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The Minicomputer Orphanage
dummy_variable writes: "A friend of mine pointed me to this site, and I thought some people here at Slashdot would probably appreciate it. Quoted from the site: "This is The Minicomputer Orphanage, a place where you can find information on computers from companies no longer in business. It contains sales brochures, reference manuals, and other things. This was started because with the passage of time, these computer systems are just below the Internet event horizon, and there is almost no on-line information on them.""
Finally, a place where my much ignored Apple Lisa can be cared for and loved.
Who would adopt a supercomputer anyway?
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Think about all the poor platforms that just couldn't make it. And think of all the poor companies that had to fold cause their platform didn't make it. It's actually kinda sad sniffle, sniffle
This site, plus www.abandonkeep.com brings a tear to my eye. i remember the commodore system we had in first grade (i actually went to a public school with money for a computer(!)).... We did graphic plotting on it. So proud when i made my first american flag bye plotting red white & blue.......
(think patent invalidation)
My school already has one of those! It's called a Mac-Lab!
Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!
I got a piece of hardware I can't find any information on anywhere. I have a Contel Minicomputer. It looks like this weird 4 way 386 setup with about a 200MB SCSI HD.
It has a front panel LCD, and a key switch in the front you have to insert a key and turn to boot the machine. If anyone has any information please email me. I will be willing to buy manuals, etc if the price is reasonable. I will post their content on the web, or provide space on a webserver to do so. It functions somewhat, but it is beginning to show signs of failure, and I want to diagnose some problems and get it to its full glory.
I would like to post the startup output, but slashdot's "Lameness Filter" says I can't. Apparently it is a junk character post, whatever the hell that means.
but I can't garantee I won't moleste it.
Thank you
Je t'aime Stéphanie
A hundred companies flowered trying to find the mix that would sell consumers. Within 5 years, the playing field had changed: software drove purchasing decisions... if you didn't have Visicalc, you didn't sell. Almost none of the hardware makers got rich, but many software makers did.
I fondly remember programming the Wang PC with 8K, the Pet vs Apple Flamewars, the ultimate 10 Meg(!) Corvus HardDisk, the highspeed Mountain modems (300 baud,) and cool printers (Epson bi-directional dot-matrix.) We programmers knew intuitively that our job was to wrap the hardware in device-independant drivers. We did it, and commoditized computer manufacture.
Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?
I was reminded about the internet horizon by a recent experience with some ca.1993 network equipment from Intel. Very little documentation and no driver software was available for pre-1995 equipment, and I find the experience rather common with other equipment and software vendors.
In a previous life, I worked with a wide variety of PC hardware, and as a result have _hundreds_ of old (1985-1995) motherboard, drive, NIC, and peripheral manuals boxed up in my basement. I've often thought that I should scan them in (maybe to PDF or OCR->text so that they are text-searchable). However, the rub is that many of these companies are still in business, don't want bother supporting old stuff, and don't want someone else to do it for them, either.
Is there any way I can make these available for people to peruse just as if I had lent them the physical book? They're books, remember. What's the deal with fair use & copying of out-of-print books? Do I have to write an applet viewer that says "I'm sorry, someone else is reading that right now" if there's a simultaneous request for an archival copy of a manual? Better yet, is there a way to legally flip the original and the archival copy so that the physical original is considered the backup for the electronic document?
hmm.
-Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
Now that we have documentation for these systems, where can we find people or organizations that would be willing to donate these types of systems to us for education and historical preservation? I for one would love to have a PDP-8, PDP-11, or a VAX of my own.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
-Eldurbarn
That is if you make a sensible post and if you don't it still counts in the number of posts and and therefore the traffic. Slashdot should be thankful to you. Keep up the good work. You add spice to our lives.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
If by "Gould" you're referring to the Gould 32-bit superminicomputers, then
CDC 6500 assembler manual plus lots of textbooks from the 1971-5 timeframe. Remember Snobol4, Algol, and Pascal? Still have the specs. Also my original Purdue MACE user manuals. Someday I should go out into my garage and see exactly what I do have. I'd like to donate them all to a good home someday. I would certainly hate for all that history to end up in the trash on that faraway day I am no longer around to protect them from my wife....
At this point in my Slashdot life, I don't care about karma anymore, so I'll rant:
You damn PFY's don't have any history. Quite a shame.
Heloooow?? Did anyone read the headline if this article? It says MINIcomputer! It's a step between a mainframe and a microcomputer. Are you so clueless to think that a TI99 is a minicomputer?! That thing doesn't have its own tape drive cabinet or the same address space as the computers I saw when I was a kid hanging around DEC on snow days.
I know what a minicomputer is because I was exposed to a VAX when I was 10 years old. I hung out a few times at the DEC plants in Salem, NH and Tewksbury, MA when my stepdad brought me in. I sat at a VT100 and played (well tried to) DnD games and chatted with his coworkers using talk.
At a young age, I got to see what very few kids my age got to see: The Machine Room. The experience was almost religious, spiritual. Brightly lit, white walls, raised flooring, awe-inspiring. The white noise of all the computers and the cooling system drowning out any distracting thought. The machine room was a would on its own. You were surrounded by sheer computing power and was one with it.
This expanded my perspective of computing beyond what sat on my desk or what was plugged in to my TV. It also planted the seed of my inner geekdom. I didn't understand fully all the implications of what I had seen... Until I started using the Internet, and later when I became a sysadmin.
I saw glimpses of the future in 1984 which became the life that we live in now: ethernet, e-mail, the laser printer.
I was there when you PFY's were proto-PFY's.
I really feel sorry for those who missed this milestone in computing. I only caught a glimpse of it. I now wished that I saw more at the time.
Please, take some time to learn the history of computing. The micro was in many ways the foundation of the Internet and the precursor to the client-server model of computing. For many people who experienced mainframes and minis either in an academic setting or just being babysat on a snow day: this is a special time for us. It was a time when computing was a priesthood and the machine room was the cathedral. Please respect our history and our memories.
Is my memory going? Don't know about the Honywell 6180, but I thought I remembered that the GE 635 and GE 645 were 48-bit machines instead of 36-bit as one of the articles says. GE also made a line of 24-bit machines, the PAC-4000 line, of which the PAC-4020 was probably the best known. The PAC-4000's were process control machines, but the IRS bought a bunch of them starting about 1966, and most of them were still in service as late as 1986. By all means, the wrong box for the job. The PAC-4000 was superseded by the Honeywell TDC 4200, TDC 4400 and TDC 44000, which used the same relative-addressing instruction set.
What's the story on the moderation here? I expressed my willingness to restore and preserve these machines that are important parts of the history of computing. I'm sorry, but I don't see this as trolling of any kind.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
A minicomuter is definitely is not, but technically--in a way--it is the baby cousin to the TI990/4 minicomputer. The 16-bit 9900 CPU in the TI99/4 and /4a used a subset of the instruction set in the 99000 CPU of the TI990/4 -- I think the link in the article mentions that connection.
Of course in many ways the little 99/4a was a piece of crap. It had a nice BASIC (and really nice extended BASIC option) and obviously a CPU with potential, but came only with a whopping 256 BYTES of system RAM. The rest of it (16K) wasn't actually system RAM--it had to be accessed through IO calls to the 9918a video chip (very very slow). Also, as full-featured as the BASIC was, I think it was DOUBLE INTERPRETED (BASIC->GPL->binary)! What were those engineers smoking and where do I get some of it?
Of course, I think there were RAM expansion cards that were directly addressable by the CPU, which helped immensely. In any case, there are some old machines (micros, minis and mainframes alike) that should be forgotten, or at leased ony remembered for their mistakes...
Many years ago, the Mindset was introduced. I can't remember the year, but I remember drooling over an article in Byte covering its features. It looked like a typical x86 box, but had some extra graphics hardware (my recollection is sketchy at best). I do remember rather wanting one, but that article was the last I heard of the thing. It had a very short lifespan. Pauvre little Mindset. Does anyone recall any details?
I remember as a child, before anyone had a personal computer, the very first desktop computer I ever saw.
:)
I was wandering through the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, Manitoba and there against a wall, where once there had been nothing at all, was (literally) a pedestal. Upon this pedestal lay a small desktop computer. I don't even remember what kind of computer it was (I think it may have been a TRS-80, but I'm not entirely sure).
It was running a simple game (written in BASIC, although I did not know that at the time) in which the "computer" was thinking of a number from 1 to 10 and you had three tries to guess it.
There was no sign describing this strange contraption, and I have a vague recollection of inadvertently stopping the program somehow.
In retrospect, seeing my first computer on a pedestal in a museum seems somehow... prophetic. On one or two levels, even.
It's an awesome machine, about 1 cubic meter, built around a whooping 16MHz 68020. It comes with a bulky 19" graphical monitor, a keyboard and optical mouse. It is loaded with an almost full copy of "GL2-W3.6" (the pre Irix SGI Unix) complete with a C compiler but lacking manpages. (no X11 though, that came later with Irix :( )
If anyone has documentation (or a system tape with the manpages) for that box, I would be glad to buy it off him. I regularly try the SGI newsgroups but haven't found anything...
I also have the very first RISC workstation ever sold (DEC) but that one will soon be happily be running NetBSD :)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It appeared to be some kind of PDP-11 clone, with boards about the size of a paperback book and two edge connectors (iirc). There were a couple of boards the full length and height of the machine (possible about 18" by 10"?), one of which had about a dozen AMD 2901 bitslice ALU's on it.
Does it sound familiar to anyone?
Two years ago, another retro-geek friend and I hauled away a Transit-load of PDP-11's from St. Andrew's University. Our load was: :-)
A PDP-11/34 (psu dead) in a rack the size of a shower cubicle
Two 11/84's in a rack the size of a four-drawer filing cabinet
A printer the size of a motorbike packing crate
Some "washing machine" disk drives (I forget, are the RK05's the ones that look like dustbin lids, and the RK11?'s the stacks of aluminium platters in a perspex fruitbowl?) and disks
*MILES* of cable
Some manuals.
If you hire a blue Transit van from Mitchell Self Drive in Aberdeen, take the one with sagging rear springs and smile...
Atari 8 bits (specifically the 800 XL, my First Personal Computer EVER!)
Apple ][ (who didn't play with one of these back in the late 70's and early 80's! I remember learning how to do animation on these....yeah it was blocky, but it was cool)
My Leading Edge 286 machine, my first IBM compatible (I loved this machine! I went through college with it! Leading Edge made great clones...where are they now? Biggest thing I remember about this machine was it was the heaviest computer I ever owned. Totally metal case and the keyboard could break a person's head open.).
Those were my early machine I messed with. Now I play with a Multiprise 2000 (S/390 machine), of course PC's, A couple Ultra 30's and maybe soon a RS/6000 server (for TSM at work). I work IN a computer room. All day, everyday. I see vestiges of computers like those on the minicomputer site in this room. When I was first hired, we had a ES/9000 machine, and several 486 based servers. We have come a long way. By the way, Xerox still uses PDP-11 chips in some of their printer controllers. I run a BIG Xerox 4890 printer and it has a PDP based controller. You thought 8 by 3 filenames were too short? Try 6 by 3's and you cannot change the extension, it must be some type that Xerox uses (FSL, FRM, LGO, JSL, JDL, PDE amongst the types....there are more, but those are the ones I use the most). I believe Xerox even uses some of the Alto like technology in their big printers as well. Their bigger machines use a interface VERY similar to what I saw in Pirates of the Silicon Valley, and other sources depicting those Alto's. Heck I even here that some traffic light manufacturers still use 8085 processors in their controllers. These are slowly changing. Xerox is starting to use Sun machines to run their printers (the above to Ultra 30's are controllers for DP-65's.). Things you wouldn't imagine using PC technology probably do now. Things are changing, but some of the old machines still are useful.
Gorkman
I needed a new user manual for my abacus
"I drank what?" - Socrates
someone actually coded an 8-bit browser for the commodore. it really does rule.
!-- wit --!
In one of my recent blunders, I removed lots of jumpers from a working motherboard for which I did not have the manual. So, after a LOT of searching, I discovered what it was, an ABIT AH4T. However, ABIT did not have the manual on their sites, no matter how much I looked. And unfortunately, their "moved manuals" site was down.
r ee.tar.gz. I encourage those with fast connections to mirror this. Enjoy!
Anyway, after a lot of searching, I came across a rather large file (for a dialup user, 9.2MB) that looked promising, so I spend 30-45min downloading it. It said it was an archive of motherboard jumper settings. And it was! Over 14,000 devices, not just motherboards. You name it, and it's not currently easily available, and it's likely there. For your convenience, I've placed it here: http://downloads.members.tripod.com/ahaning/th99f
(Oh, and yes, I was able to get the settings for my board. Of only board makers would have more often printed that information on the board somewhere. Whoopie for the internet!
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Well, I write a lot of stuff in assembly or in other higher level languages over assembly, and this is just wrong.
Writing something in 100% assembly increases stability once you've got it working, increases development time (because, as you point out, it's harder to get it working), but trades off for an enormous increase in speed.
IME badly written assembly (that is, quick without a lot of optimization, but by someone who keeps his references straight and doesn't put values in the wrong places) is always noticeably faster than any higher level language no matter how smart the compiler.
I have reverse-engineered some code in the controller I mentioned and it consistently dereferences things it uses in high speed interrupts by 2 or more levels -- that's a 50% or more speed hit no matter how you cut it, and more than that if you judiciously use a few register-level variables. This is the cost of OO languages which must use a lot of dereferencing to achieve their high level of abstraction. A 50% hit may not sound like much until you make the mistake of using it in an instrument with a 6-level interrupt system.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"I think your historical perspective is more limited than it should be, then."
;-) Once you hit 26, caffiene poisoning takes its toll and Zoloft takes the edge off.
I am aware of computing history in a broader sense, not just DEC. DEC was part of my life then and I'm writing about it. And, yes, I was reacting to all the immature trolling. Instead of dropping to their level, I wrote something passionate and literate.
"Also, lose the religious overtones."
When was the last time you read prose or 19th century literature?
Relax, it was a metaphor and I was being literate. Read the post as a op-ed nostalgic memoir. Remember what Baz Lurhman said about nostalga.
"People are gonna say you're an old fart."
Feh. Truthfully, I had a hellish childhood, nothing will age you faster. That stepdad who took me to DEC also gave me a near nervous breakdown when I was 13. I've done a lot of living for 27, it's a lot in Internet time.
I bought my VAX 400-100 for $75 when I left DEC..er..Compaq in 1998. It has served me for MANY years. In DEC, it was known as AXEL.
The reason they charged me $75 was for the VT320. The VAX I could take for free, but some VP's secretary took a look at the VT and said "You're buying a monitor!". After trying to convince her I couldn't hook it up to a PC and run Powerpoint on it, I relented and paid the $75.
My VAX runs VMS 6.2. One of these days, when the price of electricty comes down, I'll put it back up on the net. Till then, it and its 500MB (why do you need more?) disks will sit in the closet.
AXEL::FOLEY
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"