The collected works of ClassicHasClass - Page 10

I used a 95LX pretty heavily until I got a Palm Pilot. Eventually I picked up the rest of the series, but the 95LX seemed to have the most legible, if limited, display.

I am now $7000 poorer, but it went to a good cause: a well-restored Williams DCS Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game, with new opto board, repaired cannons and launcher, and a colour dot-matrix display aftermarket upgrade. Should be delivered next week after he's done fixing the launcher and will complement my Stern Whitestar Sopranos table -- the Sopranos isn't a pinball classic but it's a good game for any skill level and was the first machine I got to learn inside and out by playing it at (where else?) a pizza shop.

I'm sorely tempted by the Slugfest he also has in stock, but I'm not sure where I can stash it that doesn't look dumb.

guardian452 wrote: Wife has wanted a pinball machine for some time, but I want one I can fix up myself as a project. The problem is that neither of us have a "favorite" table to seek out and work on...

Well, the TNGs break a lot ...

Electromechanical or solid state?

I was about to say the same thing!

Yes. Outgassing DMDs is a real problem. :-/

I'm pretty sure the DMD in my Sopranos is also an LED display.

I looked in my stock closet and it looks like the HP DVD-305SKRB is the same Pioneer 305S drive under a different SKU (P/N 0950-4488 and replacement P/N A9879-67001).

Indeed, it might just be super fine particles of some kind.

The system pulls 16.5 watts just by plugging the power cable in. That is more than some laptops with a lit screen and running web browser.

When it stabilizes at the OK code on the operator panel it reads 17.566 watts

On initial boot up it goes to 90 watts when the fans come on.

Then the fans get loud and the reading is 128 watts then about 30 seconds its 145 watts then another 30 seconds and its 250 watts. Screen still hasn't turned on yet.


The keyboard caps lock etc lights flash at 271 watts

Another 20 seconds and the screen lights up instructing me to press 3 to choose it as the console, 274 watts

power stays around 271-274 watts through out the bios logo and the open boot system which ends up looking for a bootp server.

Power it off again via the operator panel and its back down to 17.344 watts

It seems in its current configuration it draws an appropriate amount of power given its namesake, 275.

I wonder if when it goes into an OS it has any power saving?

Only 275 watts? Seriously, that's actually about right for this system. POWER4 (and PowerPC G5/970) CPUs are dim-the-lights power hungry. As a point of comparison, my quad G5 pulls between 210 and 280W, depending on load; though it's clocked a lot faster than your -275 and has more cores, your -275 has a crapload of cache. Not until the POWER6 did IBM start making significant strides in power reduction; my 2-way 4.2GHz POWER6 pulls around 300W throttled down in ASMI so that it uses less juice, but it does a lot more grunt work with that power draw. The POWER7 is even better.

Unfortunately, I think the 9114-275 predates ASMI, which is really awesome and beats the crap out of SMS. I don't think there are any power throttling options on your machine. I think the -285 does have a service processor, however, which is why it "comes to life" immediately as you turn it on, and it should have HMC support.

SMS may not be able to configure your disk and that might be why it doesn't see it, assuming that the controller isn't shot. If you have no way of accessing it over HMC, I would strongly advise investing in an AIX CD set. They pop up on eBay all the time. Because you have a machine, you are automatically entitled to run AIX, so just find a disc set that works. 5.3 is the minimum that your system will run, IIRC. Once you boot AIX in service mode, you will have more options about setting up the disk.

PA-RISC is a nice architecture all the way around and was a particularly performant RISC implementation for the time. It's a shame they just drink watts of power and run rather hot. Part of this is the insane amount of cache later models shipped with.

I've always had a soft spot for PA-RISC because my first job out of college was working on an HP K-class.

sevenspirals wrote: The Pioneer 305S is the way to go. I've personally used them to load Irix 6.2 and 6.5 on an Indy, Indigo2, O2 (externally with a 68 -> 50 pin adapter), and on an octane 2. They are fast, quiet, and smooth operating. They support audio over the bus (verified) and they are usually plentiful on Ebay and elsewhere. You might get "lucky" and end up with a really weird one like this one I bought recently after this thread reminded me I loaned out my 305S and never got it back:

Long-arse link to ebay:
http://tinyurl.com/q7m6dag

I have no idea why it's light blue like that. I have some fantasy that it came from a a cool Unix machine from a secret back room at Bell Labs, but it was probably pulled from the belly of a light blue Pop Star! Karaoke machine which fritzed out after the clown fell on it during the birthday party.

What a wacky colour. Anyway, mine is the same slot loader, except it's Fuel-drive-bay-black.

I tried installing it on my G5 but it doesn't work for some reason.(*)

(*)For the humour impaired: this is a JOKE.

Now with pr0n!

STILL LOOKING FOR INDY PRESENTER CABLE! WILL DEFILE SELF FOR CABLE! (or pay a decent amount of cash)

There's a Presenter on eBay, but he has some ungodly reserve price on it, and I have no idea how good the picture quality on his is.

That, and the Indy was the machine I lusted over in undergrad and finally got to use as "my" workstation when I was at Salk for visualization. So it was the only SGI I had ever used personally when "new." When I wanted to broaden my collection, I knew my first SGI workstation had to be an Indy.

I quickly found my best solution to my occasional Amiga software needs was just to go buy an Amiga. (So I have an Amiga 4000 in an Eagle A4001T chassis and an Amiga 3000.)

NetBSD should do pretty well on that. I'm sure our OpenBSD contingent will be along shortly also.

Obama5? You mean, they're running healthcare.gov on Irix?

The girls.

Really, the only SGI I wanted was the Indy (because I used one for a summer, and I remember lusting after one in uni), but after I got the Indy, I found I couldn't resist the Fuel. My computer collecting habit is either ones I have sentimental attachments to (Commodore 8-bit, Apple 8-bit, Tomy Tutor, Power Macs and 68K Macs), or computers I thought were awesome but couldn't afford when they were new (SGI, PA-RISC, RS/6000, SPARC, Amiga, many of the portables and handhelds).

I have less of an affinity for non-6502 8-bits, though I have some of those for completeness.

hamei, seriously, you still do all your Internet browsing on your Fuel? All of it?

Hey, I still do all of it from Power Macs. Admittedly, TenFourFox is my own port, and it's based on Mozilla 24, not Mozilla 1.9.0.19.

My FW iSight works fine with the Fuel too.

smit is very nice, despite its detractors.

perzl.org is indeed a great depot for software. Almost all my installed AIX freeware packages are perzl builds. Which reminds me, I need to update gcc.

Man, I did like OpenLook. It would be fun to run it under OS/MP on my Solbournes. I have to see what version of gcc I have sitting around (if someone has a prebuilt gcc and Perl 5 for SunOS 4.1 that would also work).

Sent you a PM.

Oooh, PowerPC compatible.

Another year, another machine room panorama.

http://www.floodgap.com/etc/machines.html

The revolution has come! Our glorious people's republic has taken the crass bourgeois computers of our capitalist pig oppressors (stop typing, hamei, I know what you're going to type) and brought them to the proletariat! No longer denying the working class the means of computing production, we have put the PDP-11 in the palm of your hand!




This is a real, incredible Soviet ripoff of my favourite Casio pocket computer, the PB-700 (its sibling, the very similar PB-100, was sold by Tandy Radio Shack as the Tandy Pocket Computer PC-4 ). It smelled like rotted Marlboro-ffs opening the package, but it works perfectly. The most wacky thing is that despite emulating the Casio fairly precisely, the Elektronika MK-85 is a 16-bit architecture based on the PDP-11 rather than the 4-bit architecture the Casio original used, which they expanded to add dot addressible graphics and custom characters. You can even exploit a bug in its BASIC to run machine language programs .

The feel of the unit is about what you would expect for the CCCP of 1992. It's not great quality, but then neither was the Casio. It has an odd textured finish which is a little off-putting, and the LCD is a bit iffy though that may just be its age.

Unfortunately, it has less RAM than my PC-4 had (about 1.1K, whereas the PC-4 has a whopping 1568 bytes free with the RAM pack) and despite the heavier weight architecture, is a bit slower. It also completely lacks an expansion port, but it does have a port for an A/C adaptor (!).

By the way, I am sorely tempted to pick up an MK-90 (its bigger brother). There was even a variant of this that did military encryption: http://www.taswegian.com/MOSCOWx/mk-85c.html

But I have thirty-year-old computers here. What do I need a retrospective for?

jwp wrote:

Code: Select all

$ alias uptime='uptime|sed -e "s/ days/000 days/"'
$ uptime
21:53:01 up 84000 days,  5:58,  7 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.18, 0.29


Uh huh.

The last power outage here was 63 days ago, so everything has an uptime of that long.

I'm half-tempted to see what the quad G5 makes of it.

The first Mac I ever touched was a Mac Plus with a 30MB SCSI external hard disk. Our house still had a Commodore 64 and 128 at home, so the Mac at my friend's house was a revelation. We did a lot of HyperCard and games on it.

The first Mac I ever owned was a IIsi in my first year of medical school which I got from a school surplus lot. It also came with some IIgses and an SE/30 which acted as a boot server. From there I rapidly upgraded to (briefly) a 7200 and then a 7300, both cast-offs from my consulting job. I still have that original 7300; it eventually was repurposed to run NetBSD and is now a Mac OS 9 workstation again, in a new case. I also still have the IIsi and SE/30, but they both need recap jobs.

What's in the (I assume) SCSI enclosure below? CD-ROM and another hard disk?

The only PPC Duo was the 2300. Those are nice little machines, very collectable.

I am also a huge devotee of the PowerBook 1400. It was the first laptop I got, a hand-me-down c/117 from my brother-in-law who said if I could fix it, I could have it. It turned out to need a new inverter board, and it worked perfectly. I ended up putting the max 60MB (for the 117) in it and adding a G3/333, video out and a modem and Ethernet card. It got flaky, so I transferred everything to a donor 166, got a 466MHz G3, upgraded the hard disk, and added an Orinoco Wi-Fi card. It works fine. Even the battery holds about half an hour's charge. And the 1400's keyboard is the best any laptop ever had, Mac or otherwise.

I really want the solar panel cover.

I was copy editor for my high school paper and we did it in AppleWorks on a IIe in columns on an ImageWriter and then did manual paste-up from there. Later when I was editor of the medical school paper, it was all QuarkXPress, first on a beat-up Power Mac 7100 and then on a G4/450.

If you're really patient, NOS NiMH batteries for the 1400 turn up on eBay, and they are not difficult to re-cell. In fact, there was an NOS third-party VST one there (in shrink wrap, with the charger!) just this weekend that unfortunately got snapped up on Buy-it-now before I could nab it. The real PITA battery is the PRAM battery, which is visible under the keyboard and looks deceptively simple to swap out, but is a nightmare requiring significant disassembly of the bottom case.

Your OS 8.1 install does sound whacked. Mine runs 9.1 fairly well, but it has RAMDoubler, 64MB of physical RAM and the fastest G3 card ever made for it, so it's not exactly a typical system.

mens526? Sounds like a total sausage fest.

Unless someone's got a early 90's server humming away quietly in a corner ... yup.

Pictures or it doesn't exist.

I know of at least one other person here with an ANS (we all have anuses, though, and like opinions they all stink), which for the uninitiated is to date the last and certainly largest non-Macintosh computer Apple ever made. It ran AIX, not Mac OS, although they can be coerced to run Linux and NetBSD. My ANS 500, which I named stockholm for no good reason, came to me nearly new in 1998 and it served as my primary server for 14 years, including as gopher.ptloma.edu (when it existed) and http://www.floodgap.com . Although uppsala, the POWER6, has replaced it since 2012, it still works great and still has a place of honour in my machine room.

I meant for a long time to compile and publish all the notes and software I had in my archives, and now I have, plus some pictures from when stockholm was in operation way back when (including the signatures of the designers on the back of the front panel). I've also put up the Mac OS Services integration piece -- yes, ANS AIX speaks AppleTalk and can receive Apple Events -- showing how Mac OS clients can make "AppleTalk RPC" calls to the ANS, and uploaded all my old AIX 4.1-compatible FOSS packages to the gopher server. They should work on any AIX 4.1 system, and I have some for AIX 3.2.5 too if anyone has an RS/6000 of that vintage.

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/

I posted this on my Apple Network Server thread, but when I was rocking AIX 3.2.5 and 4.1, UCLA AIXPDSLIB was a godsend for pre-built open source packages for RS/6000s. Gradually all the mirrors disappeared, fortunately after my ANS was in its prime. I've dug out most of my old packages and put them on the Gopher server:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/ ... slib-aix-4

I only have a limited selection of what was there, particularly limited for 3.2.5, and almost everything is appallingly old, but it works and it's better than nothing. There is some source code available also. If your browser doesn't speak Gopher, here is a Firefox addon (authored by yours truly): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... verbiteff/

You are UNSTOPPABLE!