What a great episode! I fell asleep listening to it after way too long of a day and had to start over this morning, Thank you for the entefomingtainment!
The talk about having two sector 0's on the same track, and it booting differently depending on which one passed under the head first reminds me of the multi-ending flexi-disc record that MAD magazine put out in the 1980 - "Super Spectacular Day", which I had back in the day. The first part of the song played the same, but the second part of the song was a random one from 7. Like the sector 0 you mentioned above, it had multiple paths the needle could follow, so which ending you heard depended on which groove the stylus landed on.
The first computer I ever used, my high school’s Ohio Scientific Challenger II, had disk drives that constantly spun. Floppies would always be very warm when removed. I’ve never known if that behavior was normal; Ohio Scientific was back in the day when everything was mostly an amateur hack.
9:18 Believe it or not, a friend called me to help him network a bunch of Macs in the 68040 days, we did an all nighter and finally the chooser in each Mac could see one another. We just kept at it until it worked. Luckily I was in my youth in those days or I would be desperately tired. The good old days right?
I really should know better than to listen to the Roundtable's members inane prattle, but this video showed up in my UA-cam recommendations for some reason. FWIW, here are a few comments from someone who is familiar with Univac and TV teletype writers: First, WRT to Quinn's comments about Univac, it became part of the Sperry Corporation and so was referred to as "Sperry Univac" until the Company decided change its designation to "Univac, a division of the Sperry Corporation" and then simply "Sperry" to emphasize the Sperry name. Burroughs took over Sperry in 1986 and the result was renamed "Unisys". Unisys still exists today. Both predecessor companies made significant contributions to the history of computers and I find it annoying to hear someone who openly admits to not knowing much (if anything) about computers before the Apple II (most notably mainframes) taking pot shots at either of them for having been around back when computers used vacuum tubes ... as if that's where they stopped developing. And, no, the Apple IIGS did *NOT* do in the Univac or Sperry Univac or Sperry or even reel-to-reel tape drives. Again, Univac/Sperry Univac/Sperry continues on to this day in the form of Unisys, although the "mainframes" they "produce" are emulators that run on Intel servers. As for the tape drives, I recall shooting rubber bands at the buttons on the control panel of such drives (a U36N?) to get the window to slide up or down long after 1986. I used to be very good at it. And I would note for the young ones in the audience that the World is *STILL* reliant on "dusty deck" programs (often times written in COBOL) written to run on mainframes, especially in the banking industry. Second, WRT to Don Lancaster and his series of TV Teletypes (TVT), he made a series of TVTs, not just the one described in the book (which IIRC was the TYT-2). The last one IIR was the TVT-6 in which he replaced a lot of the logic with a 6502 which just happened to be a part of a KIM-1. You can still find the schematics and code (including the original "Popular Electronics" articles ... there were three IIRC) online. To the extent that he used old chips that you can't find today, about the only thing that might fall into that category is a character generator ROM chip which when fed in a scan line number would return a bit mask of the bits set in that line of a character. This can (relatively easily) be reproduced with a little programming and an EEPROM (and programmer) as Ben Eater pretty much did in his breadboard computer project. I *THINK* his TVT-2 was only TTL and CMOS (a couple of Lancaster's other books being "The TTL Cookbook" and "The CMOS Cookbook") except for the character generator chip or chips. Certainly, generating the signal chain for a TV signal can be done using just TTL chips as was shown by in the April 1977 issue of "Radio Electronics" which featured the construction of a single board micro based on the Signetics 2650 (not 6502 as is occasionally incorrectly stated elsewhere). Except for a roughly 14MHz crystal whose frequency might be odd today, there was nothing special about the chips in the signal generator. And since a VGA signal is relatively close to a TV signal, there's nothing particularly problematic about making a TVT today. If you want to save yourself some logic, you can probably get there from here using a Parallax Propeller chip which I'm pretty sure is still available at Digi-Key. OBTW, I think that the chip that Quinn is thinking of is the Motorola MC6845, not 6851, which was a popular *CRT Controller* chip. I don't recall it being at the heart of any of Don Lancaster's TVTs. I suspect that a TI TMS9918 would have been a better fit as it was supposedly intended for an NTSC display although it wasn't used either. As for the use of a TVT, yes, it could be useful to talk to a mainframe if you had an acoustic coupler, but even more important was to use it to talk to your homebrew micros which began to use a serial TTY-like terminal instead of switches and lights. It is simply fucking amazing to hear people who are supposedly into retro computing talk as if the beginning of (micro) computing sprang into existence with the Apple while apparently being completely ignoring the fact that there micros before the Apple II (e.g. the Mark-8 and Altair 8800 not to mention any number of homebrew systems) and not everyone had a Teletype 33 laying around to talk to them.
It's editing backlog, it will be published. We've recorded a few more than have made it to the audio feed yet, but the hope is that we'll be caught up soon. Working on it! The next one for the feed is about 75% edited. We're planning to add to the backlog in a few days, but we're striving to have one or more of the already recorded ones hit the audio feed before that.
Though maybe the general answer is: it is! This particular video is, at the time I am typing this, of an episode that isn't on the podcast feed yet. But if you go to rcrpodcast.com, there is a subscription link for your regular audio podcatcher.
Just spotted my Apple Podcasts had stopped your feed then on your site found your changed hosts. But after deleting the old feed in Apple Podcasts and searching there I can’t find the new one. Where am I going wrong ?
Sounds like maybe we need to investigate. The feed links are there on the rcrpodcast.com site, which you should be able to subscribe to explicitly. But I *thought* it was there in Apple podcasts. So, I don't know where you are going wrong, or even whether you are going wrong, but thanks for asking. I'll investigate.
Thank you.I didnt even notice Ive not heard you guys in a year and when I was clearing out old Follows saw your logo. Clicked it and it stopped in Dec 22. I went to the site and learned you changed hosts so went back to Apple. Unfollowed the original and went searching for the new one but nothing came up :( @@retrocomputingroundtable4445
Everything you guys talked about in networking is part of the IEEE ethernet standard except for the Apple stuff, however AppleTalk protocol can run over ethernet.
![Wolfram Physics Project: Working Session Wednesday, Apr. 29, 2020 [Finding Black Hole Structures]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SbDzqlOLIZA/mqdefault.jpg)
What a great episode! I fell asleep listening to it after way too long of a day and had to start over this morning, Thank you for the entefomingtainment!
The talk about having two sector 0's on the same track, and it booting differently depending on which one passed under the head first reminds me of the multi-ending flexi-disc record that MAD magazine put out in the 1980 - "Super Spectacular Day", which I had back in the day. The first part of the song played the same, but the second part of the song was a random one from 7. Like the sector 0 you mentioned above, it had multiple paths the needle could follow, so which ending you heard depended on which groove the stylus landed on.
The first computer I ever used, my high school’s Ohio Scientific Challenger II, had disk drives that constantly spun. Floppies would always be very warm when removed. I’ve never known if that behavior was normal; Ohio Scientific was back in the day when everything was mostly an amateur hack.
9:18 Believe it or not, a friend called me to help him network a bunch of Macs in the 68040 days, we did an all nighter and finally the chooser in each Mac could see one another. We just kept at it until it worked. Luckily I was in my youth in those days or I would be desperately tired. The good old days right?
I really should know better than to listen to the Roundtable's members inane prattle, but this video showed up in my UA-cam recommendations for some reason.
FWIW, here are a few comments from someone who is familiar with Univac and TV teletype writers:
First, WRT to Quinn's comments about Univac, it became part of the Sperry Corporation and so was referred to as "Sperry Univac" until the Company decided change its designation to "Univac, a division of the Sperry Corporation" and then simply "Sperry" to emphasize the Sperry name.
Burroughs took over Sperry in 1986 and the result was renamed "Unisys".
Unisys still exists today.
Both predecessor companies made significant contributions to the history of computers and I find it annoying to hear someone who openly admits to not knowing much (if anything) about computers before the Apple II (most notably mainframes) taking pot shots at either of them for having been around back when computers used vacuum tubes ... as if that's where they stopped developing.
And, no, the Apple IIGS did *NOT* do in the Univac or Sperry Univac or Sperry or even reel-to-reel tape drives.
Again, Univac/Sperry Univac/Sperry continues on to this day in the form of Unisys, although the "mainframes" they "produce" are emulators that run on Intel servers.
As for the tape drives, I recall shooting rubber bands at the buttons on the control panel of such drives (a U36N?) to get the window to slide up or down long after 1986.
I used to be very good at it.
And I would note for the young ones in the audience that the World is *STILL* reliant on "dusty deck" programs (often times written in COBOL) written to run on mainframes, especially in the banking industry.
Second, WRT to Don Lancaster and his series of TV Teletypes (TVT), he made a series of TVTs, not just the one described in the book (which IIRC was the TYT-2).
The last one IIR was the TVT-6 in which he replaced a lot of the logic with a 6502 which just happened to be a part of a KIM-1.
You can still find the schematics and code (including the original "Popular Electronics" articles ... there were three IIRC) online.
To the extent that he used old chips that you can't find today, about the only thing that might fall into that category is a character generator ROM chip which when fed in a scan line number would return a bit mask of the bits set in that line of a character.
This can (relatively easily) be reproduced with a little programming and an EEPROM (and programmer) as Ben Eater pretty much did in his breadboard computer project.
I *THINK* his TVT-2 was only TTL and CMOS (a couple of Lancaster's other books being "The TTL Cookbook" and "The CMOS Cookbook") except for the character generator chip or chips.
Certainly, generating the signal chain for a TV signal can be done using just TTL chips as was shown by in the April 1977 issue of "Radio Electronics" which featured the construction of a single board micro based on the Signetics 2650 (not 6502 as is occasionally incorrectly stated elsewhere).
Except for a roughly 14MHz crystal whose frequency might be odd today, there was nothing special about the chips in the signal generator.
And since a VGA signal is relatively close to a TV signal, there's nothing particularly problematic about making a TVT today.
If you want to save yourself some logic, you can probably get there from here using a Parallax Propeller chip which I'm pretty sure is still available at Digi-Key.
OBTW, I think that the chip that Quinn is thinking of is the Motorola MC6845, not 6851, which was a popular *CRT Controller* chip.
I don't recall it being at the heart of any of Don Lancaster's TVTs.
I suspect that a TI TMS9918 would have been a better fit as it was supposedly intended for an NTSC display although it wasn't used either.
As for the use of a TVT, yes, it could be useful to talk to a mainframe if you had an acoustic coupler, but even more important was to use it to talk to your homebrew micros which began to use a serial TTY-like terminal instead of switches and lights.
It is simply fucking amazing to hear people who are supposedly into retro computing talk as if the beginning of (micro) computing sprang into existence with the Apple while apparently being completely ignoring the fact that there micros before the Apple II (e.g. the Mark-8 and Altair 8800 not to mention any number of homebrew systems) and not everyone had a Teletype 33 laying around to talk to them.
General question. Why is this really great show not published as a podcast?
It's editing backlog, it will be published. We've recorded a few more than have made it to the audio feed yet, but the hope is that we'll be caught up soon. Working on it! The next one for the feed is about 75% edited. We're planning to add to the backlog in a few days, but we're striving to have one or more of the already recorded ones hit the audio feed before that.
Though maybe the general answer is: it is! This particular video is, at the time I am typing this, of an episode that isn't on the podcast feed yet. But if you go to rcrpodcast.com, there is a subscription link for your regular audio podcatcher.
Just spotted my Apple Podcasts had stopped your feed then on your site found your changed hosts. But after deleting the old feed in Apple Podcasts and searching there I can’t find the new one. Where am I going wrong ?
Sounds like maybe we need to investigate. The feed links are there on the rcrpodcast.com site, which you should be able to subscribe to explicitly. But I *thought* it was there in Apple podcasts. So, I don't know where you are going wrong, or even whether you are going wrong, but thanks for asking. I'll investigate.
Thank you.I didnt even notice Ive not heard you guys in a year and when I was clearing out old Follows saw your logo. Clicked it and it stopped in Dec 22. I went to the site and learned you changed hosts so went back to Apple. Unfollowed the original and went searching for the new one but nothing came up :(
@@retrocomputingroundtable4445
I can't find on Apple Podcasts either. I thought you guys had just stopped.@@retrocomputingroundtable4445
Everything you guys talked about in networking is part of the IEEE ethernet standard except for the Apple stuff, however AppleTalk protocol can run over ethernet.