This Old Micro - Groups

What's Wrong With Me?

Tom M. — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Collecting and using old computers can be an expensive and space-intensive hobby.

The newcomers are constantly trying to find the next machine to add to the collection.

The older guys are often trying to offload equipment to reclaim space, or downsize a collection they spent years putting together. After all, there's only so much time to play with these things.

I'm one of the latter. I basically have all the machines I can handle for a while, and lots of unused "stuff" lying around. I'm not one of those who has one or more storage spaces full of equipment, but most of the rooms in my house have old computer gear gathering dust.

It's not pretty.

So I'm getting rid of a bunch of old things. I've got old x86 computers, a 3B2/400, lots of accessories, boards, disks, cables, and other assorted stuff that has to go before I have a general family rebellion on my hands. I've got new-in-the-box MS software that is probably of interest to some

Early UNIX Documents

Tom M. — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:45:00 GMT

If you're reading this and are really interested in early UNIX systems, you have probably read some of the early UNIX books and papers. Things like Don Libes' "Life With UNIX", or Peter Salus' "A Quarter Century of UNIX". These are all great books, and if you haven't read them, many can be had for a song on eBay or as used books on Amazon. Basically these are so cheap that you end up paying only shipping. Great deals.

Kaypro Commercial

Tom M. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:50:00 GMT

A great piece of computer history!

UNIX History

Tom M. — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:05:00 GMT

As told by Thompson & Ritchie...

Security

Tom M. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I spent an hour this evening getting the firewall in order. I was getting a lot of intrusion attempts on the ssh port (22), so I restricted the port by IP address and now I bet my secure log will be very cle an.

If you run a web server (or mail server or ...), you really need to insure that all unessential services are turned off, and that your firewall is set to reject or drop everything unwanted.

There are lots of good iptables references out there. Just search for "iptables howto" or "iptables tutorial". One that might get you started if you don't already know what you're doing is at the Fedora project. It is relevant to most Linux distributions, not just Fe

Kaypro Progress!

Tom M. — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:40:00 GMT

I've had a breakthrough in preparing Kaypro 4 CP/M diskettes. In the end it was much simpler than I imagined it would be.

read on for more...

Network Cleanup

Tom M. — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:50:00 GMT

I mentioned a while back that I was working on cleaning up all the computer junk I have laying around, and I've completed a lot of it. Now for the last part: the network.

Read on for more...

Back in the Saddle

Tom M. — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:25:00 GMT

I've been gone for a week, but things are back in motion here at the Community now.

The network is working fine, I've got the firewall set up reasonably well, and VMWare player is installed and operating, although I really don't know how to make it sing yet.

Wyvern is back up, and available via telnet from this server, but you have to be able to ssh in here first. I'll work on a way for others to get in when I have time. I don't think I'll be handing out shell accounts on this host.

Backups of Community are being pulled every night now.

The next big improvement will be the installation of the Management CRM, allowing me to communicate with members much more efficiently. Hopefully that will go in sometime late this week.

All in all, things are moving along well!

Not Enough Time!

Tom M. — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:05:00 GMT

Things have been lagging here, and there have been some technical problems. And unfortunately, nothing much will happen for the next week, either.

Lunar Lander Retrospective

Tom M. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I've always loved playing games on computers, and though I don't have much time for them any more, I still do!

I remember playing Lunar Lander on my TRS-80 Model 1 many, many years ago, and I also remember writing a graphical version for that platform in Z-80 assembly language. Great memories, and made only better by this article.

Did you know that the original Lunar Lander program was written in Basic on a PDP-8 by a high school student? And in under 50 lines of code?

Read the article for a fascinating retrospective.

Site Upgrades

Tom M. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The site will be undergoing some upgrades in the next few days - hopefully this weekend (25-26 July)

The upgrades will include:

A new server will be installed after a full backup. The new server has 4 processors, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of RAID 1 mirrored storage. This machine should be fine for this site and several others.
I will hopefully be upgrading ConcourseConnect to version 2.0, which includes:
- A variety of new security features and an integrated webinar and web conferencing system using Dimdim
- Embedded video content from Youtube in wikis and maybe blogs.
- Lots of bug fixes and usability improvements

I'm looking forward to getting these improvements in place, and then going back to work on my Kaypro 4-84. Hopefully my next blog entry in the Kaypro section will deal with creating Kaypro formatted disks for the editors and compilers I have collected over the

New Server

Tom M. — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:25:00 GMT

It's time for spring cleaning at my house, and I decided to sell a bunch of the old computing stuff and consolidate everything onto one server. So I'm selling my old 1U Supermicro dual Xeon RAID system, my 1U dual 1.8GHz Athlon, and maybe the machine this is running on: a dual 1.2GHz Athlon tower with HW RAID.

I've got several other older Pentium-class boxes I would give away to interested parties. Contact me with the Contact Us button up top if you're interested.

New battery, maintenance manual

Tom M. — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Last weekend, I fired up the 3B2 and was a bit disappointed to find that I have both hard drive and maybe other problems to consider.

Retro Computer Museum / Andy Spencer

Tom M. — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:20:00 GMT

I met Andy Spencer, Administrator (Owner?) of the Retro Computer Museum in Leicestershire, UK online last night. I was a little reluctant to ask him if it was ok to post about our site on his site, but he had no problem with it.

Readers of this post should browse over to the Retro Computer Museum and say hello. He's got a great community and lots of fellow retro fans talking about all manner of old, geeky stuff, with a distinctly British flair.

Altogether, the Retro Computer Museum is a great site with a lot of information about old hardware and software, and I foresee a strong friendship between our communities in the future.

-Tom

The Venerable 3B2: a Dying Breed

Rudy S. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:55:00 GMT

The AT&T 3B2 was among the first supermicro class machines. They were expensive and not very popular with universities and hobbyists, so you don't see too many around.

But they were pretty successful in industry, especially in telecommunications. They were designed as phone switches: highly reliable, reasonably well powered for their time. You can still find one here and there if you're lucky.

I was lucky enough to find this AT&T 3B2/400 late last year and am just about ready to start the restoration. The previous owner says it was running when he last fired it up, and I believe him, but it's got some device driver problems, and maybe (I hope not!) a flaky disk drive.

What you see here is a lot of what I got, but not all. Basically, this came with just about everything you could want in a 3B2/400: the machine (w/ 2 drives a

CP/M Users review "CP/M is a favorite of mine!" (5/5)

Rudy S. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:43:21 GMT

I hope this group can become a place for sharing all kinds of information about CP/M. The thing that makes this place different is that we not only have the usual forums, but the document management, blogging and wiki are also fully integrated. It makes for a terrific and very powerful community building system.

CP/M C Compilers

Tom M. — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:05:00 GMT

I spent some time this weekend on Simh in CP/M, trying out the BDS and Aztec C compilers. They both seem pretty good, but I think the Aztec compiler has more language features, including a more complete library and a full floating point library, which BDS lacks.

BDS compiles to a relocatable object file, and then links directly to a .COM file.

Aztec compiles to an ASM file, then assembles to a .O file, then links to a .COM file. A bit more work, but I use a submit file to do most of it for me anyway.

All in all, I think I like the Aztec compiler a bit better.

I also spent some time writing some simple UNIX-like tools:

cat - prints a file to standard output
more - pages a file to standard output
cls - clears the screen and homes the cursor
wc - counts lines, words, and characters in a text file

A couple of these (more and cls) were written using some vt100/ansi escape sequences, so would need

Retro has been upgraded

Tom M. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:05:00 GMT

I've just upgraded the server to ConcourseConnect 1.0.1, released yesterday.

While we think it works great, there might be a few bugs. If you find them, please report them using "Contact Us" at the top right. This version has numerous bug fixes, and adds a new theme, which I am not using.

Read on for a summary of the changes/fixes...

CP/M Assembler

Rudy S. — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:25:00 GMT

I forget almost everything I ever knew about CP/M assembly language programming, so it took me a while to figure out Z-80 assembler and CP/M system calls.

Read on for more...

My First Computer

Tom M. — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:40:00 GMT

My first personal computer was a TRS-80 Model I bought sometime before 1980... maybe 1979?

It was a 16K machine with a cassette tape interface and Level II Basic as the "Operating SYstem".

Over time, I upgraded to a floppy disk and had a fair amount of software.

I became a fairly decent Basic programmer and also did quite a bit in MS Macro Assembler. I quit the TRS-80 scene when I bought a Zenith Z-150 PC/AT clone in about 1984.

I've recently become interested in the TRS-80 again, mostly the Model IV, and though I don't have a real machine, I have been playing with LDOS on a couple of the available emulators. I've got quite a bit of software and documentation amassed, and will probably upload a lot of it over time. In the meantime, if there's something you want, I probably have it and would be happy to trade or give away anything machine readable.

Invitation

Tom M. — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:10:00 GMT

Here's an invitation to anyone interested in helping to build a retro-computing enthusast network:

I want to build a private or "dark" network for retro-computing enthusiasts. It has to be dark because the old hardware and software was full of bugs and not very secure. Exposing it to the public network would be suicide, so I was thinking about a UUCP network, only instead of using dialup, we could use tcp/ip.

The model would be each participant keeping one machine on a public ip address, and the retro network on a private network behind the public machine, which would also be connected to the private network. We would use the old UUCP mapping project software (pathalias) to build a set of UUCP maps that would route UUCP across the public to private bridge.

This arrangement would allow us to do email, USENET, and basic file transfer in a reasonably secure way. It would not be as fast as the net, but it should work just fine.

So who wants

What Is Possible Here?

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:10:00 GMT

This site is built on top of the Concursive ConcourseConnect software. It is extremely powerful and includes just about everything one could want for a community/directory/social network.

So what can you do here? After registering, you can not can you have your own blog, forums, wiki and document store, but you can start your own group for a special purpose. I've created one for CP/M and one for TRS-80, but I know there are lots of other old technologies that deserve their own groups.

Some that come to mind are Digital Equipment Coprporation PDP-11 and Vax systems, old Sun hardware and operating system, old UNIX systems, Apple, Commodore, Atari, and who knows what else.

Feel free to register and start a conversation about something that interests you. I know my own interests span systems across the spectrum of mainframes, minis, and micros, operating systems, programming languages and old application software.

Groups have blogs, forums, wikis, do

The CP/M Group

Tom M. — Sun, 17 May 2009 19:30:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of CP/M.

The first computer I owned was a Radio Shack TRS-80, so while I did not own a CP/M system in its heyday, I did use it a fair amount over the years, and I use it still under Simh on the Altair emulator.

I have a ton of old CP/M stuff, including operating system images, programming languages, applications, games, and lots of documentation. This is my chance to share it all, and it will go up in the Documents section as I am able to upload.

-Tom