The We Will Miss You, Chohole Complaint Thread
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Same here.
When those types of computers with cassette input started showing up in the stores I tried one, and decided quickly that "it would never catch on".
i found 16GB of SODIMM memory for only $50 USD at an online store. Now I just need to save some money.
Monitor died. Computer was on for six hours plus, and the monitor hadn't woken up yet. Until yesterday, it was only taking from ten to thiry five minutes. Tried hooking up an old monitor with VGA connector to my card...it said no signal. So the card died, too. Joy.
I have a feeling my motherboard won't take the new Nvidia 1660 or newer cards. I don't think it has PCIe 3.0 capability. So, computer is in limbo...using Diane's laptop right now. Slow. Small screen (was big when it was new). Not happy.
Dana
....I've been running a Maxwell Titan X (PCIe 3.0) on a P6-T MB which has PCIe 2.0 slots fro a while now with no issue. Can't afford an upgrade as it means not only new MB, but CPU and memory and I want it to be an actual "upgrade", not just a "band aid".
Try this first. With the power off, unplug all the cords. Take the box, turn it upside down, shake it in an up and down motion 4 times. Put it back, plug everything back in and see if works. I'm not joking.
Speaking of old tech, check out my stash. I hadn't walked back there in years but this reminded me to check on things, a bit dusty.
Still several in boxes, one day I should go check how many still work.
I have the entire run of Hardcore (an apple cracker mag, not porn) and 2600 up to 2009 someplace.
And yes that's an unopened, still shrink wrapped box of 3m floppies.
..that's a bleedin' museum there.
You don't happen to have a NEC Multisync 2A JC-1403HMA monitor do you? Had one way back in the late 90s, it weighed something like 31#.
So my daughter's high school is having a "Dress Up For A Holiday" thing, and one of them dressed up in an Indian (Asian India) outfit for the Indian/Hindu holiday of Diwali... (not out of the blue, my wife is Hindu and Indian)... So I just got a text from my daughter that I think is like a text that sums up the absurdity of 2020-2021 perfectly...
"y’all thought I was gonna look out of place but I just watched Jesus shake hands with a gigantic taco in a sombrero right before the Easter bunny walked in"
I think I'm getting that printed on a coffee mug or something.
we had a lot of those old NEC at work.. high end mionitors where needed were Nanao or Viewsonic
I want to eat up all the candy I got yesterday but that would be a bad idea!
Ooh, an Osborne. Friend of mine from college had an original Osborne. He used it as the controller for the mechanics he installed into an old upright acoustic piano to make it into a digitally controlled player piano, long before I noticed such things showing up in shopping mall concourses and fancy department stores.
Complaint: my savings are taking a beating this month ,first the plumbing issue ,now I found a guy to do a major clean up clear out of my yard ,get rid of all the downed branches ,2 dying trees ,over grown hedges ,etc. good thing I've reach burnout on DAZ sale ......on the plus side it's all improvements .....
As much as I appreciate and love seeing nice collections of classic equipment, I'm sort of glad I don't have to deal with that much stuff anymore.
Something I keep my eye out for when I see photos or YouTubes of people's collections of classic equipment is one of my old Raytheon computers. A Raytheon "706" or its predecessor the Raytheon"704", or it's successor, the Raytheon Data Systems "RDS-500". My heart waxes nostalgic for a photo of one still existing. There weren't many.
I guess you will have seen this?
http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dev_en/ray704/ray704.html
I had an Osborne II with CP/M 3.0. I used it (among other things) to control the phoneme synthesizer on my self made Z80 computer to speak German, French and English, connected by a RS232 (20 m/60 ft) in another room from texts I wrote on the Osborne. Programmed it in fig-FORTH 79 and Z80 Assembler. The Osborne II had a gigantic 7 inch display (Osborn I had a tiny 5 inch one).
No, I had not. Thank you!
I haven't googled it for several years. The last thing I found was some lists of classic machines that it appeared in, and a photo of the manual cover, and a couple tiny b&w images of a pretty much fleshed out system. Multiple tape drives, multiple disk drives, card read/punch, etc. the whole shebang.
My "706" looked very similar to the "704" but was mounted in one of two 5 foot tall racks, with a 6 foot tall rack for our single magnetic tape drive. Unfortunately I have no photos of the "706" system. And although after we'd moved to the Launch Control Center and added the "RDS-500" and more peripherals, both computers were in the same lab but were completely separate and complete functioning computers until I added a serial communication circuit between them a couple years later.
The photos below show the RDS-500 system. We moved the old 7(9) track tape drive to the new computer, added two modern (at the time) 9-track, 800bpi, magnetic tape drives, the Tektronix 4012 storage graphic display, and interfaces to our video storage disk and video distribution system.
The old 706 computer lost its tape drive to the RDS-500, but we bought it a hard drive as a replacement, although I had to write the driver for it. So, it finally was able to do FORTRAN compiles without having to punch paper tape at 10 bytes/sec.
Oh, I forgot... The old 706 without a hard drive had to use its magnetic tape drive to load in the operating system (such as it was) in addition to using the tape drive for loading the FORTRAN compiler, but honestly those were the only things the single tape drive was used for. I forget exactly why we couldn't write compilation output to the tape. Although I think it was because at the time we only had one tape drive. Two would have made it better. But the point was moot because we added that disk drive which solved the compilation problems. Wheee...
During the years that I was responsible for those two Raytheons I had access to the microfiche listing of the operating system, completely written in its own assembler language. I flowcharted the entire thing for both machines. The 706 was a single user, single task machine, with not much of an OS. Very simple yet powerful if all you wanted to do was compile and run a program and handle interrupts. Although the RDS-500 was still a single user system it had a proper multi-processing OS. During the process of flowcharting its OS, I discovered a bug that would violate the multi-tasking rules under certain rare circumstances and cause wierd problems. That made me happy because it was the cause of one of my problems. Yay! I patched the OS and sent my finding back to Raytheon. Unfortunately, the woman who wrote the OS was killed in an auto crash and I never saw the correction appear in subsequent updates before I left.
Also, forgot to mention that you can see one of our Tektronix storage displays in the photo, an image was drawn with vectors on a storage screen (i.e. once drawn, the lines remained glowing until scanned again to erase it). Our video storage disk and video distribution equipment had a scan converter that would translate the image to raster TV format and we'd send it to the KSC weather station (and others) who watched our lightning potential, electric field maps. I loved those two Tektronix 4012 displays. But to be honest I lusted after the 4015 model with 4 times the resolution but we never got one. (*sigh*)
I don't have any raytheon stuff, but did you notice this? Here's a closeup.
Most of the stuff I have came from people cleaning up their closets, or attics and donating their old computers to me, over the many many years it kind of added up. I threw way more then is shown here, a lot more. I only kept what worked or was interesting. This CRAY board I did get on auction some 10 years ago though. Only because as a kid we use to joke about hacking one to turn it into a warez BBS.
Ooh, juicy!
But it's going to suffocate in that bag.
While examining the old photos of my lab I noticed that the paper tape reader had neither supply nor take-up reel. See, the little cardbord box taped to the left of the highspeed papertape read head (just under the "blinken-lites" console. I'd forgotten that I'd cobbled up that little box and it stayed there for all the years I was there. You can also see to the northeast of the papertape read head is my little handheld papertape winder widget. There's also a hand cranked model on top of the computer. I never used it. I always used the 'lectric one.
In the messy workarea you can see one of our video storage disks. Remember this is 1978. The video disk could store one frame of video on one track on the disk, then you had to turn its little crank one turn to advance the head. If you wanted video motion you had to crank as each picture was generated by the computer, then after all recorded, you had to manually crank to get each frame to display. Great for what we were doing because it took a minute to calculate each frame of video. It took an hour to get two seconds of video. But with the video we could see how the atmospheric electric field was changing over time.
It's not easy to see, but in the photo with the little TV monitors, the monitor in the upper right has my outline of the Kennedy Space Center grounds and I can see a few electric-field contour lines indicating a small field at the time.
You know what would be fun, for nerds like us, is to reproduce your lab in 3d. Do you have any more pictures?
I can figure out the relation of the first images bottom images, and the second images 2 right images, but not the placement of the others.
Osbornes, great little machines for the brief time that they were in the spotlight.
In the 8 photos I have above, what you see is what you get. 'tain't no more photos. It was a large room, and only shows about 1/3 of the equipment in there. Document cabinets, tape cabinets, filing cabinets, electronics work area, racks of equipment for analog to digital conversion of data from the analog tape drives in the other room, two complete computer systems (i.e. tty, Tektronix display, card reader, lineprinter, and at least two racks of "computer") for each area, worktables, keypunch, my desk area. Part of our lab, but next door, was a room dedicated to several rows of big analog data recorders. Lots of racks of 1" wide analog tape recorders for recording analog data from sensors placed around the Space Center grounds, we could select which analog data recorder would feed into the computers. What data? Temperature, winds, rainfall, atmospheric electric field, noise, etc. Whatever sensors were installed for ongoing research not related directly to a launch.
Ah, memories are flooding back. I remember that in one of the racks near the video distribution rack, we had a Fourier Transform analyzer and of course there were usually oscilloscopes and their dangling cables littering the pathways, in various places on different days. So many toys, so little time.
Well not knowing the exact layout, it would be even easier to just invent it. I have some of this stuff as models already and I can rip the panel surfaces from online images, like wiki. The box is just a box, nothing too fancy to model, maybe a strip or hinge here or there and some knobs and switches. The work table in second image bottom left is what I find most interesting, with lots of cords and equipment scattered about and stuff being worked on.
Here's some pics from my datacentre days..
starting at it will make it better....
Card input..
3380 disk internals..
Here you go: http://cylob.blogspot.com/2008/01/ Scroll down
Support...
it just occured to me that I can learn about Magento software online.
Those big computer rooms always facinated me.
The main computer in the central area of the 2nd floor of the LCC building was something like that, except that it was more for real-time launch related operations (rocket switches, valves, pressures, temperatures, etc.) rather than business related tasks. I only was able to get in there once or twice but there was lots of stuff in there.
In my lab we would get VIP visitors once in a while and I got a chance to show off my babies. I kept hoping that someone would ask, "What's it all for?" I had a canned answer but I never dared use it. I would love to have said: "What's it all for? Uh, sometimes the gauges register a little when the buck deer fight in the Autumn, or the birds fly over in the spring. And nearly a whole dial became active when your ship approached from deep space".
Wheee... best advertisement for a 706 I've seen. Yup, that's it. I loved the blinken-lites. Neon glow tubes inside a plastic translucent cylindrical shell. You pushed on the shell, it latched in and the light turned on, push on it again and it popped out and turned off. No cheap membrane switch, but not one of those IBM and NASA super fancy switches with multiple removable, incandescent bulbs with replaceable labels either. It was a nice machine for the time. I attended a class at Raytheon and met some of the other programmers of Raytheon computers around the country. Somewhere in Maine they were using a Raytheon to manage traffic lights.
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