June 2018 - vcf-midatlantic

Museum Report June 17, 2018
by Jeffrey Brace 17 Jun '18

17 Jun '18

I had a decent number of visitors today, especially since it is father's day. Highly interested people with some background or interest in vintage computers. I spent 30 to 40 minutes giving a tour to each of two groups of three people. There were other casual visitors that went through as I was giving tours. I would say a good turnout for a sunny great weather day and father's day. I worked on cleaning dust from my modern 2011 Aurora R2, and assessing the physical condition of my newly acquired PAL C64. -- ========================================= Jeff Brace Vice President Vintage Computer Federation

1 0

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] NeXT printer emulator/bridge
by Brian L. Stuart 17 Jun '18

17 Jun '18

On Sun, 6/17/18, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > On 06/17/2018 01:33 PM, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote: >> I have two next laser printers..I thought they were just ho laser jet II's >> with an adapter > > No, they are very different. > > HP never got their hands on these; NeXT bought SX engines from Canon. > > The engine is modified to do 400DPI, from its default of 300DPI. No > rasterizer/video driver board is present, and the raw engine video and > timing handshake signals are brought out from the SX engine's DC > controller to the interface. Sun did something similar with their SPARCprinter back around 1990-ish. Not a bad printer for the time, but they got to where they wouldn't feed the paper correctly. When ours got to where it was more trouble than it was worth, we replaced it with a pretty nice Lexmark. BLS

1 0

NeXT printer emulator/bridge
by Thomas Fuchs 17 Jun '18

17 Jun '18

Hi everybody! I’ve a NeXTstation computer that is hooked up to my local home network. I wonder if there’s a piece of software (for Mac ideally) that can act as a printing server for it bridging to printers connected to the Mac (directly or LAN). (Essentially emulate a NeXT printer so the NeXT machine can print on a modern printer.) Best, Thomas F.

3 3

New list email address
by Evan Koblentz 17 Jun '18

17 Jun '18

The list is back! Its email address is no longer vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org .... now it's vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org. Basically what happened is our web hoster decided to change some DNS recordkeeping and didn't bother telling us. :( Fortunately the support people at the list company were awesome and walked me through what I needed to tell the web hoster to get it fixed. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, executive director Vintage Computer Federation a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit evan(a)vcfed.org (646) 546-9999 www.vcfed.org facebook.com/vcfederation twitter.com/vcfederation instagram.com/vcfederation

4 4

New list email address
by Herb Johnson 16 Jun '18

16 Jun '18

> After completion any email to > vintagecomputerfederation would have no routing instructions. Since I access the maillist by Web, I discovered that http://vintagecomputerfederation.org was simply *gone*. An IP address which did not resolve to a hosted server. (shrug) Glad I finally got the memo from Evan. Thx. Hope this email gets to the new list. Herb "Testing" Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

3 2

Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 16 Jun '18

16 Jun '18

I was museum docent today. Jeff B. was supposed to be at the IA front desk, but one of their own volunteers arrived so he came to the museum too. Two groups of visitors -- an older couple who wanted the full tour and stayed for 90 minutes, and then a family with kids who knew a little about programming. Fewer visitors recently as the weather improves. More people are enjoying the outdoors. Jeff and I worked on various projects. The most important: we installed four shelves in the workshop locker, so now its contents are neatly organized (gasp!) instead of just piled in there.

1 0

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] New list email address
by Bill Degnan 16 Jun '18

16 Jun '18

> > > >> Basically what happened is our web hoster decided to change some DNS > >> recordkeeping and didn't bother telling us. :( Fortunately the support > >> people at the list company were awesome and walked me through what I > >> needed to tell the web hoster to get it fixed. > >> > >> ________________________________ > >> > > > > More than just DNS record keeping. This means they totally changed our > > master slave set up and did not take any mail server process into > account. > > Do they run this ISP out of their apartment? Ha ha > > What is wrong with that and what effect would it have on DNS? > > Ben > > > My guess is that vintagecomputerfederation.org <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> was rolled into vcfed.org as a slave A alias top free up an IP address, The master DNS record was removed. After completion any email to vintagecomputerfederation would have no routing instructions. They could have made this domain be an email routing MX alias but they did not. Probably better that they standardized things. This is the 2nd time DNS effected the hosting account, hopefully the last. Bill

1 0

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Computer terminal in WarGames
by William Sudbrink 15 Jun '18

15 Jun '18

Alexander Pierson wrote: > That is very much not a Votrax SC-01A. It's far too intelligible > to be an SC-01A. > > I'm almost certain that the WOPR's voice wasn't synthesized at all, > and instead was made from modified voice recordings. > -Alexander 'Z' Pierson Wikipedia agrees: "John Wood as Dr. Stephen Falken and the voice of Joshua/WOPR" Bill S. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

1 0

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Computer terminal in WarGames
by William Sudbrink 15 Jun '18

15 Jun '18

Alexander Pierson wrote: > That is very much not a Votrax SC-01A. It's far too intelligible > to be an SC-01A. > > I'm almost certain that the WOPR's voice wasn't synthesized at all, > and instead was made from modified voice recordings. > -Alexander 'Z' Pierson Wikipedia agrees: "John Wood <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wood_(English_actor)> as Dr. Stephen Falken and the voice of Joshua/WOPR" Bill S. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

1 0

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Computer terminal in WarGames
by Jonathan Gevaryahu 15 Jun '18

15 Jun '18

From what I recall, WOPR's voice was made by having a person (John Wood, same actor as who played Dr. Falken) read back the lines to be said with the words in reverse sentence order, then the recordings were spliced back into the correct order and a bunch of filters (vocoder?) applied to them. I'm not sure if the words were spoken in monotone and pitched up down by varying the recording speeds or not, or if the vocoder did this? -- Jonathan Gevaryahu jgevaryahu(a)gmail.com jgevaryahu(a)hotmail.com

2 1