Stuff of interest to MARCH:
The NJ Computer Museum at Camp Evans

Classic computers. Vintage electronics. It's all good, fun stuff.
I'm delighted to find that I'm not the only electrical/computer engineer who's still enthusiastic about "trailing edge technology", thus my pleasure in participating with MARCH: The NJ Computer Museum at Camp Evans, home of the Infoage Science Center

-- Jeff3 Jonas
and on Yahoo groups

MARCH hosts VCF East 8.0: the Vintage Computer Festival
Saturday, May 5th and Sunday, May 6th, 2012 More info here and on facebook

new stuff / updates

some more Unix history such as The Unix Wars
Honeywell Tapes
Analog computers
AMD 2900 evaluation and learning kit
Full Altair nudity!
sneak peeks at works in progress
One mystery panel and one missing panel
My like-new all-white TI-99
computer jokes & humor

index to related pages

vintage IBM publications
At Infoage: May 1, 2011
Mystery Items: keyboards and consoles!
more unsorted vintage computer & electronic stuff
New things I scanned: 24-March-2011

click here for my swap list

the AT&T GNAT terminal


Computer Cards and tapes
a few notes about keypunches
Computer Buttons!
new stuff: April 2010
HELP! I want to get these running
IBM 1627 drum plotter & accessories
Smart Phones
vintage & retro computer advertising
other tech stuff

Computer songs

John Forster is a great folk songwriter (often compared to Tom Lehrer).
Silicon Slim is his hacker's song (from the CD Entering Marion)

Bob Franke is a folk singer. Here's his song I'm a mainframe, baby!

Here's Mike Agranoff's "The Ballad of Captain Crunch" in 2600 magazine
Before viruses and malware, Commodore computers were protected by guards!

CP/M archives

click here for a bzip2 compressed tar of the Walnut Creek CD
filesize: 368600561
click here for a list of the files
to list it: tar tjvf cpm_cd
to extract it: tar xjf cpm_cd

Jonathan notes that "lbrate" (probably pronounced "liberate") is a LBR unpacking utility for UNIX systems. On freshmeat.
lbrate extracts and decompresses files from CP/M LBR archives.
It can also list and test such archives.
It transparently deals with all the compressed/renamed file types usually found in LBRs, making them much less awkward to deal with.

old tiny chips

Old surface mount flat paks and pinouts
Long long ago, back when Radio Shack sold kits and parts, they also sold grab-bags of "hobby" chips.
(why let Poly Paks have all the fun?)
Anyone else would've called them "defective" or "rejects" but it was a way to play with DTL/RTL when they were still new and expensive.
Just test 'em and find the good gates. If you can identify them at all, that is!
These early ceramic surface mount parts have no markings!

I probably bought these in the late 70s and forgot about them, until I heard about MARCH's Apollo Guidance Computer and realized that NASA was using surface mount chips DECADES before anyone else.
Even in the 60s, IBM's computers were full of little metal boxes with ceramic surface mount transistors & resistors, but the modules were still thru-the-hole PC boards (albeit multilayer). NASA was really ahead of the pack!

Those of us who breadboarded things usually handled 8, 14, 16 pin plastic DIP (dual inline package).
These early surface mount chips are not just TEENY in comparison but had more package variations: 9 or 10 pins!

The General Precision LGP-21


I used the transistorized LGP-21 for a while,
and finally grocked why my dad liked using SOAP (Self Optimizing Assembler Program) on drum memory based systems such as the IBM 650.
[not to be confused with Simple Object Access Protocol]
It sure beats optimizing the operands by hand using this wheel.
The earlier tube-version LGP-30 is legendary for the Story Of Mel (even in Wikipedia).
The console is a Friden Flexowriter (which is still used in carnivals for the fake handwriting analysis computer).










Other LGP-21 web sites:
Ed Thelen (which also covers GE Computers 1961-5).
Tom Jennings' World Power Systems, particularly the LGP-21 and photos.
Computermuseum der Fakultat Informatik

Klemens Krause posted to comp.os.cpm: 
Subject: Re: Very old computer technology (was: What? Me idiot?)

> >I used a "General Precision" LGP-21 just for fun.
> >I still have one of the manuals and coding pads,
> >but never found the circular slide-rule for address optimization.

In our computermuseum we have a running LGP-30.
  http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

(We have also the ACT-V-compiler and the Black-Jack-game
which is told about in the 'story of mel')

LGP means: Librascope General Precision

The LGP-30 is the forerunner (with vacuum tubes and magnet drum) of
the LGP-21 with transistors and a fixed disk as main memory)
The LGP-21 ist code compatible to the LGP-30.

The circular slide-rule for code optimization is interesting.
We have form sheets, were we can enter the machine-code and look up,
which address is optimal for the respective operation.
AT&T nearly merged with Olivetti for personal computers such as the 6300.

MINE! ALL MINE!

This is stuff I intend to keep, but I'll share and make it available upon request.

courtesy links

retr0bright is a clever solution for case yellowing.

Updated 23-Jan-2012          PL/I is ¬ dead yet (but it's pining for the fjords).