January 2017 - vcf-midatlantic

Workshop is on! For tomorrow 1/14 & Sunday 1/15, 2017
by Jeffrey Brace 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

I checked the weather report and it seems that the snow will be light and it will be in the evening around 5pm Saturday. So we *will* have the workshop as scheduled. I am only checking the weather in my area, so I don't know what it will be like outside the InfoAge area. Since weather patterns are always subject to change suddenly and unpredictably I request that everyone please use your own best judgment when driving here. Please be safe. No workshop is worth driving in bad weather. Looks like we will have a good turnout for this workshop. I look forward to everyone getting stuff fixed! :) Also, the new PayPal card reader device that VCF just bought will do chip cards, credit cards and apple pay. -- Jeff Brace - ark72axow(a)gmail.com

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Tools at workshop
by David Gesswein 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

If I remember correctly the museum has good soldering and desoldering tools. Do those get moved to the workshop or should I still bring my own? I will only need them occasionally when I find a dead component. Bad weather here will start before I leave so if it looks too bad in the morning I will cancel. Looks better for people farther north.

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Workshop is on! For tomorrow 1/14 & Sunday 1/15, 2017
by Herb Johnson 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

My weather considerations, are from Mercer County NJ, the junction of I-95 NJ/PA and I-195 which goes west to InfoAge an hour away. My read of the weather, is that the snow will come up from the south and west from early afternoon to mid-evening, possibly overlap I-195. It will "likely" be cleared or dissipate from the road by either late Saturday evening, or early Sunday morning. Therefore, I plan to travel I-195 late Sat morning, and be prepared to stay over Saturday night, if I can't travel back and forth again between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

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Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

Tony and I worked in the museum from 10:00am-12:30pm today. We installed four long bookshelves along one of the workshop area walls. Bob F. got here at 6:30pm and we worked until 11:30pm. We stocked the new bookshelves and did some other rearranging in that area. As for what happened between 12:30pm and 6:30pm, I honestly don't remember! Pretty sure I went to lunch, had a conversation with Fred, lingered around the museum, and somehow passed several hours! Going to sleep now. The museum workshop is a mess. I'll deal with that tomorrow.

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What types of VCF exhibits do you like......Re: Advice on Xenix VCF exhibit
by Herb Johnson 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

..one of several thread on VCF exhibit design. Dan Roganti ragooman said: > thought I'd alter the subject just in case the thread police is looking :) Well, *I'm* looking. As I've said before: on-subject threads are in my interest, because I look for content from decades-old email discussions, and the subject-titles matter to me. Putting that aside... Dan talked about displaying uses of early microcomputers (and minicomputers) in labs and industrial settings. That rings true to me as well. 45 years ago, I was working in those settings, as a digital engineer. There are many other programmers and engineers of my age group, who visit VCF-E and who contribute to modern vintage computing. And, to the VCF's collection. So it's an important audience - see my recent post in a similar thread on Xenix exhibit discussion for what I mean by "audience". So I'm all for Dan's exhibits of minicomputer and early microcomputer use by scientists, engineers, and in industry. For that matter, early accounting machines and programs would be of the same order. Let's keep in mind: the first generation of microcomputer owner-developers, were often techies like these. Not all, but many. I think there's good news, and bad news, about such exhibits. Research papers and university theses from that era and older, are more available on the Web today than ever. University and govt. libraries have digitized their holdings and cataloged them. So a Web search will find them - whereas, years and decades ago, this was exceptional. So the content of such work, sometimes including coding, is available online. But numeric code doesn't exhibit well. Lots of these programs were essentially mathematical in nature. Numbers in, numbers out. Interpreting them was done by humans; there wasn't enough CPU power to waste with graphs and charts, that came later. So did graphic displays, for the most part. This stuff in the original, will be hard to exhibit. Also: the science content will be hard to represent, to most people including the younger crowd (under 30) and to the non-science non-math crowd. But I would not mind seeing, some hard-science stuff at VCF-East. And I think there's an audience for it, to warrant an exhibit or two. And consider this - demonstrating an ANALOG computer is an exercise in pure math, differential equations to be exact. VCF Inc. intends to restore such computers in the near future. So this is "in the cards". But, while it's good to say "here's some atomic reaction codes", explaining the physics or math would be very challenging and take up the viewer's time. That suggests to me the use of a Web page, not an exhibit. And so the practical question becomes this: What do you do with a physical exhibit of period hardware about period users, but on display in the 21st century to people who can't interpret that use, much less the time available to them? One possible answer might be - thinking out loud - is that you use modern computing (or faster vintage computers) to show some of the results. You could do worse than use simple video display hardware, to represent your results, produce some graphics. Or audio output, that's a useful mode of presentation. This will call for some thinking and imagination, and planning. Now, later vintage computing - HP desktop computers and calculators - WERE able to produce graphical results. But are they pretty pictures - which I can make with an oscilloscope and some simple circuits - or are they pictures that have some meaning? Dan also suggests texts from the period, about use of digital technology and lab instruments, to conduct experiments and do real-time data reduction. That resonates with me, Dan: my LINCtape drive reminds me, that the design-purpose of the LINCs was to automate biological-science experiments and tests, to bring computing power to those sciences, *in the 1960's*. DEC borrowed a lot from the LINCs, into their early minicomputers. David Gesswein has brought in some PDP-8 lab-class systems at other VCF-East's. I've got some HP and Heathkit products along those lines, myself. Some of the Heath lab products were developed in Princeton if I recall, that's a local connection. But the challenge is this: either accept a narrow target audience, or to enhance the real-time experience so that mere mortals can appreciate it on exhibit. Herb Johnson my 25 cents'

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Question from another list, Video Editing and the C-64
by Matt Patoray 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

I had a question come through my OLD VTR's list that i do not know a definitive answer to, so i figured i would ask here. "Was the Commodore 64 ever used for video editing like the Amiga Was" Of course I know that the Amiga with a VideoToaster and its video switching and generation capability is NOT going to happen with a C-64 but, what about something with just simple machine control running the VTR/VCR through either an IR signal or conversion of the commodore's RS-232 serial into RS-422? Looking for something commercial or an easy to build project form the C-64's heyday. -- Matt Patoray Owner, MSP Productions KD8AMG

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forward: What types of VCF exhibits do you like......Re: Advice on Xenix VCF exhibit
by Herb Johnson 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Dan Roganti suggests a physics demonstration tool like http://powdertoy.co.uk/ might be connected to a vintage computing demostration, to provide "physics" results from vintage computations or vintage control. That sounds plausible to me. It satisfies Dan's goals of presenting early computing means to generate mathematical solutions on critical problems of the day. And it satisfies visual presentation goals of making those cryptic numeric and physics code, accessible to people without that training. For my techie interests, I'd be curious about how to make the two work together. A modern computing box or tablet, running this program with a Lua API – whatever that is - connected to some vintage box through likely-simple serial-hardware protocols? Can they live together? It's "the odd couple"! ;) Herb

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FS: Wire Wrap S-100 Protoboards, You Depopulate
by Systems Glitch 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/Y5IcG These boards came from a piece of scientific gear I picked up in an equipment lot at a local auction. Turns out the chassis is almost S-100! The cards are exactly the same size (one picture shows a card inserted in the card guides in my Altair 8800B), have the power supply rails in the right places, and use the right connector. The chassis they were in was a 22-slot OEM chassis with a linear supply, but there was no CPU board; instead, everything was controlled through a GPIB interface board. These cards are very high quality FR4 boards with hard gold plated edge connectors. Interesting design -- I don't know if the card was too complex for a two-layer board or what, but they laid out a bunch of IC footprints, then staked wire wrap sockets in at each pad. Wire wrap pins are fully gold plated. Pictures provide a better explanation. All boards have regulator + heatsink, two card ejectors, several tabs on the top edge for connectors, and a mix of 14, 16, 20, and 24 pin DIPs. The boards are as-removed, so you'll be unwrapping a bunch of connections to use them. DIPs are mostly a mix of 74HCT random logic, with a bunch of LS7061 32 bit/dual 16 bit counters (PDF datasheet available online). Price as follows: Board as-is with all chips: $40 USD I keep the chips: $30 USD IDC connectors for top tabs: $1 each, snipped off, will come with a bit of cable Shipping: $15 USD in the US, will ship international but I'll need your address for a price I have eight of these. Thanks, Jonathan

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Tomorrow evening
by Evan Koblentz 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Tony is helping me in the museum from 10:00-12:30 tomorrow, and then I'll spend a few hours sorting books/magazines/etc. on our new shelves, but I haven't got squat to do in the evening (staying over rather than making an extra round-trip). Anybody want to arrive tomorrow night and hang out, or do warehouse work with me, etc.?

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VCFed fiscal year '16 report
by Evan Koblentz 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Today we posted financial information from our first full fiscal year. http://vcfed.org/wp/financial-information/ Remember, this report is for the whole national Federation.

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