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Allison's paltry collection

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Allison

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Mar 17, 2004
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Allison

Been on the usenet for about 18 years, COMP.OS.CPM.

Collection of operational hardware:

PDP-8f
Intersil sampler (6100 chipset)
6120 based board, homebrew
2 Decmate-IIIs OS/278

2 LSI-11/03 rx02
3 PDP11/23 various hardware configs
BA11 with 11/23 +tu58
homebrew design using T-11 (the 40pin PDP11)
Rt-11, XXDP-11 and unix V6

Microvax-II (ba23 based)
Microvax-II/GPX (Ba123 based, SCSI disks)
3 Microvax2000 all with RD53 or 54 drives, one with ultrix
2 Microvax3100/m76/gpx
3 Microvax3100/server (not M10e)
VMSv5.4-4, V7.2 netbsd, Ultrix 4.2

Altair8800(pre-A) Built jan 1975 SN200!
2 Northstar horizon, CP/M, NS*dos (one I built in '77)
CCS-2200 CP/M2.2
Compupro full boat with 8085/8088 card and MPX-1 (CCPM)
1 Vt180 complete
2 Vt180 CP/M board built up as standalone one modded for 6mhz
1 Vt185 Thats a Vt125 with CP/M board.
AmproLB+ Cmos modded and running with 45mb 3.5" SCSI
3 Visual technolgies 1050, CPM-3 two with outboard 10mb SCSI disk
SB180 with SCSI adaptor, adptec scsi bridge and 20mb CPM2.2
Kaypro 4/84 w/handyman and Advent turborom+personality card
Osborne 1
Epson PX-8 with 120k ram wedge and 300bd modem wedge
NS* Advantage
Hurkon Z80 Multibus system CP/M2.2
Netronics 8085

Motorola 6800D1 SBC with TBX
National SC/MP board
National Nibble basic [sc/mpII] SBC
NEC TK80A 8080a SBC with protocard
KIM-1
Trackstar 128 (dual 6502 for ISA PC improvement)
Technico superstarter system with assembler roms
Cosmac ELF orgional (built back in '78)
DEC ADVICE VAX chipset on an SBC for in circuit emulation.
IMSAI IMP48 (8035 based SBC)
Homebrew 8039 based SBC (switches and leds pannel!)
Prompt-48 804x development tool/system
NEC EVAkit-48 8048/9 development system/board
2 TI99A (with disks and SW)
8 DEC VT100 printerbuffer cards modded as SBCs (8085 based).

Commodore 128, I keep forgetting that one..


H19 terminal
Vt100/125 terminal
Vt1200 Xterminal
3 Vt320 terminal White, amber and green!
Vt340 Color Terminal

PCs of interest, generally I dont bother but these are interesting.
Leading edge Model D (either V20 or Intel Inboard386)
Tandy 1000 (V20)
2 Vi15g boards VESA with 5x86/133

Oh yes and a severe shortange of storage. I may have forgotten a few
along the way.
 
Re: Allison's paltry collection

Allison wrote:

> Been on the usenet for about 18
> years, COMP.OS.CPM.

I thought that was you! ;-)

I'm the joke of COMP.OS.CPM !

> Collection of operational hardware:

My heads just spinning looking at that
list!

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
Re: Allison's paltry collection

Allison said:
Allison

Been on the usenet for about 18 years, COMP.OS.CPM.

Collection of operational hardware:

SNIP

PCs of interest, generally I dont bother but these are interesting.
Leading edge Model D (either V20 or Intel Inboard386)
Tandy 1000 (V20)
2 Vi15g boards VESA with 5x86/133

Oh yes and a severe shortange of storage. I may have forgotten a few
along the way.
Click to expand...

Classiccmp is moving to the vintage computer forum.
Good to see you're still functioning even if DEC/Compaq is not.
BTW I have a disk copy of the Intel Inboard setup I scooped from
the Intel site eons ago. And my IBM PC with it is still functioning.
Fired it up today. The Win 1.01 isn't working but I noticed the HD has
a copy of Uniform on it. Don't know which version.

Lawrence
 
Further update on the paltry collection....

recent addition of a complete Altair 8800B-T.

That is a 8800 turnkey business system complete with 64k of 88-16 static ram, and Altair disk controller and matching drives in the desk. The only foreign board is a Tarbell SD controller. The SD Tarbel is for CPM and the other is used for MITS based stuff. Runs too. I got it from the original owner that used it for business since new around early '79.

Allison
 
Hello Allison and welcome to the VC Forum!

That's hardly a paltry collection, by the way. I'm impressed! :)

I especially like your latest edition. I hope to find one of those someday and then, sometime thereafter, find the space to play with it!

Enjoy!

Erik
 
there are a few things here.

The biggest challenge is space to actually operate the equipment.

Some like my Amprolb+ and the NS* Horizon and the Kaypro4/84 are
always within reach and are part of my "toolkit" systems that I use for real work.

However what I really enjoy is hotrodding systems and my first NS* Horizon, Compupro crate and a VT180 board set up for standalone (no vt100 requried) are for experiments. One such experiment is the VT180 board running at 6mhz. In stock form they are 4mhz z80 64k CP/M engines.


Allison
 
just a few comments...
Allison...I take it the Ampro LB is the one with the 8088. I have the model with the NEC V40, which is more or less an 80186. I think Terry Yager has the one with the actuall '186. They did make them in the 8080 days though.
Why no DEC Rainbow in your collection? Dopey question I guess, but you mean to tell me you never came across one?
Did you ever see a Northstar Dimension? I haven't even been able to find a picture of one.
I want the Leading Edge Model M, which is the same as a unit offered by Sperry. Had one in my clutches but muffed it :(
 
Chris2005 said:
just a few comments...
Allison...I take it the Ampro LB is the one with the 8088. I have the model with the NEC V40, which is more or less an 80186. I think Terry Yager has the one with the actuall '186. They did make them in the 8080 days though.
Why no DEC Rainbow in your collection? Dopey question I guess, but you mean to tell me you never came across one?
Did you ever see a Northstar Dimension? I haven't even been able to find a picture of one.
I want the Leading Edge Model M, which is the same as a unit offered by Sperry. Had one in my clutches but muffed it :(
Click to expand...

The the AmproLB+ I have is a 1984 4mhz Z80 powered model.

I have limited interest in 8088 or 80186/188 machines. I do have a handful of 8088 and 80186/188 including some cmos parts. I also have some V20s loose too. The only machine I have of that class I've kept is a Tandy 1000. I have a working one with manuals and software with a V20 in it.

I used to have leading edge model D for and gave it away. Never considered it collectable. Just an old PC XT compatable that worked well.
It was my first nonPDP-11 or VAXen for connecting to the 'net.

DEC Rainbow, every time I get one I give it away. No real intrest in PCs or their sort other than as current or near current application engines. To me other than a few clones and odditites they are not my cup of tea. Even for that I only have a few old Modular System 486/50s, dell 486/66 pizza boxes, color 486 laptops plus a few slow Pentiums.

I do have several DEC Robins as they are CP/M machines. My focus is PDP-8s (small 8s), Qbus PDP-11s, desktop VAXen and of course anything that runs CP/M-80.

I've seen a NS* Dimension but don't have one, nor have actively sought one. I stopped with the Horizon and Advantage.

If I were to seek something to add my list would seem rather odd. Examples would be Bob's (spare time gizmos) SBC6120 or a 1802 based system that has disk and OS, and just about any small single board 8085/z80 system. Other candidates would be a S100 LSI-11 board or
TI9900 for S100.


Allison
 
Chris,

That's funny, caz when I read "Ampro LB", the one that pops into my mind is the Z80 (Z180?, eZ280?...) model. That's the one on my wish-list. BTW, one of the V-40 models showed up on eBay a couple days ago. It's a complete system, built into a dual 5.25 drive enclosure. (I dunno if it has a handle tho).

--T
 
Terry Yager said:
Chris,

That's funny, caz when I read "Ampro LB", the one that pops into my mind is the Z80 (Z180?, eZ280?...) model. That's the one on my wish-list. BTW, one of the V-40 models showed up on eBay a couple days ago. It's a complete system, built into a dual 5.25 drive enclosure. (I dunno if it has a handle tho).
--T
Click to expand...

Ampro had been around for a while and the and LB+ was z80 but at that same time you could buy a similar board with 80188 on it. Before they disappeard off my radar they'd made it to the V40 class SBC for embedded use.

Another name that should be significant is Micromint with the BCC and SB
series single board microcontrollers. I have a BCC180 (z180) and a SB180 (64180) with the big difference in them being the BCC is for embedded use(Eprom based) and the SB180 series ran CP/M by virtue of a floppy controller being present.



Allison
 
Terry Yager said:
Before they disappeard off my radar they'd made it to the V40 class SBC for embedded use.
Click to expand...

AFAIK, they're still around, selling Pentium-based SBCs in PC/104 (and others) form-factors. Wonder if www.ampro.com will be thier webpage? <disappearing into the datastream> Yup! Still there all right.

--T
Click to expand...


The clue should have been dissapeard off "MY" radar. IE: I stopped tracking what they did because they went full PC. PCs and PC/104 to me are YASPC (Yet Another Stupid PC). If I needed YASPC I'd look around at names I know.


Allison
 
Regard that as "stupid pc's" if you will, but they were the first machines where you could accomplish something useful. Was my and alot of other's intro to computers. Sorry, hex pads and toggle switches just don't seem to have the selling point that bit mapped graphics and addressable memory capacities greater than 32k have. A computer is meant to amplify a person's abilities, not simply act as a paper weight.
 
Chris2005 said:
Regard that as "stupid pc's" if you will, but they were the first machines where you could accomplish something useful. Was my and alot of other's intro to computers. Sorry, hex pads and toggle switches just don't seem to have the selling point that bit mapped graphics and addressable memory capacities greater than 32k have. A computer is meant to amplify a person's abilities, not simply act as a paper weight.
Click to expand...

Hey...I resemble that! My 32K machine does more than hold down papers. (It keeps me off the streets, if nothing else). It has bit-addressable graphics (120 x 32 dots), on it's built-in screen, built-in programming language (BASIC), built-in printer (cash-register type), built-in mass storage (micro-cassette), very good, built-in keyboard (with programmable keys), extra ROM sockets for further expansion, dual CPUs (clocked @ 614KHz), and runs for 30 hours on it's built-in rechargable batteries. It enhances my ability to program in BASIC, by giving me a platform to practice on, anytime, anywhere. Many of it's brethern (and sisteren) are still on the job, doing something useful, after more than 20 years, and working as well as they did when new. They really don't build 'em like that anymore. It is fun to use, and a joy to own.

--T
 
Chris2005 said:
Regard that as "stupid pc's" if you will, but they were the first machines where you could accomplish something useful. Was my and alot of other's intro to computers. Sorry, hex pads and toggle switches just don't seem to have the selling point that bit mapped graphics and addressable memory capacities greater than 32k have. A computer is meant to amplify a person's abilities, not simply act as a paper weight.
Click to expand...

Well lets disect that.

First I was running CP/M-86 in early 1982 on an 8mhz 8086 multibus system with 1mb floppy drives and a reall megabyte of ram. Compared to the PC-xt it's was light years ahead. The S100 crate with 64k of ram and a hard disk of 5mb I owned at that same time was running database software, multiplan and my favorite tool word processing with spell checking. The PC didn't invent crap, at best the name IBM helped get small computing firmly off the ground. However, it was going that way already.

Actually I abandoned "hex pads and toggle switches" by early 1979 with a NS* Horizon and a H19 terminal. With a disk system, three drives and a full complment of software that included CP/M, NS*dos and UCSD Pascal P-system it was a working tool.

New a friend of mine went a different path with an H11[DEC lsi-11] and H27 disk running a varient of RT-11 and UCSD Pascal. By 1979 standards it was already 16bit and a it would take a Turbo PC AT to match it for basic performance. By time the PC hit a full 640k the 11/23 was commonly running 4mb.

Sorry, the PC as a serious tool only hit stride with the midlife 286s and was wanting for the later 386s and a marginaly useful OS. By then we
were in the latter half of the 80s.

My running joke for years about PCs is the PDP-8 used to do what PC users wished for. The only difference is size. That and for security I'll run VAX/VMS against a PC anytime.

Actually the breaking point for me to switch from CP/M as a working environment full time was 1988, The replacement was an 11/23 with
RD52 (30mb) disk and RSTS, RT11 and RSX-11. That was followed by a MicroVAX-II and by 1991 I was running DECwindows on an eithernet connected Xterminal. They live on the network in my room that's now reaching 15 years old. It was nearly 1996 before I started seriously using PCs and even now they are still also ran for some things.

I use PCs when being first to the scene of a crash is not to inconvenient or when others who were of the true believers wanted theirs to work and paid me to make that happen. Remember even the newest PC has two buttons in easy reach power and reset.

Look back hard, the PC was not the be all. It was only the sloppy continuation of what started with 8080/z80. I believe the PC XT is historical in that it represented the evolotionary wrong turn that needed
10 years of legacy pain into the Pentium era to winnow out.


Allison
 
stupid pc's

stupid pc's

Chris2005 said:
Regard that as "stupid pc's" if you will, but they were the first machines where you could accomplish something useful. Was my and alot of other's intro to computers. Sorry, hex pads and toggle switches just don't seem to have the selling point that bit mapped graphics and addressable memory capacities greater than 32k have. A computer is meant to amplify a person's abilities, not simply act as a paper weight.[/quote


Well, I don't know about bit mapped graphics.

Stock PC's came with MDA, which was a text-only card, or you could buy a CGA card, with crappy resolution.
It wasn't until Hercules brought out it's card that bit-mapped graphics were conveniently available for the PC.
Sure, you could run a PC with an MDA, and a CGA, but that was expensive, and required you use "mode" to switch between monitors. A few apps like 123 supported dual-monitor use.
The "stock" OS for the PC. DOS, certainly didn't give a hoot about bit-mapped graphics.
And for for many,many years, IBM graphics lagged far behind almost everything else out there.
The real graphics machines were Amigas or Macs, if you were into bit-mapped graphics.


About doing useful things.

The Apple II had been out for several years, and there were tons of educational and scientific apps out there for it. And games, you could get some pretty good graphics on Apples.

Ditto for the TRS-80 line.

WordPerfect 1.0 was released, I think for DataGeneral systems.
VisiCalc, a spreadsheet, was releaesd for the Apple II.

Morrow shipped 26 MByte hard drive systems for their CP/M 80 systems.

HP's model 85 luggable became quite popular for controlling scientific equipment, it was programmable, and very accurate due to it's BCD math.

And all this before the first IBM PC ever shipped, and surely something in the above list can be considered useful.

So, IBM decides to jump on the bandwagon:

The PC used a 8088, which was mainly since they had already licensed it to manufatcture. Legend has it IBM originally wanted to use it in a "smart" typewriter.

The 8088 has got a half-assed method of addressing memory, which for the next 10 years had every programmer who had to deal with their segmented memory model cursing IBM and Intel.

For those of you never having to deal with segmented memory, it basically limited you to 64k chunks of memory for a lot of what you do. You have to "shift" your addressing around to get at the next 64k chunk. (I know, this is really simplified, so please don't flame me)

This is similar to bank-switching, which is how a lot of other computers at the time were able to access larger amounts of memory than their address bus would normally permit. All Intel did was to jam the bank-switching into the chip, so they could be somewhat competitive with it.

So, yes, you could deal with more than 32k. A lot of other machines could as well.This is where in IBM land near, far, and huge pointers started happening.
To further confuse the issue, bank-switching on the PC platform was made official with the expanded memory boards, non of which were compatabile, but finally brought about the LIM-EMS 4.0 standard.

The reason for all this memory need ? DOS has no provision for virtual memory, and the killer app of DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, required that the entire app space be contained in memory. Hence, more memory was required.
This trend of throwing more memory at the problem( for the PC platform) continues to this day, look at Windows with it's Unicode and MCBS character sets. Sure, it's nice for internationalization, but that was managed with ANSI long ago, and you only needed 1 byte per character.

The MC68000, the other 16-bit processor of choice at the time, certainly didn't muck around with segments. (There were other 16-bit chips and sets as well, 8086 and 68000 are the only ones I have direct 'coding' experience with)
MC68000 machines had linear memory. Very simple, very elegent.
Here's a good link that goes into this:

http://linux.cis.monroeccc.edu/~paulrsm/doc/dpbm68k1.htm

Here IBM had a chance to give us all a workstation-class machine offering flat addressing, and instead we got a glorified "smart" typewriter.(Anything more powerfull might have cut into their mainframe and mini market)
And they didn't even use the 8086, they used the 8-bit data bus version so they could use more off-the-shelf parts.

Any time you make it harder for a programmer to do something, or more complicated than it has to be, application and platform stability suffer, and I'm sure all of us that used PC's remember how often they crashed, and how buggy a lot of the apps were(are).

To me, the ability to do something useful requires your tool be reliable.
You'll notice that IBM and Microsft even gave us the "three-finger-salute" for free to help us deal with reliability issues.
Speed is important as well, and the CISC, multiple cycle instruction set of the 8086 wasn't really the quickest chip out there at the time.

I guess it depends on how you define useful.

They missed the wagon, as far as I'm concerned. Even when laptops started happening, here's what IBM did:

In '83, the Kyocera-driven laptops where coming onto the market( Think TRS-80 Model 100)
They ran off batteries, for up to twenty hours. They had a real keyboard. Journalist loved them. Biologists loved them for data entry in remote (no power) locations.

Epson sold it's HX-20, same size, nicad's, printer, microcassete drive.

IBM (in 86) comes out with the PC convertible, an oddball of machine where you stacked "packs" onto the back to expand the unit. This increased the length of the unit. I have one, with the RS232 module, CGA module, and Ribbon Printer Module, and it's close to 2 feet long.

To me, IBM at the time clearly weren't the most cutting edge guys.

About the only thing IBM got right with it was that ISA bus didn't require any licensing, so virtually everyone could make cards for it. (And later they rethought even that, with the PS/2's; the MCA architecture required licensing from IBM)That, and the manuals. The old technical manuals were so complete( including BIOS listing), the PC practically had "clone me" written all over it.

I think what sold a lot PC's was Lotus-123, and the fact that it came from a "reputable" company.
The big purchasers of PC's, businesses, probably were already running an IBM mainframe, and IBM had an eviable reputation for quality due to their mainframes, and their typewriters.

Hex pads and toggle switches:

Well, I'd have actually prefered hex pads and toggle switches to the nightmare of jumper settings you had to fiddle with everytime you wanted to add an expansion card to your PC. Cards were very jealous about the address space the wanted, the interrupts they required, the list goes on and on.
I mean, it was a great way to make a living, because most people didn't want to fuss with jumpers.

The only reason I got one in the first place is because clones were so cheap, and I couldn't afford anything better at the time.

patscc
Click to expand...
 
Re: stupid pc's

Re: stupid pc's

>>Well, I don't know about bit mapped graphics.

For S100 in 1976 there was the Comemco Dazler, color graphics for S100
and on a par with Herc in the PC 5 years later. You got that right. the PCs were a throw back and took years to get on track. I'd say the XT
and 286ATs really didn't leave the scene till the early 90s.

>>The Apple II had been out for several years, and there were tons of educational and scientific apps out there for it. And games, you could get some pretty good graphics on Apples.

Considering in 1980 two others plus myself did a cross platform forcasting program using UCSD Pascal. the platforms, S100 NS*, TRS80m1, Apple][.
The programming was the same for all three at the source level.

>Morrow shipped 26 MByte hard drive systems for their CP/M 80 systems.

When the IBM PC hit the street I bought my ST506 (5mb) and a Teltek HDC for S100. The IBM equivilent was a nearly a year later. It was also slower.

>>HP's model 85 luggable became quite popular for controlling scientific equipment, it was programmable, and very accurate due to it's BCD math.

It had GPIB and it set a standard for labratory systems.

>>The 8088 has got a half-assed method of addressing memory, which for the next 10 years had every programmer who had to deal with their segmented memory model cursing IBM and Intel.<<

That was the evolutionary wrong turn I refered to. I've worked with the 8088/6 and it was horrible to use past 64k.

>For those of you never having to deal with segmented memory, it basically limited you to 64k chunks of memory for a lot of what you do. You have to "shift" your addressing around to get at the next 64k chunk. (I know, this is really simplified, so please don't flame me)<<

Even the Z280 was better in that it was not only 16bit address with MMU
taking it to 24 it had the seperate I&D space thing that DEC did on the PDP-11. Still the Z280 was an 8bitter but a lot better than 8088. It's failing was it was way late. The only one that had a real linear address
was the 68000.

>>They missed the wagon, as far as I'm concerned. Even when laptops started happening, here's what IBM did:

In '83, the Kyocera-driven laptops where coming onto the market( Think TRS-80 Model 100) They ran off batteries, for up to twenty hours. They had a real keyboard. Journalist loved them. Biologists loved them for data entry in remote (no power) locations. <<

And you could buy new batteries anyther in the world!
My Epson PX-8 is still better than on batteries compared to any PC laptop for data logging and other tasks. the PX8 even had graphics.

>>About the only thing IBM got right with it was that ISA bus didn't require any licensing, so virtually everyone could make cards for it. (And later they rethought even that, with the PS/2's; the MCA architecture required licensing from IBM)That, and the manuals. The old technical manuals were so complete( including BIOS listing), the PC practically had "clone me" written all over it.<<<

They got ISA wrong too. ISA-8 is basically the same signal set as the Intel multibus with one BIG error. IBM inverted the interrupts and that made "wired ORing" of interrupts very difficult. Big oops in my book.

>>Hex pads and toggle switches:

Fabulous debug tool they were. However by 1980 it was more optional that standard fare on S100 stuff.

I'd tack on one thing. I took a 8085 and added a simple MMU and tossed that on a PC board to plug in where a 8088 went in a XT clone. Fiairly straight forward actually as theinterface for 8088 in minimum mode and 8085 are nearly the same save for 4 address bits. Pulled the rom and created a boot monitor and it became a really nice expanded memory, two floppy CP/M system that OBTW was faster than the 8088. I'll admit the 8085 was running at 6.144mhz (8085-6 hmosII part). Looking back I'll have to find another XT and dig out that kluge as it was fun. For word
processing it was faster than the PC running the 8088 at 4.77mhz!


Allison
 
I'd tack on one thing. I took a 8085 and added a simple MMU and tossed that on a PC board to plug in where a 8088 went in a XT clone. Fiairly straight forward actually as theinterface for 8088 in minimum mode and 8085 are nearly the same save for 4 address bits. Pulled the rom and created a boot monitor and it became a really nice expanded memory, two floppy CP/M system that OBTW was faster than the 8088. I'll admit the 8085 was running at 6.144mhz (8085-6 hmosII part). Looking back I'll have to find another XT and dig out that kluge as it was fun. For word
processing it was faster than the PC running the 8088 at 4.77mhz!
Click to expand...

Sounds great. Are you going to make the plans & source available...or even better yet, kits? Put me down as your first customer, I've always thought there must be some way to make all those old XTs useful.

--T
 
Terry Yager said:
Sounds great. Are you going to make the plans & source available...or even better yet, kits? Put me down as your first customer, I've always thought there must be some way to make all those old XTs useful.

--T
Click to expand...

I did this 12 years ago. No scanner and also the sources for the boot monitor were lost to a crash. If I did it again I'd revisit the whole show.

If I get a suitable candidate XT I may do it again. I haven't decided if the Tandy 1000 I have is a good candidate. Though that has a V20 in it already.

Allison
 
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