Aucbvax.1383 fa.info-micro utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!CSTACY@MIT-AI Thu May 21 01:01:02 1981 INFO-MICRO Digest V3 #44 INFO-MICRO AM Digest Wednesday, 21 May 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 44 Today's Topics: Modems - LMODEM & APPLE-CAT II & Bell 212 speed, Ithica Review, CCBIOS Mods, Unix Software Query ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 25 April 1981 04:36-EST From: Keith B. Petersen Subject: [W8SDZ: Northstar/modem conflict] This is not an "official answer" from BUG-MTN, but I noticed your message there and wanted to pass along a bit of info you may find useful. If you are using a Horizon mainframe, you cannot use port C0H for the PMMI modem. The reason is that that port is used by the mother board for some sort of parity business with Northstar memory. Everyone I know who has a Horizon II has had this problem. It doesn't seem to matter whether you have the parity option on your memory boards or not. The symptom is unexplained bombing of programs used with the modem. Anytime the program does an output to port C0H, it messes up the system memory. Around here, Horizon owners have standaradized on port B0H. ------------------------------ Date: 24 April 1981 22:09-EST From: Edward Barton The LMODEM program recently mentioned in INFO-MICRO runs on MIT-Multics in addition to ITS, though storage of 8-bit files is not implemented there. ------------------------------ Date: 23 April 1981 From: Mike Leavitt Subject: Apple-Cat ii, MicroAce, Locksmith Three quick items: 1. The Apple-Cat II by Novation's 1200 baud capability is Bell 202 half-duplex. Don't think youwill be able to talk to 212a's. But aside from that,the specs look fine. 2. Has anyone out there actually built a $150 MicroAce. I described it to a friend, after seeing it at the Faire, and he ran right out and ordered one. Did I lead him wrong? 3. I heard rumors that Locksmith is in bankruptcy after being sued by every software house in the world because of its bit- copying program. Can anyone confirm or deny this? That would be a real tragedy! Mike ------------------------------ Date: 28 April 1981 19:26-EDT From: Brian P. Lloyd Subject: Bell 212A speed selection. There has been some misunderstanding as to the function of pin 23 of the EIA connector. As it turns out, there are two function (options) available for pin 23. When the "Interface Speed Indication" option is selected, pin 23 indicates the operating speed of the modem. If the "Speed Control" option is selected, pin 23 controls the originate speed of the modem (rather than the HS switch). Needless to say, these two options are mutually exclusive. Brian Lloyd ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1981 0841-PST From: Mo at LBL-Unix (Mike O'Dell) Subject: 212 lossages The recent messages about 212 interconnections have me puzzled. When I read the Ma Bell documentation on the 212, this business about speed select on originate comes out differently. The way I read it, the button on the front panel is the ONLY thing which will effect originate speed. The business about the pin 23 option is some frob whereby the direction of the line is reversed (sourced by modem, rather than sinked by modem) so the modem can tell you what speed the connection is coming in on. I could be very wrong, but in my documentation, it does not show pin 23 providing speed select in originate mode. Does someone out there actually have one WORKING with 23 doing originate speed select?? I realize that according to RS-232, if the pin does anything, speed selection is what it should do, but this would not be the first time Ma Bell's designers neglected the pertinant specifications. Yours in quandry, Mike ------------------------------ Date: 26 April 1981 01:11-EST From: Robert E. Spivack Update on ithaca intersystems problems in cook-book out of the box installation the followng problems were found: The boards are often sold separately, documentation cnsists of very complete info on eac board, but a 'system' level manual on how t brng up a system consisting of all boards does not exist. The million jumpers are for setting slightly non-ieee timing specs for memory access, etc. and/or running with non-ieee imsai type systems tat may use altair-like s-100 conventions, Unfortnately, the manual is sometimes wrng. We found the only ithaca intersystems distributer for New England area located in Newton , MA (about 1 hour from us in r.i.) and we drove in Saturday and played micro-doctor. Well, just as I had deduced, the 64K dynamic ram board was d-o-a (dead on arrival) after swapping memory, resetting a few jumpers, the system ran with the other guy's discs and terminal. ok, so on to our nifty, double-sided, double or single density morrow dsc drives (also known by some as 'tinker' toys). Well, the good ole sugart 850's were all jumpered wrong, and even after an hour our helpful wizard could not get em right. We finally decided to just buy a set of jade single-sided discs from him, but lo, those also needed jumpers and he found shugart had changed the pcb on him and hehad no documentation on them. Soooooooo, we bought the lobo sngle-sided drives he was using 'out from under him', plugged them into our main-frame and HIS terminal and everything worked fne...... went home only to find our brand new televideo 920C was also a basket case ...it works in local mode but refuses to talk to the mainframe. Thinking fast, I set up the good old unreliable trash-80 threw in the rs-232 comm-80 box from Steve Ciarcia, loaded the dmb terinal emulator program and ..... thank godness it worked. so right now we have the ithaca running with 2 8 inch discs and a 16 row by 64 col trash-80 as the console. well, now at least we can start bringing up some software. whehw!!!!!!! i guess the lesson is that noting ever works correctly like god old Murphy says... Hmmm.. we bought everything mail-order to get low prices i wnder if all the QA rejects get sent by the manufacturers to these kind of dealers and the list price retail stores get the working hardware!!! thank you to those of you that sent me mail in reply to my earlier msg. spiv ------------------------------ Date: 25 Apr 1981 (Saturday) 1417-PST From: DWS at LLL-MFE Subject: C.C.S. BIOS mods Does anyone have experience with modifying California Computer Systems' CCBIOS? Specifically, is there anything non-obvious involved with adding driver code for devices other than their disk controller and the serial port on their CPU card? Their documentation says that mods are trivial. Any reports on this? -- Dave Smith ------------------------------ Date: 21 Apr 1981 1147-PST From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow Subject: UNIX "Business" Software packages. I have a friend in the bay area who is interested in buying an 11/44 system for his business. I recommended he run UNIX(TM) on it (of course). What he needs is a General-Accounting Package (i.e. General Ledger, Accounts Payable, etc). as well as a Manufacturing Package (i.e. Inventory Control, Bill Materials Generator, Purchase Order Processing, Materials Requirement Planning, etc.). Anyone know of any packages that would run under UNIX on an 11/44 (running V6 or V7) that would do any of this stuff, who has it, what price, how good, etc.? Also, anyone know of the speed comparison between a TI-990 Mod/10 CPU and an 11/44? ------------------------------ End of INFO-MICRO Digest ************************ ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.