|
|
News, announcements, and
|
We hold our open house on the 3rd Sat. of each month from 10:00am - 4:30 pm at our facility on 118 Manton Ave in Providence, RI.
For more information send e-mail to rcs@osfn.org
Directions to RCS/RI are online.
We checked out the Xerox Dandelion during the open house yesterday. There is a problem with the monitor but the rest of the system appears to be in good working order.
The RCS/RI Open House on 2005-11-19 saw the substantial resurrection of a thirty-two year-old Data General NOVA 840. This 48kW mapped NOVA, vintage November, 1973, hadn't seen power since 1994 and had been stored in a moderately hostile dusty environment. After a thorough cleaning and checkout, the CPU powered up and ran normally; there were a few mechanical problems with the Disk-drive adaptor chassis, however, and those (specifically, a warped printed- circuit board) were eventually resolved. The two Diablo Model 31 disks were in exemplary shape, spun up normally and the heads flew without incident for the afternoon.
The 840 -- the first Mapped NOVA -- was originally purchased by the Town of North Attleborough (Massachusetts) in 1973 for educational and administrative use in the town's High School. Clearly, North Attleborough was years ahead of its time in 1973, and the purchase price of the machine was in the neighbourhood of $100,000 -- in 1973 dollars! I had a short discussion last year (2004) with the (in 1973) Superintendent of Schools for the town, and he related that the whole endeavour was regarded as visionary by some, outright silly by others, and that it took a lot of persuasion to get the Town Selectmen to go along with the idea. (As an aside, he was unaware of the machine's fate until I related to him that I now held posession of it, and that it still runs; he seemed gratified by the outcome. Considering that the town got more than 20 years' service from the machine, I think the town got a bargain.)
The system served in education and administration until the mid 1980s, and soldiered on in an administrative capacity until the early 1990s. Its life then, in the eyes of its owners, over, one of the department heads was tasked with "making it disappear". Providentially, I happened to catch wind of this approaching travesty and assisted in the "disappearance". In addition to educational and administrative uses, the machine was also used for several years to tally the results of local elections.
As originally configured, the system had ten Teletype ASR-33s, one Infoton visual terminal, and a 300bps DataPhone connection to the Junior High School which had a DECwriter LA-36 on the premises. The Teletypes and DECwriter were run in a multi-user Extended BASIC environment and the Infoton was used for the administrative roles and for teaching FORTRAN IV to students who were interested and had passed the BASIC courses. In addition to the twelve terminals, the system was configured with two Diablo Model 31 Disks, a Wangco Model 10 tape drive, an original 132- column Centronics line printer, a high-speed paper-tape reader, and a Documation M-200 card reader with the Mark-Sense option.
The current configuration is a single background terminal with an RS-232 interface, the single foreground Teletype interface (current-loop), 48 kW of mainstore, the two Diablo disks, the tape drive, the paper-tape reader, and the line printer interface. Due to the degradation with age of the rubber coating on the tape drive capstan, the tape drive is non-operational; similar problems afflict the paper-tape reader.
The current configuration, by slot, is:
17 - Open slot -- originally card-reader controller 16 - Magtape Control 15 - Disk Pack Control 14 - ADC/PLT/LPT Control -- only LPT chips installed 13 - Cassette I/O -- only second TTY interface installed 12 - Open slot -- originally quad TTY controller 11 - Open slot -- originally quad modem line control 10 - 8 kW memory 9 - 8 kW memory 8 - 8 kW memory 7 - 8 kW memory 6 - 8 kW memory 5 - 8 kW memory 4 - Memory Management and Protection unit, option 8021 3 - Basic I/O -- first TTY, paper tape reader, real-time clock 2 - CPU2 w/Hardware Multiply/Divide 1 - CPU1In the original configuration, the other TTY controllers were situated in an expansion chassis that remains slung beneath the main CPU. This chassis has problems with the power supply that causes erroneous power-fail indications, but in the "shortened" configuration the machine operates in now doesn't matter and the expansion chassis is disconnected and powered down.
Thanks to Mike McMahon for donating a Xerox 1108 (aka "Dandelion") complete with docs and software. This machine is the same hardware as the Xerox Star, but runs InterLisp-D. The Dandelion was introduced in 1981; this machine was built in 1984 and includes some later software upgrades.
Our facility is located in the Atlantic Mills, and like most New England mill buildings it is adjacent to a river. As of yesterday it has been raining for nine days straight. The 1st floor of the building was inundated with a couple feet of water and the 1st and 2nd floors lost power. Here is an excerpt from the local weather advisory:
FLOOD STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA
3:15 PM EDT SAT OCT 15 2005
On the Woonasquatucket River record flooding has occurred. A new flood
of record has been established... 8.3 feet. This surpasses its earlier
record flood of 7.6 feet set in march of 1968. The river has crested
and as of 3 pm it had fallen to 7.3 feet. The Greystone Dam is being
monitored closely on the Woonasquatucket River due to the extremely
high river elevation. Flooding will continue into this evening. If
you are asked to evacuate... do so immediately.
The flooding mentioned above caused some concern about the possibility of a power failure on our floor, so we decided not to power up the VAX-11/750. We did, however, work on some of the DEC peripherals such as the VT100 series terminals. We will work on this machine at the December Open House.
One of our neighbors in the building donated a Fluke Model 893A AC-DC differential voltmeter with the Recorder Output option, circa early 1970's, which is in good working order. RCS would also like to thank Dan for donating a large stack of IEEE and ACM periodicals to the RCS Library.
Yesterday we installed two 120V Hubble twist-n-lock receptacles at the new facility: 20A and 30A. So we now have the same capacity that we had at Eagle Street. This will allow us to run many of the medium sized machines in the collection.
Many of the pages on this website have been updated. Most of the changes are minor such as correcting broken links or the change of address for our new facility. One new page is the tentative schedule for 2006. Another is the 1998 feature article about RCS reprinted from the Providence Journal.
Opening day at the new facility went well, and we made more progress in the physical layout of the space. New networking drops got put in, networking gear got racked up, and we verified that we have sufficient 10-Base-5 ("thickwire" Ethernet) cable to do a working, visible, installation. The space is still cramped, and we have a way to go before we're up and running in pristine shape, but here we are!
The partnership between RCS/RI and the Ocean State Free-Net continues at the new Atlantic Mills facility. Yesterday we moved the OSFN servers that have been colocated at RCS since January 2002.
The Retro-Computing Society has moved to a new facility as of September 1st. RCS/RI is now located in the Atlantic Mills in the Olneyville section of Providence. We are on the fourth floor at 118 Manton Avenue in Suite 411. The new facility is only 1 mile from the Eagle Street location.