Retro PC thread

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>NEC
Is that a TK80?

After a little research, turns out it's a TK85. Close enough.

>Keep your generic, worthless 90s IBM compatibles and eMachines at the door, please.
>Rulefagging starts again

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>Keep your generic, worthless 90s IBM compatibles and eMachines at the door, please.

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>tfw my first language when I was 9 years old
fuck that brings back some memories

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ID on the computer please?
This was my second computer back in the middish 90s.
486 if I recall correctly, but I could be wrong.

Would love to know what it was. I was a kid at the time so can't remember model numbers.

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Is DIGITAL DECpc 425SL Retro? Getting sold on Craigslist for $39 Canadian bucks

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It could be an AST of some kind but I'm not totally sure.

>February 14, 1983
Neat, that's the day my parents first met.

what the fuck compelled you to believe (pic related) is okay

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>Sticky Bear
Uh oh.

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I think Python eventually absorbed most of LOGO's functions.

I don't get it. Is that bad?

There was absolutely no standardization on CP/M machines. The disk format, screen dimensions, even the connectors for the serial and parallel ports could be completely different on each machine. The takeover of PC compatibles eliminated a lot of that clusterfuck.

>floppy formats could be virtually anything
>serial ports might use male or female D-shell connectors
>parallel ports could use just about any form of 25 pin connector
>terminals also came in all sorts of sizes, shapes, and flavors

A lot of people think that IBM was incapable of making a personal computer and for that reason had to approach Gary Kildal and Bill Gates. People dont realize that IBM released the 5100 in 1975 which was 2 years before the Apple II and TRS-80. It had a base price of $10,000 and ran BASIC and APL interpreters. It used magnetic tape storage as floppy discs werent out yet.

Here is a commercial in 1977 for the IBM 5100
youtube.com/watch?v=9m54rKlErwA

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For example, there were 77 track floppy drives for a time--the Commodore 8050 and 8250 used them. They didn't last too long because they couldn't read anything except their own disks--40 or 80 track disks were impossible due to the different track spacing.

>It used magnetic tape storage as floppy discs werent out yet.

Beg pardon? 8" floppies dated to 1970. The reason for magnetic tape storage was because you couldn't very well fit an 8" drive into that thing.

youre right, I thought only hard discs were made that early

This used purely discreet logic and wasn't CPU-based. A board called the PALM handled all processing functions.

>This used purely discreet logic
does that mean it could only work on integers and not floats?

The 5.25" drive was developed by Shugart in 1976 because 8" drives were too unwieldy and expensive for the nascent home computer market.

oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html

Ok it did have some custom chips in it.

The first IBM computer produced which was not a mainframe.

>apple fag doesn't want any actual retro computers here

yikes, delete your account.
apple collecting is for the absolute birds

>The first IBM computer produced which was not a mainframe.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
IBM also made mid-range and mini- computers.
The System/32 was hardly the first non-mainframe when it arrived in 1975. Two years before the Apple II and 6 years before the PC.

It'll still work in offline mode forever and just because they don't support it doesn't necessarily mean it won't work online for a while after

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What? CBM drives used standard 40 track drive assemblies. Only the DOS limited it to less than 40 or 80. No, there were plenty of other issues: the fact that they used GCR rather than MFM, the zoned bit recording, and some other less obvious kooks, such as subtle bugs in the DOS.

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>I have no cd and I must multimedia

Correction:
>CBM drives used standard 40 OR 80 track drive assemblies.

The North Star Advantage was a nice machine. Had full bitmap graphics and even a sound generator. It could have even done gaming stuff. If only North Star weren't the world's stupidest people and decided to use hard sectored disks.

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I have this board, but now it won't POST.

Help? Pentium 120 under heatsink by the way.

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vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-19897.html

The 8050/8250 really do use 77 track drives; not a lot else had them except some CP/M boxes.

checked for buldging capacitors
change battery
reseat ram
reseat cpu
hope those jumpers are correct

Also the 4040 drives had 35 track units because they used the trusty Shugart SA-400 which also formed the basis of the Apple II disk drives. The 1541 had 40 track mechanisms but Commodore limited the standard CBM DOS format to 35 because early units had alignment issues. However, you can program the drive to write on tracks 36-40 and some copy protections used it.

>>The first IBM computer produced which was not a mainframe.
>Wrong, wrong, wrong.

>IBM also made mid-range and mini- computers.
even though mid-range and mini-computers were not mainframes, they were refrigerator sized computers and did not qualify as personal computers

question for all:

In the last 70s most personal computers only had 4k of memory. What is the most complicated programming language interpreter that could have run in that memory? We know BASIC and Forth did. What about Bash? Could a light scripting language like Lua have run in 4k?

>bulging caps
Replaced recently.
>change battery
Changed recently as well.
>reseat RAM and CPU
Done that about 20 times.
>hope those jumpers are correct
They are.

You could have as much memory as the CPU could address, but memory prices in the 70s were expensive.

nobody cares about your opinion

It appears that it was more that the drive assembly was 100tpi - which a lot of other manufacturers (Tandon springs to mind) were also doing. But QD was a weirdo anyway.

Could have sworn CBM using Tandons pretty exclusively - which also did have trouble with later tracks (original 1541, anybody?).

I know that. go be stupid somewhere else

The 1541 had Alps mechs in 1982-83 which were replaced by Mitsumi units from 1984 onward due to persistent alignment problems. 4040s used Shugart mechs and the 8050/8250 had Tandon, Micropolis, or MPI mechanisms.

Ta for the correction.

The SA-400 was the first 5.25" drive to market and widely used in the late 70s by the Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore 4040, and numerous CP/M boxes. Shugart however didn't survive the transition into the 80s--Tandon beat them out to a 40 track drive and Shugart also failed to develop a reliable 80 track drive. In 1982, they also lost their lucrative contract with Apple when they switched to cheaper Alps mechanisms for the Disk II and IBM named Tandon as the exclusive supplier of PC disk drives.

>IBM named Tandon
This must be where I screwed up. Forty year old memories are a hell of a thing.

>It appears that it was more that the drive assembly was 100tpi - which a lot of other manufacturers (Tandon springs to mind) were also doing.

Those drives were only a thing for about three years before being rendered obsolete by 80 track drives which stored more and could also read 40 track disks by double stepping the heads, which the 77 track mechanisms could not do. However, I'm pretty sure Commodore continued to produce the 8050/8250 until the PET line was retired for good in 1986.

Someone argued with me that Amigas could not reliably use 1.44MB disks. Can any experts tell me if this is true or not?

The magnetic coating on DD disks is different from HD disks, however the rotation speed on 3.5" drives is always 300 RPM.

8" drives=500 bps @ 360 RPM
5.25" HD=500 bps @ 360 RPM
5.25" DD=250 bps @ 300 RPM
3.5" DD=250 bps @ 300 RPM
3.5" HD=500 bps @ 300 RPM

You can often use 1.44MB disks in Amigas and they will work while it would be completely impossible to use 5.25" HD disks in a DD drive due to the difference in rotation speed.

3.5" drives are basically interchangeable with 5.25" DD as long as it's a soft sectored controller (hard sector controllers like in the North Stars won't work). Also note that 3.5" drives are exclusively 80 track and cannot double step the heads like 5.25" 80 track drives do when reading 40 track disks. If the OS software only supports 40 tracks, it will still work, but the 3.5" drive will only write to half the disk.

What difference does the controller make?

Nobody cares about your little 50 dollar each apple collection either you poor poverty nigger.

Hard sectored disks had physical holes punched in the disk hub to mark the sectors; different controllers supported different amounts of sectors and you also had to have the correct disk type for your controller (8" usually had 16 or 32 sectors, 5.25" usually 10 or 16 sectors). Any 8" or 5.25" drive could be used with a hard sectored controller; 3.5" drives obviously won't work since they don't have an index sensor. It was much more common for 8" disks to be hard sectored than 5.25".

8" controllers (that use the Shugart standard) have a 50 pin connector and spin the disk at 360 rpm while using a 500 bps bitrate. Later, Shugart introduced the 34 pin connector on the SA-400 which was also used on 3.5" floppies. Some stuff like minicomputers, mainframes, and industrial equipment used other connector types and I believe some Japanese PCs also had nonstandard floppy controllers and connector types.

The IBM PC floppy controller actually used an 8" NEC controller chip which IBM did some l33t hax0r tricks with to get it to read DD floppies.

Also there was FM versus MFM encoding. FM uses discreet timing bits which take a lot of space and result in very small disk capacity (just 100k per side) while the more advanced MFM controllers did not require the timing bits so could support triple the capacity (up to 500k per side).

That's if you were using a double density controller that operates at 250 bps/300 rpm. Of course you could also use FM with 8" drives and their 360 rpm/500 bps throughput in which case you averaged around 200-300k per side or around 500k if an MFM controller was used.

So on the controller side of things, you could have FM or MFM controllers, which can also be hard or soft sectored, and if the former, the sectors supported can vary and you would need the correct media type. On the drive side of things, 5.25" drives may be 35 or 40 or 77 or 80 track and either single or double sided. 3.5" drives come in fewer variations--they're all 80 track and only early ones made MFM hard 10 sector+5.25" 77 track single sided drive
>FM soft sector+5.25" 40 track double sided drive
>MFM soft sector+5.25" 80 track single sided
>FM hard 16 sector+5.25" 80 track single sided

Am I twisting your sanity yet?

I was watching a little too many of Lucasboy's game LPs.

*shakes head* And to think. I grew up in the 90s and never knew anything but 1.44MB 3.5" disks.

>Youtube celebrities

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What's the best thing I could do with a working Macintosh Classic II?

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