue started suing, then they
changed things just enough to get round the lawsuits).

There were some other factors which contributed, of course, like Apple's
closed source and hardware policy and Commodore's marketing of the Amiga
as a "games machine" (which it was, but it cuuld be so much more than
that but the sales emphasised the games to the exclusion of anything
else).

However, apart from the memory 'hole' still built into PCs there's
nothing wrong with the modern Intel-based machines. The RISC chips
proved in practice to not be able to compete on either price or speed in
the long run, the 68k seems to now be used only in a few specialised
areas, the PPC seems to be going the same way and the NS chip never got
off the starting block.

Chris C

I spent some time in 1983 developing an NS16032 design as an add-in
board for the IBM PC [this was the first project Locomotive worked on
and it did indeed predate the renaming of the chip as the 32016!]. The
project was unsuccessful commercially because National were unable to
make the chips at anything like the projected speed when they had
promised, nor without some quite interesting bugs in the instructions...
so I'm not sure that this device was a real competitor for IBM's
attention.

... that said, our board did work (albeit only at 6 MHz) and our Pascal
interpreter did run an awful lot faster than it did on the native PC.

[snip]

add to this that the keyboard was solidly made (reminiscent of a
GolfBall typewriter keyboard) and the screen stable and easy to read ...
never underestimate ergonomics!

[there seem to be a lot of strange newsgroups for this to go to]

--
richard Richard Clayton

Are you a Friend of FIPR yet? http://www.fipr.org/friends.html

ISTR a joke doing the rounds when everyone was waiting for various
second processor add-ons to the BBC Micro:

Q: What's the difference between a 16032 and a 32016 processor?
A: They are exactly the same, but the 32016 is twice as late.

In fact, the "joke" was more true than funny.
--
Ben

The PC was launched based on the 8086, not the 8080 - so in many ways it
was much better than the competition at the time (eg The Superbrain).

This was one of Don Estridge's brain wave. IIRC, Intel did a nice deal
on the chips. Was the 68000 a better chip? Sure, just like betamax was a
better vcr standard.

The thing that was so amazing at the time was how open IBM was. Can you
imagine if Microsoft were as open today?

No, it was built around the 8088 which was a cut-down 8086 with
an 8 bit databus.

And how does this post actually contribute anything positive.

Why not take elsewhere?

In case you forgot, this group is meant to be about creating new
newsgroups in uk.*.

I beg to dffer. It was a poor piece of hardware design. In fact, it
looked like the work of some fresh-out-of-school engineers who should
have looked at common practice in the industry before they started.

Shared interrupts (lack thereof) and poor bus timing to start.

IIUC it was not really designed by IBM at all, but was simply adapted from a
schematic that was found in the application notes for the CPU. Such
application circuits are of course meant to illustrate techniques rather
than be an example of a good or practical design. The story I heard is that
it was a panic response by the marketing department who decided (probably
correctly) that they had to have a saleable PC solution PDQ, and the design
engineers were at the time unfamiliar with that type of product and so
seized on the easiest way to achieve a solution fast. Something that we
have all had to suffer for ever since.

In fact, the choice of CPU may even have been decided because it happened to
have a suitable application circuit available!

The popular story surrounding the decision to use a hitherto unknown
operating system (DOS) written by a stranger rather than the proven CP/M is
also quite famous - though I have also read that the truth is not *quite*
the same as the myth (though close).

--
Cynic

This is a good 'usenet-style' summary of the debate about whether to use
edge- or level-triggered interrupts.

You can't share interrupts on the ISA bus because they're edge-triggered,
because that's the way that the 8259 interrupt controller gets programmed by
a standard BIOS (the chip itself can support either method).

There's a failure mode of level triggered interrupt schemes which is that
peripherals don't release the interrupt line (because they've crashed,
because their drivers aren't working, etc,etc) which causes the system to
interrupt again immediately every time the ISR exits - effectively stopping
it. This problem doesn't happen with edge triggered interrupts, where once
the peripheral has pulled the line down it only causes one interrupt.

It seems a fair possibility to me that the original designers thought that
edge would be a safer option if there was to be undisciplined 3rd party
development of add-in cards, and anyway there were half a dozen IRQs
available to the ISA bus, so sharing probably wasn't considered to be a
necessity at the time. PCI, which has level-triggered wire-or IRQ lines,
has a much more regimented specification that ISA did.

This is largely speculation, but there might actually be a technical reason
behind this decision, just as the fact the VHS decks were cheaper to make
than Betamax ones might have played some part in its victory.

Will

I still have an AT keyboard: I would still be using it, if only I could
discover the part number for, and a supplier of, the cable that goes from
the little diddly flat multiway connector at the back of the keyboard,
and with a PS/2 connector on the other end --- I don't have sufficient
space behind my computer to use the original AT DIN connector through an
adapter.

Absolutely THE best-ever keyboard; no Windoze or other superfluous keys,
of course, but better than the original PC or XT kbd in that it had the
cursor and editing keys separated out from the numeric keypad. (I still
use s/w that maps the latter into DEC VT100 codes, including the NumLock
key being PF1.)

--
Brian {Hamilton Kelly} b...@dsl.co.uk
"We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
distributed ignorance. And we know and understand less while being incr-
easingly capable." Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs

In article <memo.2002032...@paul.gst-group.co.uk>
pa...@cummins.ie.eu.org "Paul Cummins" writes:

> In article <hkss9ug44m1848acf...@4ax.com>,

> > I am an atheist. There is no god(s). Blasphemy is an impossible thing
> > for me to do.
>
> Blasphemy is an offence under English LAw. Whether you believe that law is
> correct or not canot change the fact that, while that law exists, you
> have, and do, commit blasphemy.

Is it? I thought that the last remaining statutes criminalizing
blasphemous acts were repealed a few years ago (and I mean a *very* few:
one of the laws was invoked at the trial of the "Schoolkid's Issue" of Oz
way back in the 70s).

ITALITH?

But was it better than contemporaries from such companies as
"Apricot" and other (whose names I have forgotten) 8086 (not 8088)
based systems?

In what way? The ACT Apricot was an excellent PC. It came with both
CPM/86 and MS-DOS. It was much more stylish, though not quite as bullet
proof as the original IBM PC. Its keyboard was excellent, and included 2
row x 40 character 'MicroScreen' LCD display with 6 touch-sensitive
programmable function keys - and could be used as a calculator. It came
with 3.5" floppy disk drives when 5.25" were the norm. It defaulted to
running a user friendly GUI rather than dumping users at the a:/ prompt
and it had bit mapped graphics rather than the text only MDA or the
horrific CGA.

The Apricot was an innovative piece of kit. It even had a panel which
could be pulled down to protect the disk drives when the PC wasn't in
use. Its big downside was that it wasn't 100% PC compatible and didn't
have 'Industry Standard' (sic) expansion slots. It was a real step
backwards when we replaced our Apricot with an Original IBM PC.

I know someone who was using one of these until as recently as a couple
of years ago, when he bought a Psion Series 7.

Take care,

Mark..........
--
"The thing I love most about deadlines is the wonderful WHOOSHing
sound they make as they go past" Douglas Adams 1952 - 2001

So long, and thanks for all the fish. - 11th May 2001

And I haven't been able to finish my 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'
game since I got rid of my Apricots. It doesn't run under IBM-style
kit. Dammit.
--
Paul

Well, actually it was based on the 8088...which saved some costs...

--
Bob Eager
rde at tavi.co.uk
PC Server 325; PS/2s 8595*3, 9595*3 (2*P60 + P90), 8535, 8570, 9556*2, 8580*6,
8557*2, 8550, 9577, 8530, P70, PC/AT..

You can buy adaptors that are a short length of cable with a DIN plug on one end
and a mini-DIN socket on the other....

There are ports of the Z-code interpreter to many platforms (inclusing
java and perl) and most of the old Infocom adventures are available for
download from archive sites on the web. There is also a thriving
community of interactive fiction writers who implement using z-code. You
can even play HHGG on Douglas Adams' website:

http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

The z5 file is located at:

http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.z5

Personally I have a load of Z-code games on my little Jornada Handheld
PC, including HHGG. Good to while away the time on trains/busses or when
just waiting.

In many ways it is scary that I have more processing power and storage
capacity in my pocket right ow than was available to many big iron
mainframes when I first got into computing.

Take care,

It's usually reckoned the 16032 / 32016 were too late for the IBM PC
process.

ian

Ah, that's very nice, that'll be something to while away my time!

--
Take a nap, it saves lives.

http://www.munted.org.uk (updated 27 March 2002)

I do the same on a Psion Revo, and previously on the Series3. ;-)

--
Dave Hillam
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft, Farted & belchd & coughd
And said: I love hanging & drawing & quartering
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering"

> In article <101730...@dsl.co.uk>, b...@dsl.co.uk (Brian {Hamilton

> Still a common law offence.

I'd rather hear that from someone with genuine qualifications in Law,
thank you.

Take that as read.

Rumpole

> And Nokia Communicators (9110 & 9000), and Sharp Organisers (the My Wizard
> series - ZQ700, ZQ770, etc.)

I'm thinking about doing a Z-code interpreter for the Nokia 9110. Watch
this space.

> What's the pont, when one already exists?
> http://www.artilect.co.uk/z9k/

Ahh.. knew I should have spent some time grepping the web. Thank you very
much, I shall look forward to uploading it to my little Nokia.

> Grepping the web was unecessary - just try reading what is put in front
> of you: Julie said it existed in the message you followed up, you even
> quoted the relevant line "And Nokia Communicators (9110 & 9000)"...

Oh dear, the Buell drops an clanger again.

It's not an edge/level triggered issue, it's a polarity issue. Had
they chosen for active low interrupts, then you can wire-or interrupt
lines and expect things to work. They chose active high.

I don't think this is an issue. If hardware failure which jams an IRQ
active on a level triggered system is an issue (most PCs are not
expected to function with failed components), then within the ISR, one
can check the state of the IRQ line and, if it fails to clear and the
software "knows" it should have been cleared by the ISR, then you can
simply mask the interrupt out before exiting. Level rather than edge
triggered interrupts are far more reliable at preventing lost
interrupts when they occur close together.

Level triggered interrupts, active low, were common practice for years
before the PC, with good reason.

Possibly the wrong thing!... I think he's talking about the connector at the
keyboard end .
http://www.pckeyboard.com probably sell the new equivalent (I think it's
part number 1395110, cost $7.25) . The full buckling spring keybaord was one
of the best purchases I ever made, well worth the investment of $120 ($80
for keyboard, $40 for shipping)

--
Work pet...@lakeview.co.uk.plugh.org | remove magic word .org to reply
Home pe...@ibbotson.co.uk.plugh.org | I own the domain but theres no MX

No....he wants to plug his existing keyboard into a PS/2 socket. He says the
barrel type adapter won't fit due to lack of clearance. He was asking about a
complete cable with the connector you mention...I was offering the alternative
of a non-barrel adapter at the other end, retaining ther existing cable and
obviating the need for any new connection at the keybiard end.

snip

Surely that's not an insuperable problem, using diodes or PNP open
collector devices - or is there something to do with the 'low' level
that makes this difficult?

--
Percy Picacity

<sigh>

The PC (as others have pointed out) used an 8088 not an 8086 - same
instruction set, same software, but slower access to memory.

The Superbrain was used not the 8080 but the Z80, which was a
considerably better chip.

There was a lot of fuss at the time about 8/16/32 bit chips and
which was better. Motorola called the 68k a 32-bit chip (because it
was one) intel called the 8086 AND the 8088 16-bit chips (which was
stretching the point for the 8088) and all the older chips (z80,
6502, 8080, 6809, etc.) were sneered at for being merely 8-bit.

It always seemed to me to be reasonable to take the arithmetic mean
of a few significant features of a chip as a guideline to it's real
"bittishness". I chose four key features:

The width of external the data bus, because it gives an idea of how
fast data can be moved around.

The width of the address bus, because it tells you how much memory
can be addressed by the chip.

The size of the stack pointer, because it tells you how big a stack
frame can be - which is important for efficient high-level language
implementation.

The size of the accumulator (or rather: the largest register that
can be used for arithmetic) because it gives a measure of the
arithmetic processing power of the chip.

Using these four I got:

6502 (8+16+8+8)/4 = 10 bits
8080 (8+16+16+8)/4 = 12 bits
Z80 (8+16+16+16)/4 = 14 bits (using HL for arithmetic)
8088 (8+20+16+16)/4 = 15 bits
8086 (16+20+16+16)/4 = 17 bits
68000 (32+24+32+32)/4 = 30 bits

Now, my "bittishness" figure is only a rough guide (it ignores clock
speeds, for example, and that the 8086 and 68000 can multiply and
divide 16 bit numbers while the Z80's HL register can only add and
subtract), but I think it shows that the intel "16-bit" chips were
of about the same order of power as the better 8-bit chips while the
68000 was almost twice as powerful.

Cheers,
Daniel.

ISTRT the truth of the flying story is that GK had flown his plane
to visit a client, so the story - which is always told so as to
suggest a recreational flight - distorts the truth.

> Of course there was no "proven" or any other kind of CP/M
> compiled to run on the 8088 at that time, so the "hitherto
> unknown" one written by Tim Patterson for Seattle Computer
> Products was as good as anything existing.

.. but, of course, IBM didn't go to Seattle Computer Products,
they went to Microsoft - the authors of the well-known MBasic
interpreter for CP/M-80 - who said "yes, we can do that" and
promptly went out and bought in a "hitherto unknown" 3rd-party
solution.

Plus ça change ...

Cheers,
Daniel.

No - they went to the son of Mary Gates.

And they demanded the rights. I'd have loved to have been a fly in the
cabin of the plane back to Armonk with the lawyers laughing their heads
off...

--
Thomas Lee
(t...@psp.co.uk)

Yes - my typo. I was around on the day the system was launched and had
one a few months beter.

Whoops. I was sure the superbrain was an 8080 - but on checking, you're
right. <blush>.

I seem to recall Don Estridge saying that one of the reasons they chose
the 8088 was for compatibility - they could get stuff off the shelf to
plug in cheaply and easily. Remember that the PC was a skunk works
project done in Boca Raton, not a normal IBM project. It was done quick
and dirty-ish.

Thomas

--
Thomas Lee
(t...@psp.co.uk)

Using combinations of SLA/SRA and RL/RR (on the H and L registers
individually), you can perform basic doubling and halving fairly
trivially. (Since you can combine them so that the relevant cross-over
bit is moved in and out of carry, in the right order.) I forget if it's
arithmetic or logical shifts you need, because I always forget the
difference.

If terribly bored, you can use Russian multiplication to achieve
'proper' multiplication.

Of course, this isn't actually hard coded into the chip.

--
James Coupe She often said very sensible things, you know. She told
PGP 0x5D623D5D me: "Always give a thief enough rope, because it's
EBD690ECD7A1FB457CA2 cumbersome and he won't be able to carry the video."
13D7E668C3695D623D5D - Jon Ingold, "Three Figures, at Creation"

The Intertec Superbrain used two Z80s. One for the main processor and one
for the floppy disk system. IIRC there was some clever switching of a block
of RAM between the two processors.

I had a SuperBrain QD which cost me £2600 -- A bargain at the time and
it did have twin Z80's and it was a very good machine which served me
well.

It ran a CPM operating system. Those were the days.
--
David Husband, Portland, Dorset. (Use rot-13 to get correct e-mail address)
[I am posting from uk.legal and I am not a lawyer.]

> [first of the four numbers is] The width of external the data bus, because

> 68000 (32+24+32+32)/4 = 30 bits

That should be (16+24+32+32)/4 = 26 bits

I think the 68020 was the first one with a 32 bit external data bus. The
68000 still wins your comparison, but not by as much as a margin.

Oops - apologies. I'll take your word for it - that was all a long
time ago and my 68000 refrence book seems to have gone walkabout.

Cheers,
Daniel.

I also seem to remember that multiply/divide took an horrendous amount of
cycles and there was no barrel shift for rotates on the original 68K.

Actually my pet 68K hate is the lack of an reverse the byte order
instruction for big/little endian machine swapping. (intel has the BSWAP &
XCHG instructions)

A real bummer for one comms protocol I was involved with:
8 bit values on a comms line are sent lsb first so 16 bit values were too
but this meant a byte swap was needed on the 68K client machines (bummer was
by this stage we'd commited to silicon so couldn't change).

How does the Z8000 rate?
16 bit data, 23 bit address (7 bit segment, 16 bit offset), 16 bit
stack, 64 bit (quad register) maths.
(16+23+16+64)/4=29.75
Designed for multiprocessor use.

I used a Bridgeport Textron CNC machine that had a Z8000 looking after
the program and interfaces. A 68000 driving the axis servo motors.
And a 65xx micro controller on the user keyboard and display.

I have a Cifer that has a two 4 MHz Z80's with a high speed serial
link between them. One is a CPM computer, the other is the Terminal.
It can display text files quicker from YE-data 8" floppy than an
i486/33 with ISA SVGA graphics on a 12MHz bus can from a IDE hard
disk. Took an i486/33 with VESA graphics card to beat it.

--
Peter Hill

Can of worms - what every fisherman wants.
Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

Nor on the original 8086/8 or any othe processor at the time. From what
I recall (and this is over 20 years ago), Plessey (as was then) got a
patent on the barrel shift process and used it to lock out everyone
else, it wasn't until (IIRC) the 386 was being designed that the patent
expired and Intel and others started incorporating the vastly faster
system into their processors.

IIRC only XCHG in the 8086/8, but still useful. The ability to address
both low and high bytes of 16 bit registers was also useful (although it
only applied to the first 4 registers, some of which were had other
dedicated uses).

Anyone for uk.comp.cpu.nostalgia?

Chris C

AFAIR, the NEC V20 (8088 replacement) and V30 (8086 replacement) had barrel
shifters. They certainly did multiplies and divides a hell of a lot faster.

They may well have done, they came along after the 8086 (I don't
remember when the Plessey pastent ran out, but it was after the 8086 was
in production I believe). The NEC chips also added some instructions
from the 80286 (I believe pushall and popall among them).

BTW, you wouldn't be the Bob Eager who was a postgrad at UKC around
1977 by any chance? The one who, as I recall, could enter the PDP-11/20
bootstrap into core from memory? I was an undergrad ther at that
time...

Chris C

Fraid so....!!!!

Now senior lecturer in CS at the same place....and Master of Darwin College for
now....

Depending on the media being loaded from that could be just load '5' in one
register for an auto 64KB DMA to start from sector 0 !

I used to be able to do the same for the paper tape bootstrap, but then again
at that time paper tape was just in its last years as the standard distro
for the diagnostics that had to run in 4KB or less. Having written a couple
of diagnostics in PDP-11 Assembler for DEC, when I was working for part
of it at the time.

Still got somewhere some PDP-11 programming cards and an old DECUS tape.
Probably some old listings as well.

--
Paul Carpenter | pa...@pcserv.demon.co.uk
<http://www.pcserv.demon.co.uk/> Main Site
<http://www.snugglebot.co.uk/> Robot Wars entry using H8 and GNUH8
<http://www.gnuh8.org.uk/> GNU H8 & mailing list info.
<http://www.readingsme.org.uk/> Reading SME Business Club info
<http://www.badweb.org.uk/> For those web sites you hate.

> Does that mean you have a duty to go hunting racoons armed with a can of
> butane, a six-pack, and a picture of George Bush pinned to the rear of
> your coat?

No, just students....nuch more fun!

You'd be thinking of the RK05 I believe...

This was the paper tape bootstrap....!

I also have ported the PDP-11 simulator to OS/2. Must put it on the website
sometime....I have UNIX v6 running on OS/2 under it, also TSS-8 on the PDP-8
emulator. It's fun having several Telnet windows open, each logged into a TSS-8
port...

Correct give the man a coconut...

I had to use it quite a lot until A couple of use setup our ODT cards
with serial links to a PDP-11/70 running RSTS for diagnostic download and
debugging..

The PDP-11 should be fairly easy to simulate, unless of course you are talking
things like PDP-11/60 with your own instruction set :-)

Now where eas that PDP-8 newsgroup...

Okay, just how many UKC alumni are there hanging around here?

I just mentioned this thread to my friend Pete Wise (BSc Hons and
postgrad ElecEng, Rutherford) who's visiting, who said something about
Bob Eager hacking the Vax machines from vi...

- ANDREA

PS. I'm BA Hons and postgrad History, Eliot - I also have an excuse for
being considered a pseudo-techy because I taught Computing for the
Humanities there and have helped Jarod nearly set fire to his house.

PPS. As an historian however, I have no excuse for the two server boxes
(one parallel processing and currently pretending to be a PC, on which
I'm writing this), three laptops, one dead pentium, two dodgy Amstrads,
a Hercules clone from the Far East, a Perkin-Elmer and an ex-UKC
Alphatronic with which I seem to be sharing my house. Although to be
fair, hopefully Pete will take a server box and a laptop away with him,
and one of the other laptops is only here to be fixed.

--
^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^
<and...@bloodaxe.com> http://www.bloodaxe.com/
Bloodaxe's History Links: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5055/
The Loony Bin Archive: http://loonies.net800.co.uk/

And were you the Chris Croughton who once gave me the "latest" Nas-sys
eprom when I lived in the Poole area ?
--
David Husband, Portland, Dorset, United Kingdom

You're sick, aren't you? OS/2? We are all doomed.

--
I'm an infojunkie.

http://www.munted.org.uk (updated 5 April 2002)

Congratulations! (But do they still have the 11/20? <g>)

I remember someone on a newsgroup (several years ago) who was a current
student at UKC asking me what the names of the computers were when I was
there (thinking of a network). I replied that there was the batch 4130,
the 'big' 4130, the 11/20 and 11/40 and the 2960 but apart from that
what we called them wasn't very printable <g>. Poor kid, he'd never
seen a card punch...

(I still think, occasionally when complaining that a compilation is
taking a significant fraction of a minute, that when I was there we were
lucky to get lineprinter output back within a day of submitting the job
(on cards). Those were the days...)

Chris C

Chris Croughton, BSc Hons Computers and Cybernetics 1978 (Eliot).
Also in (and occasionally on) UKC Radio '76 to '78.

Must have been after my time, we didn't have a VAX when I was there.
Although his name rings a faint bell...

And you have friends in Rutherford? Shock, horror! <g>

<g> OK, you have more than I have. Although if I count the two DEC
Alpha boxes, one of which needs repairing and neither of which are live
at the moment, and the dead 486 and the gods know how many old
motherboards around...

Chris C

I've been thinking of downloading the Linux PDP-11 port and running Unix
under it. It's a frightening thought that it will probably run faster
than it did on the real PDP-11 25 years ago...

Chris C

That machine was paper tape, although it did have the very useful
DecTape drive. The 11/40 used RK05s, I think (could have been RK02s).

I know I've still got some listings from that time...

Chris C

Ye gods and little hairy fishes! That would have been what, '82? It
was about then that I got the Nascom (I still have it, I don't think
it's still working though). Small world...

(As far as I know there's only one Chris Croughton in the UK...)

Chris C

Look at my sig..which doesn't tell the half of it. The current count is around
40...some of them are almost archaeology. I have a PC/AT running oS/2 1.0....

Anyone want a mint condition Amiga 1200 in original packaging?

ONly if it's free ;-)

--
Paul Cummins - Always a Nethead, Wasting bandwidth since 1981

Tel: 07021 117179 Fax: 07092 105150 Email paul (at) cummins.ie.eu.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Ashton the Fuckwit* Check out MID<9sglup$2hsd$1...@pc-news.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>

On my OS/2 port, it does.....!

The best Field Service story about DECTape, was the engineer called to a
machine shop that used them for CNC control. Having tested the drive with
no fault, asked customer to replicate the fault, customer poroduced a clear
tape with no ferric oxide layer at all! Next question of course was
"and where is the backup"......

I was reading only the other day (was it here?) about the accessory with every
DECTape - the LBT-11.

Little Blue Thing.....

Pete's definitely after your time, although after spending six years
there it's certainly wouldn't surprise me if his name has been mentioned
by folks who were there when he was. There are plenty of students and
staff who'd remember him.

It's a dreadful embarrassment, but I have to admit that while I made
many friends in my years at UKC, most of them came up through
Rutherford, mostly Computing, ElecEng and Physics. I suspect that's how
I turned into an honorary techie. After all, humanities students aren't
supposed to know what sysadmins are, much less be on first name terms
with them.

I don't think components count. I suspect (based on personal experience)
that bits like that breed by themselves while not being watched. At
least, I seem to keep finding bits that I have no memory of acquiring.

- ANDREA

>On 7 Apr 2002 03:13:07 -0500, David Husband

It must be you then !! Yes, around 1982 would be about correct. Are you
still in that area ?
--
David Husband, Portland, Dorset. (Use rot-13 to get correct e-mail address)
[I am posting from uk.legal and I am not a lawyer.]

Cough. Probably far too many for comfort. Mostly, like myself, models of
restraint on the old hardware collection front. I only
have a NCD 15b X terminal, Bull Australia diskless 386, BBC Model A,
Atom, 8k PET with integral cassette and calculator keyboard. Also a P120
doing router/webserver duty plus a K6/2 for Doing Stuff, but they don't
count 'cos they're actually useful.

(Bob - hi Bob! - was my PhD supervisor '84-'88).
--
Jim Hague - jim....@insignia.com (Work), j...@bear-cave.org.uk (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift.

Is there a newsgroup for this sort of natter? I'd like to know more
about the evolution of systems, say from the days of DEC10 / PDP11 (my
school days) onwards but this cross posted OT jewel of a thread just
isn't the place..

--
Dave Johnson : req...@freeuk.com

Hi Jim! Oh yes... The Ravenous Bugblatter Editor....

You could try alt.folklore.computers Just don't discuss PCs or anything
else developed since the '70s. ;)

Chris.

Or if you want somewhere to discuss any sort of machine, where topic
drift (UKC college Christmas tree thievery, Doom, Jarod's barbecues,
Furby clusters) is acceptable - in other words, something rather like
this thread - I can start a Yahoo group mailing list for it.

We had a great group that ran for well over a year that grew out of an
OT spam thread to uk.rec.motorsport.misc, uk.rec.motorcycles,
uk.rec.naturist and uk.rec.sheds!

>In article <7bis8a...@teabag.cbhnet>, Chris Hedley

Bit early for me, I'm after the progression from mid eighties onwards.
I might give the group a look though.

--
Dave Johnson : req...@freeuk.com

There's always been Christmas tree thievery - it's timeless. I managed to
collect all threee other Colleges' (and the Gulbenkian Theatre's) as an
undergraduate.

My first Christmas as Master, I installed very heavy duty chain and a
concreted-in ringbolt.

>My first Christmas as Master, I installed very heavy duty chain and a
>concreted-in ringbolt.

Spoilsport! <g>

Did it actually stop the tree thievery or did they find a way?

Once, they did. But then we attached a rape alarm to a nearby pillar with the
string tied to the top of the tree (unobtrusively)

alt.sex.bdsm is over thataway...

ian

So, still at FTel Ian? I never knew you were into that stuff.
--
Bob Cousins

>Poor kid, he'd never
>seen a card punch...

Lucky lucky kid, he'd never had a four-inch stack of punched cards go
spraying all over the floor as he picked them up ... quicker to re-punch
than to try and put them back in order again!
--
Molly
I don't speak for UKVoting. Hey, half the time I don't even speak for myself.

You only had a four-inch stack? We had card drawers about 18 inches
long, and some programs were several drawers-full.

We _did_ have the cards sequence-numbered, thank goodness.

ttfn

Allen

--
Allen
Before posting proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Not yahoo, I won't go near them with their policies (enabling
advertising spam without even telling the customers recently). I could
run one from here...

Hah, URP gained several people from a troll sent crossposted to UKBA and
a Vegan group. The troll must have been really disappointed, we were
all perfectly polite and had some interesting conversations.

Chris C

No, I moved out in '83). Plessey wanted to give me more money -- which
was good -- but also wanted to push me into management (which is very
ungood) so I left, went up to Windsor/Slough. Been up in Aylesbury
since '85...

Chris C

>On 8 Apr 2002 04:38:44 -0500, David Husband

OK, nice area...

I spend most of my time during the week in w. London working for a
broadcasting company and return to Dorset at the weekends...

Or trying to rewind a paper tape that had got all tangled up.

FU set (though deciding which of the four groups this is least off-topic
for is an interesting exercise :)
--
John Hall
"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history
that man can never learn anything from history."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

>Not yahoo, I won't go near them with their policies (enabling

I still have groups there, because I don't yet have an always on
connection (not that one would really notice since I seem to live
online), although eventually I'll get around to sorting things out here.
I have already moved things like my humour list that don't need an
always on connection.

Andrea, you may be interested to look at the services provided by
www.gradwell.com, I have set up an ezmlm list for one of the sites I
host there and it seems quite fully featured and easy to maintain.

Take care,

Mark..........
--
"The thing I love most about deadlines is the wonderful WHOOSHing
sound they make as they go past" Douglas Adams 1952 - 2001

So long, and thanks for all the fish. - 11th May 2001

Richard Ashton is not trustworthy he will and can abuse any position
where he has access to a persons personal data.

Would you like your name, home address and telephone numbers publishing
in news groups ??

Richard Ashton has published details previously in order to bully and
harm individuals. He carries on personal vendettas with persons for
such reasons as them asking him not to swear on usenet.
He is pillorying a Nursing Sister on two web sites and if you fall
foul of him you might be the next.

Look at his sig file about myself and you could be treated like this by
him.

Gradwell has defended his right to do this.

If you sign up with Gradwell you may find that he has access to
information you would rather keep private.

Allen

--

snip

>
> To surmise, I'd have to say you're talking completer and utter
> rubbish.

The article is so clearly defamatory that Mr. Ashton and Mr. Gradwell
might be forced, perhaps against their inclinations, to take action
against the perpetrator to protect their employment and business
respectively, unless he rapidly and very publically apologises. There
is an argument for saying the Gradwell business might suffer even if he
does apologise, as there is a general tendency for people to wonder if
there is "no smoke without fire".

--
Percy Picacity

Nick Webster wrote:
> I have found him to be noting

--

--

It certainly would be a good excuse to use *if* the gradwell spamming
business were going down the tubes...
--
David Husband, Portland, Dorset, United Kingdom