Amstrad NC-100 and Amstrad NC-200 laptops with Z80 CPU Both computers come from around 1992
SRAM cards Cards to search for: PCMCIA Type 1 SRAM Card , <= 1MB. (It is rumored that 2 MB cards can be used but only first 1MB is usable then, I have not tested that).
These cards contain SRAM chips and a battery for keeping RAM content over some time (about 1 year). The card shown below uses a 3 volts lithium battery type DL2325, but this varies from card to card.
Hakko 475 Desoldering Station Hakko is a company with japanese origin. They are famous in the area of soldering tools. Also desoldering tools.
Why Hakko was a choice? I already own a Hakko FX-888D soldering station. This is a low-cost product from Hakko, but it offers many advantages, compared to the soldering irons I had in the past.
One very important thing is the time after being switched on, until the iron is usable.
Für Freunde des guten Klangs, insbesondere bei Plattenspielern, ist Dual ein Begriff. Wie ich in Foren gelesen habe, sind die alten Dual Plattenspieler einem Neugerät normalerweise an Qualität überlegen, bis zu einer Neugerätmarke von rund 500 Euro. Erst dann bekommt man was Besseres. Ich persönlich würde daher immer einen Dual, oft für ein paar dutzend Euros, nehmen.
Und tatsächlich sind diese circa 50 Jahre alten Geräte heute oft noch in sehr gutem Zustand, mechanisch robust, elektrisch dauerhaft hergestellt.
Ultrix 4.5 on a MicroVAX 3100 I wanted to install Ultrix on my VAX, described here. Here is some log regarding installation.
The installation was already documented by various people, so it is nothing new, and credits go to these people.
Ultrix version used is from 1995, so 28 years old.
The following screenshot shows, after installation, some DEC Windows tools, remote displayed on my Linux machine. You see 2xdtterm, dxpaint, dxpuzzle, dxnotepad and dxclock.
SCSI2SD SCSI2SD is an approach emulating SCSI hardware with software running in an PSoC microcontroller from Cypress. An ARM Cortex M3 controller is provided as part of the PSoC, and furthermore a bunch of programmable system parts, e.g. usable for interfaces etc. Focus is on mass storage, so SCSI2SD can emulate hard drives and other mass storage devices, all on a SD card. Main website is http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD .
Alternative PCB layout, specialized for Powerbook hardware, but can be used for general SCSI purposes too: https://www.
Digital DEC MicroVAX 3100 I bought this as a fully working machine.
Series BA42A board and KA41A CPU. So this is a Microvax 3100-10. 16MB RAM. The machine contains two harddrives. One contains a VMS operating system, the other one a NetBSD installation. So it can run both VMS and UNIX.
Contains a DHW-42-AA (also called: DSH32-B?) extension board. It offers 8 additional serial lines (for terminals) and 2 synchronous lines RS-423.
DEC VT 330+ is a successor of VT330. My device has latest date codes from week 28 in 1990, so it is about 1990 or 1991. The electronics differs from the VT330, the digital logic part is build on a single PCB only. While older VT330 were built on two boards.
This newer board has an Intel 8032 8-Bit CPU, 2x128 KByte EPROMS (27C010), 2xHM62256 2x32KByte RAM. The microcontroller has two companion chips SCC2692AC1N40, these are dual asynchronous receiver/transmitters.
Microdrive, IBM DSCM-11000, with 1GB capacity. From year 2000. Connector type is “CF+ Type II”. Formfactor 1.8’’. Weight 16 gramms.
These are real harddiscs, with super-small rotating discs inside, moving heads and all that fancy stuff.
This was designed at a time, where it was not possible to create large semiconductor based non-volatile memory.
At that time, it was easier to scale down the physics of a real harddrive and to create a tiny version of that.
PDP11 Assembler This text describes how to assemble PDP11 files on Linux.
MACRO-11 assembler, linker, disassembler for Linux There are several ways to create object binaries for PDP11 on Linux. I have tested these tools that form a nice tool set for handling PDP11 assembler files on Linux:
Macro-11 Assembler, see https://github.com/andpp/macro11 (written in C) Macro-11 Linker, see https://github.com/andpp/pclink11 (Written in C++) PDP-11 Disassembler, see https://github.com/caldwell/pdp11dasm (Written in C) All tools did compile without any options by just executing make on them.
Coding for PDP11 machines without any target operating system (bare metal). Gnu GCC does the job.
Github location There is useful code on Github, see here: https://github.com/DennisD2/pdptools/tree/main/all2deposit
Toolchain install https://www.teckelworks.com/2020/03/c-programming-on-a-bare-metal-pdp-11/
https://xw.is/wiki/Bare_metal_PDP-11_GCC_9.3.0_cross_compiler_instructions
# Download packages curl https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.34.tar.gz >binutils-2.34.tar.gz curl https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-9.3.0/gcc-9.3.0.tar.gz >gcc-9.3.0.tar.gz # Extract packages tar xvf gcc-9.3.0.tar.gz tar xvf binutils-2.34.tar.gz # Download/install prerequisites for compiler cd gcc-9.3.0/ ./contrib/download_prerequisites # Create build dirs cd .. mkdir binutils-build mkdir gcc-build # Build binutils cd binutils-build/ .
