Notices by philpem (philpem@digipres.club)

@foone Bad idea or the best idea

This could well be one of the biggest lies ever printed. #digipres

I completely fell down a rabbit hole with Wabash disks. Looks like there are a few different versions:
- Maxi-myte
- "Silver Box"
- Pinnacle Series
- Wabash DataTech blue label

Photo credits:
Maxi-myte: State Library of NC, https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibrarync/8743834679
Silver: "Cruzin for a Deal", https://www.ebay.com/itm/386250491985?
Pinnacle: vcam2000, https://www.ebay.com/itm/266157181999
Datatech: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/286091441706

There's also another version of the Pinnacle packaging...
photo credit: Blazing Media, https://www.ebay.com/itm/176084798238

@foone PC actually! It's the cable TV headend. I'm trying to clear out all the old cable converters so I can load my own.
It's a K6-II running Interactive Unix and the General Instrument/Jerrold ACC-4000 software.

@foone Oh go on then...

We get signal.

I think there's a nonzero chance I might end up making PiSCSI emulate WORM devices. Pure absurdity, but I don't want to waste any of the five precious WORM disks I (am soon to) have.

@foone Funnily enough I was looking at used Redbox machines being sold off and had a similar idea. There's been some interesting posts on r/redbox.

@foone Happy birthday, Foone!

@foone Well if that ain't the most cursed thing I've seen today...

@foone Eh, not awful. A bit of flux would make it "perfect" but if it works and isn't shorted out, it's a fine repair.

@foone @lethalbit Extra points available if you can actually get the ties to hold - those cables are thick and heavily shielded...!

@foone I have literally just started reading this series and I'm loving it. I just wish there was a way to keep the Kindle app and my paperback copy in sync...

@foone yeah! I'm just lucky it was easy to figure out, and the card wasn't expensive either. There's also a tantalising note on Quickpath's old website about "custom address decoding available on request" - so you can bet I'll be figuring out how to do that too.

@foone the REALLY good news is I just found a copy of the instruction manual for sale on ebay, and it's going to be scanned. At the very least it'll be on my website and I'll chuck it on the Retroweb discord too for them to include in the next update.

I just spent 20 minutes buzzing out the pinout of a 4-port serial card... input, input, output, output, ground... oh hello, that's a PC DB9 serial port, mapped 1:1 onto a DC37. Four ports, one after the other. Awful nice of them to make it easy.

@foone It depends on the video mode it expects. A VGA card should probably be able to drive it, but if it wants composite video style timing (525 or 625 lines), you'll probably need a sync separator and a composite source.

edit: I think there's a way to hook a Pi up to generate VGA using an R2R DAC, but it's been ages since I looked. It has a parallel output too, on the GPIOs, it's meant for LCDs. I have no idea how to set the mode timing though.

Does anyone have Sun patches 107235-01 (at Y2K fix) and 107436-01 (fsck fix for large FSes) for Interactive Unix 4.1.1?

They're are from around April 1999 and may be on a Sun Patches CD from then

Sadly they're not on Archive.org, or the ZX[1] and ICM[2] mirrors of Sun's ~2006 FTP.

[1]: https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/patches/
[2]: https://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/patches/
#retrocomputing #OldUNIX #UNIX #ClassicUNIX #Sun #Solaris

Boosts and shares appreciated!

@foone Looks like the label is "8C" and that looks like a SOT89 package. Going by Marsport it's probably a 78L05:
8C NJM78L05A NJR KQ SOT89 78L 5.0V 0.1A regulator

e: From left to right, the three pins on the bottom are Out, Gnd, In. The tab connects to the middle pin, which is GND.

Marsport: http://www.marsport.org.uk/smd/mainframe.htm