January 2022 - vcf-midatlantic

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] [OT] light bulb collector/museum
by Jeffrey Jonas 18 Jan '22

18 Jan '22

Chris Fala noted this interview with a light bulb collector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5EOHEWJCxs My take is that the interviewer was somewhat condescending. Worst of all: no links or information on how to visit the museum in the video or the accompanying text. I was hoping to follow up because I'm curious about other lighting technologies such as The Nernst lamp: didn't require a vacuum! https://edisontechcenter.org/NernstLamps.html The "Moore lamp" refers to a neon bulb used in a Nipkow disk, and long Carbon Dioxide tubes that first lit a NJ store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_McFarlan_Moore The Cooper-Hewitt mercury lamp was an early technology that photographers loved despite the odd color: http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Documents/M6%20Cooper%20Hewitt.htm Jason Perkins noted > I used to have a collection of burnt out lamps > of all different kinds and sizes. Annoyingly, > I added the pram battery from an original Mac > to the bin at one point, which leaked and off gassed, > ruining all the bases of the lamps. I'm having similar problems with things stored as properly-as-possible. Some plastics, rubber or foam deteriorates into dust, or just cracks when flexed. Equipment rubber feet love to turn into a gooey slime that ruins anything beneath it. I even had a drafting template outgass and destroy all those near it. -- jeff jonas

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Internal Amdahl T-Shirt preservation
by Adam Michlin 17 Jan '22

17 Jan '22

Hi Everyone, As some of you know, my father worked at Amdahl from 1984 to 1993. He held many roles, including Product Planning. Director of Design Automation, and ultimately Director of Storage, before moving on to other things. He has a t-shirt that was produced for internal usage only (it was not traditional swag) that Dean Notarnicola was kind enough to scan and Javier Rivera was kind enough to clean up for reprinting. Javier is also making it available for purchase, although neither Dean nor I receive any funds. I absolutely love Javier's store (check it out even if you aren't interested in Amdahl!) and look at it as my small contribution to support him. My only concern was making sure the history lived on. Here's the t-shirt: https://www.8bittees.com/product/amdahl-5990-tee/ And here's the history behind the shirt in my father's own words (although we're still trying to figure out the significance of the bees): --- The Story of the Amdahl 5990 During the 1970s era it took roughly 7 years from the time a mainframe project was initiated until the product actually shipped to customers. The technology of the time required advancing the semiconductors, then advancing the packaging and cooling, then advancing the architecture based on them, then tuning an operating system to support them and finally going through a tortuous bring-up and test process to assure that the mainframe – at prices ranging from $1 million or so up to perhaps $9-10 million – didn’t fail in embarrassing ways on a customer’s data center. This 7-year cycle applied to both IBM itself and Amdahl, its major plug-compatible competitor, and both knew it. Therefore each felt fairly secure in the competition to market their high end mainframes without fear of any short term surprises. But Amdahl was a partner, both technologically and financially with Fujitsu, a Japanese company. Fujitsu was offering mainframes of its own design under its own brand. They were sold mostly in the Japanese market and didn’t compete with IBM products as directly as Amdahl did. If Fujitsu needed to field a product directly competing with IBM, it offered an Amdahl. Japanese mainframe users often valued fast numerical (floating point) performance for scientific programs, and Fujitsu tended to design with this in mind. By contrast, American users were running more commercially oriented workloads, and IBM was known for designing to this requirement. Amdahl’s key competitive claim was high performance for various workloads including both scientific and commercial. So it came to pass that Fujitsu was well along in developing its next mainframe at a time when Amdahl and IBM were each only a year or two into their 7-year cycle. On a visit to Japan, Amdahl engineers learned about the coming Fujitsu product and decided that with some work to make it meet Amdahl’s “100% IBM plug-compatible” promise, it could compete with IBM in the U.S. And it would be a huge surprise since it would enter the market years before anyone expected a new, higher performance product from Amdahl, or IBM. As a result, it was treated as a top secret within Amdahl and quietly perfected under the code name “Hawk.” As it progressed from an engineering project toward seeing the light of day as a full fledged Amdahl product, it looked more and more promising, and secrecy became more and more critical. At one point as the code name “Hawk” seemed to be leaking, the project name was changed to “Lynx.” The rest is history. Hawk/Lynx was announced and shipped as the Amdahl model 5990. It was a big surprise to IBM and a market success, especially for scientific users. As a memento of the project, participants received a custom T-shirt, a common Silicon Valley tradition. The words on this T-shirt said “Amdahl 5990,” and the image combined a bird of prey – a Hawk – and a Lynx – a relatively large and wild bobcat. And those who had worked on the secret project knew exactly what it referred to. JM: 1/10/2022 --- Best wishes, -Adam

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Off Topic But Relatable
by Jason Perkins 16 Jan '22

16 Jan '22

I used to have a collection of burnt out lamps of all different kinds and sizes. Annoyingly, I added the pram battery from an original Mac to the bin at one point, which leaked and off gassed, ruining all the bases of the lamps. -J On Sun, Jan 16, 2022 at 1:35 PM Sentrytv via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > At least this guy had the bright idea of collecting bulbs! > > Sent from: > My extremely complicated, hand held electronic device. > > > On Jan 16, 2022, at 12:25 PM, Chris Fala via vcf-midatlantic < > vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > > > > To the collector in us all. > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5EOHEWJCxs > > -- Jason Perkins 313 355 0085 Sent from my iPhone

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Totally Worth it
by Bill Degnan 16 Jan '22

16 Jan '22

https://www.ebay.com/itm/313742149778 For $60 you too can have no idea what you just bought.

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Off Topic But Relatable
by Chris Fala 16 Jan '22

16 Jan '22

To the collector in us all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5EOHEWJCxs

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Flyers and paraphernalia from Vintage Computer Festival Past
by Jeffrey Brace 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

I'm looking for flyers, program books and other paraphernalia from Vintage Computer Festivals. I have them from the past 5 years, I'm looking to preserve the history of the show and the organization. The organization has been around 17 years and hopefully for a long time so it's a good idea to preserve the history for posterity. The founders had no idea of what the organization would become and how long it would last. I'm hoping that those who have been around "since the beginning" can send me a scan of items. If you have anything, then please let me know privately and we will take it from there. Thanks! ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner VCF Mid-Atlantic Executive Director Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] GTE XT 300 - Information
by jsalzman＠gmail.com 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

If they just scanned the document today, then it won't be available for download until tomorrow at the earliest. On Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 7:36 PM skogkatt007--- via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > OK. CHM was able to find the manual and now it is online: > https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102638857 > > No option to download, unless I'm doing something wrong (a given :). > > >

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GTE XT 300 - Information
by Jeffrey Brace 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

Someone is looking for information on the GTE XT 300 computer. Here is an ad for it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19OfZY5biuA4acft4Y5jQdt8uakpPsm-d/view?usp=… If anyone has any more info, then please let me know. Thanks! ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner VCF Mid-Atlantic Executive Director Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

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Add-on card edge fingers for mock S-100 boards
by Herb Johnson 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

> Jonathan Chapman > > retrobrewcomputers.org > > Their boards are high-quality modern production with proper hard gold edge plating ... It wasn't clear if they (Goodman) is offering what they call "unbuffered" or "plain" S-100 prototype boards. The buffered board is apparently expected to be memory or I/O, not a processor board or bus-controlling board such as a new-designed 8080 board as Joe Giliberti may be considering. And without detailing the differences, there's different flavors of S-100 bus; Joe may desire the earliest kind for IMSAI/MITS operation. Prices at "auction" for old-stock S-100 prototype boards with no layouts, as old stock commercial products, seem to be in the $25-$50 range plus shipping. The newly produced bare boards at retrobrew, seem to be in that range also. The cheapest possible least-desired old S-100 cards touch that range also, as I've observed. Thus I'd call that range "the bottom" for S-100 boards of any sort. And it's hard to find S-100 connectors below $10 a pop, for that matter, they are often more. It's not appreciated, that S-100 PC mount connectors came in two pin-widths between the two rows. Different brands of backplanes used one or the other. It's a gotcha to buy the wrong width connectors for a particular unpopulated backplane. So much for "standard" S-100. ;) Regards, Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT comcast DOT net

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S-100 protoboards
by Herb Johnson 14 Jan '22

14 Jan '22

>> It's not appreciated, that S-100 PC mount >> connectors came in two pin-widths between the two rows. Different brands >> of backplanes used one or the other. It's a gotcha to buy the wrong >> width connectors for a particular unpopulated backplane. >> >> Regards, Herb Johnson > > It was my understanding that only the Altair backplane had a different row > spacing for it's connectors. Everything that I have seen since (IMSAI, > Ithaca, TEI, CompuPro, Cromemco) used the same .250 row spacing. > > Regards, Jeff Well, maybe I didn't state the situation clearly. It takes a little longer to do so, I didn't want to go off on details, on side issues to another topic that has already ended. So I'll make a simple point. There's all kinds of 100 pin connectors one might buy, which won't likely be labeled "S-100". You have to measure the pin spacing anyway - which for all S-100 cards is 8 pins per inch. .125 inches apart. So you may as well, check *your particular motherboard* that you are buying connectors for, *just* to be sure the the particular connectors you are buying, match the pin row-width also. That will be, whateverthehell it is, because there were any number of S-100 card-producers, who made backplanes, with whatever connectors they purchased. Just check all your measurements, to avoid getting the wrong part. That's all I was saying. It's factually been a problem. Regards again, Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT comcast DOT net

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