It was a long road to booting DOS68 on the old SWTPC 6800
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2022
- The SWTPC 6800 is back and this time we're booting the system using the original 1977 Smoke Signal Broadcasting BFD-68 disk controller and a SSB DOS68 disc image found on archive.org.
Part 1: • The 8-bit home compute...
Part 2: • Let's try to get the S...
Part 3: • Searching for bad RAM ...
Part 4: • We can fix it! A home-...
Part 5: This part!
--- Video Links
Archive.org repository with the disk images and HW manual:
archive.org/details/smoke-sig...
archive.org/details/ssb-bfd-6...
SWTPC 6800 Simulator:
github.com/rsanchovilla/SimH_...
Mike Douglas's UA-cam Channel with lots of videos on the SWTPC 6800:
/ @deramp5113
Mike's website:
deramp.com/swtpc.html
South West Technical Products Company:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWTPC
The SS-50 Bus used in this machine:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-50_bus
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - Наука та технологія
I got a nice message from the person who made these original disk images I used to make this work, so I'll post it here. (And it appears that UA-cam did eat the comment!!!)
"I'm the guy who made the crappy KryoFlux image on archive.org -- awesome video, and I'm glad you were able to make it work! Back when I imaged the disk I was just starting out with KyroFlux and was only familiar with IBM-formatted stuff. I actually found those SSB disks at a swap meet after I had bought the KryoFlux. They were sitting in an old cigar box, and the vendor wanted $15 for them. I hadn't the faintest clue who Smoke Signal Broadcasting was but found DOS-68 and the company's name enigmatic. It turns out I was lucky that I purchased them that day, as all the other electronics-related stuff that the vendor had that day (loose PROMs, ancient LEDs, breadboards and a TRS-80 Model I monitor) were gone the next week.
Sorry for the headache that my 360 RPM 80-track drive caused! At the time all I had was a TEAC 55GFR, which I did all my PC disk archiving on before I found the SSB disks. I was aware of the issue with reading 360 KB disks written from a 1.2 MB drive, but thought that flux imaging would benefit from the finer pitch of the read head of a 1.2 MB drive, in the case of bit rot and other bad sector errors. I never realized that crosstalk is a potential problem! Really I was concerned with the age of the disks (almost 40 years old when I found them) and the potential for sticky-shed syndrome to eventually ruin them, so I just wanted them backed up by any means possible. I was amazed that KyroFlux software detected no errors when interpreting the data as FM encoded, and putting the output disk image into a hex editor looked promising with all the DOS-68 filenames and message strings, but without a 6800 system or experience with emulating one I couldn't really put those images to the test. I'm glad it worked out perfect, even though it took some effort to correct my mistakes.
I still have all the disks, including the FORTRAN compilers, and will plan to recreate the flux images with a 300RPM 360K drive eventually (right now they're in cold storage).
--@fleaslikeus"
Great job! Any disk image is better than no disk image at all. :) All the data was there and it lead to a bootable disk, albeit with some work, and made a vintage OS boot that would otherwise have been lost to time.
All of this is amazing. Even if the image wasn't done the right way, it still saved the disk in a way that actually saved the disk. Great work.
Try putty for Connecting for this type of computers
"And it appears that UA-cam did eat the comment!!!"
(Sorry to reply here, YT buries comments atm.) - How about some SK*Dos, OS-9 and/or Unix System V, next?
They all run on 6800 type processors, and some have versions specifically for the SWTP computer. (see bitsavers manuals on Star-k for SK*Dos)
As for why SK*Dos, it was made later, and specifically was more compatible with what would become MS-Dos
As for why Unix V, Unix is not mentioned on the channel often, but its usability was far greater than dos, Incredibly more at the time. Most modern code is still compatible.
As for why OS-9, its a much later OS, that was also found on X86 hardware and some versions even offered a GUI called GEM. (You could use this even over serial with a little work!)
This operating system makes MS-DOS, CP/M and the Linux command line look like a miracle of user-friendliness and verbosity by comparison. What an amazing piece of history.
Done when memory was expensive, so every bit counted. No room to put fancy error messages, or even error detection code for odd cases, as you only had the 8k of ROM available to use, and likely were already trying to put an entire extra kitchen sink into it as well. Thus all the optimised code that reused routines as much as possible, or even some that did different things depending on where you entered the subroutine, as the CPU would always execute the first byte on entry as an opcode.
@@SeanBZA I played a little bit with some super optimization on a BIOS I wrote for the Sanyo MBC-55x series - it's 8088 based but no BIOS in ROM (normally it loaded the BIOS functions along with DOS and ROM just had a basic bootstrap loader). I found some interesting tricks like using a jump on parity to make a loop run exactly twice and save a few bytes, using a mov opcode to skip 2 bytes of data that served as alternate instructions for another entry point (saving one byte), shrinking init code down by making an initialization list of port addresses and data, and then a bit of trickery to make different sections more similar to each other so that the UPX compression could shrink it more (due to the memory layout, I actually had RAM to spare and wanted to use it to shrink the on-disk size).
Optimizing for size at all costs is definitely an exercise in doing all the bad things you normally should never do when programming.
Well, you have to start somewhere, if you fire up some PDP11 emulator with Unix V6 you will have a similar experience. :)
70s CP/M isn't going to be much better.
Brings back memories. I built my SWTPC 6800 from a kit. Soldered all the components in the motherboard and 4K ram board. I didn't have a floppy drive, I used a Teletype ASR 33 to load basic from a paper tape.
It's funny you said, "I'm more of a hardware guy, and this software stuff is a bit over my pay grade." I feel the same way watching you, except in reverse. I'm a software engineer trying to learn how to repair old PC hardware (to keep it running)... you're way beyond my pay grade!
Back in the bad old days everyone was a hardware AND and software guy! The two went hand in hand. Assembly/machine code is the manipulation of logic gates. Every programming language since then has been just an abstraction of that process.
@@AndyGraceMedia John von Neumann, at least early on, considered the emerging assembly languages a cop out and was really not a fan. Any abstraction comes at a cost to clarity of what's actually going on with the machine, and when you're trying to debug a library-sized computer... Yeah.
I'm in between. I understand enough of both aspects to follow and understand pretty much everything, but if I was in Adrian's shoes I could never get any of this going on my own.
@@GdotWdot I love that guys from that time were like “if you can’t keep track of your jump points you’re not a real programmer, assemblers are pointless”
Wow! This swtpc 6800 series for me was a great trip down memory lane. As a student I was designing my own 6800/6809 based computer systems as well as peripheral and DRAM cards. At that time I was still working with 8" floppy drives. I also built a 128kByte paged EPROM card that contained my editor, assembler, linker and a hw debugger. I was actually building these EPROMs by using a cross assembler on a CDC Cyber mainframe, printing to paper tape, taking this to the university and reading the tape using a teletype into an eprom programmer. Well, life as a programmer was hard at those times ;-)
Thanks a lot for bringing back all those memories! 😀
ive been watching this channel for a couple years. i know i have learned alot because i can always follow along logically with what is going on, even if i dont understand the 'why' of a ton of it, nor could i recreate it or explain it to someone else. but the crazy thing is that despite that, and despite the fact that i rarely watch videos 30-60 min long, i always watch these videos in their entirety, never get bored and enjoy every minute. keep doing what you do adrian, you have my support.
support from satan is always welcome ;)
agreed - I probably understand far less than most here (I’m more familiarized with vintage channels like Mr. Carlson’s Lab, and I’ve been studying Ben Eater’s more basic videos recently after deciding to really learn 8/16/64-bit electronics) but I can still follow the flow of these videos. My aspiration is to become a hobbyist in my own living space one day! (but I suspect I’ll be starting simple with radios and VTVMs and such… it’ll be some time before I repair my first computer!)
ive also been watching for a few years now i started my pc fascination with my schools old acorn systems(uk) then primary school bought a win 95 machine with a cd rom for £1000 there was a whole school assembly too then in high school back to acorns then finally windows xp as we leave thanks Britain . left school built my own win xp machine ive been tweaking ever since anything pre 90s is pure pc archeology to me keep up the good work guys
Satan165.... Agreed 💯
I have to agree with the original poster. Adrian, please stop feeling like your videos are too long. They're not! If someone feels like a video is too long, they can always skip ahead.
I actually knew some people back in the day who had these SWTPC 6800 machines. Sure it looks clunky and simple today. But back then it was the best thing ever. Watching this series is a real trip down memory lane.
Very fitting for Adrian Black to take over the reins of this computer from Hank White! 😁
Back then, I purchased for a stagering $10K , my first TRS80-1200, 2 floppies, 10MB HD, built-in screen, with a Dot Matrix Printer. When booted-up, it showed DOS, ready to accept commands. This video brings me back in time. I make me feel so weird when I compare with today's technology. That's how I started with computers. Evolution is such a weird thing. Thanks for posting 🎉
What I love about this is that even though the original backup was made with the wrong drive/wrong settings, it was still enough to turn it into a completely usable, bootable disk (with some extra steps). Just goes to show that when it comes to data preservation, doing something is always better than doing nothing. Even if you don't get it completely right it can still be useful to someone in the future!
I think the delay on the floppy disk controller card, either software or hardware, has to do with some older floppy disk drive, as the spindle motors on some of them were huge and heavy, so the controller is simply buying the floppy disk drives time to stabilize in term of speed of the spindle before it even bother to read the floppy disks, mostly to prevent the CRC checksum errors while reading the disk that's not in the alignment of both rotation speed and MFM subcarrier frequency. Modern floppy disk controller doesn't do that anymore as we were using the final 3 inches floppy disk drives whose motors were light so it spins up right away.
So, protip; for those who love computing history and uses 5 inch floppy disk drives, especially those modified to accept the classic MFM datalink, I recommend to incur the three seconds hard drive boot delay in the BIOS, so you can give those classic drives time to stabilize before booting up the OS on it or do anything with it otherwise.
Great work Adrian!! That computer is crying out for a FORTH operating system! See how much you can do in 48k of RAM! Complete control of the hardware!
I love your transistor radio sitting there so you can listen to the RF noise the system emits. Back in the day there was one permanently sitting behind my TRS-80 Model I.
The problems you worked through demonstrate just how far we've come in terms of sophistication on not only the hardware, but also the software in the systems we use. Troubleshooting these old systems is definitely an adventure!
"earlier in this video when I took a dump " - was seriously worried Adrian was about to do a major overshare 😂
I am a older gent that used to loved working on Computers before IC became too hard to work with. Watching this series has given me an idea to recreate this computer with newer parts... and by that I mean ATX power supply, use 50 pin cable style connectors for main bus and 30 pin for IO bus. I am starting with the base board (MP-B) and go from there. Plan is to design new circuit boards that use the new tech such as you using sram, it could all be on a very small board with a single ram and a few support curcuits.
This was a great series and who knows... someday I maybe able to make the boards I design available to other people that are interesred in this sort of thing.
Thanks Adrian
Computer archaeology in action! This was a fascinating series - really helps to see the complexity of simple procedures we took for granted in later machines.
Most users of computers these days have no clue what the 70's and 80's were like. Today Google, Siri, Alexa and the like can usually understand your spoken words and search or run commands for you. You don't have to memorize cryptic commands to get anything useful done.
At least *micro* computer archaeology. There had been computers around for several decades, before we got modern VLSI designs like this, that fits on a desktop.
Your dogged determination to fight through all that disk track .. etc stuff is amazing. And to have multiple faults (card chips need reseating, ribbon cable problems, disk sector issues, termination issues etc) and eventually end up with a DOS prompt was amazing. The tour through the various commands was wonderful. Made me appreciate how easy it became for people like me who started with msdos. Thumbs-up !
CPM and MSDOS/PCDOS were quite the advancements back in the day. Then came the GUIs, and now people rarely see command prompts, unless they are programmers or work on servers.
I'm not too experienced with these old systems, but I DO remember that it was VERY easy to damage those discs from power spikes. Hence, it was always standard practice to put the disc in a few (3) seconds AFTER switching the computer on and to NEVER remove a disc while the drive light was still on. Also, it was a thing to wait 5 seconds after a forced shutdown to allow for any memory to be completely flushed before switching on again. That procedure does eliminate some spurious errors.
I have often said, "I miss the 8-bit days. Back then, there was absolutely no doubt that you were the superior being." Well, this is to those 8-bit machines what the 8-bit machines are to us. xD
It's super cool to see such an ancient and even more rudimentary machine actually running. Huge kudos, Adrian, for your efforts and determination to get this beast chugging along again!
We still are the superior beings. And our younger colleagues know it.
In the IMD docs it discusses the potential need to format a disk on the target machine then copy the IMD imaged disk to the locally formatted disk when writing to an IMD written disk corrupts the disk. The issue you saw is consistent with my experiences with IMD as well. It may be related to the R/W Gap and/or the Format Gap settings in IMD.
It’s pretty interesting how it’s basically bootstrapping modulation tolerances, using asymmetric tolerances for reads and writes, until you finally get something nice and in spec
Being able to essentially restore a more stable copy of the original disc is great. It was cool to get the breakdown of how you slowly pieces bits of things together to get a workable solution.
A less common form of bootstrapping :D
Having my own computer in 1975 was just an impossible dream. By 1981 we had CP/M with Assembler and BASIC on a Z80 at school... but I still had to dream of that Fortran compiler. That repair command takes me back to college.... replacing BASIC's error messages with our own "funny" versions.
I have to chuckle because I first heard about the stunt as a child. My mother was taking college classes and had a prof who/and/or students that had replaced the error codes in some of the university's terminals, where a piece of the exploded death star was on display circa '78.... My actual interest at the time is obvious, but I never forgot the "naughty" error codes bit.
You do have what was referred to as flippy floppies. We used to keep hole punches for punching holes in paper around to make our own flippy floppies, You gently lift the cover away from the recording medium, punch a new hole 180 degrees from the original hole into the soft cover on both the front and back of the diskette. This gives you a new index hole on the opposing side, next on the opposite edge of the floppy you also cut a new write protect notch to mirror the original notch. Now both sides of the floppy can be written or read on a single side floppy drive by simply flipping the diskette over./ The data on the back side of the floppy is recorded backwards and the for can not be read on a double-sided drives second side. To read the back you must flip the diskette over even in a double sided drive. I never did figure out why some genius did not figure out how to read the data, and reverse the bits/bytes in software to make them readable.
6:40 I actually saw some 5.25" floppies which has cutouts for the index holes on both sides, so you can flip the disk in drives which use the index pulse. IIRC they were some German made disks.
I saw that computer advertised in so many issues of Popular Electronics that the SWTP logo seems to have been burned into my childhood brain. There was no way I could afford it of course.
I had a disk drive I bought from SWTPC. It used 8" floppies and plugged into a smaller card at the rear of the computer. I think I paid $1200 for the drive and controller. I didn't know about DOS68, But I did have a Smoke Signals BASIC and Smoke Signals word processor (not GUI) I took my system to an attorney's office and demonstrated the word processor. I also had a Xerox daisy wheel printer that I used as a terminal. The clerical staff at the attorney's office weren't happy. They thought I was trying to replace them with a computer.
I was thinking about daisy wheels the other day; 3D print the "wheel" an RPi0 to control a hammer that smacks it against Some-Kind-Of-Ribbon. Pi Pico would do the job. Or robot finger, more RPi, moving across electric typewriter. Write a "driver" that converts ASCII to finger presses.
> Xerox daisy wheel printer
The famous, Diablo 630, I bet!
@@andrewkieran8942 yes I later made a deal with a computer store owner. He had a customer who needed it and I ended up with an original IBM PC about a month after they were introduced. I also wrote some software in the exchange.
@@stalinvladThere were devices that could be attached to typewriter keyboards, effectively adapting them for use as printers or teletypes. These were controlled by a computer and used electromechanical plungers to actuate the keys.
A long time ago, I used DOS for a long time. From the early version to last. I started using it much later than others at the place I worked. we created menues and was able to use it at our office. When i first started working for a company who used DOS mostly. Well, us in the back of the business. I was able to catch on very fast. The guy who brought my computer to me, I quikly programmed a menu option that we used on our network. He was quite suprised I figured it out. Well, I did a lot of research. And from there, I started working in IT jobs only. I was living inTexas when I started my IT career. I have made lots of money in that field of work.
That BFD was probably a BFD when it came out.
FYI, the reason for the cable twist is simply so IBM could ship all drives configured as drive 1 (second drive) and not need to stock a separate part number, or to deal with extra documentation and the chance of someone doing it wrong.
Just a small note on bulk erasers. In the instructions for audio media, I recall that they said to turn on the unit when far away (both arms length) from the media before bringing it against the media to erase. Same thing before turning it off: take it away from the media before releasing the switch. The idea is to avoid creating magnetic pulses that would magnetize the media when operating the AC switch. Thanks!
This is a super-interesting example of how even early 1980s disc systems are essentially related to earlier devices. No-one was reinventing technology (even IBM), these were evolutions. I guess that is largely because Shugart mechanisms were the only game in town.
I will never in my life do anything like this, even if I would fantasize about it. Thanks for letting me do it vicariously. It's so important to preserve these things.
Well done on the detective work. One thing that I learnt the hard way with my TRS80 Model 1 is to remove the disk (or at least open the drive door) before power up or down as the “splurt” of data down the cable can corrupt the disk. I’d be doing that here as well…
Turning the system power on or off would push a glitch through the drive heads, corrupting whatever was under the head, even without the drive spinning. I glitched a few disk sectors on my Model 1 from that back in the day. I quickly learned to keep the door open when not using the disk.
I think the internet archive is a godsend for a lot of stuff. I like to support them as much as I can.
You are a legend. These videos bring back memories of Amiga 500 I used to own, and bringing computers I've never seen. That intuitive problem solving is top notch, because old hardware is so dodgy, you never know if it's a bad connection somewhere or dirty disk drive.
Back in the day, we used to "make" SD-disks to DD-disks by making a nothc to the diskette, as it fools the drive to think it's a double density, and it worked with better quality disks. Try that one sometimes. Greetings from a nerd from Finland!
Ah, back in the days when not only was it possible to have absolute knowledge of how your computer worked, every single feature, every IC, port, memory address, etc, but it was also mandatory.
Fifty years from now, someone will be trying to access an old laptop by using the FO to SATA version of Kryo and they will be adjusting clock times to match the solid state chips just as you adjusted the rpm controller of the disk drive.
Fascinating video. Bravo on your hard work paying off. Little by little. Thank you for the upload.
“Man these turn of the century semiconductors had such slow slew times… it’s hard to turn down modern hardware to even run this slowly”
That DOS is like a weird mashup of MS-DOS and Apple DOS. (Yes, I know this predates both of those.) The SAVE command is very similar to BSAVE in Apple DOS, for example.
U first congratulations
FYI, the Kryoflux is absolutely the device NOT to have. The AppleSauce disk imager is the tool of choice for those that have serious work to do and don't want to worry about being mistreated or threatened by the company that sells the device.
I love the mentions back and forth between Adrian and Clint (LGR)! They both got their own thing with a lot of mutual respect. Us nerds got to stick together!
This series is an instant classic. Wow, all the old memories from the 70's and 80's. Thanks so much for these.
I really liked this series on the SWTP computer. I would love to see a similar series on Cromemco and Digital Group computers. Keep up the good work!
6800 - The first processor I ever used, and programmed in binary level machine code.
When you can do that, you can do anything.
Amazing work. When I first saw this computer I didn't have the slightest clue how it even operated. After watching your videos, I still don't have the slightest clue but I'm glad you got it working! Seriously cool to see it functioning how it did back in the day.
My friend's co-worker was totally CLUELESS when it came to computers. He asked him for a copy of a certain floppy. You guessed it, he Xeroxed the floppy itself and placed it in a (physical) folder! :)
I was about to ask if he even stuck the floppy on the side of a metal desk with (you guessed it) a magnet. Remember: closing all windows doesn't mean to literally close all the windows in your house. That, and your CD drive tray is not a cup holder. 🤣
Scotty: (holds mouse like a microphone) Hello, computer?
-No response.
Proceeds to rewrite operating system...
This right here is the big unknown era of computing, the wild west (or Southwest lol) with very little documentation. Any video showing something working is historical imo.
fantastic work, and a great addition of the preservation of this hardware and software, its great to see that MS-DOS wasn't the only game in town, an addition to other DOSes like TRS-DOS and CP/M.
MS-DOS' disk structure was actually fairly primitive compared to what was available on other much earlier systems. Good old TRS-80 MI/III used free space bitmaps, the concept of block allocation runs, different levels of file access by password, spanning directory entries for extra metadata storage, while MS-DOS had crude memory hungry FAT chains and that was about it. It wasn't just TRS-80 DOSes either, there's plenty of examples of more advanced structures. In many ways MS-DOS was actually a backward step.
Amazing walk through of this system (all parts in the series). I know so little of those very early computers, and to see you progress from receiving it to a functioning 2 drive setup like that is really eye opening! All that sleuthing to get the drives working, imaging & booting - very impressive! Again, fantastic series. Thank you.
Are you related to the "King of Kong" Wiebe? Just spitballing here, didn't check the spelling.
@@jamesdye4603 Same spelling I believe, but slightly different pronunciation (last e is silent). But no, we're not related.
Wow! I'm an EE and worked on old computer for a hobby for years and I constantly learn so much here. Thanks!
Insane how things have changed over the years
The steprate in that 1771 floppy disc controller is hardwired but it can select 4 different rates.
There is a "seek track" command that the OS sends to the controller, and 2 bits of that byte specify how fast it should step.
I don't know DOS68, but likely the only way to send another steprate to the controller is to patch some byte in the DOS image.
OSes developed a little later (e.g. NEWDOS/80 for the TRS-80) had disk parameter tables that you could change to adapt the steprate to your drive.
In another comment I read this, indicating that DOS68 also had such a feature to adapt the steprate:
Note that as supplied, the system disk is shipped to boot⠂
with the slowest step rate and the longest dealy time after⠂
select. Your disk drives most likely can use a faster step⠂
rate; thus, please ensure you establish your boot disk as is⠂
appropriate for your system. Read about SYSTEM (STEP=n) and⠂
SYSTEM (DELAY=) in your user manual. Also use the proper⠂
BSTEP= parameter when you format your working system disk.⠂
I was a senior lab tech at University of North Texas computer lab in the 1980s. Computers with hard disc drives were scarce. A PhD student was finishing his dissertation on a dual floppy IBM PC. He tried to save and got the Error writing drive B Abort Retry Fail message. To his credit he came to me instead of turning the computer off. .Drive B had an error. So with the computer on I unplugged the A drive and swapped it with the B drive and selected retry. It saved his dissertation. All the connectors are low voltage so if you are careful with the connectors, it will reset the drive once it gets power. He graduated and the lab got pizza at night, my shift, for the remainder of the summer. I miss this level of computer technology. Faster great but very little is repairable by the average person with the newer technology
Awesome Adrian, well done on getting that going! And thanks for the tour of DOS - most interesting. It does seem to work at a lower level than more modern systems; I worked with CP/M in the 80's and that was a bit like that.
I remember in old times everything was so complicated and delicate, it was difficult to reproduce success stories and you had to try over and over till it worked again for a while.
As for trouble reading/writing on a disk formatted on a different drive (but could read/write disks formatted by itself) this was extremely common back in the 1980's with Radio Shack Shugart drives ..We would tell the person to bring their computer with drives into local Tandy Computer Repair Center and have drives aligned ...which what i would do as a Repair Center manager...
The process would be using a specially made floppy disk from Dyson there is a signal written at the very edge of the track 16 and 17 and another signal written on the edge of 17 and 18..We would set the drive on track 17 and with an O-Scope read the signals making sure both signals were equal... commonly called setting the head azimuth this would make sure the head was directly over track 17 (center of the disk) ..
Thanks for sharing, really nice research, I wonder how much time was spent on it to get it working. Great job. OSs from a preDOS time are barely known today, and its really nice to see how it works. And last but not least, its great to see a good technical explanation of how system works, not just a video when somebody takes an old machine and just start gaming.
Very cool about these old odd computers. The OS is probably inspired by CP/M (which I think was around at this time?) and RSX-11 and similar.
A genuinely amazing bit of real digital archeology, very impressed with the flopy disc salvage. As was pointed out, this was in the age when everything was hacked together, one step up from punched card or tape. Reminds me of my early days on a Research Machines 380Z!.
It's fascinating to see a time capsule like this getting preserved, and thanks to the other videos on the channel you can get a sense of where this machine fits in on the computing timeline. It's not something I'd most likely ever get to see outside of a vintage computer fair or museum, so thank you for get this old timer up and running in the highly educational way that you do. I used to sell antique Ford auto parts, and like a Model T, the SWTPC has a certain type of charm in its simplicity, but also something I would never ever want to own. :)
That case would make for one sweet sleeper PC. Love the look.
Just recently discovered your videos. Looking at the PCB's of this system are similar to what 3M used for their business equipment, during the 1970's The first good computer I had was the Atari 800, but I did have a heath kit microprocessor trainer that used a 6800 and the Timex Sinclair which was Z80 based. You did an excellent job on the restoration. A few years ago (closer to 10) I assembled a supercomputer from 8 individual PC stystems. Two of the individuals in the video have sadly passed on..
Thank you for clarifying what BFD stood for. 😉
Awesome interview you and Bil Herd did!
Fascinating video - I think there was also a UNIX like OS for the SWTPC. (UniFlex?) I'd love to see a demo of that!
Data transfer is an interesting puzzle. Someone could probably implement xmodem or something, but otherwise I think your best bet is to just transfer hex dumps through the terminal.
Of all those machine you have show on the bench, I think this is the most interesting machine imho., because it is so much different than newer more standardized machine. Really interesting to learn about how this machine works.
What a great, winding road this forgotten old piece of metal took you on. Thanks for taking us with you!
17:21 aah that makes sense. all these analog considerations never really occurred to me back in the day. interesting stuff
I have owned an IT company for 30 plus years, built, repaired hardware and developed software. The amount of intuition a professional has to take to investigate, repair, and find success in this reguard is extremely rare. An individual has to either have lived during the era or simply have the attitude never to give up. I have employess like myself in their late 40s...50s and only in this age group have I found one or two individuals over the three decades that can perform/tolerate this agonizing and challenging work. Admittedly, when sucess is found the reward is beyond monetary compensation, I equate it to reaching the peak of Mount Everest! Typically very rare professionals like yourself find success in their own businesses. So I have to ask, what was or is your profession in this regard?
Awesome work, sir. Maybe, as an idea, that ROM chip on the disk controller could be dumped just in case it gets lost forever.
I've been looking into the DOS68 code, and both DOS and the boot block call directly into the ROM to talk to the disk. Without it, none of this stuff works. And this board is sufficiently rare that I can't find a dump of the ROM anywhere on the internet.
That ROM is *really* important, Adrian, please dump it!
@@8bitwiz_ In any other context, asking someone to dump something that is really rare would be very concerning. lol
@@8bitwiz_ has he archived it yet?
Hugely useful to a person trying to bring up a computer from that generation. Very well done. Your talents are appreciated.
You can use flipped drive cables, as all you need to do is cut out the flip, and solder the 4 select and motor wires back to pass through, as half the wires in the flipped cable are ground wires, and do not need to be connected again. Easy if you do not want to count is to just solder all 7 as straight, little bit of wire and some thin heatshrink to get the extra length and insulate. That will give you easy cables, and also allow you to use 3.5in drives as well as you just use half the capacity on the 720k drive.
These DOS-68 really show how far things had come by MS-DOS days, they also show quite well DOS evolutions (when you move up the version tree, _and_ start using stuff like FLEX). Thanks for putting in the time to get a good outcome.
Fascinating! Some excellent detective work there and entertainingly presented. I remember seeing adverts for these machines back in the day but have never seen one working.
I can feel and sense those parts SO WELL...
Awesome job, Adrian, getting the SWTPC back in action! I am thoroughly impressed!! By any chance are you planning on either acquiring or adding in the SWTPC AC-30 cassette interface w/ the "Kansas City" standard data format? It would be neat to see that in action (short up seeing it done on Mike Douglas' channel (deramp5113). Maybe a way to get software from tape images onto disk or vise versa?
Keep up the great work! Thank you!😁
"basic floppy disk"
right, and BFG stands for "bio force gun"
Awesome video! That machine deserves its own pillar of fame with floppy's and terminal to show of what it can do!
I can barely hold on by the skin of my teeth to what you talk about, Adrian. Sincerest kudos for breaking most of this stuff down for those of us that lived during that era. Even though I took classes in three different assembly languages, COBOL, JCL, Pascal and C, etc., I haven't kept up with it. Hardware and electronics, and tube amp repair is something I dabble in, so much of what you do in your videos, blows my mind. Thanks for some crazy interesting topics.
I only wish you could spend more time on the Apple ][ series, and breakdown the internals of the Apple ][+ and //e, memory maps, the & command, etc. Though there are a lot of Commodore users in the world, I kinda get tired of having SO MUCH done on your channel regarding Commodore.
But, thanks for everything you do, regardless. Awesome brain!
Great job, Adrian! Very persistent effort, leads to fantastic results!
Incredibly detailed video. This definitely was a voyage! Adrian, thanks for bringing us along. Each video about this PC has been a treat!
There exists a full implementation of FORTH for the 6800. I once typed it into a 6800 development system from a printout.
Amazing work here, Adrian. Really learning a lot through your videos especially this series on the 6800.
Excellent content! :) Absolutely my favorite retrocomputing channel!
Congratulations Adrian, fantastic work!
I'm really impressed.
Great video as ever, love the extra detail and so good to bring these to life
Excellent job Adrian! thank you for all your hard work on this project!
This has been a great series Adrian, thoroughly enjoying seeing this old machine come back to life bit by bit.
Wow, this was some process! Well done for seeing it through to the end, Adrian!
I was on the edge of my seat the whole time! What a journey! I'm glad that you ended up with a fully working system, and with that assembler included in the dos disk, the sky is really the limit now!
Nice work Adrian. I love the amount of technical detail you went into in this video to get those disk images working (and preserved).
Man, I miss the days when computers were fun. You could spend all day toiling away on them and get almost nothing accomplished and still be happy. :)
Let me introduce you to Docker and Linux.
😂😂😂 What nonsense are you talking
You can still do this quite readily.
Linux mandrake 7.1 didn't want to play nicely with my hardware, i managed to fix it after messing with it FOR TWO WEEKS! For hours at a time.
I love Linux, but also... Fuck Linux.
95% of what these machines could achieve could be done on a calculator.
That was brilliant Adrian. Many thanks, hours of endless fun!!
I had a Heathkit H89 that used hard-sectored disks. Those disks went the way of the 8-track pretty quickly after it was released, and by the late 80s, they were unobtainable. It's probably easier to find hard-sectored 5 1/4" floppies now, thanks to eBay.
Absolutely brilliant... you are getting amazing at working through the problems that confront you in retro computing. I have to watch this a few more times to understand exactly what you figured out along the way.
always a pleasure to watch your videos Adrian thank you so much !
Wow! You’ve stirred up some memories of early disk experiences. Thanks!
This is a truely amazing video! You have take computer archeology to a new level! congrats!
Hey Adrian - Thanks for the trip down memory lane! So many memories form back in the day of trying to get this gear to work. But more importantly all the people who were there. We all spent a lot of hours helping each other. Lots of pizza, beer and good friends!