- vcf-midatlantic - lists.vcfed.org

Byt-8
by Evan Koblentz 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

I know a few people on our list have Byte Shop Byt-8 computers. I happened to be emailing with store owner Paul Terrell recently. I asked him who did the system design, and thought some of you would be interested in his response: "My next door neighbor in San Jose was a design engineer for IBM at their Los Gatos Labs and he did the design work for the Byte 8 CPU card and front panel board with the led lights and switches and one uped the Altair front panel with some extra debug features. He transferred to their Tuscon office and I heard he had passed away." ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, 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

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] D-I-Y slide rule display case
by VAXman＠tmesis.org 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic writes: >How to show off slide rules in style! > >http://www.stefanv.com/calculators/a-display-case-for-my-slide-rule-collect… FYI, those of you without wordworking tools or skills as described in Jeff's link, big chain hobby stores like Hobby Lobby do sell large shadow box frames should you wish to display your slide rules or any other 3D items in similar fashion.

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9000/300 available (fwd)
by Herb Johnson 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

J. Alexander Jacocks (Alex) did acquire those HP 9000's and brought a few to Festivus. I want to acknowledge and thank him for his efforts. I was one who acquired a 9000/300 and a hard/floppy drive. VCFed Museum got a set also, as did others. Not a big priority for me, but I used HP computing equipment in the era, I have a number of HP test equipment items, and so on. Alex particularly worked hard at my request, to try to generate a boot floppy during the event. I literally had to pry his fingers from his laptop, as he tried to get 21st century technology to generate 1980's 3.5" floppies. My "cave man" needs were simply to see the floppy drive acknowledged during boot-up. Since the event, I got the hard drive - old MFM 5.25 inch drive - to operate; the system comes up in BASIC. I have two 800K floppy drives working (a third has a broken head). I'm hampered in looking it over, by the lack of a proper monochrome monitor. It's a composite video, my guess 30Khz horizontal rate. I'd like to obtain a monitor, or futz with some other monitor. So I'd like to know the scan rate and other video-format data. Again, my thanks to Alex Jacocks. Herb Johnson Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

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BlockChain Filing / Akin to Bitsavers
by Herb Johnson 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

Bill Inderrieden's post was subject'ed by "digest" - he answered a digest email, not an individual email. So I chose to reply with a proper subject-line. HIs post was: Thu Dec 21 13:51:11 EST 2017 To The Guys: Degan, Jonas, Johnson and Oprysko. And all others listening and interested. In a non related search of other stuff, I came across this, which I had not seen originally on the [PBS] News Hour. https://www.pbs.org/video/an-archive-preserving-the-fragile-history-of-the-… It shows what is being done out in CA, concerning constructing a complete digital library archive of the human knowledge, formidable task to be sure, and addresses (not yet completely solved) how to access the knowledge base in "50 let alone 500 years". The technology we all play in is so fragile! Both hardware and software!!! Runs 10min with a intro advert for a Broadway production of Shakespeare's Farinelli and the King, that you have to sit through. Bill Inderrieden --------------------------------- The interview was aired 01/02/17, an interview including Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Jeffrey Brown reporter. The video of Kahle shows a stack of servers in some former San Fransisco church. It's worth viewing to see the facility. One row of four hard drives, says Kahle, represents "all the words in the Library of Congress". The Web is fragile, says the narrator Brown, because links break, documents are edited or removed, owners shut down their sites. Others interviewed say, computers & storage break and become obsolete. Mr Peabody is cited as the inventor of "the Wayback Machine" (look it up, millennials). "what the archive saves, is based on popularity" (narrator). (sigh) A million flies...."why aren't all the books digitized?" (Kahle). (sigh, because we are capitalists). And by the way: in looking up Kahle, I came across the Internet Archive Blog, and his remarks of Feb 2 2017 on "micropayments". https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/02/micropayments-to-archive-org-by-using-t… which 1) goes to recovering costs by a mechanism of micropayments from certain Internet Archive readers and 2) goes to a reference to my old mentor, and former New Jersey resident, Project Xanadu's Ted Nelson. He's widely credited for associating micropayments with hypertext (he coined the term). also 3) it mentioned bitcoin which is akin to blockchain, a technology in discussion. Please note: this is what curation looks like. Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

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Could a Blockchain based file system be the answer!
by Herb Johnson 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

First, responding to comments to my comments. Clearly I know nothing about bitchain and torrent, so I won't comment further on those technologies. "Herb is curmudgeonly about this" - acknowledged, I did call myself "stone-age" for a reason. "hammer looking for a nail" seems to be an acknowledged call. My comment on the Internet Archive was misread a bit. It collects the first few "layers" of Web content - not all of a site's files are preserved. Hence "wide not deep". If that changes, bless 'em and our good fortune. On the issues - which to me are about content and acquisition. The discussion is about technical methods and their merits. That's fine. A claimed motivation is "lost archives", which is or was an issue. Many online archives become replicated now, some people like doing that, they often claim "duplication is preservation". Replication solves the problem. As on-line technology is getting cheaper and faster and bigger - I'm just not worried about the technical details or costs; for others that's their interests, and that's fine. My worries, and Dave McGuire and others echos these, are motivating *people* - to preserve content in the first place, to contribute to those who ARE preserving and who need support ($$$, show-of-interest, provide more content). I also worry about archiving institutions; they have merits and issues, that's another discussion. And I worry about "curation" - how to represent a thing, give it a context, a history. As Dave McGuire said, short-attention and narrow interests are problems. Blockchain doesn't help us with block-heads, or about simple ignorance of the past, or with efforts to acquire and digitize. Or, with preserving artifacts and not just content. (shrug) but those are other discussions. Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

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D-I-Y slide rule display case
by Jeffrey Jonas 22 Dec '17

22 Dec '17

How to show off slide rules in style! http://www.stefanv.com/calculators/a-display-case-for-my-slide-rule-collect…

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Re: Digest, Vol 26, Issue 19, BlockChain Filing / Akin to Bitsavers
by svcatitc＠aol.com 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

To The Guys: Degan, Jonas, Johnson and Oprysko. And all others listening and interested. In a non related search of other stuff, I came across this, which I had not seen originally on the News Hour. https://www.pbs.org/video/an-archive-preserving-the-fragile-history-of-the-… It shows what is being done out in CA, concerning constructing a complete digital library archive of the human knowledge, formidable task to be sure, and addresses (not yet completely solved) how to access the knowledge base in "50 let alone 500 years". The technology we all play in is so fragile! Both hardware and software!!! Runs 10min with a intro advert for a Broadway production of Shakespeare's Farinelli and the King that you have to sit through. Bill Inderrieden

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Could a Blockchain based file system be the answer!
by Herb Johnson 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

> Internet Archive and the like are great resources, > and I support their works, but they are still a "cathedral entity." If they > disappear, we lose a LOT! If for some unfortunate reason they collapse, > we're stuck with a lot of rebuilding of the archive as a community. > Volunteers keeping torrents would not only distribute many recoverable > duplicates of the overall content, but will also allow for a quick recovery > of the whole. I don't understand "torrents", and don't need to. They seem to amount to copying and Web distribution of archived content in an active real-time way. Seems to me, there's no shortage of people who are obsessed with copying vintage archives and making them available - their way. Whatever technology they choose to that end, is up to them. That said, others say "I won't bother to obtain this manual, someone else has preserved it". A problem of excess. And access to Web servers has never EVER been cheaper - skip some business lunches and pay for a year. (Funding was part of the original post.) Ask some users to donate some dollars - and we as users *should* make those contributions, to guard against the "fall of the Cathedral". Note: the Internet Archive "is a mile wide and an inch deep". It doesn't save enough, for the purposes of this discussion. Torrents, blockchain, distributed file systems - all "hammers" looking for a "nail", in my opinion as an engineer among other engineers. I'm scanning manuals and making them available, thank you, and I have my own tools. When my "cathedral" falls, the people who got my content, will resurrect it; and I may provide for other "cathedrals" too; and for what was in mine. Thanks for reminding me of this issue. Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net

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Strange 8" drive
by Herb Johnson 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

>>> Matt Patoray >>> I was looking at an issue of RCA "Broadcast News" from December 1975,... >>> picture of the main rack mount unit shows an 8" floppy drive,.... Page 52 of the PDF (50 of the magazine) shows a photo of a floppy drive with a simple lever for a drive-eject. Probably a hard-sectored drive, produced by one of any number of 8-inch drive manufacturers of the mid-1970's. I "cover" the oldest floppy drives and controllers on my Web site, because Dr Gary Kildall and Dr. John Torode produced a floppy controller running CP/M in early 1974. The natural question is, what other floppy controllers were around at that time? They were non-microprocessor based controllers, intended for minicomputers or the earliest microprocessors. http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/first_floppy.html Sykes and ICOM and others produced drives and controllers in the era. A look through ComputerWorld or other computer-trade magazines of 1975 and earlier may find an identifying ad for the RCA-used floppy drive. 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 retrotechnology DOT info

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Strange 8" drive
by Matt Patoray 20 Dec '17

20 Dec '17

I was looking at an issue of RCA "Broadcast News" from December 1975, in it they show the RCA Video IV CG system for broadcast television use. A picture of the main rack mount unit shows an 8" floppy drive, the likes of which I have never seen. I will try and attach a picture of the drive. Any help would be appreciated. [image: Inline image 1] -- Matt Patoray Owner, MSP Productions KD8AMG

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