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PM me an estimate - I would like to weigh the ROI on the cost considering this is just for my personal gratification
-Alex
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PM me an estimate - I would like to weigh the ROI on the cost considering this is just for my personal gratification
-Alex
The deliverables would be a PDF of the documentation and two Rawrite image files placed into public domain. You will handle the legal side of making sure we can place it into public domain without violating any laws. You could take a similar sized manual to the local print shop and have a quote on converting it to PDF.
Average hourly rates for a designer and lab time can be found on-line. While you could hire a seasoned designer to wash your dishes, it wouldn't be cost effective. Sadly, this is what you have. Your asking about items that I have not used in several years. There's a possibility that the media itself is no longer good which could be true for the diskettes as well. The PC could also have other problems from sitting so long. It will take time to check it out. Worse case, I would say 15 hours assuming I am able to locate the media and it's still good.
You may find that your PC / card no longer function. It seems like every time I drag one of these old relics out, I have to do some work on them. Personally, I suggest you mount the board in a picture frame and be happy with your memories of days gone by... If you want to play with CPM, install one of the PC versions. -
I used to use a gun that was fully automatic using Slit-Wrap.
I tried the Slit-Wrap but it never worked for me. IIRC the wrap tool was supposed to slit the insulation of the wire but wasn't intended to remove the insulation completely. When you wrapped the wife on the post, the wire was supposed to make contact with the post through the slit in the insulation. More often than not, it never did. I was using the hand tools and not an automatic system so YMMV.
I also tried another WW system were you wrapped the wire onto the post, insulation and all, and then you soldered the wire and it was supposed to melt the insulation and metal conductor would then contact the post. But all it did was make a burnt gummy mess! I think it was called Solder-Wrap or something like that.
"A friend of mine had worked on some WW boards that were put into space. "
I didn't know that they ever put any WW stuff into space. I've seen a lot boards that were built to go into space but never any WW ones. One friend of mine landed a job at KSC re -soldering boards intended to go into space with lead based solder instead of the RHOS crap that they were originally built with.
Several friends of mine were part of the group that designed and built the AMSATs. I was an engineer on one missile system that went into space, but only as part of it's ballistic trajectory. I was also an engineer on another that would have been space based but I can't really talk about either of those. I was offered a job at NASA KSC as an engineer dealing with the payload electrical interfaces on the space shuttle but I was having too much fun elsewhere and I turned it down. Another friend of mine, and someone I later worked with, designed and built the deep IR sensors for the Hubble Space Telescope and he still has the prototypes.
For a short time, I worked with some of the engineers from a company in Canada that built big automated machines used to make the very large wire wrap backplanes for main frame computers and other uses. I don't remember how the name was spelled but it was Dimetco or something like that. At the time we needed very large, extremely fast video processors so we were building the entire system with the then new, experimental GaAs chips and everything was done in hardware and they were building WW boards for us that would hold several thousand ICs per board. The amount of WW on those boards was absolutely insane! Occasionally the machine that was WW'ing the boards would lose track of where it was and it would shift one row or column of the WW connections, and every row/column after it, over one position. That was a real AW-S***! moment when we found that, especially when we had already started populating the board.
I don't know if it's still around here but I used to have one of those boards that was fully build and worked but was always "glitchy" and couldn't be trusted so they finally scrapped it. It had over 2500 socketed ICs on it and I was pulling the ICs and using them for other projects and I eventually found one IC where one of the legs had folded under the IC instead of going into the socket. From the outside it appeared to be perfectly fine but when I removed the IC I found the pin folded under. I'm sure the the pin pressed against the socket and would work occasionally but with temperature cycling it would gradually creep away from the socket and not make contact. -
Personally, I suggest you mount the board in a picture frame and be happy with your memories of days gone by... If you want to play with CPM, install one of the PC versions.
Fair enough Joe - we can close this loop. I'm sure I'll come across the software in time - CP/M wasn't the issue. I have quite a collection of vintage computers and several with original versions of CP/M on them. This was more a personal venture in trying to get this card working beyond just the 64k RAM it's providing me natively. As you stated, not really worthy of spending a lot of time/money on it.
I appreciated you looking into it. Thank you
-Alex
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I used to use a gun that was fully automatic using Slit-Wrap.
I tried the Slit-Wrap but it never worked for me. IIRC the wrap tool was supposed to slit the insulation of the wire but wasn't intended to remove the insulation completely. When you wrapped the wife on the post, the wire was supposed to make contact with the post through the slit in the insulation. More often than not, it never did. I was using the hand tools and not an automatic system so YMMV.
I also tried another WW system were you wrapped the wire onto the post, insulation and all, and then you soldered the wire and it was supposed to melt the insulation and metal conductor would then contact the post. But all it did was make a burnt gummy mess! I think it was called Solder-Wrap or something like that.
"A friend of mine had worked on some WW boards that were put into space. "
I didn't know that they ever put any WW stuff into space. I've seen a lot boards that were built to go into space but never any WW ones. One friend of mine landed a job at KSC re -soldering boards intended to go into space with lead based solder instead of the RHOS crap that they were originally built with.
Several friends of mine were part of the group that designed and built the AMSATs. I was an engineer on one missile system that went into space, but only as part of it's ballistic trajectory. I was also an engineer on another that would have been space based but I can't really talk about either of those. I was offered a job at NASA KSC as an engineer dealing with the payload electrical interfaces on the space shuttle but I was having too much fun elsewhere and I turned it down. Another friend of mine, and someone I later worked with, designed and built the deep IR sensors for the Hubble Space Telescope and he still has the prototypes.
For a short time, I worked with some of the engineers from a company in Canada that built big automated machines used to make the very large wire wrap backplanes for main frame computers and other uses. I don't remember how the name was spelled but it was Dimetco or something like that. At the time we needed very large, extremely fast video processors so we were building the entire system with the then new, experimental GaAs chips and everything was done in hardware and they were building WW boards for us that would hold several thousand ICs per board. The amount of WW on those boards was absolutely insane! Occasionally the machine that was WW'ing the boards would lose track of where it was and it would shift one row or column of the WW connections, and every row/column after it, over one position. That was a real AW-S***! moment when we found that, especially when we had already started populating the board.
I don't know if it's still around here but I used to have one of those boards that was fully build and worked but was always "glitchy" and couldn't be trusted so they finally scrapped it. It had over 2500 socketed ICs on it and I was pulling the ICs and using them for other projects and I eventually found one IC where one of the legs had folded under the IC instead of going into the socket. From the outside it appeared to be perfectly fine but when I removed the IC I found the pin folded under. I'm sure the the pin pressed against the socket and would work occasionally but with temperature cycling it would gradually creep away from the socket and not make contact.
We used solder wrap for smaller projects in the early 80s. The Slit-Wrap worked great but you had to have the tip sharp and set the wire tension. My gun came with spare cutters and the tension meter (fish scale sort of thing). Yes, the insulation was slit up the side and with my gun, you could program the number of turns.
I had visited a company that built some very large (several sq feet) WW boards made of ECL. The biggest systems I ever saw were at Western Electric. Those were made with automated machines as well. Crazy what we were doing back.
New HD installed in the old PC and have started to install DOS (remember MKS). Note the two CDs on the keyboard. That yellowed disc was left in this PC and the drive. Not good.
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A moment of silence for my 1997, 4.3GB drive. May you rest in peace.
Condolences from Bigfoot.
Brother is in bad shape but group elder from Oklahoma is participating, chilling on '06 tax form filling aid.
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I already posted about this here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/vintage-computing/real-world-interfacing-pc-1987/
but it is the oldest PC card that I have. -
These give you the ability to create anything you want for the PC/AT/XT.
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These give you the ability to create anything you want for the PC/AT/XT.
(Attachment Link) (Attachment Link)
While I had some fun entering a member's high speed oscillator on a bread board contest, I don't think we want to do any sort of high speed (LOL) digital designs on a breadboard. Any pictures of what you were able to use it for? -
Years ago in the UK there was a great hobby electronics store called Maplin, very much like Tandy/Radioshack. In their heyday Maplin also printed a high quality magazine, filled with projects and technology updates. One project was an Input/Output ISA card based on the Intel 8255. It gave you three general-purpose, programmable 8-bit ports. This one was assembled from the Maplin kit and spent most of its working life inside an Opus XT where it switched radio channels on a system I'd rigged to interface my AX25 packet-radio BBS to to my Fido Node. It worked great for about a year, and then one morning I had a letter from Ofcom (the UK government communications regulatory dept) telling me to shut it down :-)
Cheers
Phil G4PHL / GB7PHL
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Dumb question of the day.
I have restored the the images to the new drive and now realized, I have no idea what my password was 20 years ago.
The PC uses DOS, 95 and various flavors of NT. These are on various partitions using various formats. I am guessing all with the same PW. Any idea on tools that would decode or remove them?
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Dumb question of the day.
I have restored the the images to the new drive and now realized, I have no idea what my password was 20 years ago.
The PC uses DOS, 95 and various flavors of NT. These are on various partitions using various formats. I am guessing all with the same PW. Any idea on tools that would decode or remove them?
*groan* from times, long ago ( the memory of which has long been suppressed) I had to do this.
Think reset not decode. This http://www.chntpw.com/guide/ looks promising. -
While I had some fun entering a member's high speed oscillator on a bread board contest, I don't think we want to do any sort of high speed (LOL) digital designs on a breadboard. Any pictures of what you were able to use it for?
I never did anything with those boards. In fact, the breadboard is still in the shrinkwrap. I bought those from Jameco or JDR Microdevices decades ago. The green one was Archer so I probably bought that from Radio Shack in the 90's. IIRC, the XT/AT's ISA bus operated from 4.77MHz to maybe up to 8MHz so breadboarding shouldn't be a limiting factor for digital logic. Maybe if you're doing mixed signal with high frequency analog then you might have to be careful, but I've personally wire wrapped and breadboarded many designs up to 8MHz.
Here is a 486 single board computer I made back in the 90's. It's only running at ~7MHz
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I have not burned a CD in over 10 years and was looking forward to some much needed improvements in this area. The new PC that is now almost 6 years old, running Windows 10, I have managed to put three CDs to the dumpster so far. Some cryptic message because there is still not enough space on a hard drive to actually add some useful error messages. I was going to try a small R/W disc but the idiots who designed the PC mounted the drives vertical rather than horz. The disc fell into the drive as expected. lol. So it's sitting on top of a glass of water. lol. Of course, that failed as well.
I have a new burner sitting in a box. Too bad it's not SATA and the new PC only supports SATA.
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I never did anything with those boards. In fact, the breadboard is still in the shrinkwrap. I bought those from Jameco or JDR Microdevices decades ago. The green one was Archer so I probably bought that from Radio Shack in the 90's. IIRC, the XT/AT's ISA bus operated from 4.77MHz to maybe up to 8MHz so breadboarding shouldn't be a limiting factor for digital logic. Maybe if you're doing mixed signal with high frequency analog then you might have to be careful, but I've personally wire wrapped and breadboarded many designs up to 8MHz.
Now that's some slick hardware there! So I was going through my notes trying to find where I may have written down the password and I came across the original documentation from JDR with their demo design to get you started with designing hardware for the PC.
Here is a 486 single board computer I made back in the 90's. It's only running at ~7MHz -
Dumb question of the day.
I have restored the the images to the new drive and now realized, I have no idea what my password was 20 years ago.
The PC uses DOS, 95 and various flavors of NT. These are on various partitions using various formats. I am guessing all with the same PW. Any idea on tools that would decode or remove them?
*groan* from times, long ago ( the memory of which has long been suppressed) I had to do this.
Think reset not decode. This http://www.chntpw.com/guide/ looks promising.
After tossing a few CDs, finally a Windows NT 3.51 prompt! Big thanks for finding that needle in the internet haystack! One step closer.
Back on topic, while the PC is apart....
Starting at the bottom is my custom made board that I used to develop my own CPUs.
Above that, the DIO-500. To most people, this is a typical 2 serial port and a printer port card. For the EE, this is a hacked super digital IO board. It has a couple of small PALs that I had hacked an then burned my own.
Above that is my Keithley DAS-20. It has A/D, D/A, timers and some DIO. Like Fluke, my early experiences with Keithley don't bring fond memories.
Of course, who can't remember the Spigot. MS used this card as an example for their driver development tools as long as I remember. For all I know, they still include source for it today.
And finally, the Adaptech AHA2940 SCSI card.
The dust gives it character.
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With the PC now running, I made an attempt to use rawrite to image the CPM disks. The windows version will not support the old 360K floppy and the original versions I have will not touch it under DOS. I suspect when I copied these two disks, I used COPYIIPC. Attempting to run it on the new PC presents the divide overflow. Back then, I may have had my powerful IBM AT....
So I tried ImageDisk which seems like it may support the old format. Really, I would need to drag out that old PC and just try it but I already have about 10 hours on this
http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/index.htm
Another option:
http://gaby.de/ftp/pub/cpm/znode51/specials/faqs/cpmfaq.htm#18
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Learn to use Linux, it doesn't have those limitations.
You don't need much eighter so it wont be a burden.
Just try few distros and pick your style.
I think knoppix and lubuntu could be suitable.
There is a command called dd.
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These give you the ability to create anything you want for the PC/AT/XT.
We had the breadboard - pretty well built.
(Attachment Link) (Attachment Link)
There was a model from JDR that was for wire-wrap/solder that was already furnished with the addressing and decode logic - a much more useful IMHO, but it was shift-left the price of the breadboard one. -
That was the one, although my recollection of the price is wrong - the Jameco breadboard was not much cheaper than this.
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Another vector board made by Scientific Solutions from 1981. Shown is a board I designed to automate some tests I was running. I liked how they routed the power and ground layers. At the time, all I used was the DIP packages. Note the TO92s stuffed into the WW sockets for ease of replacement.
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Pretty cool board, joeqsmith. The supply routing indeed helped a lot to reduce the then common wobbly supply lines for these heavily populated and (somewhat) power hungry logic ICs.
I love the drunk IC just above the end of the edge connector - it is trying to escape!
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Maybe when I am gone, these old WW boards will be recognized for their art and be worth millions... Each unique. Straightening the pins would be akin to stripping the patina.
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Yes, Maplin was an amazing electronics DIY company. I loved the magazine and I too made the 8255 based project. It worked great for my college car control project.
While soldering and making the project, I remember having soldered one of the tantalum caps with reversed polarity. It exploded after I inserted the card in my PC and I freaked out thinking I've blown the PC motherboard
Luckily, there was no serious damage.
This was one of the most fun electronics projects I've worked on!
