February 2016 - vcf-midatlantic

ENIAC day
by Evan Koblentz 16 Feb '16

16 Feb '16

Today is the 70th anniversary of when the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineering and the Army ordnance department unveiled ENIAC to the public in 1946. The computer was in production use several months prior and ran until the early 1950s at Aberdeen (Maryland) Proving Ground. I represented VCF today at a ceremony at the Moore School. They showed a computer simulated walk-through of the classroom-sized ENIAC and debuted a 3D printed model of it. I'm going to follow up and see if we can get the files to make our own. :) There was also a lecture by professional historians Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley, who are two of the three co-authors of the new book ENIAC in Action which is the best examination yet of how the machine worked and was actually used. Several friends-of-VCF were there including Bill Mauchly, IEEE History Center staff, Dick Moberg, etc. .... Also met a Penn CS professor who learned programming on a PDP-8 and IBM 1130, so of course I invited him to visit us.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] ENIAC day
by Brian L. Stuart 16 Feb '16

16 Feb '16

On Tue, 2/16/16, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: >> Was this open to the public? > > Yes in reality; not sure in policy. Received a private invitation > so I didn't feel right sharing it. Then started seeing public Facebook > posts about it in the last day or two but I don’t know if those were > authorized or rogue, because I couldn't find anything about it on the > web. Upon arrival they were letting anyone inside. I'm pretty sure it was in policy as well. The announcement I got didn't contain anything suggesting restricted attendance. In fact, I would have been there, but I had a class that spanned the two talks. (I was particularly interested in going since I'm in the process of writing a cycle-level simulator of it.) I've got an inquiry in as to the availability of recordings of the talks. Hopefully, they'll be publicly available soon. BLS

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Feb. 27-28 workshop
by Evan Koblentz 15 Feb '16

15 Feb '16

There is a twist to the next repair workshop on Feb. 27-28: we'll be moving the big systems out of the old museum that weekend. Hope to start Saturday morning and get it done in a few hours, so we can have a normal workshop the rest of the weekend. InfoAge gave us permission to Glitch operate their forklift. He has a lot of experience and safety training. The stuff we'll have to move is: Bendix G-15, tape drive, possibly its desk; all four racks of George; IBM 1130, printer, card reader, and 029; Vax 785; a couple of display cases; and the PDP-8. There may be other things. We'll use blankets to protect the systems from the forklift itself. Only actually lifting and moving stuff a very short distance -- about 25 feet -- but it's across beat-up old blacktop which is why we're not just pushing everything on their old caster wheels. There will be a specific order in which we need to move things into the new museum. Jon will be in charge of safety and loading/unloading.

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Web site back to normal
by Evan Koblentz 15 Feb '16

15 Feb '16

Everyone, Our site is back to normal. Darren fixed the logo, header text, social media links, and blog menu item. I made a change last night: removed the static "Sound Bytes" widget+page and replaced it with a quote widget that changing the quote every 30 seconds. Will add more quotes (famous folks talking about VCF) as they are available. Remember, when telling people our domain, the correct one is vcfed.org. VC Forum is also now on our domain at vcfed.org/forum. I have to find a good way to integrate it. Meanwhile we'll make all the colors match, etc., but that will take a few days.

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VCFSE
by Peter Cetinski 15 Feb '16

15 Feb '16

Is VCFSE part of VCF? I don’t see it on the website.

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Received H11 - it works!
by Richard Cini 15 Feb '16

15 Feb '16

All — Made some good progress today. I built the console cable and verified that the serial console board was properly jumpered. I put in all of the boards and turned it on and I saw the following on the console: 173002 @ Yea! Looks like it works. I connected it to PDP11GUI and ran a memory test and it seems to be fine. Interestingly, the RUN light only blinks at startup and no other time. Not sure what that means, but it’s running. I have a couple of things to do: * I need to repair the side panels. I bought epoxy putty today and I’ll give that a try tomorrow. * I’d like to remove the flat black paint from the metal front panel. Any recommendations? It looks like regular latex paint on top of the painted metal panel. I have a 3M “safe” (non-VOC) paint stripper that I was going to try. * I have another SLU that I’d like to configure for use with the TU58 emulator. Any advice on this? Thanks! Very exciting day indeed. Rich -- Rich Cini Collector of Classic Computers Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32

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Teletype Session at VCF
by william degnan 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

Persons planning to or considering the teletype class for this upcoming VCF U on Friday contact me privately if you'd like to bring your Teletype (ASR 33/32) as a demo unit for diagnosing issues with it. We may be able to have more than one. We have to clear each machine in advance, I am told, for insurance reasons. More Info: vintagecomputer.net/teletype Contact: vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg <https://twitter.com/billdeg> Youtube: @billdeg <https://www.youtube.com/user/billdeg> Unauthorized Bio <http://www.vintagecomputer.net/readme.cfm>

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Site is back!!! (mostly)
by Evan Koblentz 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

I can't say "thank you" enough to Bill Dudley. Dilbert once again saved the pointy-haired boss from the boss' own stupidity. :) There are two or three small fixes needed in the WordPress stuff (our logo, a menu item here and there), but the important thing is our actual content is alive and back online. The primary URL until yesterday was vintagecomputerfederation.org. That is way too long. The new primary URL, as of right now, is vcfed.org. Vintagecomputerederation.org (and .com) forward to the short one. I still have to make vcfed.com forward to the .org too, but there's some glitch where it is not appearing inthe cpanel drop-down box for redirects. We'll get it sorted out.

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HELP!!!!!! MySQL / MyPHPadmin
by Evan Koblentz 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

I need to talk on the phone with someone who's very good at MyPHPadmin / MySQL, right now. No time/patience for going back and forth on email.

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Final Write-up Dell Dimension XPS 466V
by william degnan 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

Final Write-up Dell Dimension XPS 466V http://vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=626 -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg <https://twitter.com/billdeg> Youtube: @billdeg <https://www.youtube.com/user/billdeg> Unauthorized Bio <http://www.vintagecomputer.net/readme.cfm>

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